"The cranks in authority"

The lights appear to be going back on all over the world.  

This Low Mass was celebrated at the seminary of the NY Archdiocese

From a letter of  Evelyn Waugh to the Editor of The Tablet, August 14, 1965:

"We have had the "liturgical movement" with us in parts of the USA and northern Europe for a generation.  We looked on them as harmless cranks who were attempting to devise a charade of second-century habits.  We had confidence in the abiding Romanita of our Church.  Suddenly we find the cranks in authority.

In the sixteenth century the demand for Communion in both kinds (itself inoffensive) became a characteristic of heresy.  In rather the same way today the appetite for small interpolations and abridgements, for raising the voice instead of the mind and heart, the disordering of services of great beauty and meaning which have developed throughout the centuries (e.g. the ritual of Good Friday) may prove to be symptoms of grave ill."

We have, these last several decades, suffered the grave ill of which Waugh noted the symptoms.  Although our sufferings are far from being at an end, there are signs that perhaps the tide has begun to turn back toward tradition.

Elizabethan martyrs, pray for us.