After 50 Years of Vatican II, the Blindfold Has Finally Been Removed
She belongs to a community of consecrated virgins who have been living in Refet since March 2016.
In her previous community, Sister Trinitat lived through the years of the secularisation of the Catholic liturgy ("liturgical reform") after the Second Vatican Council.
Little by little, the Eucharist in her convent became more occasional, the rosary a rare practice, confession almost scorned. After all, "Jesus was our friend, he knew us and knew everything about us; what is the point of telling a priest our business?"
The nuns began to take off their veils, then their religious habits. They left the convents to live among themselves in small communities.
Liturgical prayer had disappeared and everything was absorbed by supposed "pastoral activities".
Sister Trinitat, along with a few other sisters, felt confused by the spiritual poverty of this life and by the restlessness that gnawed at her, which she could not explain.
Then she discovered the Sisters of Saint Jerome, who helped her to understand the problem:
"These nuns preserved as much of the liturgy as they could, but they were not traditionalists. It became clear to me that a more serious and profound decision was needed to restore the strength of the Congregation.
At the beginning of 2000, Sister Trinitat became superior, and although her order was better placed than others, there were no new vocations except from non-European sisters with superficial formation, "because it did not depend on us".
In 2014, a young Spanish graduate, Pilar, entered the convent, which was exceptional. But after a year she decided that our community was not for her, even though she wanted to become a nun.
It was while studying the texts of Benedict XVI and reading about Catholicism, in particular the novel The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin, that Sister Trinitat's blindfold was finally taken off.
She understood that Holy Mass had been replaced by a horizontal, desacralised ceremony [Novus Ordo]: "But we rediscovered it, at the cost of many kilometres in search of the few Holy Masses that were available".
"We studied Latin and this also 'forced' us to understand better the texts that we recited in Spanish, without delving into the meaning of what we were saying."
Picture: messainlatino.it, #newsRfdyokspbd