"I Found The Comments More Interesting Than The Article."

A visitor made that observation about the Charles Coulombe piece in Crisis that I linked Friday. The visitor, whose pithy remarks are always fun, went on:

After the complete destruction of the church in the seventies I figured If I were to be a Protty I should go to the experts. The Baptists and Congregationalists and Presbyterians were nice but lacked color. The Episcopalians were the most interesting, but I never could understand why they tried so hard to be Catholic.

Irrespective of the quality of the comments vis-a-vis the article itself, we're still left with the conundrum of why Mr Coulombe, a cradle Catholic of French Canadian heritage, should be selling -- and using Roger Scruton's insights, selling is what he's doing -- Anglicanism to other cradle Catholics. My regular correspondent observed,

Just looked at the Crisis comments. Presumably those who regularly read this publication are “disaffected Catholics” for the most part. Nothing wrong with looking for good music and liturgy, which as you often point out can be found in a diocesan parish with some searching.

So here's an example. Someone named Bob Wilkens posts,

As for a righteous fulfilling of the early promise of Vatican II before its highjack, one could not do better than attend an Ordinariate Of Peter service...

There in all its glory is the near Latin Tridentine Mass translated into magnificent near King James English....

It is what the English speaking Catholic churches SHOULD have been and were originally meant to be after Vatican II.

. . . And, as mentioned, there is the music...again fulfilling the Vatican II promise of more modern than Gregorian liturgical English language music of stunning beauty, and also the simple Anglo piety of hymns familiar to most any English speaking Christian, ....as opposed to many modern Catholic parishes music of Andrew Lloyd Webber/Peter, Paul and Mary trainwreck style.

The number of ordinariate groups and parishes that actually offer a full fuss-and-feathers liturgy and competent music is somewhere in the low double digits, and the numbers aren't growing. But notice the subsequent comments, in which even more traddy Catholics pile on poor Bob Wilkens:

The English Martyrs would certainly not agree with that statement. Many of them died for the Mass not the Anglican Communion Service. Too many people wrongly think that Divine Worship Mass is simply the TLM in KJV English. It is nowhere near the TLM, more patterned on the Novus Ordo.

And,

It's infinitely better than the Novus Ordo, I would agree, but the Ordinariate Rite as currently constructed is clearly a compromise rite in that it mandates the use of a number of post-Vatican 2 innovations, most likely in the name of avoiding insinuations (such as those lobbed by "dem rad trads") that the post-coniciliar liturgical novelties should be scrapped wholesale.

Most of the commenters appear to be cradle Catholics, although a few do mention they're Anglican converts. But the tenor of the discussion is that the Divine Worship missal is nothing but a compromise, and the true liturgy must be pre-Conciliar, including the old lectionary. One thing that puzzles me is that, of the commenters who are fairly plain about what ought to be, none say they're attending a mass that they find satisfactory, (A couple say they used to have a parish that did things right, but the parish council screwed it up, and they had to leave.)

I would go so far as to say there's a mythic quality to these remarks, a "once upon a time" when the liturgy was good, but it ain't good no more, and even a place they used to go that had good liturgy is gone, killed by the parish council. Poor Bob Wilkens, who wandered into an ordinariate parish and thought it was OK, is brought sternly up short -- the Cranmerian prayers, the post-Conciliar insertions, indeed, that awful lectionary.

None of these people says, "At St _______, they do it right!" Where does any of them actually go to mass? Or do they go to mass at all, if no mass meets their standards?

Yes. Mass could be vastly improved if the celebrant refrained from making off the cuff side comments, joking in his homilies, and having people clap multiple times during Mass for attendees "accomplishments". I was at one Mass where we (rather they...I refuse to) clapped eight times . .

Joking during homilies? Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

I think it's important that Mr Coulombe's appeal is sentimental and an example of what Roger Scruton calls deep Romantic mourning for the life of "natural piety" in a mythic past. There is in fact no practical exhortation in Coulombe's piece -- he doesn't say, "Get right over to Holy Martyrs Murrieta! You'll find no applause, no joking homilies from Fr Bartus there!"

Instead, he invokes the abdicated Benedict XVI, the Duke of Windsor in the modern Church, who proposed an abstraction, Anglicanorum coetibus, that I think the intended audience interprets quite correctly as something not entirely real, certainly not fully realized, but also not quite the thing required, and thus not worth real followup.

But hey, Charles, thanks for letting us know about it!