I had an interesting back and forth with a dear friend, a woman who did a beautiful job as volunteer and then paid music director in a small city parish. (The city was small; the parish got huge.) She has greeted these changes with considerable apprehension, as possibly causing lots of harm. I myself don't see how, if everyone just sticks to the script, it could, but that is her fear. She finally let loose with something close to a tirade about how brutal the change were when the Novus Ordo was promulgated and the harm that it did. She "hope(d) they learned their lesson," but her bishop has done little that she has seen, and her pastor has done nothing. It has fallen to the new, professionally trained music director, who is something like CMAA's ideal--a person at the local level who is really trying. She loves him, but says that he has hit a brick wall. I don't go to that parish so much anymore, but I have to wonder about how much teaching is going on to make things clearer and less fear inducing. If it's anything like what I found on the websites, it is up to the pastor, and there of course is no record of that online. I'll found out next time I go.

I have head in more than one context that people feel like they don't participate, but if there is no teaching how can they know that the choir is not just doing a performance?

It is interesting,because that is the reason Benedict goes so slowly. Although he supported the liturgical changes, he said repeatedly as Prefect that great harm was done by the brutal manner of their execution. That's why it took him two years to sign an indult for the Tridentine Mass, when he had been a prime mover behind such a move and had a big hand in drafting the indult as Prefect. That's why a rumored walk back through everything that was done in creating the Novus Ordo has long been rumored, but has been going on for ten years now and may both predate and outlast his papacy, if rumors are to be believed. And that's why he coined the terms Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms--for unity's sake.

I myself do not understand why every parish would not want to have a High Mass with Latin propers, and why every Cathedral does not have full Latin Novus Ordo. But I also don't understand why some people are so attached to the Extraordinary Form, and have gotten scowls for saying simply that I myself am happy that it is a Mass done properly, whichever form.

So maybe this is a huge part of it. Where I, as a convert, just see the beauty that could be, cradle Catholics remember the trauma. They don't see it as a restoration, but as 'another period of trauma." People who want to restore then become troublemakers.

The wonderful TOR who had so much to do with my conversion taught me a lot. Everyone thought he was liberal, but as I said to him at his goodbye dinner, at a moment when everyone else was blabbing away happily, "You're pre-conciliar. You think the Church is always going to win." He pointed at me and said, "That's exactly right." That's why his Provincial looked at him seriously at a meeting once and said, "You know, I think Columba may be the most conservative of all us." He professed dislike for Joseph Ratzinger, but read the Ratzinger Report when I did and pronounced it a very good book. He had not realized that Ratzinger was thinking along the lines he was: that the fighting is wrong. He loved the way it was put in the old Catechism, that the most minor of offenses, as opposed to the big ones like heresy and schism, was 'gives offense to pious ears."

So that's the blowback, even among the bishops. I think it is interesting that one bishop remembered that there was a "Mass for Christian Unity" during the transitional period and has imposed that: he remembers the hope and wants to, as Jeff Tucker has put it in a slightly different context, jump from 1967 to 2011 and kind of forget about all the bad that happened in between.

I get in trouble for bad mouthing bishops who deserve it, so I have had to learn to curtail my language. (During the scandals, I was stunned to find out that cradle Catholics didn't know that scandal is caused by the person who does the harm, not by the person who talks about it. A lot of bad people hid behind that 'don't criticize the Church' thing.) But maybe here again our exuberance for beauty may be something we have to watch. I don't have to worry about that here: I either go to the Mass at the National Shrine or the Latin OF at the Cathedral. But the people out there in other dioceses--well, my friend was offended by my exuberance. So I had to walk it back a little bit.

I can tell you that I have looked at diocesan websites, and it doesn't surprise me that so many music directors have answered the question about early implementation by saying they have only gotten silence, or made jokes about the (non-existent) liturgical police enforcing norms. A lot of diocese merely link to the USCCB, or, as in Washington, every liturgical publisher under the sun, without any guidance on music. (Lots on implementation of the text, which puts us lightyears ahead of way too many dioceses I looked at.) I don't even know what has been done in the parishes in my own diocese, because of where I go to Mass.

But my friend's reaction made me see it in a whole different light: the cradle Catholics see any change as bringing on the old fights, and they just want to go to Mass. The memory of the fights prevents them from seeing beauty restored, and makes them resent those who want to restore it.

Just a thought.