A Defense of Catholic Tradition in the Post-Conciliar Era

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” So declaimed William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming,” a biting premonition of the age of post-industrial secular decadence that was to come, and that was to so haunt another William — William F. Buckley Jr. — that it compelled him to pen in the mid '60s a wordy apologia, which functioned as a scintillating yet eloquent abjuration against his most holy Catholic Church, its grand concession to the tides of post-modernism, and the resulting liturgy — the Novus Ordo Missae, or Mass of Paul VI — that was, by its detractors, viewed as a sterile capitulation to the humanistic spirit of the age that would later in the same decade also spawn the countercultural revolution.