Monsignor Charles Pope writes that the Traditional Latin Mass (which he supports) is a boutique phenomenon among American Catholics, and looks likely to stay that way:
Some years ago (as far back at the early 1980s) we who love the Traditional Latin Mass often said (or it heard said) that if we would just return to the beautiful Latin Mass our churches would again be filled.
Sometimes it seems that this is John Rawls’ world, we’re just living in it: conducting our political and social debates as though we were behind a veil of ignorance, as though we can only trust the judgments made in perfect abstraction from any actual lived contexts. The debate about the future of Larycia Hawkins at Wheaton College is a classic example, where a complex, embodied, richly personal situation gets translated into the terms of disembodied theological debate.
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At least 231 children in a choir that was run by the former Pope’s brother, have allegedly been beaten and sexually abused for decades. The famous Catholic boys’ choir in Germany was condcuted by Pope Benedict’s elder brother, Georg Ratzinger, from 1964 to 1994 when most of the claimed abuses took place. The journal.ie reports: The Domspatzen, a 1,000-year-old choir in Regensburg, Bavaria, was dragged into the massive sexual abuse scandal plaguing the Catholic Church in 2010, when allegations of assaults that took place several decades ago went public.
If you missed Ross Douthat’s excellent post “Catholicism at Year Zero,” please make sure to read it now. It does a superlative job of explaining why progressive-vs-orthodox dialogue (such as it is) within Catholicism goes nowhere. There are lessons here for all small-o orthodox Christians. Excerpts: