✣ Highlights from the week online
Old Rite warning At the National Catholic Register Mgr Charles Pope has written an “urgent warning” about the future of the traditional Latin Mass. Sensing that the Old Rite has “reached its peak” in the numbers attending, he wrote: “Some years ago (as far back as the early 1980s) we who love the Traditional Latin Mass often said that if we would just return to the beautiful Latin Mass our churches would again be filled. “At first this appeared to be happening. As many dioceses began to offer the traditional Latin Mass, those churches were filled, often to standing room only. Liturgical progressives were horrified and traditionalists were joyfully pleased ... But as the availability of the traditional Latin Mass has increased, it seems that a certain ceiling has been reached.” In his own diocese, he said, only 0.5 per cent of churchgoers attended the older form of Mass. “If we who love the Traditional Latin Mass thought that it would do its own evangelising, we were mistaken,” he wrote. The answer? “Evangelise or else close and die.” Horrid Traditionalists The downbeat mood among those sympathetic to tradition seemed to continue at Rorate Caeli, the traditionalist site, which warned of an archetype in Catholicism, the Horrid Traditionalist – “bitter, resentful, judgmental, duplicitous, and aggressive”. The site says: “As St Paul warned in his Second Epistle to Timothy about some men in the last days, the Horrid Traditionalist is ‘without affection,’ ‘without peace’, ‘without kindness’ – they have ‘an appearance indeed of godliness, but denying the power thereof’.” The blog post warned: “They bring no one to Christ with their behaviour, not even themselves. They certainly do not help to spread the Good News of the Salvation of the Lord to the world at large – who wants to hear good news from those who seem to embody only bad news? How many have been led away from Tradition when they were just getting to know it by being humiliated by the Horrid Traditionalist and his venomous mouth and spirit?” Dryden and Muslims At The Conversation blog (theconversation. com), Stephen Bernard compared the position of Muslims in Europe today to that of 17th-century poet John Dryden. Dryden was appointed poet laureate by Charles II but, as a Catholic convert, was deprived of his position when William III took the throne. The author noted that two of Dryden’s sons became priests yet, in his letters, he barely mentions religion: “Dryden’s correspondence represents something in its silences which may be felt by marginalised Muslims today.” Bernard suggested Dryden felt his religion tarnished by plotters in the same way that Muslims feel about terrorists.
