About three months ago, I wrote a piece about the pastoral letter from all the bishops on the subject of the new translation of the Novus Ordo—a letter which I said was another example of “a pattern of behaviour which the bishops have been exhibiting more and more since the papal visit”. I was thinking also of the welcome given by them to the Ordinariate (a stark contrast to their behaviour 15 years ago when they crushed any such idea before it had chance to be born), and also of the restoration of two of our holy days of obligation, the return of Friday abstinence from meat, and so on. All this was very welcome, and I had hopes that it portended not a selective tactical retreat but a permanent and irreversible cultural revolution. But a blog posted on Monday by Fr Christopher Smith, tellingly headlined “Why Are Seminaries Afraid of the Extraordinary Form?” tells a different story: the revolution in English Episcopal thinking has some way to go yet. Anglicanorum Coetibus may have attracted the support of our bishops: but Summorum Pontificum has so far attracted stiff Episcopal opposition to the Pope’s wishes, an attitude which may tell the real truth about what they think of him and his vision for the Church’s future. Why are seminaries afraid of the Extraordinary Form? Simple: as Fr Hill puts it, “what does a good seminary rector do when he knows that Tradition-unfriendly Bishops will pull their guys out of their seminaries if they begin to teach the EF?” The fact is that these “Tradition-unfriendly Bishops”—if it really is, quite shockingly, the case that they are likely to pull their ordination candidates out from any seminary which teaches the Extraordinary Form—may think that they are being progressive and forward looking in defending their dioceses from the Pope’s vision of liturgical pluralism: but they are in fact being just as as reactionary and backward looking as those who they believe scandalously stood in the way of the Second Vatican Council (even though many of them were actually opposed to the distortion of the Council by people like them). And their reactionary and authoritarian views on Summorum Pontificum (though they oppose the pope’s wishes on the bogus grounds that the Extraordinary form is divisive) are themselves, by leading those bishops who hold them secretly to subvert or even openly to oppose the Pope’s wishes for the liturgy, in fact profoundly divisive if not actually schismatic—as well as tyrannically authoritarian. They are, it has to be said, prolonging an essentially totalitarian attitude towards the Old Rite and the liturgical ideas of the present Pope which has a long and inglorious history. If you want a flavour of what used to happen and probably still does, read Fr Smith's blog. It opens with a chilling story, which I would have found as incredible as it should be, if it were not for the fact that I have heard variants of it so many times before from a wide variety of different sources: