Abstract

Catherine Pickstock's project of returning to community by means of the Roman Rite (the Latin Mass) betrays a paradox that runs throughout her presentation.¹ Her defense of liturgical community entails a conscious rejection of the sirens of postmodernism: she argues that the breakdown of fixed meanings, particularly with regard to theological truths, originates in the modernist enterprise predicated on individual will and self-centered secularism. Postmodernists are allegedly the offspring, albeit often unrecognized, of the modernist disaster. Thus they perpetuate modernism's anti-communal, anti-religious and subjectivist perspective.

Yet, Pickstock seems steeped in the same postmodernism she links in a common pattern of…