Is The Latin Mass Worse Than Child Rape?

The American Conservative ^ | 7/13/14 | Rod Dreher

[BlatherNaut]

Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in praise of Pope Benedict XVI for establishing that the Tridentine Mass (also known as the “Latin Mass,” or the “Old Mass”) is always and everywhere licit. The papal ruling came in a document titled Summorum Pontificum. MBD says — rightly in my view — that even nonbelievers ought to be grateful for the old mass’s comeback, because it has inspired so much beautiful art over the centuries. In his 1980s book Once A Catholic, the writer Peter Occhiogrosso interviewed a number of prominent, or semi-prominent, people who are or who once were Catholics, about their life in the Church. One of the most surprising things about it when I read the book as a brand-new Catholic was how many people interviewed in the book — even an ex-Catholic like the avant-garde rock musician Frank Zappa — missed the old mass.

Anyway, MBD, who is himself a Traditionalist, writes that the pope’s intervention did not save his parish:

Summorum came too late to save that community in Poughkeepsie. In the New York Archdiocese as then ruled by Cardinal Edward Egan, the offense of saying this Mass and publishing tracts in its favor was treated as a far more serious crime and scandal than clerical pederasty.

[right way right]

Silliness is worse than evil.

[redgolum]

In a way it is.

A Latin Mass Parish tends to be it’s own little diocese. The concerns of the people are much different than the concerns of a typical NO parish.

It self selects a type of person and family that many bishops don’t like and want to keep quiet.

[Veto!]

vast majority of today’s priests do not know Latin and cannot say a Latin based mass.

Pity. .

I liked the idea of going to a church service in Latin, joining millions of others all over the world reciting the same words. It gave it a certain mystical power, imho.