Other blogs

In response to enquiries: the blogs which I recommended, for those really interested in the evolution of the Roman Rite, were the "St Lawrence's Press blog", which gives you the Roman Rite as it was just before Pius XII's protegee Bugnini began his wrecking career. Then there is "The Tridentine Rite", which gives you what the Missal of S Pius V provides. As you look at the latter blog, you will have to remember that - if the dates appear a trifle strange - this is because they relate to the Julian Calendar. That will explain to you how it could be that last Sunday's First Vespers had to be reconciled with the Second Vespers of S James.

Go for it. The writer has at the finger tips of his mind a body of expertise which is possessed, I suspect, by nobody else in the world. And so many of the misunderstandings of the present age arise from an oversimplified understanding of the evolution of the Roman Rite since the sixteenth century.

I agree with the author of these blogs on most things, and where I don't, it's probably my own ignorance that's in the way. Just one thing ... it's a matter where I get the impression that I have not been able to persuade him of a conviction of my own ... the first modern' and objectionable intrusion into Tradition, long before Pius X corrupted the disposition of the Psalter, was the corruption of the texts of the hymns by Urban VIII in the 1620s. This was symptomatic of the root problem: if a liturgical tinkerer has the weapon of printing at his disposal, it enables him, be he Papa Barberini or Thomas Cranmer or Hannibal himself, to impose his own fads on a whole ecclesial community almost overnight. It is subversive of the whole principle of organic development.