The Great Reformers

As long-term readers of my blogs have learned, over the last few years, I have developed a strong aversion to talking, writing or even thinking much about liturgy. I have for some years shied away from the usual Trad topics, except for making the occasional joke at the expense of the Grey Pony-Tail and Wrinkly Birkenstock crowd. I take a look fairly regularly at Rorate Caeli and even at NLM now and then, just to keep my nose in the latest topics.

But friends from my liturgy-ranting days will recall that I am (almost) not exaggerating when I say that the Liturgy Wars put me into enraged convulsions and that it is best all 'round if I leave such things to those whose constitutions are better suited. (Those who are, in a word, less Irish).

I offer the following as an example of the sort of thing that has inspired me to stay carefully away from Traditionalist blogs, discussion groups and websites:

The great reformer Martin Luther, appalled by aberrations committed on relics, fiercely took issue with the Catholic Church. Indeed, who would not be scandalized by reports that when priests were compelled to celebrate only one Mass a day to stifle the abuses surrounding Mass stipends, some had the temerity to simulate the Mass and raise the relic of a saint at the supposed moment of consecration? I can still hear my mentor Adrian Nocent's dismissive remark when he listened to stories of relics, private apparitions, and saccharine devotions: "It's another religion!"

This was from a book by Anscar Chupungco's What, Then, is Liturgy?: Musings and Memoir, Claretian Publications. Adrian Nocent, Rorate Caeli informs me "was one of the leading lights of the liturgical reform of the 1960's."

It makes me want to go live in a cave.



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