Countercultural Illumination ... "a new and liberating truth"

 The Sixth of the Twelve Old Roman Vigil Lections which I am inviting you to consider (six before Easter; six in Easter Week) seems to me particularly important; and the Nineteen Fifties Anglican Catholic Note which I have reproduced today seems to me particularly inspired and massively relevant. 

The writer, who might or might not have been Canon Arthur Couratin, very prophetically observed that what he called "the Church of tomorrow" would have a problem: a gigantic gap would have opened up between the "standards" of the World and "the Christian way of looking at things". In the 1950s, they were still "in the fag end of a Christian society"; the Christian might well see her duty as striving, with the aid of Divine Grace, to live up to standards to which the wider society at least paid lip-service. But now, not only have the old Christian no-nos (No divorce ... no contraception ... no pre-marital sex ... ...) almost entirely disappeared from view, but a whole new set of precepts, inimical to Christian morality, have taken their place: inclusivity ... liceity of homosexual genital activity ... all the 'trans' nonsenses ... .... and, pray note, most of these Ten Dozen Commandments are not take-it-or-leave it; they are as compulsory as the land-blood-and-race nonsense was under Hitler.

In this context, the Christian is distinguished from the non-Christian by an enormous ethical chasm. 

And, in this context, the Christian is "illuminated" by possessing a Wisdom which the World does not know or (if it has heard of it) violently and angrily demands should be given up. This Wisdom of ours includes the mores which the three millennia of our culture have inculcated.

BTW: in the early fifties, this Reading from Baruch was ejected from the Vigil by Papa Pacelli, Pius XII, as part of his violent assault upon Tradition ... I presume, therefore, that the 1962 missal fails to include it. After the Council, Baruch was to a degree reprieved by being reincluded as an option. But I doubt if there are very many places where it can be heard. Its message is that of Quinquagesima: the Christian neophyte is to be one who can See as others cannot See; the man who possesses a Wisdom radically alien from that of the Zeitgeist and its blasphemous parody of Wisdom.