Over at Crisis there is a great piece recounting memories of Vatican II times… those spirit-filled, halcyon days!
I particularly enjoyed this paragraph about the writer’s days in a Catholic girls school:
We attended Mass in Latin, sang hymns in Latin and studied Latin. Our quietly spoken, yet determined teacher Mother Conleth, managed to convey to us that conjugating verbs in Latin and translation, was essential to any kind of semi-decent life on earth. She would begin each class with Salve puellae (“Hello girls”) and then get down to business. Not to do one’s Latin homework was simply human perfidy and would produce abject horror on her face. I am amazed my school retained large Latin classes despite the anti-Latin forces beyond but Mother Conleth, of blessed memory, was a supernatural tour de force.
And there is this cringeworthy description of the shift from decent music to schlock.
This was the era of confident banners at feast day marches, the Children of Mary and their Aspirants, Sodalities and St Vincent de Paul. We sang the school song to St Brigid, Far away enthroned in glory, sweetest saint of Erin’s Isle and of course to St Patrick. We sang Soul of My Savior, Hail Queen of Heaven, the Pange Lingua and that triumphalist Catholic hymn which would make feminists blanche—Faith of Our Fathers Living Still with its words: “Our fathers chained in prisons dark, Were still in heart and conscience free, How Sweet would be their children’s fate, if they like them could die for Thee.”
[…]
It was only in my senior year that a general sense of something strange, new, even “revolutionary” began wafting through the corridors. We sang Spirit of God in the Clear Running Water in the local church as this is “what the Bishops want now.” Mother Conleth, however, loathed such changes and showed it in her “non verbals.”
She also makes serious points in her piece, as if that weren’t serious enough.
I imagine that many of you readers had similar experiences of those “halcyon days”.
As you contemplate them, many of you younger readers here haven’t had the joys of Joy Is Like The Rain, or the ditty the writer mentioned above. Here it is:
BTW… the writer asks some questions at the end, such as, “Who could’ve predicted what happened?”
Well… how about the people engineered it?
