Latins Should Return to the Ancient Practice

NLM

That it was the universal custom and observed by all Apostolic Churches is sufficient reason for its restoration in the patriarchate of Rome. (The rationale, I believe, was the same as well.)

That there is great confusion about the very essence of the Mass and the meaning of the ministerial priesthood may be gleaned from newspaper articles that interview priests who are now at loose ends because they have no congregation to engage. Having been led to define priesthood as a relation with the people when it is a relation with Christ first and foremost, on behalf of the people, they search in vain, or at least with great difficulty, for an intrinsic and transcendent meaning to the offering of due worship to the Most Holy Trinity, such as animated centuries of so-called “private Masses,” which the Magisterium of the Church encouraged right through Benedict XVI (see my article “The Church encourages priests to say Masses, even without the faithful”).

Has any Latin progressive admitted the force of the psychologically or "subjective" or "phenomenological"  arguments against versus populum? Or are they "pro-science" only when it agrees with their opinions?

If ever there was a reductio ad absurdum for the versus populum stance, this, the final outcome of the closed-circle mentality, would be it. If the church in which this priest is standing happened to have a tabernacle behind the altar, the inversion would be complete: a priest praying towards pieces of paper with faces, instead of praying towards the God who dwells with His people as their Head, their King, and their Shepherd, in Person—the Son of God whose bloody sacrifice on the Cross, sacramentally enacted upon the altar, is the reason Mass is said at all, for the profit of the living and the dead, wherever they may be.

This objectification of the reserved Eucharistic species in the tabernacle, that was not the rationale of the early Church but it is the dominant within second millennium Latin liturgical piety.

Seeing this photo brought home to me once again the wisdom of the tradition in having the Epistle chanted eastwards and the Gospel chanted northwards: in this way the position of the reader is dictated by theological and symbolic ideas that lead to no weirdness when implemented in an empty church, unlike the scenario depicted above.

Latin customs. For the readings, should the focus be on the reader? The direction in which the reader is facing? What image will help a "viewer" attend to the readings? An image of Christ? Or an image of the specific aspect of the Mystery being remembered?

Related: Eastern Christian Books: Orthodox Liturgy Phenomenologically Understood

Fordham UP: Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy by Christina M. Gschwandtner