Letter #71, 2021, Mon , July 26: Mutsaerts insidethevatican.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from insidethevatican.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Language Barriers
By Stephen P. White, Catholic Thing, June 17, 2021
Liturgy can be a very divisive and contentious matter in the life of the Church. It is a sad reality that the setting in which we are most perfectly united to each other – literally “in communion” with one another – can become a source of division and disunity. It is one thing when these division arise over aesthetic preferences, or generational divides, or even serious disagreements about the theology of the Eucharist. But in recent decades there’s been another kind of division that has received much less notice.
It begins with a story we all know well by now: The Second Vatican Council opened to the promise of a new engagement of the Church with the modern world but was followed promptly by a period of dramatic upheaval in Catholic life. Men abandoned the priesthood; monasteries and (especially) convents emptied; Catholic marriage rates began a long decline from which they have not recovered; Mass att