With respect to actual liturgical renewal, the trad slop program is over and should be considered over. Going forward, those seeking liturgical renewal in union with the Church should proceed as follows: 1. Stop making the liturgy, especially very specific particulars of the liturgy, the rallying banner around which you gather the community you need to support liturgical renewal. Intentional communities are extremely important and are the base camp of local activism of any kind, but making your red line the St. Michael prayer, the Latin Mass, such and such a kind of homily, or whatever external you want to pick presents an obvious problem. Not only is there the possibility of these things being restricted or taken away, which clearly some of these communities cannot endure even the slightest possibility of, but this also creates a nonstrategic weak point in the community itself. Nobody's going to like trying to partner with a group when the whole group is founded on a bunch of guys who don't care about you and only care whether or not they get their particular liturgical thing. You have to have an intentional community that has solidarity among its members and with the wider Church, and that also has a project of liturgical advocacy, rather than one whose entire existence depends upon obtaining or retaining particular liturgical arrangements. This is activism of any kind 101, but we are clearly too stupid to think this through. 2. There should primarily be a spirit of liturgical improvement and renewal, not a checklist of nonnegotiable liturgical preferences. It's fine to introduce an idea of increased reverence and intentional liturgical piety. But if that's going to mean that you have to do this or that or it's a bad community, not only are you going to be unintentionally divisive, but you also create concrete and trivial points of attack. It's like educational reform. It's not whether or not the children get to see sodium thrown into water or read Pride and Prejudice; it's whether or not you have standards and concerns high enough that you might end up reading classical literature, doing concrete chemistry, becoming interested in systematic mathematics, or developing any general attitude of investment and improvement that might lead to an indefinite number of concrete improvements. We have half a dozen or more books about what improving the contemporary liturgy would look like, and it is not necessary to tie ourselves down to this or that particular thing as long as we have intentional, concrete, and constant efforts toward improvement. This does not mean abandoning particular proposals or demands, but subordinating them to a general project of liturgical renewal rather than making each of them a test of fidelity. More importantly, if it's an attitude and a set of shared principles, it is a community approach. If it's merely a set of nonnegotiable demands, it's an external condition that can be rejected. Very different. 3. The space you make for advocating in the Church has to be durable, independent of particular discretionary concessions, and difficult to take away. Is what you're doing dependent on some priest's personality? Wrong. Stupid. Don't do that. Is it dependent on some particular liturgical practice? Wrong. Stupid. Don't do that. If the thing you're doing is sustained by the community, and if the community is capable of sustaining itself, the withdrawal of some particular permission or arrangement need not destroy it. Even if they shut down the parish, you can move and continue your work elsewhere, within the legitimate structures of the Church. But if you cannot maintain some permanent, self-sustaining community to advocate for something, you have no hope of sustaining a serious project of reform. You are a complainer and an annoyance. Next --->