The Change in the Liturgy: the real reason men fell away from the Church post-Vatican II

Nobody can deny that the exodus of Mass-attending Catholics from the Church in the wake of the changes applied after Vatican II (and very notably the exodus of men in particular) has been a disaster for families and the whole life of the Church. In a recent article by Fr Richard Heilman (ROMAN CATHOLIC MAN) posted here about searching for good strategies to “reel men back into the Church”, one root cause of the whole original collapse was brushed over: the change in the way we pray affects the way we believe!

One of our great regular commentators on CP&S from Australia, ‘Crow’, has once again hit the nail on the head, this time with the [slightly edited] insightful analysis below of the sorry situation once the faitjful were deprived of the holy Traditional Latin Mass . Thank you Crow.

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The description of the reduction of those tenets of the faith [in the aftermath of V2] which are the basic structure show the consequence, not the cause. The cause is the infliction of the Novus Ordo Mass upon the whole of the Catholic world and the suppression of the traditional Latin Mass.

Cardinal Ottoviani said, at the time of Vatican II, that if the planned changes went through, all we would have left attending Mass would be women and children. The Novus Ordo Mass didn’t so much as feminize the Mass as ‘demasculinize’ it. It made room for the abuses of which we are all aware, but, more insidiously, it allowed for the creep of the intrusion of the banal – hence the track suits and thongs (flip flops to Americans) and propping up of doctrine by avoiding the supernatural. The supernatural is avoided because it is excised from the liturgy. The liturgy is amputated from its historical narrative in the Jewish temple and the culmination of the Jewish tradition in the Word of God in Christ is lost. The Novus Ordo presents the Christian Mass as an entity with no past and the meaning is therefore reduced to what is capable of being understood with no study, no knowledge of history and no effort. It is therefore of no value in leading the faithful into the divine mysteries because the Mass itself has been flattened into a secular, shallow version of itself – basically, protestantised.

When it comes to Protestant services, ironically, the protestants try to draw as much as they can from the Catholic tradition, without attributing it – they call the past, pre-Reformation traditions they pick out as theirs, ‘Christian ‘ and the ones they choose to disallow ‘Catholic.’ It is ironic that they seek to imbue their faith (a recent faith), with a history appropriated from Catholic tradition when the Catholic Church itself attempted to junk her 2,000 year history and impose a committee-formed liturgy upon us by coercion.

There is a simple answer to the issue of the exit of men from the faith – it is the traditional Latin Mass. A visit to any traditional parish will reveal a large number of healthy, courteous faithful young men (those whom are best described by some people as ‘rigid’). Similarly, a visit to a traditional Latin Mass will reveal very few, or short-lived, exhibitions of dress in thongs and trackkies, lack of respect for the Real Presence, or those factors which have operated in numerous surveys by those Vatican II fans amongst the hierarchy who are looking to implement the ‘new evangelisation ‘.

Quite frankly, if you have the real thing, if you have the Truth, you just need to Be, you don’t need to evangelise like a Protestant. The protestantisation of the liturgy has been followed by a Protestant attitude to ‘evangelising’. It is interesting that the top hierarchy of the Vatican (who do not appear, at a glance, to be holy and faithful men), disapprove of the traditional Latin Mass – I wonder why that would be so?