Today is the seventeenth anniversary of the New Liturgical Movement, and of course, we never let this day pass without a word of thanks to our founder Shawn Tribe for his nearly eight years of dedication to the site, to our publisher, Dr William Mahrt, to our parent organization, the Church Music Association of America, to our long-time contributor Jeffrey Tucker, who succeeded Shawn as editor, as well as to the rest of our team, new and old, and our innumerable guest and photopost contributors, for everything they have done for the site over these many years. Last summer, between my time as managing editor and editor, I passed the point of running NLM longer than Shawn did. Over the years, I have received many words of encouragement and appreciation from readers, and I wish to reiterate how grateful I am for them. I know our other writers share this sentiment.
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| The NLM banner as it appeared from 2005-8 |
This is the second such anniversary that passes under the dark cloud of
Traditionis Custodes, and subsequent developments from it. I do not intend to belabor the subject now, since
I said what I think was most important to say about it last year. But some of the most recent developments have been particularly bad, and so I simply repeat this:
The surest sign that a revolution has failed, and knows in its heart of hearts that it has failed, is its terror of the past, of the memory of what life was really like before the revolution. And this is why so many of the Church’s authorities have chosen to ignore the tidal wave of crises that threaten it in countless ways, and instead deal with the fictitious problem posed by young fathers and mothers who were born at least 20 years after the last time a cleric used the word “aggiornamento” unironically, and by their children who are too young to remember the papacy of Benedict XVI.
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| Dangerous counter-revolutionaries threatening the unity of the Faith! |
There can be no clearer sign that the post-Conciliar revolution knows that it has no appeal to the rising generations, and thus, growing deathly afraid, and unwilling to take an honest look at its failure, resorts to doing by force what it cannot do by persuasion. A dying revolution is not a dead revolution. It has stuck out like a dying animal and caused a great deal of pain, unnecessarily, and will for some time continue to do so, to worse effect in some places than in others. But every such strike, every suppressed Mass, every closed church, every dispersed community, is a confession that it has failed and is dying.
