"The younger generation (those born post VCII) have elevated the pre VCII Mass to some sort of euphoric level. I witnessed it first hand and returned to it several years ago, fully expecting that perhaps I had not understood something from my own experience as a child. Stepping into the Church that morning to attend the Indult Tridentine Mass, I recognized that NOTHING had changed. Here were the women praying their rosaries during the Mass. Young families assembled in the pews and I 'relived' my own childhood watching the parents turn the pages in their children's missals. The kids were totally lost. The children were expected to behave like adults, "little soldiers" kneeling straight in their respective pews. They dared not utter a word, or turn a page without the approval of their parents. I couldn't wait to leave the church that day."
But you see, NYer, it wasn't really the Tridentine Mass that was the problem, but rather a centuries long inculcating of the people that they were simply individual, autononmous observers of the Mass. That is not what the Liturgy was ever meant, properly, to be. The Liturgy is just what its name says it is, the work of the people, not as individuals but as a community together. The problem lies in a mindset which took hold of the Western Church centuries ago and which, luckily, never got into Orthodoxy or all of the Eastern Rite Churches in communion with Rome. Your own Maronite Church, however, as your priest will tell you, became almost completely Latinized, something which of late, by the grace of God, that Church has been moving away from.
"But you see, NYer, it wasn't really the Tridentine Mass that was the problem, but rather a centuries long inculcating of the people that they were simply individual, autononmous observers of the Mass. That is not what the Liturgy was ever meant, properly, to be. The Liturgy is just what its name says it is, the work of the people, not as individuals but as a community together. The problem lies in a mindset which took hold of the Western Church centuries ago and which, luckily, never got into Orthodoxy or all of the Eastern Rite Churches in communion with Rome. Your own Maronite Church, however, as your priest will tell you, became almost completely Latinized, something which of late, by the grace of God, that Church has been moving away from."
(Your posts on this thread are very good)
The communal aspects of the Liturgy is, in my view, the major difference between eastern Christianity and western. Speaking broadly....in the western Liturgy, you're a spectator. In the eastern Liturgy, you're a participant.