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Entry: Theological Cannon Fodder Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/theological_cannon_fodder#18185 Post contents: <I> However, I wonder what would happen if the Church pushed more to introduce the original Latin Rite mass, or the heritage of the Gregorian chants/Baroque music in the US. </I> A major problem - unacknowledged or, if acknowledged, too seldom admitted by far too many soi disant traditionalists - was the Church in America had the Latin Mass and Gregorian Chant (we had in back in the day in the small VT. town I grew-up in) but the Church was so suffused with clericalism that when the culture corrupted there was no knowledgeable vigorous Laity to war against the collapse. Existing as Church was something the Bishops and the Priests and the Nuns did. Even now when the Catholic Laity seems so ignorant the blame for that reality is placed on the Bishops and Priests even though it is the family which has the primary responsibility to pass on the Faith and to educate the children. If you ever read a rad trad publication blaming themselves or the family, you've got a scoop. Like the Liberals they ape, rad trads blame others first, last, and always. So, be very suspect when you read (as one ALWAYS does) that Vatican Two, or Pope Paul VI, or the new Normative Mass, or Pope John Paul II is responsible for the collapse of this or that. Back in the so-called Golden Age of Catholicism in America, there was a Church with a fortress mentality, highly clericalised, cold, ritualistic, that was a rules-based institution and it could not survive the cultural chaos because its children were unprepared to bring Christ to the world or to defend what they, supposedly, believed. Maybe if the Church in America had as its educational locus a love of Christ and an evangelistic orientation the collapse would have been less stark. Who knows? What can be known that a "return to the past" will not happen. The Church moves through time in one direction - towards the Second Coming - always preserving the Dogmatic Truths but always changing Disciplines, Rites, Liturgies, Sacramentals, etc. The Church is not the institution imagined by far to many soi disant traditionalists - one that tries to recreate some imagined past cultural perfection as a way to save the world. Sent at: 2009 01 08