One more thing: consider the source.
Ferrara is 'interesting' in terms of which heretics he defends (he defends mightily Mother Angelica who promoted religious indifferentism for one) and which ones he decries.
He is quick to point a finger at guys that travelled around doing lectures and selling books (people I will call "Professional Catholics") and seems to be quite unaware of the irony of him making such denunciations.
My grandmother was a victim of her propaganda in this regard. : :cry:
??
Belloc, I mean that my mother in law became an indifferentist because of EWTN and Mother Angelica and her "one religion is as good as another" talk. She had EWTN on at her house practically 24/7. She even had that "Father Roberts" over at the house. I was there. It was just ... :barf:
As my mother was getting very old, she complained there was nothing worth
watching on TV anymore. This was around 1995. I had some friends who were
rather enthusiastic about EWTN who suggested getting satellite TV so my mom
could have EWTN. So I installed a "dish" on her roof and she was able to watch
the shows, but she never really got "into it" much. She was always half-disappointed.
I only saw a show from time to time, and I relied mostly on her reports. I must
say, my mother was able to identify the trend long before others I knew were
aware of it. When I would relate to them that EWTN was going "downhill," they
would disagree and say I was dreaming.
Eventually, around 1999 or 2000, she abandoned the dish network entirely,
because she would no longer watch EWTN and there was nothing else worth
watching. I eventually removed the "dish" because it was an eyesore.
So I was fortunate to have a mother who was not "sucked in" by indifferentism.
Her education was better than that. It gave me the "heads up" that something was
amiss.
The chapel they had set up gave the appearance from a TV angle that it was a
Traditional Latin Mass, but if you listen carefully and pay close attention you would
see that it was actually a Novus Ordoized liturgy with the TV audience sitting
BEHIND the sanctuary. There was a kind of rood screen on the "back" side of the
altar, and beyond that was an area for the cloistered nuns to attend Mass. If you
imagined the screen missing and the TV audience area walled off, all that would
be left is an altar facing the "people" - that is, the nuns - with a tabernacle in the
way -- that's how it first looked when they first turned the altar around in 1969:
the priest had to peek around the tabernacle at the congregation. And the next
move was to put the tabernacle off to the side, and eventually in a broom closet
or in another room, in exile.
I know a priest who imitated this setup, and used a hybrid liturgy, half Novus
Ordo, half TLM, and when he gave his sermon, he stood off to the left side,
facing the altar, so that the congregation on his right and the "cloister" on his
left, could both see him from the side, so to speak.
At the time when in the TLM the priest turns around and says "Dominus
vobiscuм," he would have been turning away from the cloister, which would make
no sense. As I recall, there was some other rubric they used there so as to give
the impression the cloister was included in the "vobiscuм." He may have said it
twice, facing both ways, but I don't recall exactly. But it was different than a
normal TLM, also in other ways.
There are pictures you can see of the "early days" of the Novus Ordo, where
the young woman who would become Mother Angelica was involved with the
music for mass. She played the drums. You can see her there, sitting on a stool
behind a rock 'n roll drum set, big grin on her face, waving drumsticks. Those
were the days, eh? So you can see "where she came from." In her later years
she was a lot less "progressive," but she still "had it in her." It seems to me she
typifies the new age with one foot in Tradition and the other stepping off the cliff
of Modernist innovations.