Seven Years of Summorum, from Juventutem DC

On this day in 2007, I was toasting the good news from Rome with close friends, while overlooking a cow pasture in suburban Ireland. It's hard to believe it's been seven years since the promulgation of Summorum Pontificum, though I've been intrigued to notice, among my friends in their early twenties, there are now young people who have lived much of their formative years under its rule. Even if the Extraordinary Form may not have been as widely-available as one might prefer in some places, to them it has been for a good stretch of their recent memory, always one of the two forms of the single Roman rite, rather than something which had a curious (if, for me, exciting, even invigorating) edginess to it, as I remember from my own days in college only a few years before the Motu Proprio. It is now once again part of our heritage as Catholics, restored to the glorious sunlight of the open life of the Church, rather than a historical appendix, and this shift in attitudes as much of the genius and spirit of Summorum as the beauty and theological heft of the Extraordinary Form itself. Certainly, while we must not rest on our laurels, we have still come quite a way in such a short time.

Our good friends at Juventutem DC have compiled this lovely thank-you video to the Pope Emeritus. Watch it, say a prayer, and rejoice.