The eighth day
I suppose that I could call today, “the Octave of Rant Sunday,” thus bestowing a name upon the Sunday before. Gentle reader may have noticed my plan for Canada in the last week of January. In the Bugnini Liturgy, we are probably already in “Ordinary Time.” (I haven’t checked.) The liturgical colour is environmental green. (Okay, now I’ve checked.)
My scheme would break this up a bit. Proposed liturgical colour: back to Christmastide white. My overlay may be forgotten in the coming week, which contains Candlemas — a conclusion to the Christmas season, in the liturgy before and after Bugnini’s. It marked, or rather marks, an inflection, or tipping point, between our celebration of Christ’s appearance in the world, and the coming Lent that will anticipate Easter.
All of this may seem irrelevant, now that Holy Church has gone online. For people like me (a characteristic ranter) the Internet hardly exists, and what I write on it is written on water. The Mass has become, for many, something you may watch on YouTube, in moments taken from Batflu worship. “Make yourself comfortable,” I heard, on one of these programmes.
My favourite railway-platform poster for The Times, many decades ago when I lived in England, was jet black, with a logo below a slogan, reversed out of it in white. The slogan was: “Slip into something less comfortable.”
This is what I aspire to, when writing on water. The message will only be visible for a moment, or less. I wish I could say that for Bugnini, but he didn’t say it, before passing on; alas Pope Paul VI didn’t say it for him. Instead, his Novus Ordo has made a lasting contribution to Catholic confusion, and evaporation. I have come to think of the Vatican II reforms, distantly remembered from the 1960s, as the ecclesiastical equivalent of Roe v. Wade. But of course, the analogy isn’t exact. Abortion, after all, only kills babies.
Back then, I wasn’t a Catholic; I was being raised in a post-Protestant home. By 1969, I was flirting with Atheism. But I did know some Catholic children (my liberal parents had told me to play with them), and later, as I came to know more, and older Catholics, I sensed their discomfiture with post-Catholicism. Within a few years, however, I dived into “organized” Christianity, at the deepest, Anglican end I could find. Call me a curmudgeon. Or a fish. (I swam towards Catholicism, deeper still.)
By now, we live in total confusion. For the Church, it has become the preferential option; for society, a new way of life. These Idleposts are too short to document this degeneration, thank God. I am, myself, merely confused most days. Rant Sunday, and Rant Week, are my tiny contribution to recovery.