Not too long after I wrote the post about the Philadelphia grand jury, I visited Fr. Z's blog. He, too, had posted a short reflection, a call to prayers and penance. And amidst the comments, I found a few posts by some ... people ... who suggested that the cause of the scandal was the adoption of the Novus Ordo liturgy.
This is exactly why traddies set my teeth on edge: Clown Masses? Wymyn ordaining themselves priests? Prominent Catholic politicians blatantly thumbing their noses at Humanae Vitae? Gay ephebophile clerics? Well, it can all be solved if we just go back to the Tridentine Latin Mass!
Since I kept to the spirit of Fr. Z's post, let me post my reply to the anti-VII crowd here:
Dear dumbjohns,
First, let me introduce you to a concept known in logic as the post-hoc fallacy. The post-hoc fallacy occurs when you say, "A happened, then B happened after that, so A must have caused B."
Now that you've absorbed that complex idea, let me ask you this: Do you honestly think this kind of thing never occurred prior to 1962?
Let me tell you: it did.
People didn't know about it, because people didn't want to hear that that nice Fr. O'Malley was a sexual pervert, any more than they wanted to hear that that nice Reverend Mooney, Rabbi Tuchman, Dr. Fassbein, Mr. Holmquist down the street, the Little League coach or dear Uncle Fred was a sexual pervert. In those days—in fact, just up until the last twenty years or so—the Church didn't have to work too hard to cover these things up because the community didn't go out of its way to unearth child-molesters. They still don't.
Yes, the Novus Ordo Mass has problems, most of which will (hopefully!) be corrected with the new Missa Romanum translation coming out this Advent. But there are a lot of other problems in the Church that simply throwing away the NO won't solve, and may even exacerbate.
Your brother in Christ,Anthony S. "Tony" Layne
P.S. Vatican II will never be disowned or discarded. Paul VI declared it part of the Church's ordinary Magisterium; both JP2 and B16 have accepted it in its entirety. It's with us forever. Get over it; get used to it.
