Idle Reflections on the Liturgy --

"The sincere and dedicated men who made the post-Vatican revolution really believed that the good of the Church genuinely and certainly required the secularization of Catholic consciousness. Increasingly agnostic about God and eternal life, the reformers passionately believed that the only hope for mankind lay in a shift of emphasis from the sacred to the secular span of human life, to global community, to the quest for social justice and peace. For them Christ's prayer 'Thy Kingdom come' was a hope meant to be realized and capable of realization here and now, if the spiritual energies of the Catholic Church were redirected to that end instead of being squandered on myths and dreams. A truncated cosmology, a human communtity, was 'the holy thing' that the revolution intended that the new liturgy should convey...

In the new paradigm, the horizontal this-worldly dimension of Christianity has crowded out the vertical dimension. All that remains is the social gospel....The liturgy offered the most available opportunity for conveying this paradigm shift to the consciousness of theCatholic laity: first, because the bulk of the laity is unreachable by the revolution in any other way; second, because of the way the liturgy communicates, on an immediate, intuitive level, to the stomach before the head." -- Anne Muggeridge