You may have timidly pointed out to your parish priest that some of his initiatives regarding the liturgy and sacred music are in fact not congruent with the traditional practice of the Church.
Yet, despite all your efforts, you are always told that everything changed after the Second Vatican Council. So you should ask whether the Church after Vatican II is the same as the Church before Vatican II. The obvious answer should be that it is, but not to your parish priest.
He repeats the usual spiel that the Council was the epochal event, the new spring, the moment that changed the course of the history of the Church. Yet if there was a "new spring", there must also have been an old one.
However, it is useful to take a look at the documents of Vatican II, for example the one for the liturgy called Sacrosanctum Concilium. In it, at point 4, the council fathers refer to their obedience to the "holy tradition", there is no argument that suggests an unlikely new beginning for the Church. And it could not be otherwise, because a new beginning would give us another Church and not the one handed down to us from apostolic times.
But how, you tell your parish priest, there is so much talk that we have to go back to being like the early Church and then you tell us that after Vatican II there was a new beginning? Don't you perceive the contradiction?
It was certainly perceived by Benedict XVI who, in his famous speech to the Roman Curia in 2005, warned against those who carried forward a completely incorrect hermeneutic of the Council: "The question arises: Why has the implementation of the Council, in large parts of the Church, thus far been so difficult?
Well, it all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or - as we would say today - on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application. The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit.
On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture"; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.
The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church.”. Here, Benedict XVI had said it very clearly, also along the lines of studies in this sense by Cardinal Agostino Marchetto and many other authoritative scholars.
No new beginning, rather a new impulse for the Church of all time. Whether this impulse was beneficial, I leave it to you to judge.