How the Liturgical Industrial Complex Propagandized the Liturgical Reform and Pulled Off A Coup
The real puzzle about the liturgical changes after Vatican II is why they happened. Why the average Catholic or average priest went along with giving up so many of the hallmarks and traditions of Catholicism is far more confusing, especially when the faith, especially in the United States, which had been on an upswing by any discernible metric in the early 20th century, suddenly saw all indicators turn negative immediately after the changes to the Mass.
Why, outside of those who were ideologically already on board with revolution, did so many otherwise faithful Catholics jump on a train that quickly led to the decline of the faith of so many of them?
Defenders of the liturgical changes after Vatican II take the rapidity of their implementation to imply that they were what all Catholics implicitly wanted: Archbishop Bugnini and his Consilium were merely enacting the popular will for change from a stereotyped, backwards liturgy where no one knew what was going on. Critics of the reform, interpreting the same history, look at the quick adoption of liturgical changes as signs of broad corruption in the body of the faithful and the hierarchy predating the Council that softened the broad mass of Catholics up to acquiesce to the revolution.
There are some elements of truth to these narratives. The pre-Vatican II Church was not free from infiltration, and certainly, there was popular support for some changes to the liturgy.
But the real story is more tragic, a coup was carried out by “experts” and ideologically motivated organizations who manipulated all the players (Pope, bishops, priests, and laity alike) into thinking that all the others wanted more and more radical liturgical “change”, putting everyone, in the interim, into such a state of psychosis, like COVID-19 or the Great Terror of the French Revolution, that ideas that were on few people’s radar became standard practice in less than a decade. In short, the 60s weren’t a grassroots Catholic Revolution but a Catholic mass psychosis induced by ideologically motivated “experts” for their own self-aggrandizement, profit, and power.
Thanks in major part to Nico Fassino’s Hand Missal History Project, this is a first attempt (with sequels and further expansion to come) to tell the history of the Catholic Revolution as the tragedy and psy-op that it was.
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