The subject of the liturgy is often reduced to being a mere matter of preference, but isn't how we worship more significant than that?
One might prefer burger and fries to salad, but does that make it superior?
One could prefer the Beatles to Beethoven, while still acknowledging the superiority of the latter.
So, while one may "prefer" the New Mass or the Traditional Mass, which one is superior?
This post from last year might provide a clue.
Pomp need not come into it though. I maintain that a Traditional Mass, offered in the humblest of surroundings, without music, is still superior to a reverent New Mass in a cathedral.
(The Divine Liturgy is also superior. I often think of detergent adverts:
We washed the Latin Rite in new improved Vatican II, but we used the original formula on the
Eastern Rites. Let's see how they turned out!)
The changes matter. They matter to those who protest against them, and they matter to those who introduced them, otherwise they wouldn't have introduced them, imposing the new and suppressing the old.
The only preference which counts is God's preference. He "preferred" Abel's sacrifice to Cain's.
He preferred Abel' s sacrifice because it was offered "in spirit and in truth", whereas Cain was just doing "religion". You can "do religion" as much in the older rites as the new, so that's not the issue. The services, as received from ancient times, are, together with the lives and writings of the saints, the context in which we read and understand scripture. They are the "realisation" of Scripture in the life of the Church - which is the very definition of sacred tradition. That's why to tamper with them or recast them ought to be utterly abhorrent to us.
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