The Recovering Choir Director

The Dyspeptic Mutterer likens the new liturgy to the Jarvik artificial heart, and liturgical experts to the operating surgeons.

I’ll have to acknowledge that the liturgical/education trendsetters have correctly identified that this is indeed the case–hence, the incessant efforts at community building.

The problem is that too many of our liturgical/educator types never much liked that culture in the first place. In fact, they were and remain profoundly embarrassed by it and are desperately trying to put it behind them: hence the readings of Vatican II documents that have gutted churches, liturgy, scriptural study, religious education, formation, theology, etc. all at once. Goodbye to all that. We are an Easter People, you know, and the preconciliar Church was a corpse, etc….

The “problem” with that has been that the tattered remnants of the sensus fidei keep rejecting the offered transplant as the faulty artificial heart it is. The reforms don’t work because they have no real, living (as opposed to pretextual) connection to Catholic tradition. But the surgeons are bent on making the transplant work no matter how profound the signs of rejection are, no matter how badly the patient’s life signs falter. If they just change “X”, they know things will get better. This time for sure.

Then he outlines his reasons for taking refuge in the East, with this striking comparison between Eastern and Western episcopal collegiality when it comes to liturgy.

[I]n the much-heralded (for some reason) new GIRM there are plenty of episcopal escape hatches conceded to the bishops in the name of collegiality. By virtue of the fact a particular butt happens to warm the cathedra, you will stand/kneel/play Twister/greet the “presider” with “Yahtzee!” because Albany/Los Angeles/Richmond/Rochester/Saginaw deems it meet to so do….

The Divine Liturgy of the the Eastern Catholics and Orthodox isn’t open to episcopal/priestly/expert interference. Nor, interestingly, do the collegially-sensitive Orthodox prelates seem to desire such. Seeing our example has proven to be, shall we say, inspiring to them in their desire to preserve the heart of their faith.

Mr. Price is another confirmation of Fr. Martin Edward’s assertion that “many people now look towards the east to recover that sense of the mysterious and spiritual in a religion that has sometimes been stripped bare to its essentials and sometimes even beyond.”