Dom Alcuin Reid stands athwart Traditionis Custodes and its defenders

Three respected academics, John Cavadini, Mary Healy, and Thomas Weinandy, have written a five-part series in the Notre Dame Church Life Journal on the Novus Ordo, the Mass of Paul VI -- the Mass that the vast majority of Roman Catholics throughout the world attend. (The articles are linked here -- the last link gathers them together in one.)

This series is frustrating to read, because it assumes what it sets out to demonstrate, that the Novus Ordo is superior to the (in their view, following Pope Francis in Traditionis Custodis) superannuated Traditional Latin Mass; a premise that the authors seem not to understand is self destructing, as it undermines the ability of the Church to guarantee true worship, if it must discard as inadequate the form in which it was celebrated for Roman Catholics in a span comprising the greater part of its history. 

I commend to your attention this excellent response from Dom Alcuin Reid, published in OnePeterFive today: The One Thread By Which the Council Hangs: a Response to Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy.

“Don’t touch that! If you do, everything will collapse!” The warning is clear enough. Any sensible person would rapidly desist, lest their one seemingly minor act bring everything crashing down, undoing the work of many days, weeks, years or even decades.

I am not sure whether these were the exact words used by a number of bishops at the beginning of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, but, whatever words they chose, these bishops forcefully conveyed to him their opinion that he could not under any circumstances permit a wider use of the older liturgical rites without perilously detracting from the authority of the Second Vatican Council. “Don’t do it,” they insisted, “or the Council will seem to have been reversed and will lose its authority.”

Of course, Benedict XVI did “do it” with his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (7 July 2007)—having first spent a cheerful morning or two telephoning many of the bishops who had previously shouted at him, in order personally to ‘explain’ that they had little or nothing to worry about. The world did not come to an end. The Church did not implode, and the Second Vatican Council’s true authority was not undermined.

Dom Reid has the confidence of one well versed in his subject, who is not academically or in any other professional way beholden to the regime built up around what he calls "the super-dogma" of Vatican II. He is exactly right, that those in the extraordinarily entrenched status quo live in fear of challenges to their received notions about liturgy -- that this "old, thin, and worn" thread will be pulled and everything will tumble down.

His freedom from human respect (a breath of fresh air, for these academics have throttled us with their iron grip on how we may think about the post-conciliar time) allows him to respond to the arguments (some of which, as you will see, is aimed at him) with what is readily observable to those not invested in the opposing narrative -- what even the National Catholic Reporter, that bastion of unorthodoxy, has on many occasions noted as "the hemorrhaging of Catholic youth" out of our Church. And, what supporters of innovation do not like, the popularity amongst the young of Tradition:

Calvadini, Healy, and Weinandy are honest in seeing that this poses quite a problem when there is at least one generation of Catholics, young and growing in number, for whom the reformed liturgical rites are practically unknown. They have discovered or even have grown up with the usus antiquior—the older liturgical rites—and they are now raising their own children accordingly, having been assured by popes and prelates across the world—even by the likes of the then Archbishop Roche[1]—that this was perfectly acceptable and did not in any way damage the communion of the Church; indeed, that it enriched it as an expression of that legitimate plurality that is part of the One Church of Christ.  

Today, he goes on, 

"... as repeated statistical studies from various countries demonstrate, the reformed liturgy has simply not delivered the ecclesial renewal promised. Promised? Yes: the assumption that guided (“motivated”? “sold”?) the introduction of the new rites was that if the liturgy were simplified, modernised, made more contemporary, then people would participate in it more fruitfully and a new springtime in the life of the Church would be ushered in. Alas, the opposite has proved to be true."

I highly recommend reading the whole thing. It is long, but bracing. His words are a tonic for the wilting spirit, especially as the attacks on Tradition show no signs of abating.

For a specific example of how the team just gets things wrong and, in Reid's words, suffers from "the paucity of their liturgical history and the lack of a range of sources in their footnotes," see Peter Kwasniewski's earlier response to the second article (Offspring of Arius in the Holy of Holies: Recent False Claims about the Roman Rite), in which he takes on "one of the (more ridiculous) claims of Cavadini-Healy-Weinandy, namely, that the Novus Ordo is more Trinitarian and that it makes the faithful more aware of Trinitarian prayer."

Frankly, this claim is so false that nothing could be falser, and that is why it had to be exposed mercilessly. I demonstrate not only the profound Trinitarian elements of the old rite and the new rite's systematic removal of them, but also the old rite's bold confession of the divinity of Christ and the new rite's semi-Arian softening of that confession.

It's really time for defenders of the Novus Ordo Mass of Paul VI come to grips with things as they are, not as they wish them to be.