Benedict XVI resurrects the aesthetics of the Mass

[Brennan_Doherty]

This whole article would be worth pasting in here, but here is a selection with the link at the end. Cannot recommend this article highly enough:

Those who dismiss the pope’s efforts as an exercise in retrograde pomposity are oddly tone-deaf. They fail to grasp the power of the traditional Mass’s auditory as well as its visual music, its intricate interplay of harmonious sound and harmonious movement. Andrew Sullivan rejects the Tridentine Mass as “a relic.” Fr. James Martin, S.J., was quoted in *Time *as saying that the revival of the Latin Mass “would make it much more difficult for people to engage in full conscious and active participation” in the liturgy. Fr. Martin’s critique echoed that of Lord Macaulay, who argued that the “service, being in a dead language, is intelligible only to the learned; and the great majority of the congregation may be said to assist as spectators rather than as auditors.”

…In his essay on Dante, T. S. Eliot observed that the poetic intensity of a work of art or of the spirit often lies concealed in the music of its rhythm. “I was passionately fond,” Eliot wrote, “of certain French poetry long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly. With Dante the discrepancy between enjoyment and discrepancy was still wider. . . . The enjoyment of the *Divine Comedy *is a continuous process. If you get nothing out of it at first, you probably never will; but if from your first deciphering of it there comes now and then some direct shock of poetic intensity, nothing but laziness can deaden the desire for fuller and fuller knowledge.”

So it is with the Latin Mass. Nor is it only in the rhythms of its language that the poetic intensity of the Mass is made manifest. Its rhythms of motion have their own peculiar power. Eliot described the Mass as “one of the highest forms of dancing” he knew. It was this interplay of sound and movement that led him to say that “the consummation of the drama, the perfect and ideal drama, is to be found in the ceremony of the Mass.”

article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjE4NjM1NzIwZTBlYzBhYjQ0MTdiN2MyZWM3ZmY4ZTY=&w=MA

 

[chrisb]

When Holy Tradition is spoken by the lips of our Pope it is the sweetest sound. May he have many years!

 

[jj2011]

Fr. James Martin, S.J., was quoted in *Time *as saying that the revival of the Latin Mass “would make it much more difficult for people to engage in full conscious and active participation” in the liturgy.

Let jj2011 be quoted as saying that the revival of the Latin Mass “would make it much more difficult for people to engage in full conscious and active participation” in a mockery.

 

[Malcolm_McLean]

Andrew Sullivan rejects the Tridentine Mass as “a relic.” Fr. James Martin, S.J., was quoted in *Time *as saying that the revival of the Latin Mass “would make it much more difficult for people to engage in full conscious and active participation” in the liturgy.

Fr Martin is right. But in a Tridentine Mass it is easier to engage partially in the liturgy.
It’s a natural mistake for a priest to make. He’s so highly educated himself that he doesn’t realise that for many people being asked to read from the lectionary is a terrifying prospect.

Partial is all that a lot of people can do. If they are not allowed to do that, they might not feel able to come at all. If only a few of the congregation have fluent Latin, however, there is no shame in being one of the majority.