Shea: "There are no second-class liturgies ... Period"

Mark Shea continues his earlier diatribe (Motu Propu Mania, April 25, 2007) against obsessing over "nitnoid details of liturgy" with a new post, "Why Liturgical Obsessives Don't Have Any Friends" (April 27, 2007), raising the question whether he isn't beginning to obsess a bit over the liturgical question.

He ends his piece thus: "There are no second-class liturgies and there are no second-class Catholics. Period. End of story." His argument seems to boil down to something like this: The Mass is the Mass is the Mass. The Eucharist is the Eucharist is the Eucharist. Externals are externals are externals. There is a whole dissertation there waiting to be written and a whole hornets' nest of assumptions begging to be challenged. I would personally start at a gentle distance with a pleasant book like Tom Howard's Chance, or the Dance? My positivist friends won't read it because they think it's probably irrelevant poetic fluff. In fact, it blows the head of the fact-value dichotomy clean off its shoulders. And that's a good place to start if you want to talk about objective standards of beauty and liturgical fittingness.

Of related interest:

"Mark Shea yawns over the motu whazzit?" (Musings, April 27, 2007)