In a letter to his son, Michael Tolkien, dated November 1, 1963, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote: "I can recommend this as an exercise: make your Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children -- from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn -- open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same as a Mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. (It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand -- after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.)" (Gratia tibi, Video meliora)
Doubtless this is good advice. One has no choice but to take Tolkien's advice to heart if one is to survive spiritually as a Catholic today. Even what passes generally for a properly executed Novus Ordo liturgy is an affront, not only to my tastes, mind you, but to my sense of fidelity to what it means to be Catholic. It's not merely a matter of putting up with what Thomas Day calls "the triumph of bad taste" in Catholic culture, but with the pervasive theological rot of fashionable dissent, which, so much the worse, doesn't even understand itself as mischievous. But prayer for tasteless philistines as well as prayer for the heretical is, I'm quite sure, as good for the one praying in sincerity as for the one for whom the prayer is offered. While we're at it, let us also remember in our prayers Master Tolkien himself, with gratitude and hope.
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