Told Ya So Addendum: Infamous Folly and the Faithful Few

Absurd belief #201: the Second Vatican Council did away with all that Tridentine nonsense and compelled the Church to move beyond her ancient ways and revered customs.

An article at Corpus Christi Watershed describes the fantasy well enough:

https://www.ccwatershed.org/2013/06/13/what-vatican-ii-said-and-didnt-say-about-liturgy/

1. The Council never said that Mass should cease to be in Latin and should only be in the vernacular. The Constitution reaffirmed that the fixed parts of the Mass would continue to be in Latin, the very language of the Roman Rite, but gave permission to vernacularize some parts, such as the readings and the general intercessions (par. 36; cf. par. 101). After stating that the people’s language may be used for some parts, the Council added: “Steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them” (par. 54). Latin remains, to this day, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church and of her liturgy, and yet it is surprising, to say the least, that the aforementioned desideratum of Vatican II has only rarely been achieved.
2. The Council never said that Gregorian chant should be set aside in favor of new songs. On the contrary, the Council acknowledged Gregorian chant as “specially suited to the Roman liturgy” and deserving “pride of place” in the celebration of Mass, along with the great musical compositions of our heritage (pars. 114-117).
3. The Council breathed not a word about the priest “facing the people.” The Council assumed that Mass would continue to be offered by the priest facing eastwards, with the people, towards the rising sun, symbol of the Christ who is to come—the universal custom of all Eastern and Western liturgical rites from the beginning. In fact, the rubrics of the Missal promulgated by Paul VI presuppose that the priest is facing eastwards.
4. The Council never dictated that tabernacles be moved from the center of the church, that sanctuaries be “reordered,” or that altar rails be removed. It said nothing about receiving communion in the hand while standing. It assumed that communion under both species would continue to be of rare occurrence among the non-ordained (cf. par. 55); extraordinary ministers of holy communion are nowhere mentioned.
5. Lastly, the Council did not downplay or discourage traditional practices of piety such as Eucharistic adoration and Marian devotions.

Silly because... .

Anyone with two eyes and half a brain can read the documents of the Second Vatican Council and determine that the misrepresentations being fed Catholics by ordained and lay ideologues too often do not measure up to the facts. History has become a casualty stripped of its truth by subversives who, like their sewer inhabiting muroid kin, lay in wait to gnaw at the fine lines that connect people to facts, to truth, to identity, and humanity.

NLM: Was the work of the Consilium done with respect for the ideals of the Liturgical Movement and for the provisions of Sacrosanctum Concilium?

Dom Alcuin: Fr Carlo Braga, a close collaborator of Bugnini, once wrote to me that the principles outlined in the 1948 document of the Pius XII reform commission were “amplified by another spirit” after the Council (“dopo il concilio”). In February 1964 Paul VI established the Consilium in order to “to apply” Sacrosanctum Concilium “according to the letter and spirit of the Council”. Its “letter” was quickly left behind, and its “spirit” became something other than that of the Council fathers: one of innovation rather than restoration.

Some currently attempt to justify this departure and subsequent innovation by regarding Vatican II as an “event” and by insisting that the “core values” and “theology” of this “event”—in other words its increasingly hard to define “spirit”—are the only legitimate bases for interpreting Conciliar documents, regardless of the provisions and theology of the documents themselves. Such a position is utterly revisionist and astonishingly a-historical. The Council Fathers never proposed this. It renders the principles and provisions of Sacrosanctum Concilium null and void, and provides a carte blanche for liturgical innovation.

https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2014/02/the-consilium-ad-exsequendam-at-50_12.html?m=1#.YOQC2OhKiUk 

Believers can and should expect authoritative clarification of the (unchanging) teaching of Holy Mother Church to assist us to better enter into the historic and living Faith. That said, the common form of the Mass, as it currently exists in most parishes, has but a tenuous connection to the Council's documents promoting renewal in continuity with the received liturgical legacy of the Roman Church.

Formerly the "Ordinary Form" of the Mass, the Pauline Liturgy hardly resembles the design called for by the Council Fathers. The Pauline Mass, as it has taken shape over the past 50 years in the wake of the Council, reflects more the excesses of individual conferences, i.e., the failing tinkerings of liturgical tamperers too proud to anchor their thinking in the vast continuum of liturgical art - theology, architecture, sculpture, music, poetry - which produced countless saints. Instead of art, the Pauline Liturgy has become a circus rife with odd toys and narcissistic behaviour.

So then, the tough question: if the Pauline Form of the Mass is capable of being celebrated in a solemn and dignified manner, why isn't it done so more often? Why isn't reverence and dignity the norm? Why do the vast majority of celebrations of the Pauline Form Masses border on the silly and cheap? The most obvious answer is that there is a defect somewhere in the mix. Where is that defect located? In the text of the Mass? In the rubrics? In the minds of (poorly catechized) Catholics?

There is good news. The good news is that the Ordinariate Form of the Mass, called Divine Worship, realizes the best intentions of the Second Vatican Council. Strange, is it not, that a cadre of former Protestants returning to full communion have brought with them Catholic treasures while a committee of Catholics (Bugnini et al.) chopped away at the Mass, removing or making optional certain elements that have formed and sustained countless saints? Rather than 'strange', perhaps the Ordinariate Form of the Mass is an act of Divine Providence that restores to Holy Mother Church an emphasis on truth, goodness and beauty. As Ordinariate Catholics are fond of saying: worship God in the beauty of holiness! (Ps 96:9)

Even Jesuits heretics can be useful.

Let us recall a celebrity from way-back-when who was on the wrong side of history, a figure who made the fundamental mistake of substituting his ideas about God for the God of revelation.

Marcion of Sinope, c. 85 – c. 160, was an early Christian theologian, an evangelist, and an important figure in early Christianity. Marcion preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus Christ into the world as the savior was the true Supreme Being, different from and opposed to the malevolent demiurge or creator god, identified with the Hebrew God of the Old Testament. He considered himself a follower of Paul the Apostle, whom he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus Christ, a doctrine called Marcionism. Marcion published the earliest extant fixed collection of New Testament books, making him a vital figure in the development of Christian history.

Early Church Fathers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian denounced Marcion as a heretic, and he was excommunicated by the church of Rome around 144. He published the first known canon of Christian sacred scriptures, which contained ten Pauline epistles (the Pastoral epistles weren't included) and a shorter version of the Gospel of Luke (the Gospel of Marcion). This made him a catalyst in the process of the development of the New Testament canon by forcing the proto-orthodox Church to respond to his canon. - Wikipedia.

Just as Marcion provoked the orthodox to get off their duffs and respond to his kooky thinking, so the many contemporary kooks of today are provoking the faithful to marshal the resources given them by God to respond to theological problems and accompanying liturgical distortions.

Like an cunning general, good Pope Benedict XVI outflanked the opponents of history and Tradition by issuing with strategic timing the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus (AC). The troops gathering under the banner of AC are marshalling resources not for defense but rather to mobilize for greater impact in the same theatre of operations:

The primary mission of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter is evangelization. The Ordinariate exists for those who are and who will be coming into full communion with the Catholic Church. Through the reverence and beauty of our worship, study of sacred Scripture and charity for those in need, we desire to share the joy of being Roman Catholic! With respect and gratitude for the Anglican heritage that nourished us, we seek to build bridges with all our brothers and sisters who are drawn to the Church, so that we might build up the one Body of Christ. Our mission is particularly experienced in our celebration of liturgy, which features Anglican traditions of worship while conforming to Catholic doctrinal, sacramental and liturgical standards. Through Divine Worship: The Missal — the liturgy that unites the Ordinariates throughout the English-speaking world — we share our distinctive commitment to praising God in the eloquence of the Anglican liturgical patrimony and Prayer Book English. In addition, the founding documents of the Personal Ordinariate make clear that it is intended to be an instrument of Catholic unity: an opportunity to model what the future reconciliation of separated Christian communities could be. We wish to fulfill the Holy Father’s vision for Christian unity, in which diverse expressions of one faith are joined together in the Church.

See also: https://atreasuretobeshared.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-beauty-of-ordinariate-liturgy.html 

Battlefield Church

The nature of that theatre of operations escapes many bishops. Young people possessing an enthusiasm for history, authenticity and traditional identity, and a deep thirst for truth, goodness and beauty, are flocking to Tradition-minded communities. Why? - because there they find Christ! "Progressive Catholics", typically older liberal types, tend to cling to an almost neurotic need to reinvent and improvise. They fabricate idols made in their image, idols that satisfy for the length of the lifespan of a gnat, and so the process of invention constantly begins again and again.

Lowered Expectations

There is nothing attractive about a church community that, possessed by the spirit of the age, contradicts itself by asking little in terms of faithfulness to God, yet demands absolute conformity to empty-headed ideologies that are as far from Christ's teaching and example as pornography is from art. Theologians, schooled or amateur, who entertain and promote heterodoxy and heresy are pornographers. They traffic in ideas that rot the mind and corrupt the soul. They are putting not only their own souls at risk but dragging down others into their error. If they persist in their obscene and therefore profane behaviour, they should not be surprised that they are denied entry into the fanum, the temple of the Lord.

Trust God

God continues to draw younger people into His service, young people who are interested in the God of revelation not the stunted imaginings of protestantized (c)atholics (i.e., protestors). Good ritual is a window into the Divine, a window through which the Lord pours His light and illuminates the world-weary soul. Everyone needs ritual. If we fail to discover the authentic ritual of the Mass, people start to invent their own. If the past 60 years reveal anything, it is that human beings who have cut themselves off from the river of Tradition tend to produce sterile, haphazard, banal and misleading ritual.

God's faithful lieutenants are increasing in number. Religious communities and fraternities that remain confident in their realization of Tradition are thriving. The formation provided to the lay faithful by faithful and zealous clergy is equipping them/us to be effective missionaries who are capable of weathering adversity and who are happy compatriots leading others toward the hospital and fortress of God. 

Ordinariate parishes are small compared to their diocesan sister communities. We are so very blessed in the Ordinariate to have good priests and deacons who reverently pray the Mass and teach the Catholic and Apostolic Faith.

As Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, said:

The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.

She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members....

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. "The church will become small." from Faith and the Future (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). Faith and the Future was originally published in 1969.

The Ordinariate is a "fresh blossoming", a "little flock of believers" that is "something wholly new". 

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger saw clearly in 1969 where the Church was and is heading. The tiny reservoirs or oases of faithfulness wherein the sacred Liturgy is revered and the Faith is confidently practiced are here, thanks in large part to the prophetic vision of Pope Benedict XVI who published Anglicanorum Coetibus to establish "something wholly new", an "answer for which" our beloved separated brethren and those who "feel the whole of their poverty" "have always been searching in secret." And, let us not forget our Eastern Catholic brethren who have faithfully preserved their ancient rites, especially the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and others, that have endured severe persecution and have remained strong and true to the Lord! Lastly, let us pray for those who worship according to the 1962 Missale Romanum. Groups such as the FSSP and ICKSP are quietly maintaining the liturgical culture of the Church which sustained martyrs and beautified man's experience by inspiring magnificent architecture, sublime music, awe inspiring art, and profound theology that fostered the authentic liberation of man.

Visit also: 7 Powerful Ways Traditional Anglican Liturgical Music Evangelizes in the Ordinariate