{"id":989,"date":"2024-01-25T11:01:55","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T11:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/01\/25\/thomas-merton-on-the-destruction-of-the-liturgy\/"},"modified":"2024-01-25T11:01:55","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T11:01:55","slug":"thomas-merton-on-the-destruction-of-the-liturgy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/01\/25\/thomas-merton-on-the-destruction-of-the-liturgy\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Merton on the Destruction of the Liturgy"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was with no excess of charity that I described Merton the other day as "a flabby liberal both politically and theologically." So let me balance that out a bit with a quotation from Volume Five (1963 – 1965) of his Journal<\/em>. Here is an excerpt from the entry of 13 April 1965, Tuesday in Holy Week, p. 227:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

On Palm Sunday everything was going well and I was getting into the chants of the Mass when suddenly the Passion, instead of being solemnly sung on the ancient tone in Latin, was read in the extremely trite and pedestrian English version that has been approved by the American bishops. The effect was, to my mind, disastrous. Total lack of nobility, solemnity, or even of any style whatever. A trivial act — liturgical vaudeville. I could not get away from the impression of a blasphemous comedy.  <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What was going on in the Church in those days? The Second Vatican Council. It ran from October 1962 to December 1965.  Merton's attitude toward Vatican II was ambivalent as you might expect, but above he strikes a traditionalist note.<\/span><\/p>\n

I myself would like to return of a Sunday morning to the piety of my pre-Vatican II boyhood and a Latin mass with my wife, a good Catholic girl, but the RCC seems bent on reducing itself to a pile of leftist junk, secular and useless.  A comparison of the RCC with Budweiser seems fitting.<\/span><\/p>\n

They have this much in common: they don't understand their respective clienteles. <\/span><\/p>\n

Who drinks Budweiser? Connoisseurs of the brewer's art? No. Different sorts, but mainly country folk, rednecks, Hillary's deplorables, and Barack Hussein Obama's "clingers" to guns and Bibles.  So what were the head honchos thinking when they enlisted Dylan Mulvaney to promote their swill?  You know, that cute little narcissistic sweetie-pie who wants to grow up to be a girly-girl.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beats me.  Apparently, drinking Bud makes you none the wiser. The 'suits' seemed shocked by the predictable boycott and backlash and have reversed course with an appeal to Harley riders. They should have gone 'whole hog' with  an appeal to outlaw bikers.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for the RCC,   I have vented my spleen and blown my stack over at the Stack<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  <\/span><\/p>\n

The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was with no excess of charity that I described Merton the other day as "a flabby liberal both politically and theologically." So let me balance that out a bit with a quotation from Volume Five (1963 – 1965) of his Journal. Here is an excerpt from the entry of 13 April 1965, Tuesday in … Continue reading “Thomas Merton on the Destruction of the Liturgy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic-corner","category-merton-thomas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}