The priest informed her that "we can't go back," and promptly hired a music director known in the area for her "praise and worship" (evangelical Protestant) approach to Catholic "church music."
"We can't go back" has become the rallying cry for those Catholics who have become thralls of the liturgical revolution. This call to rally around the modernist flag of innovation and novelty is a grave misunderstanding of the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Holy Catholic Church, not to mention, it represents a fatalistic, dead end approach to authentic liturgical development.
Truth be told, I totally agree with the sentiment: we can't go back, we most move on.
My sense of the Catholic Church in America is that, for the most part, it has been mired in the "Spirit of Vatican II" for so long that few Catholics understand the nature of authentic liturgical development and fewer still would recognize the difference between liturgy and parody, at least as defined by Card. Ratzinger in his book, "The Spirit of the Liturgy": "...If the various external actions (as a matter of fact, there are not very many of them, though they are being artificially multiplied) become the essential in the liturgy, if the liturgy degenerates into general activity, then we have radically misunderstood the 'theo-drama' of the liturgy and lapsed into a parody." (from pp. 171-5, _The Spirit of the Liturgy_.)
For decades now the wheels have been spinning in the muck of the novel modernist insistence that going forward means embracing this year's innovations, this year's fads, this years sound bites, this year's post-modern conversion theories. And as if thralldom to fashion is not enough, we are also instructed to define this endless parade of novelty as progress.
This approach is every bit as identifiable with the '70's, every bit as stuck in the '70's, as platform shoes, leisure suits, and striped bell-bottom pants.
Being that this approach hinges upon generational fads, the most profound effect it has had is to divide generations of Catholics: the hootenanny Catholics from the Evangelical Catholics, the sing-around-the-campfire Catholics from the contemporary music Catholics, the "praise and worship" Catholics from the Polka Mass Catholics, and anyone with a sense of the orthodox approach to worship seems to be set out on an island all by themselves.
Each new crop of youth ministers spends an inordinate amount of time convincing their charges of the utter lameness of the previous generation's education and approach to worship. Ultimately, the prayer of the Church, the Mass, resides right along side the guy in the platform shoes, the woman in the big hair from the '80's, the grunge of the '90's, etc.: worship as fashion. All is ordered to each generation.
What difference does it make as long as each fad sparks a little spike in attendance and interest in parish events?
The danger is exactly that which was predicted by certain orthodox heroes of the Second Vatican Council. The insistence on cultural/generational adaptation and on a multitude of options that distinguish Pope Paul's New Mass presents a "law of prayer," a manner of worship, that is no longer ordered to Christ but, instead is ordered to Man and the noise of the secular world. As the saying goes, the law of prayer, the law of belief, or the way we pray informs our belief. In case it's not clear by now, this notion of adaption to Man, so popular in the early '70's, has sown the seeds of relativism among the Catholic faithful. The Church is at a point where one of the most common phrases we might hear or read in the church social hall or on social media, respectively, is the one that begins, "I'm Catholic, but...." From there, all manner of error is embraced in the name of "the Spirit," in the name of cultural norms, and in the name of individual conscience (no matter how that conscience was actually informed, or rather, misinformed).
There is growing recognition that it will take drastic actions to correct the damage done by this distortion of the Roman Rite. Much has been written lately about reverence, bringing back "the sacred," and engaging and/or restoring various pre-Vatican II devotions; but what doesn't seem to be on the table, what seems to be beyond the comprehension of the powers that be in the Catholic Church in America, is the idea of leaving behind this notion that these problems are solved by the inventions of men. We must move forward and realize the utter futility of trying to solve problems which, mind you, were created by novelties rooted in humanism, merely by plugging in new novelties rooted in humanism. Spinning the wheels...always spinning the wheels....
No, we can't go back. We must go forward.
