The liturgiciblogosphere has been lurching back and forth over the past few days, attempting to follow the story of Whatever Is Coming.

Cardinal Ricard, Archbishop of Bourdeaux and president of the French bishops’ conference, as well as a member of the Ecclesia Dei commission (charged with overseeing the implementation of the Indult and other related issues), spoke to the French bishops last week, telling them that anything that was coming from Rome in relation to the Tridentine rite was purely an attempt to reach out to Lefebvrites and nothing more, not an attempt to roll back V2, etc.

This was parsed everywhere, with the conclusion by many that the speech was essentially an attempt to calm the bishops down, and an indication that Something was, indeed, coming. His interpretation of the move (Whatever It Is) puzzled others, though, since that rationale does not fit into anything much of what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote about liturgy, liturgical reform and history over the past decades. Hmmm.

Then there was some noise about a possible November 11 signing date – of something.

The latest is from Le Figaro, quoted by Fr. Z, in which Ricard told reporters that Anything That Would Happen is purely a suggestion of Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos:

The Pope assured [Ricard] that "the work and reflection are still to be done" and that not even the nature of the document had yet been defined. That is, the commotion of the French bishops was due to no more than a project of the Colombian Cardinal, considered as too favorable to the integrists, and to premature reports by the press.

Fr. Z has further comments, trying to put everything together.

Related reading. Thanks to Patrick Rothwell for sending along this really interesting account from an Anglo-Catholic priest in NYC who did some European traveling recently, and reports in his parish magazine. His experience of an SSPX Mass in Parish: packed, overflowing, and, most interestingly, with high levels of vocal participation by the congregation. He then attended an Indult Mass in London, and found it also crowded, but a totally different experience:

Whereas in Paris all the masses are “dialogue masses” (that is to say the people take an active role), at St James’, only the server responded and the people never said a word.  A few had Latin-English missals and were following the service, but the great majority either just stood there listening or were saying the Rosary privately.  The atmosphere was very much that of a museum of “the way things used to be”, and might have been any Roman Church in England in, say, the 1940s.  There was no engagement of the people with the rites, and it was offered almost as a display for them to watch.  As much as I love the old rites, I found it rather sad.  It occurred to me that since this was a modern rite parish church, the old rite was offered almost as a curiosity for those interested in that kind of thing, a sort of a boutique within the larger department store.