Culture, Empty Culture, Counterculture: A Reply to Fr. de Souza on the Petition to Save the TLM
Misgivings about defending the cultural aspects of the traditional Latin Mass fail to recognize that the aesthetic value of the Mass cannot be separated from its spiritual content.
In the National Catholic Register, Fr. Raymond de Souza tries to articulate the discomfort some feel about the “Agatha Christie” petition that played a role in saving the Traditional Mass in 1971 and a new petition organized by Sir James MacMillan with a similar group of signatories to the same end. Non-Catholic cultural figures signed these to save something (as they wrote in 1971) “that…