Since not everyone reads the comments, especially after the first day a post has appeared, I thought this comment from Richard was worth highlighting:

Certainly we do well to read our history; to realize the human constants through every age of the Church.  There never was a Golden Age of the Church.  We shouldn’t forget that.

And yet it is not unreasonable to say – at least so far as the liturgical and devotional life (which in turn, lex orandi, lex credendi, affects the rest of the life of the Church) of the Church is concerned, that some ages have been worse than others.  Even a cursory study of the development of the Liturgical Reform Movement in the 20th century suggests two realities: That the liturgy had already been deformed and abused by the time of Pius X, and the popes knew this all too well; but also that the damage they were facing was of a different order from what we face today. We should not underestimate that damage.

And this is the point made by Alcuin Reid in his Organic Development of the Liturgy, by Klaus Gamber, by Lauren Pristas’s study of the profound theological shifts in the prayers of the classic Roman Rite and the Novus Ordo, and above by Pope Benedict himself in numerous statements and works.  That is to say that what happened to the liturgy in the wake of the Consilium’s creation of the Novus Ordo has been different from any previous liturgical renewal.  It has not been organic.  It is too often, as the Pope has written, a "fabricated liturgy," as is its sacred art and architecture.  Not illicit or invalid, mind you, but greatly impoverished, much more so than anything which went before.  We can go on all the livelong day (and we certainly can) about the defects of the pre-conciliar liturgical life, or the imperfections of the Roman Rite as it existed by 1962 – but that can’t allow us to underrate the enormity of the changes which have taken place since, or the damage they have frequently done to the liturgy itself. 

If that weren’t the case, we would not have Benedict’s large body of work on the problems with the modern liturgy, or Liturgiam Authenticam, Redemptionist Sacramentum, Sacramentum Caritatis, or the impending motu proprio liberating the accessibility of the TLM.

It’s precisely because I’m the worst liturgical abuse I know that I so urgently need reverent liturgy in continuity with the whole tradition of the Church.  Maybe if we had more Chrysostoms for bishops, we’d be closer to reacquiring that.