It Isn’t ‘Hard-Right Rhetoric’ Drawing Catholics To The Latin Mass, No Matter What NYT Says

[Kamaji]

It Isn’t ‘Hard-Right Rhetoric’ Drawing Catholics To The Latin Mass, No Matter What NYT Says

The resurgence of the traditional Latin Mass is not an embrace of ‘hard-right’ rhetoric but a return to the millennia-old Judeo-Christian beliefs that shaped Western civilization.

BY: CARINA BENTON
NOVEMBER 28, 2022

The New York Times recently published an article on the increasing numbers of American Catholic families who are gravitating to the traditional Latin Mass in search of liturgical reverence, orthodoxy, and a more Catholic experience. They are making the switch, as reporter Ruth Graham explains, despite being thwarted by a pope whose hostility to the ancient rite contrasts sharply with the conciliation and pastoral generosity demonstrated by his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

My own family migrated to the Latin Mass in 2021 for many of the reasons cited by the families interviewed for the report. Yet my reaction to the piece, unlike that of some Catholic bloggers and conservative Catholic writers such as Michael Brendan Dougherty, sounded a little less like Deo gratias and a little more like cui bono? On the one hand, at a time when Rome has literally forbidden most Catholic parishes from advertising the scheduled times of Latin Masses in their church bulletins, Latin Mass attendees are probably grateful for The New York Times’ free publicity. On the other hand, it’s intriguing that an ancient liturgy representing “a fraction of Masses performed at the 17,000 Catholic parishes in the US” was important enough to warrant a front page spot.

Yet significant it is, but not for the reasons close to the hearts of traditional Catholics caught up in the turmoil of Pope Francis’s severe restrictions on the Latin Mass, senior prelates’ abandonment of core Catholic teaching, and liturgical cringefests in the New Mass or Novus Ordo Mass.

Instead, the real focus is sneaked into the third paragraph, where Graham describes the resurgence of the Latin Mass as “part of a rising right-wing strain within American Christianity.” The report is no bigoted attack on “radical-traditional Catholics” like The Atlantic’s recent sledgehammer of an “exposé,” a piece so outrageously obnoxious that the original headline and cover art had to be scrubbed. Graham’s style and substance is far more subtle, sophisticated, and insightful. But the underlying message is unsettling, and certainly not a celebration of traditional Catholicism.

Graham, who covers religious affairs for The New York Times, is evidently taking a pause from profiling white evangelical Christian “extremists” and pivoting to the increasing number of Latin Mass Catholics. Like their evangelical brothers and sisters, traditional Catholics believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God, adhere to its theological and moral truths, and profess that God’s law is eternal and unchangeable. Clearly, this makes traditionalists personae non gratae with the cultural and political elite, and therefore a strain worth examining.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/28/it-isnt-hard-right-rhetoric-drawing-catholics-to-the-latin-mass-no-matter-what-nyt-says/

[BellyAche]

"The resurgence of the traditional Latin Mass is not an embrace of ‘hard-right’ rhetoric but a return to the millennia-old Judeo-Christian beliefs that shaped Western civilization."

 

[Smokin Joe]

Hard Right?

Only on the "right" because the whole of society has shifted to the LEFT.

Only "hard right" because that shift has taken the formerly right wing left as well (a result of "compromise" that only works in one direction.

The Latin Mass, and indeed the Catholic faithful haven't moved. The liturgy of my youth was mainstream American where I grew up, when I grew up there. The Maryland Colony, which later became the State of Maryland, was founded by Catholics. The Latin Mass was part of its DNA.
Characterizing this traditional resurgence as "hard right" is only a measure of how far to the left all else has moved.

[Wingnut]

As a fish eater from birth, I love the Latin Mass.   I can't wait for a new Pope... A real Catholic Pope, not this piece of shit stand in.