Monday, October 10, 2005

Cardinal Heenan's prediction about the New Mass

The following is offered as a footnote to Tom Bethell's article, "Refugees from the Vernacular Mass" (posted Monday, October 3, 2005), whose major premise is taken from David Murrow's book, Why Men Hate Going to Church.

Cardinal Heenan was present in the Sistine Chapel at the time of Fr. Annibale Bugnini's demonstration his experimental rite of the new Mass in 1967, and, like most of the other witnesses present, he was dismayed by what he witnessed. His prediction, an exact quote from his intervention, was prescient:
At home it is not only women and children but also fathers of families and young men who come regularly to Mass. If we were to offer the kind of ceremony we saw yesterday in the Sistine Chapel we would soon be left with a congregation mostly of women and children.

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