Got this today in a news feed from The New Oxford Review. It was written in 2000 and appeared in the Archive section of today’s feed. It actually sounds a little dated to me, now, perhaps because I frequent more orthodox liturgies and have an interest in examples of improvements. What do you think? Are things turning around? Can we cite examples?
Thankfully, the new translation of the Mass has taken hold. That would be one example I could offer.
“The institution that understands the power of symbols best is the Catholic Church.” This statement, which I heard over thirty years ago in a sociology class in an Ivy League college, seemed remarkable at the time. The professor making it was Jewish — and it was greeted with good natured hisses by the students — mostly cradle-Protestants who presumably saw the Church as an instrument of oppression amid Age of Aquarius liberation. The statement remained in my mind, and it seems worth revisiting now, decades later. For I wonder if it could be made today. In their apparently unending efforts to make the Church “relevant” to the “modern” world, her shepherds in recent years have been showing a diminished understanding of how the Church’s traditional symbols speak to the heart of the human condition, and they have often traded the power of liturgical symbols for what at some times seems nothing more than poorly followed rules of procedure for a town meeting, and for what at other times is nothing at all. The impoverishment of Catholic symbols has led to a desacralization of Catholic life.
The most serious example is also the most laden with…
The author is Noel J. Augustyn
Read the whole article HERE
Tags: Liturgy
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