Are there any traditionalist Catholic churches left in this country? Or they all disappeared after Vatican II?

The big change after Vatican II was the New Mass, in which the priest faces the congregation instead of the altar and speaks the vernacular instead of Latin. The English liturgy used by the American Catholic church is unspeakably bad. It is junk, without dignity or beauty. Such a liturgy would only have been written by people who wanted to degrade the feeling of God and of holiness, and make everything in the church a reflection of the democratic culture of the larger society. I can’t think of any other explanation.

The current Pope has allowed some parishes to observe the traditional Latin mass. And of course some dioceses and parishes are more morally traditionalist than others. And even very contemporary, liberal bishops have occasionally done great things. The late Cardinal John O’Connor brought back the Corpus Christi procession. It was amazing. I’m not a Catholic, but participated in this great procession from the late Middle Ages, a large crowd moving in stages around St. Patrick’s Cathedral, following the Cardinal who carried the Host, repeating the prayers on each side of the church, the traffic stopped on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, with everyone getting down on their knees in the middle of Fifth Avenue! This was the real Christianity, brought back from the Middle Ages to the modern world. For this, I largely forgave O’Connor, a mealy mouthed liberal, all the bad, things he had done, including his approving embrace of criminals. (Well, forgive isn’t the right word; let’s say I gave him a special dispensation.)

What you described is almost identical to the situation with Judaism in America. In Orthodox temples, the rabbi faces the Ark with the Torah scrolls and all of the prayers are in Hebrew. In Reform and Conservative “temples”, the “rabbis” (some of whom are female!) face the congregation and the service (all in the language of the country) consists of songs that have little or nothing to do with the Jewish faith. The similarity between the post-Vatican II Catholicism and Reform “Judaism” is chilling.

There’s no need to dream about a Mass in rousing, vivid English, because one is already available (at least if you live in Texas):
http://www.cin.org/anguse.html

My church manages to celebrate the New Mass in Latin. High Mass is orchestral or chanted, and Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Gounod and the rest set their music to Latin text. Also, to the untrained eye it looks much more Tridentine than Novus Ordo.

Mr. Caesar- wow! I might be a Calvinist Protestant, but I’d be soely tempted to join your congregation if I were in your locale. I’m getting sick and tired of the faux-pop music, for starters.

Mr. Auster,

Speaking of Cardinal O’Connor, when he died endless newspaper articles came out about what a voice of “conservative” or “orthodox” Catholicism he was. Yet, none of the articles mentioned a single thing he had done, e.g, the name of a single priest who was disciplined for being a modernist, a single professor at Fordham who got fired for teaching that Jesus didn’t perform miracles, etc.

Carl: if you’re tired of pop-music “worship”, and want to sing psalms and old hymns in your Calvinist worship services, including some set to music from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., see if you can find a United Reformed Church in your area, or an Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

The Tridentine Mass is banished in our diocese alas, but I also attend a Novus Ordo Mass in Latin which is quite beautiful and very traditional. I will not try to improve on Mr. Caesar’s description.