Where things went wrong

[wombat_socho]

Sometimes you come across a post that hits so close to home that you're reduced to tears by the awful truth of it, the sense that someone else has seen what you have seen, felt the same loss that broke your heart. Amy Welborn's extended comment on Jody Bottum's "When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano", which discusses how the Catholic culture of the 1950s fragmented, dissolved and was lost in the wave of post-conciliar...bullshit, I have to say, although it's a word that neither Mrs. Welborn nor Ms. Bottum would use. The loss of the rituals and the traditions was something I felt very powerfully when the "folk Mass" movement hit the corner of the MiIitary Ordinariate that was Bolling AFB in 1971, and it did a lot to drive me away from regular attendance and observance. My father tried to point out to me that the fundmental truths hadn't changed, and of course he was right, but it was hard to accept that at a time when everything seemed to be changing, everything seemed to be in flux, and the Lord only knew what strange things might be ordered next.

RTWT.
(Via Eve Tushnet, who hopefully will get better soon and who I really should be reading every day. It would be good for my soul, I think.)