Tradition vs. Modernity (and Post-modernity)
This is a must-read: The Enlightenment's Impact on the Mass. Here's a taste:

We live in a world for which the language of traditional Christianity is a dead letter. The intellectual frame work, the images, and the moral teaching of the faith no longer color the ordinary consciousness as they once did.

There are many different strands in the history of thought that have contributed to this condition. The difficulty for the Christian is that many of these strands contain valuable elements.

There is the Enlightenment with its concern for justice, human rights and due process; or again "the rise of modern science" with its applications to health and technology; or the Romantic movement, with its historical, communitarian and imaginative preoccupations.

All these in different ways have persuasive and desirable elements. Nonetheless the overall thrust that characterizes them is hostile to the Christian revelation. The efforts of various sorts of Christians to accommodate the Gospel in order to make it acceptable to the world had proved, not surprisingly, destructive of the Christian message.

I think the attitudes and concepts that we associate with "postmodernism" is toward "liberation" -- especially liberation from the necessity of making judgments.

Postmodernists are not required to reject or accept anything at all; they are at home with everything from the Nicene Creed to hard pornography, from kitsch to high culture.

This, they believe, is their escape from what they regard as the harsh, scientific, masculine sort of thinking of modernism. The postmodernists seem to think that they are living beyond value, beyond right and wrong, beyond truth and falsehood.

I think this attitude has fearful consequences for freedom, for sanity and for any serious version of the Catholic faith.

Furthermore, I believe postmodernism is used by the self-anointed inheritors of the Enlightenment as one more tool to destroy the authority of tradition, and to wreck the partnership -- of which Edmund Burke wrote so eloquently -- between the dead, the living and yet unborn, and is the only real guarantee of a freedom not based on the whims of sociology departments and high court judges.

Whether this is viable politics I do not really know; but I believe that something like Burke's attitude is necessary to Catholicism if the Church is to recover its liturgical worship.