I recently read "A Bitter Trial," which contains the correspondence between Archbishop Heenan and Evelyn Waugh regarding the liturgical changes following the second Vatican Council. The book also contains an article by Waugh on the Council published in "The Spectator" in November, 1962, from which the following is excerpted:
"... I wondered how many of us wanted to see any change. The church is rather dark. The priest stood rather far away. His voice was not clear and the language he spoke was not that of everyday use. This was the Mass for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold. St. Augustine, St. Thomas a Becket, St. Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us; were, in fact, present there with us. Perhaps few of us consciously considered this, but their presence and that of all the saints silently supported us. Their presence would not have been more palpable had we been making the responses aloud in the modern fashion."
Elizabethan martyrs, pray for us.
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