Any truth on Latin Mass 'error(s)?'

  • Thread starter Thread starter thestudentAD
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
I still don’t understand what “Any truth on Latin Mass 'error(s)” might mean.
 
thestudentAD said:
Hey, a few months ago, before I started my third job, I met a third order dominican sister at a cafe. We talked for a bit, I told her the news that I had heard about sedevecantism, she actually didn’t know anything about it, told me she would rather not pay attention to it. I also asked her about the Tridentine Mass and asked if they gave her pew cards like one of the articles on this site said. She said that the church never had any when she was a little kid. In fact, she didn’t understand the latin, nobody told her, nobody translated it, and I think nobody even taught latin in the school (Don’t know how long that school near our church was around). She said she was ‘happy’ when Vatican II came around and the mass became more vernacular. Of course, I understand the feelings of some traditionalists: You had something that you were raised up taken from you. I’ve had that done to me several times. So, just to ask the questions:
  1. Did you know latin in the Tridentine Mass?
  2. Did the priest repeat the readings and the gospel in vernacular?
  3. Did anyone give you pew cards for the Mass?
  4. Did anyone say when the Church started doing the Tridentine Mass? (Heard it started around 1600s, possibly. But, I know for certain, there are other rites in union with the Holy See) Would love to hear all your answers!
Click to expand...
  1. Although I didn’t know Latin ,everyone I knew had a missile with English translation
    on the opposite side. If you attended regularly and followed along after awhile you understood the Latin
  2. I always remember the readings in English . Their were fewer reading choices most all New Testament. I pretty much memorized the readings.
    3 never saw a pew card ,their was never a need
  3. No it was just the Mass . That date actually is a misconception as the form is much older. Trent only consolidated the most popular existing forms of the mass
 
Errors is in air quotes as I have heard that some people didn’t understand latin in pre v2 days. Also, i heard that there were cards in the pews that translated what was going on.
 
1) Did you know latin in the Tridentine Mass?
Yes, but not very much.
2) Did the priest repeat the readings and the gospel in vernacular?
No, I don’t think so.
3) Did anyone give you pew cards for the Mass?
No, we all had our own missals, even the kids usually.
 
Thomas_White said:
Having grown up Catholic prior to Vatican II, and having become very familiar with the Tridentine Mass, what occurred on the first Sunday of Avent in 1969 was stunning. And I know this was so for many Catholics. I also think more than a few Catholcs have come to believe Vatican II was at least in part a mistake. While I believe the Council was well intentioned and in good faith, I also think it was a first step onto that very slippery slope. And at the bottom of that slope is a secular world.
Click to expand...
I also grew up prior to Vatican II , however I felt the changes as a breath of fresh air. Yes there was a period of experimentation when a lot of nutty things occurred, but today that seems to have settled down and my only gripe is the lack of quality in many of the modern hymns.

I will admit that many of my fellow parishioners felt the same pain that you experienced.

It is my opinion that it was not Vatican II that led to the secularization of modern society but rather the unrest and social uprooting that had already began in the very late 50’s and early 60,s The Viet Nam experience did not help matters either.🙂
l
 
thestudentAD said:
Errors is in air quotes as I have heard that some people didn’t understand latin in pre v2 days. Also, i heard that there were cards in the pews that translated what was going on.
Click to expand...
I emphatically agree. Of course the Catholic Church and Vatican II did not secularize society, and neither did Protestantism. That development occurred apart from and in many ways in opposition to religious belief in general. And it occurred over many centuries.

Although science is limited too in what it too can explain, there is a tendency for science to summarily reject what it cannot explain. The recent books of Stephen Hawking are a prime example. He concludes that God is not necessary and Creation could have occurred on its own. It is too complex to explain here in any detail, but what he is doing is taking extrapolations from statistics–essentially probability and quantum mechanics–and then making assumptions derived from his statistical extrapolations to formulate conclusions. The conclusions are merely unproven assumptions. It is complete nonsense. My guess is the only real idea here is to produce best sellers for consumption by general readers.

Science cannot explain Creation–the Universe–and neither can Hawking. This primarily involves two things–the limits of human reason and the intellect, and the primacy of science in the secular world. Science has in its own peculiar way become similar to religion, and Hawking is a prime example of it. His conclusions are his own unquestioned beliefs. When his books become best sellers, I don’t imagine any large number of general readers can figure out what he is doing. For them, it too then becomes a matter of belief in the sense of a blind faith in science.

Sorry if this is difficult. But it was most definitely not my intention to imply that the Catholic Church was responsible for the secular world. To be clear, it is not.
 
rwoehmke said:
It is my opinion that it was not Vatican II that led to the secularization of modern society but rather the unrest and social uprooting that had already began in the very late 50’s and early 60,s The Viet Nam experience did not help matters either.🙂
Click to expand...
.

Of course Vatican Ii did not lead to the secularization of modern society, and neither did either the Catholic Church or Protestantism. Secularization occurred over many centuries, with science essentially in opposition to religious belief in general. 🙂
 
A note of explanation to my comment above: The word “secularism” has a technical definition dating to around 1846. The separation of Church and state and the primacy of reason were major tenants. It held that the temporal world of materialism and man’s life in it was “the good”. It also maintained that theology was indefinite, inadequate, unreliable and unbelievable. Secularism held that reason and not belief were the providence of man. In the U.S. today, the American Secular Union aggressively advocates for this very agenda and often in extreme ways, such as opposing any religious display by the government, what duties military Chaplains may perform and so on. It would also revoke the tax-exempt status of religious organizations.

However, its roots are at the foundation of Western philosophy, dating back to Plato and centuries before the life of the historic Jesus on the earth. In the philosophy of Plato there is the dualism of mind and body, each basically a separate entitity. Virtue is knowledge. It therefore can be known by reason. This dualism resulted in many dichotomies: mind (or soul)/body; reason/belief; rational/irrational; moral/immoral; objective/subjective; good/evil and so on. There are many such dichotomies and they permeated Western civilization. Note that in this dualism that body and belief are in the same category. And in ethics, so is the bad in the category of the Body. The full explanation is necessarily radically shortened here, but with the Age of Reason belief came into question. As reason was utilized in an attempt to fully understand the world by empirical fact alone many beliefs could not be verified. This involves, I think, the limits of human reason and the intellect and does not mean that what cannot be explained by reason or science does not exist. But this was the premise of secularism.

But again note that belief, subjectivity and what is bad (philosophical ethics) are in the same category is this dualism. Reason and science could not explain everything. By the 18th Century, with science unable to explain either the existence of God or an absolute Good, these questions evoled into beliefs within the ‘Body’ category in the Mind/Body dualism. Virtue was no longer viewed as knowable, or as absolute knowledge, and what was good or bad thus became relative and subjective beliefs. Suffice it to say, secularism took the final step: belief was bad. The theology of the Church (e.g., the philosophies of Augustine and Aquinas), also had roots in Plato and Aristotle where the body was of the temporal world, and for Augustine and Aquinas the body (that is the flesh) was the source of the bad, or sin. That ‘belief’, or faith, was also in this same category became extremely problematic. The Church resisted this development. But for those who have studied philosophy, it is what Nietzche meant with his declaration that ‘God is dead.’ What he meant was that the existence of God was no longer, in philosophy, considered an absolute that was knowable by reason. Belief was subjective and so was morality. It was the Objective God that was ‘dead’. God was now a matter of belief.

The difficulty is the rejection by secularism of what science cannot explain. Is Creation understod by science? Not hardly, and not by the statistical extrapolations of the likes of Hawking, taken from quantum mechanics (itself involving theoretical probabilities) and with his resulting assumptions from his extrapolations becoming conclusions. This is beyond nebulous. It is nonsense. Ironically, science, as the result of its many hypotheses that are assumptions that logically cannot be proven within their own closed system, is itself a form of belief. So there are only probabilies, and Hawking, for example, presnts dramatic conclusions that are really only mere assumptions.

Sorry if this comment is complex.
 
Addendum: the scientific method is limited, and there are those things that are, I think, beyond the limits of reason. But there is also spirituality, and throughout the history of the Church there have been those Saints and many others who have by contemplation and mysticism–or spirituality–experienced something ineffable that cannot be explained by reason or science. I experience this spirituality when I receive Holy Communion, for instance, but what is experienced cannot easily be put into words or explained. But it is a real experience. One begins to feel sorry for those who have closed themselves off from the experience of spirituality.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top