by Denis Rice

When he was in his eighties, my father and I were leaving Mass at the Dominicans’ Hawkesyard Priory. Tears in his eyes, he said: ‘I’m sad your late mum never experienced this’. For the first time in his life, he’d just received Communion under both kinds.

Now I am in my eighties, and that touching memory faces me with a question. My father, raised in Glasgow’s traditional, tribal Catholicism, eagerly welcomed the vision of Vatican II and its profound liturgical changes. Why, then, is this octogenarian still so unready to accept and respond to the Mass translation presently imposed on us?