On Being Educated

I am always intrigued when people send me links to stuff that is designed to educate me. It has happened before (here for example) and has just happened again. Maureen Clarke (@retrochbabe) on Twitter sent me a link to this piece in the NCR.

As before, I wonder what ignorance has been detected for which the link is the antidote. I ask myself, why do I need educating by this particular article?  And as before, I struggle to find the answer.

The article seems to be arguing that the new rite of Mass is good (and the old, bad) because the new rite supports the new understanding of the Church developed at Vatican 2, whereas the old subverts it, in favour of the old understanding.

I dispute that analysis, of course - so perhaps that is why I am perceived to need educating.  

But what strikes me as funny, in an ironic sort of way, is that the progressive people who believe this (eg the author, and, I assume, Maureen Clarke) are very close to the sedevacantists who believe this; much closer to them than I am, or those who believe in a hermeneutic of continuity.

If I accepted the thrust of the argument in this preposterous NCR article, then I would be unable to attend the new Mass in good conscience: for I hold to the religion of the apostles and the saints, founded by Christ and unchanging in essentials. If Vatican 2 introduced something so radically at odds with that, that the Mass of Ages was suddenly subversive, then I could have nothing to do with it.

But of course Vatican 2 did no such thing; and it is only the extreme progressives and the extreme reactionaries who think that it did. Strange bedfellows...