The new and old liturgies compared

[hibernicus]

Joseph Shaw of the England and Wales Latin Mass Society discusses how the tendency of the OF to emphasise social gathering means it is less well adapted to cope with epidemics than the EF.
He also has some interesting comments on how the EF aimed at creating an otherworldly/transcendent atmosphere which was extended into everyday life by traditional devotions, whereas the OF emphasis on the ordinary, everyday and immanent is linked to the hostility of its promoters to such devotions.
(A devil's advocate - that useful traditional office - might point out that the OF advocates were partly reacting against certain deformities which could grow out of the EF and its devotions - the whited sepulchre factor of people combining highly emotional devotional life with all sorts of cruelties and vices, because they saw religion as occupying a separate sphere from "real life". Italy is particularly notorious for certain forms of this, but the phenomenon wasn't unknown in Ireland either. That doesn't mean the solution hasn't turned out worse than the problem, but it should be borne in mind.)

www.hprweb.com/2020/04/epidemic-and-the-liturgical-reform/#fnref-26315-3

[hibernicus]

I have been reading Fr Baldovin SJ's REFORMING THE LITURGY: A RESPONSE TO THE CRITICS, a defence of the post-Vatican II liturgical changes which came out just after SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM. While he does make some reasonable points - for example, that many critics of the new liturgy have an idealised view of how well the old liturgy worked in practice - and he does admit that some liturgical theories from the conciliar era have since been disproved - e.g. that versus populum celebration was the norm in the early Church - there are some very strange aspects of his approach:
(1) He tends to appeal to the weight of expert opinion without going into details about its nature and strands.
(2) He makes a reasonable case that other liturgies could/should be devised and permitted, but he doesn't address the issue of why the EF should have been actively suppressed rather than preserved as one option among others.
(3) He takes the view that the EF is no longer meaningful because it doesn't correspond to the spirit of the present age; this raises the question of who decides what constitutes the spirit of the age and why it has to be imposed from above (and his attacks on 'classicism' seem to go beyond criticising the search for a moment of perfection to assuming that we can learn nothing from the past). For example, he praises the reformers for using Eastern liturgies to provide a framework while stripping them of 'inappropriate' monarchical elements - but who decides what's 'inappropriate', especially given the use of kingly imagery for God in the Bible? Is that inappropriate also?
(4) While he actually quotes CS Lewis's FERNSEED AND ELEPHANTS essay, he misses the bit where Lewis complains that many scholarly reconstructions of the Gospels seem to be based not on understanding what they are what they are, but on criticising them for not being THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF YESHUA BAR-YOSEF IN FOUR VOLUMES. Baldovin's approach to the "haphazard" development of the liturgy (a process which might be called 'organic growth' if he approved of it) and the necessity of reconstructing it from scratch on abstract principle reminds me of Le Corbusier's approach to town planning. Perhaps this resemblance also says something about the spirit of the age?
www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/crimes-in-concrete
www.city-journal.org/html/architect-totalitarian-13246.html