My friend (and my RCIA sponsor) and I drove an hour and a half today to go to a High Mass at an FSSP church in Atlanta today. It was the the first Latin mass for either of us, and we both thought it was well worth the trip! The Latin was beautiful /…/ I definitely was impressed with the choreography of it all, with the deacon and so many alter servers
I guess two big questions I have after this are first, why is this not more popular? Like I said, we had to drive an hour and a half to a tiny church in the middle of not the nicest neighborhood in the outskirts of the state capital. While I was definitely impressed by the inside of the church, it was small /…/
My second question is why are more of the prayers and practices of the Latin mass not in the ordinary form? The beginning of the gospel of John at the end comes to mind as something that doesn’t seem controversial for any reason.
The short answer to your last question is: because of the application of the norms and guidelines of
Sacrosanctum Concilium. Expanding that, for an old liturgy professor, would take multiple posts
I used to teach Latin on rotation – so there were many places where it always was a required cognate. As a priest who was a liturgist as well as a professor of liturgy and sacraments, I was entrusted by the bishop with offering Mass and other sacraments according to the
vetus ordo in the days of the indult…long before
Summorum Pontificum
As readers of the forum know, when the bishop, thankfully and happily from my perspective, relieved me of that assignment – we had far more pressing needs than the tiny group who had sought the indult – I handed the indult back. He asked if I wanted to keep it “at least as a memento”; I said “absolutely not.” And I have never celebrated Mass in the
vetus ordo since
I had lived through the Council. I could not have been happier with
Sacrosanctum Concilium and its aftermath. It was, for me, the perfect fruition of the liturgical movement of earlier days, which had breathed new and fresh life into the Church
For years, I was on rotation for our
novus ordo Mass celebrated in Latin…there we had an excellent music ministry and a very engaged complement of laity fulfilling various liturgical functions. The
vetus ordo community on the other hand never broke out of the circle of its petitioning adherents and eventually was dissolved for lack of a sufficient stable community
In retirement, my private Masses are many times in Latin or in one of the languages I habitually speak-- but always in the
novus ordo; I would never even think of offering Mass using the 1962 missal
So it has been many years since I offered Mass in the
vetus ordo…although after
Summorum Pontificum, I again had/have on occasion provided various sacraments and so forth using the corresponding rite as it was in the
vetus ordo
If you have a reasonable command of Latin, it’s really not that difficult – the Latin is not that complex – if you prepare. I was gratified at how readily I fell back into it after the years and was content after just one practice run
I’ve helped mentor younger priests who wanted the ability to say Mass according to the '62 missal. In my part of the world, none of my students, once they had the basics to hand, wanted to go on to another level however. Some did quite admirably with their first attempt actually but they all said, “No. Don’t want to do it again”
To what some of the posters are writing…well, it is, frankly, an entirely different matter pedagogically to prepare students to read and comprehend a document (my theology students were certainly expected to do that) and another thing to render an outstanding translation. It’s one thing to celebrate Mass in Latin and quite another to carry on a conversation or give a lecture in Latin. These are different levels of proficiency, which each have their place
While I didn’t mind, when circumstances necessitated it, conversing in Latin and even more readily making a presentation or intervention in Latin…since after all I lectured on primary source materials that were in Latin…I would still say asking my students to have that level, as non-academics in regular pastoral work, seemed really not utilitarian given all the needs and situations today, to be blunt
Latin does have a beauty – depending upon what I am saying. Some things I find quite pleasant enunciated in Latin…but the same is true for all the Romance Languages, actually, and English too in some utilisations
I find especially when I am in a monastery that I fall naturally into Latin – which, I hasten to add, is very different and with very different capacities and resources than a parish…even a cathedral parish
You ask if I miss the prayers that were omitted…no. Not at all. Quite to the contrary. I cherish what was changed. I prefer the additional anaphoras today; I seldom to never use the Roman canon, preferring even the Swiss canon to the Roman one. I’m glad for the discarding of redundancy and the restoration of elements that had been lost…to say nothing of the far superior breadth of scripture readings in the lectionary of the
novus ordo
Pope Benedict, when he wrote to the bishops of the Catholic world in 2007 about the
motu proprio, essentially said that it is only a very small and narrow slice of the Church that would use the
vetus ordo and, clearly, the vast majority of communities would use the
novus ordo. That has certainly been not only my lived experience, it has been what I have seen in the mind and in the hearts of my brother priests and well as the laity
