In The Pink

Another year in which I have been told by people well over 70 and with no axes to grind that they have "never heard" of rose vestments.

As with a lot of things favoured in trad circles, I am beginning to think that the places that still have them are the only ones that ever did.

A friend of mine who used to serve at a cathedral that shall remain nameless once told me that even the servers there from before the War had never heard of such a thing.

I am not saying that it is a good thing that most people's liturgical experience before the Council was probably no better, or even worse, than it has been since. But I do not think that that can be gainsaid as a fact.

Nostalgia for the 1950s has nothing to do with liturgical enrichment today, and is in many ways positively inimical to it.