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| Sir Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) |
“Much water has flown under Tiber's bridges, carrying away splendour and
mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII. The essentials, I
know, remain firmly entrenched and I find the post-Conciliar Mass
simpler and generally better than the Tridentine; but the banality and
vulgarity of the translations which have ousted the sonorous Latin and
little Greek are of a super-market quality which is quite unacceptable.
Hand-shaking and embarrassed smiles or smirks have replaced the older
courtesies; kneeling is out, queueing is in, and the general tone is
rather like a BBC radio broadcast for tiny tots (so however will they
learn to put away childish things?) The clouds of incense have
dispersed, together with many hidebound, blinkered and repressive
attitudes, and we are left with social messages of an almost
over-whelming progressiveness. The Church has proved she is not
moribund. ‘All shall be well,’ I feel, ‘and all manner of things shall
be well,’ so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages,
past and to come, and not the idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of
our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.” Sir Alec Guinness in Blessings in Disguise.
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