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30 Jul 2007 11:59 am

A De Facto Schism?

I'm intrigued by the Latin mass, being a Second Council baby myself. But it seems to me that the likeliest result of the new shift toward the 1950s is the one sketched in the NYT on Saturday:

It's easy enough to see where this is going: same God, same church, but separate camps, each with an affinity for vernacular or Latin, John XXIII or Benedict XVI. Smart, devout, ambitious Catholics — ecclesial young Republicans, home-schoolers, seminarians and other shock troops of the faith — will have their Mass. The rest of us — a lumpy assortment of cafeteria Catholics, guilty parents, peace-’n’-justice lefties, stubborn Vatican II die-hards — will have ours. We'll have to prod our snoozing pewmates when to sit and stand; they'll have to rein in their zealots.

And we probably won't see one another on Sunday mornings, if ever.

One of the consequences of the collapse in the moral authority of the Catholic hierarchy, in the wake of Humanae Vitae and then the child and teen abuse revelations, is the inability to hold the Catholicity of the church together. The hierarchy does not command all of us any more. And then there is the suspicion that this kind of schism is actually deliberate, a way to deter the not-so-devout or traditional or politically conservative Catholics. It has worked and will continue to work. And the church will get smaller and smaller in the West.

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