The Bitter Pill

The Left-wing magazine The Tablet is known throughout the Catholic world as “The Bitter Pill”. Well, it certainly lives up to its nickname in this week’s issue, which deplores the liberation of the Latin Mass and the “Evelyn Waugh” Catholicism of seminarians.

Evelyn Waugh would have laughed at The Tablet’s pomposity

The Tablet is all in favour of English bishops blocking the return of the classical Mass, on the grounds that traditionalists are “disobedient” to the spirit of Vatican II. The fact that, in opposing Pope Benedict’s wishes, the bishops are themselves being gravely disobedient does not trouble the magazine at all.

There is something intrinsically hilarious at the spectacle of a publication read mostly by ex-hippies with bus passes wringing its hands at the conservatism of the young.

Here is the relevant paragraph. I know it reads like a cruel parody, but it’s the real thing:

“Bishops have every right to have reservations about the return of the Tridentine Mass, as it has long been the symbolic flag carried by elements in the Church which most disliked the reforms promoted by the Second Vatican Council. The bishops have a duty not to let this disobedient and anti-conciliar spirit spread. It is already present in some seminaries, where a proportion of young men studying for the priesthood seem particularly attracted to a backwards-looking style of Catholicism that was familiar in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.”

Don’t you love that reference to “backwards-looking”?

And this from a publication whose writers and readers think and dress as if it was still 1979, and the evil “Thatch” had just won her first general election.

Anyway, it always cheers me up to see old-style Lefties doing a little liturgical dance of rage. And I think Evelyn Waugh would have enjoyed it, too.