This in the Catholic Herald today. It is very interesting historical perspective. It includes, for example, the names of those who first gathered to save the TLM (now called the Extraordinary Form of the Mass).
I find this so fascinating because, as I have mentioned many times, when I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s, nobody explained to me why the Catholicism in old books was so different from the Catholicism in everyday life. When I asked teachers, I got variations on "those were the bad old days."
It is curious how clueless I was able to remain about the changes until I was in my early thirties. Until I went to theology school, I had a Chesterton-era belief that the Jesuits were still the canny "shock troops of the Vatican" fighting the good fight against post-Reformation heresy.
My Jesuit professors in Canada were wonderful teachers--intelligent, professional, generous, personable, inspiring--but the Society's concerns were quite different from those I imagined they were. There was still an emphasis on saving one's own soul (at very least), but they did not train us students in apologetics. I think that a pity, really, as some of the most inspiring lay Catholics I know could argue a dead horse into life again.
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