Indult Schmindult

Puella Paschalis is less than completely overjoyed at the prospect of a universal indult, seeing in it a looming choice between boredom and irreverence. She also objects to traditionalists speaking negatively of the NO, since the two missals are equivalent.

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As long as the NO masses are said with mangled words of consecration (claiming Jesus said "for all" instead of "for many"), it is not clear (to me) that the NO and TLM are equivalent. However, my view is a minority view. Most of the commentary I have read celebrates the prospect of a freely available traditional Mass without disparaging the new Mass at all.

If you want to keep going to the new Mass, great, keep going to the new Mass, and may it be an instrument of God's grace to draw you closer to Him. I agree that "the NO is not per se some kind of automatic route into inevitable happy-clapping"; most Sundays I go to the NO myself.

I do find the traditional Mass to be a more clear-cut act of worship, with stronger expressions of piety that just naturally nudge people towards reverence in the rest of the Mass. But I think the difficulty of worship in Latin would be enough to keep most Catholics going to the new Mass, even if they had a choice. Why not go to one or a few traditional Masses yourself, and judge whether this is a form of worship to which you can imagine the majority of church-going Catholics returning? It might put your mind at ease.

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11/9/06 update:
Puella is still thinking about the Traditional Mass, and Fr. Finigan has some helpful comments for her here, here and here.