After the revolution, the reckoning
SIR – The article by Fr Hugh Somerville Knapman (Feature, April 5), on the desirability of revisiting the question of the liturgical changes post-Vatican II, is representative of many such counsels in recent years which have largely gone unheeded. But we now know a great deal more about the procedure, the mindset and the ultimate aims of the so-called experts who drove and designed this experiment.
What is beyond dispute is that for motives discernible in its archive of engagement, it went far beyond what was voted for by the Council Fathers. What has also emerged is that it was in some instances based on flawed scholarship as well as an animus against the millennial liturgy that had nourished and indeed embedded itself in the Catholic culture and piety of five continents. What has been gained may be calculable. What has been lost is inestimable in cultural and devotional terms as well as traceable heritage.
