Modernism and innovation have nearly ruined what was once a holy house. My 14 year old daughter attended her first mass last week while staying with my parents, and she was horrified. She said it is absolutely nothing like our liturgy and she did not feel the presence of God. Which kind of depressed me, because in second grade I had to attend mass every morning before school and I know God was there in those days.
In regard to our troubles, I site Chesterton:
"I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the many Catholic revivals of our own time . . . Just as some might have thought the Church simply a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have thought the Church only a part of the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages ended as the Empire had ended; and the Church should have departed with them, if she had been also one of the shades of night."
(The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, 250-252)
"At least five times, . . . with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died."
(The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, 254)