M
MarkThompson
Guest
From what I gather, the common perception is that, in order to understand the Latin Mass before Vatican II, everybody just took their own little private missals with them. There could be no question of not understanding what was going on or being said, because everybody had their St. Andrew’s Missal or Father Lasance Missal, and most were dutifully following along. The Latin is on one side and the English on the other; what could possibly be simpler?
Recently I was reading a portion of Walter W. Whitehouse’s The Musical Prelude to Vatican II: Plainchant, Participation, and Pius X in which he remarks with surprise about that pope’s progressive attitudes:
Pius published a catechism and prayerbook for the Catholic laity of Rome in 1905 . . . which included the full Ordinary and Canon of the Mass, and recommended the Mass-text as the preferred prayers for Sunday use. This was only eight years after the vernacular translation of the Missal had come off the Index of Forbidden Books!
Is that right?
I poked around a little bit. In Where Thousands Fell (1995), William J. Leonard, S.J. offers these recollections:
In any case, I remember that when I arrived at the novitiate I was asked if I had brought a missal.
"A missal?" I said, "What’s that?"
I had spent four years in a Catholic high school and never heard the word. But that was in 1925, before the hand missal became popular. We had prayer-books – The Key of Heaven for girls and The Young Men’s Guide for boys – which contained devotions for various occasions and sometimes even the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays. No publisher, as far as I know, however, and brought out a complete missal in translation. Actually, the prohibition against printing a translation of the Latin Canon had been dropped from the Index of Forbidden Books only twenty-five years before.
It certainly seems that in fairly short order – by 1950 or so (the period that we today tend to assume as the paradigm of “traditional Catholicism”) – hand missals were common enough. Is it really true, though, that the era of people commonly taking their hand missals with them to Mass is really only a blip of a few decades in history? Where does this leave Catholics, say, 100 years ago (1911), though? Or, really, at any point before that? Somebody at Fisheaters hypothesizes that “people went to daily Mass at every corner of the street, so most knew what the Latin meant by heart,” but since the majority of Masses were silent low Masses it seems difficult indeed to imagine that “most” people had committed to memory the entire temporal and sanctoral cycles of Epistles, Gospels, propers, collects, and so forth, in a language they did not otherwise speak. Not even priests or cloistered monks did such a thing.
Am I missing something? If I lived in 1890, when personal missals were forbidden, was there much hope for finding out, on an ordinary basis, what the prayers and readings were at Mass on any given day? I can’t say I’ve ever read much on this topic, since people just imagine that the way it was in 1950 is the way it always was. I’d be very curious to know if others are aware of more of the history of this issue.
Recently I was reading a portion of Walter W. Whitehouse’s The Musical Prelude to Vatican II: Plainchant, Participation, and Pius X in which he remarks with surprise about that pope’s progressive attitudes:
Pius published a catechism and prayerbook for the Catholic laity of Rome in 1905 . . . which included the full Ordinary and Canon of the Mass, and recommended the Mass-text as the preferred prayers for Sunday use. This was only eight years after the vernacular translation of the Missal had come off the Index of Forbidden Books!
Is that right?
I poked around a little bit. In Where Thousands Fell (1995), William J. Leonard, S.J. offers these recollections:
In any case, I remember that when I arrived at the novitiate I was asked if I had brought a missal.
"A missal?" I said, "What’s that?"
I had spent four years in a Catholic high school and never heard the word. But that was in 1925, before the hand missal became popular. We had prayer-books – The Key of Heaven for girls and The Young Men’s Guide for boys – which contained devotions for various occasions and sometimes even the Epistles and Gospels for the Sundays. No publisher, as far as I know, however, and brought out a complete missal in translation. Actually, the prohibition against printing a translation of the Latin Canon had been dropped from the Index of Forbidden Books only twenty-five years before.
It certainly seems that in fairly short order – by 1950 or so (the period that we today tend to assume as the paradigm of “traditional Catholicism”) – hand missals were common enough. Is it really true, though, that the era of people commonly taking their hand missals with them to Mass is really only a blip of a few decades in history? Where does this leave Catholics, say, 100 years ago (1911), though? Or, really, at any point before that? Somebody at Fisheaters hypothesizes that “people went to daily Mass at every corner of the street, so most knew what the Latin meant by heart,” but since the majority of Masses were silent low Masses it seems difficult indeed to imagine that “most” people had committed to memory the entire temporal and sanctoral cycles of Epistles, Gospels, propers, collects, and so forth, in a language they did not otherwise speak. Not even priests or cloistered monks did such a thing.
Am I missing something? If I lived in 1890, when personal missals were forbidden, was there much hope for finding out, on an ordinary basis, what the prayers and readings were at Mass on any given day? I can’t say I’ve ever read much on this topic, since people just imagine that the way it was in 1950 is the way it always was. I’d be very curious to know if others are aware of more of the history of this issue.
Be realistic?
Christ says “peace be with you” after the Resurrection… He’s not John the Baptist first of all, though that is necessary. Missals give us peace! 