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The real solution is to have them co-exist and see which rite eventually survives.

They have coexisted for 20 years now ... Indult (FSSP) Tridentine Rite and Indult Novus Ordo Rite - both sanctioned by the pope.

Are you also suggesting that there is a difference between the mass celebrated by the SSPX and FSSP? Do you disagree with the SSPX position that By a priest who celebrates the Novus Ordo Missae on other days of the week or at other times, cannot celebrate the Tridentine mass?

They have coexisted for 20 years now ... Indult (FSSP) Tridentine Rite and Indult Novus Ordo Rite - both sanctioned by the pope.

They coexist, but are not treated equally. The Latin Masses are not promoted at all and are disdained quite a bit. At least here. I know many people who have gone down to St. Agatha to Latin Mass for the first time and have not cared for it at all, and those who refuse to go down there because they remember pre-Vat II.

Eventually, the more pious rites are going to survive. The entertainment aspect of the Mass will go away, simply because those who want that at Mass are having far fewer kids than those who want piety. And those of us who were raised by the guitar devotees and grew up, are pulling no punnches about getting out of that rut.

The changes aren't going to happen overnight, like the first time. It will be gradual, but it will happen.

The FSSP is at present in chains. The minute it began to thrive, Rome cut it off at the knees, firing its duly elected superior general and some key seminary theologians, and forcing its members to accept a Vatican-appointed superior and the concelebration of the Novus Ordo. This has had a seriously demoralizing effect and is compromising its commitment to the old Mass. This is why SSPX has been so wary of "regularizing" its status. It needs its "irregular" status to preserve tradition as a living reality intact until a later day when it may emerge from isolation in freedom. Otherwise our memory of Catholicism as it truly existed in the past will have been lost.

Right now if you attend an SSPX Mass you are not only going back forty years, but you are going back to the days of ancient Rome. There is virtually very little difference. It is like running a newsreel from 500 A.D. That busy altar boy, for instance, now serving in the sanctuary is doing so precisely as he did fifteen hundred years ago in the west with very few rubrical or textual changes, all of them minor. This connection to the past is already fading in the FSSP where some priests are beginning to offer Communion in the hands and even using altar girls. Only the SSPX remains the glue that binds the past and the present together.

One caveat regarding my last post. I am aware the issue of communion in the hands is controversial precisely because many believe this was the way the early Christians received Communion. But one of the evolutionary aspects of the Mass has been the shift to Communion on the tongue. The further we got from apostolic times, the more the need was perceived for greater external reverence as a show of faith in the Real Presence. Tradition always gradually evolves in this way and is never absolute or static. But neither is it ever radical and revolutionary, as Cardinal Newman pointed out.

Communion on the tongue also underscores the separateness of the priest who, by his ordination, alone has the power to consecrate. This is an essential Catholic teaching. Under the pretext of returning to a more primitive practice, therefore, the Novus Ordo in actuality undermines the Catholic faith by erasing this distinctiveness. In other words, it returns to the primitive practice--in order to reduce outer signs of respect and to merge the sacrificial priesthood of the ordained with the common priesthood of the baptized--thus serving a different, non-Catholic doctrine. This is only one of many differences between the old Mass and the new in this contemporary struggle for Catholic identity.