There is an interesting article in the traditional bi-monthly The Remnant by Michael Matt about the change of the Good Friday prayers for Jews in the 1962 Missale Romanum.
The thrust of the piece is that we need to defend Pope Benedict.
The article is very long, too long for this entry really. But here is the conclusion with my emphases and comments.
Conclusion
Clearly, this controversy involves so much more than merely a prayer in the Mass of the Pre-sanctified on Good Friday. Benedict’s opponents (inside the Church and out) know very well that every day and throughout the whole world traditional Masses are being restored, and that if this trend continues there’s every possibility of the old Faith making a comeback. [As I have written many times, when Pope Benedict changed the Good Friday prayers for Jews he removed one of the possible points of objection some bishops might have against establishing "personal parishes" where the Sacred Triduum would be celebrated in its totality with the 1962 Missale Romanum. In other words, Pope Benedict made the 1962 Missale a living liturgical book which he intends be used on the Church’s most sacred days.] Would that we traditionalists could all develop a similar appreciation for the potential ramifications of the MP! Lex orandi, lex credendi, remember? Hundreds of priests and seminarians, thousands of families, tens of thousands in number – returning to their knees [yep!] in front of the altars of Tridentine sacrifice. If you think none of that matters then perhaps you haven’t been in this fight long enough to know what it’s all about. It is not now nor has it ever been merely about us or our liturgical "preferences"! [Well said.] For forty years, traditionalists stormed heaven with prayers that a pope would one day admit the old Mass had never been abrogated and needs to be restored to the life of the Church for the life of the Church, the moral and spiritual health of our nations, and souls of our children. Only then could all Catholics begin to understand how it is that this sublime touchstone of the old Faith is the antidote to the errors of the modern world, the bedrock of Christendom and the key to the restoration of all things in Christ. [It will help reinvigorate Catholic identity by exerting a gravitational pull on everything we do as Catholics.]
Please, let’s not be so imperceptive as to demand the Holy Father spell everything out for us. It’s the Mass that matters, and he knows it. This is what his MP is all about. This is what he told Michael Davies ten years ago and this is what he’s trying to tell us now. Msgr. Klaus Gamber contended in The Reform of the Roman Liturgy that the New Mass was a "disaster". [And key to his criticisms was the disaster of the turned around altars!] Let’s not forget who wrote the foreword to that monumental work–one Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. We may disagree with him here and there; we may wish he’d say and do more to recall the Novus Ordo; [Brick by brick…] but consider the storm of hell and fury roaring against him right now for making one change to one prayer to be said at one liturgy offered once a year. [Gee… I made that same point once and got raked over the coals for it in some trad sites. o{]:¬) ] Obviously, this is going to take some time. Benedict understands that about which precious few of us know anything at all—Vatican bureaucracy. [More on this below.] It took forty years of revolution in the Eternal City to get to this point, and it may take another forty to get back. In the meantime traditional Masses are returning en masse—a dramatic turn of events that absolutely had to happen first if, in fact, the old Faith was ever to rise again.
My counsel, for what it’s worth: Pray for the Pope and accept the prayer. Do not let them sabotage the Motu Proprio! Do not let this divide the Catholic counterrevolution. [Perhaps "counter-reformation" is a better image.] There is nothing in the revised prayer contrary to Faith. In fact, the Holy Father is under attack for its inherent orthodoxy. We must, therefore, be willing to take some risks of our own—even when it comes to our “status” in the little world of traditional Catholicism—to go out and meet him halfway… and perhaps even come to his defense when no one else will.
I applaud Michael Matt for his article, which you should go to look at in its entirety. That was just the conclusion.
Regarding the point of "Vatican bureaucracy"…
Many people are impatient with the Pope. I admit, I am too… sometimes. We know what he thinks and know the direction he so obviously wants to go.
Why doesn’t he just do it?
There are a few points to keep in mind.
First, the Pope is Pope of the whole Church, and not just Pope of the Church we prefer.
Second, the Pope can’t do everything himself: he must delegate in order to get anything done.
Third, the Pope must work with the big picture. He cannot bog down in micromanaging local issues.
Fourth, the Pope’s workdesk is covered with things from all over the world, not just your little corrner of St. Ipsidipsy in Tall Tree Circle where you live. Think of how complex it is to issue universal law for a vastly diverse world.
Fifth, timing and support are everything. If the Pope has a plan (and he does) but acts too soon or with too little support, he risks not only failure but crippling failure. When the Pope does something, it has to work. It cannot not work. If something fails, the Pope’s authority and ability to get anything done is weakened. Look how the liturgy continued to errode even when document after document came out. Issuing something as huge as Summorum Pontificum was bold beyond the ability of most to understand. Thus, calls for support are exactly what are needed.
Sixth, Benedict XVI might be Pope right now, but there are still a lot of curial officials who would rather have that old portrait of Paul VI on their office walls. The Vatican Curia is an incredibly lean machine… a bureaucracy, yes, but a very spare one. It is very firmly entrenched, difficult to pull in another direction.
