Exsultet

One of most beautiful Latin chants from my (mostly secular) Catholic childhood is the Exsultet from the Easter Vigil.

I can’t help but lament the whole-scale destruction of the Latin rite of the Catholic Church, nearly two thousand years of tradition eviscerated overnight by Vatican II. Looking at the timeline, Vatican II is likely more of a symptom than one of the initial causes of the collapse of Christianity in the West.

As a dying tradition, what’s left of Western Christendom is roughly divided into three groups:

1. Textual reconstructions that don’t have strong connections to any living, ancestral traditions of Christian practice
2. Fundamentalist movements, which are themselves usually textual reconstructions but with a narrow emphasis on certain parts of the textual tradition to the exclusion of the larger whole
3. Heavily secularized variants that more of a mockery of the older Christian tradition than a continuation thereof, search for “liturgical dance” to get a sense of this

I wonder how different Western society would be had a vibrant, living tradition of historical Christianity survived to the present. Would it be enough to counter the consumerist nihilism and spiritual black hole we see today?

Traditional Western Christianity offers a sense of the sacred interacting with the world. There’s no secular substitute for the sense of sacred space, pilgrimage, spiritual journey. For a look at the monastic tradition, the last bastion of this beautiful tradition, watch Die Große Stille.