As a High Church Anglican who climbed fairly high up the candlestick, I developed a great appreciation for the ancient Church at prayer. It was catechism by incense, rood screens, gorgeous vestments and ad orientem Masses chanted from high altars that scrape the heavens.
What a shock, then, when I was finally received into the Catholic Church in 2011 and discovered that, in the Latin Rite, this patrimony had been discarded and was viewed with suspicion. While studying for ordination to the priesthood, I was told to stop wearing a cassock, denied the opportunity to learn the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (I learned it later on my own) and warned against the clericalism of traditional worship. Those were fraught times.
