Modernity and Tradition

Canon Macdonald-Radcliff having been struck down by the plague, the President has been seconded to write the Editor’s Notes for this issue.

The phenomenon of the ‘new traditionalism’ of the young has been widely noted. Though their numbers are not big, nor likely to get very big, their influence is likely to increase in churches that are diminishing rapidly in numbers who are deserting them for the greener pastures of ‘spiritual not religious’. For those who embraced joyfully the brave new world of modernized liturgy and doctrine, the turn of the young away from the modernization agenda can only be confounding. ‘How can these things be?’

What is driving this ‘new traditionalism’ was the subject of a ‘priest’s answer’ to the question of a ‘concerned grandparent’ in the May 2024 issue of Catholic Herald. The answer lives up to that periodical’s boast of ‘independent and high-caliber counter-cultural Catholic journalism’. The concerned grandparent grew up before Vatican II, welcomed the changes that arrived in the Roman Catholic Church in its wake and is now appalled by the traditionalism of her granddaughter (which she considers,