What Happened?

Catholic Insight ^ | 3/27/23

[marshmallow]

For these latter days of Lent, I just began reading Father Romano Guardini’s Jesus Christus – his 1963 meditation on the life of the Saviour, and a recommended read – when I noticed tucked within its pages this bulletin from Saint John’s Cathedral in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It’s from the same year, preserved in pristine condition, :

Readers may join with me in marveling, wondering, and asking – what happened?

This is August 1963. The Second Vatican Council had been running for one year, but had not produced any documents. Pope John XXIII, who had called the Council, had died the previous June 3rd, and Cardinal Giovanni Baptisti Montini had been elected Pope on the 21st of the same month as Paul VI. He chose to continue the Council, which would resume that October. No one had much idea of what was on the stormy, horizon, with a bad moon risin’ (CCR released the song six years later, April of 1969, with the storm then in full swing).

Yet there, in 1963, Saint John’s Cathedral is offering four Masses every weekday morning, on the half-hour, in full, if functional, Tridentine splendour, the first of them at 6 am, for all the workers and students who had the very beneficial habit of going, even receiving, daily. Bring back the pre-dawn liturgy, and may the Eucharist be elevated with the rising sun!

On holy days, there were twelve Masses, the first of them at 5:30 am. All of them, we may presume, well-attended.

I need scarcely – and would really rather not – look up what is now on offer at the cathedral. Most Mass times in parishes, even many cathedrals, are suitable only for retirees or those on vacation.

What intrigues me is how we got from there to here.......

[Ken522]

“What Happened?” you ask -— Vatican II, and it’s subsequent implementation ...

[SuperLuminal]

A combination of the highly suspicious ousting of Pop John and the ascension of an ardent communist...

Eventually, it was combined, in the United States, with the total destruction of the globe’s finest public education system through the establishment of the Federal Education Department, starting the flow of federal money into the neighborhood and regional public schools under the guise of preventing hunger, the heinous act of the SCOTUS in totally destroying the neighborhood construct in raising children, and the preferred hiring of leftists with drug histories as teachers...

We now have communists teaching “the government’s” children to be America-hating communists...
This, of course, has led to a drop in church worshipers and Christian beliefs...

It took several generations to get us here...
It would take us twice as many to get back to sanity and American beliefs...

Not much chance, Ronald Reagan warned us and few listened...