Thank you for your time in responding, Mark. You are very blessed to have accumulated a working knowledge of our liturgy. May I trouble you for another question?
I have spent some time on Youtube looking at various liturgies. My own experience so far has been limited to our liturgy, or should I say the new Mass. What I’ve found so far is our new Mass looks very similar to several Protestant services whereas the Latin Mass looks very different. What came first, the Protestant services or our new Mass?
Ignoring the argument of the last two pages, let me make a couple of brief points:
- The modern Mass can be expressed in a number of different ways. If you saw it in all Latin, with the priest’s back turned to the congregation, no hymns, and a Gregorian schola to provide the chant, I don’t think you would sense much similarity to a Protestant service. Most people who were not experts would probably have a hard time telling the difference between that and a celebration of the traditional Latin Mass.
- Obviously, that type of celebration of the modern Mass is rare – it’s generally in the vernacular, facing the congregation, with hymns for the people to sing and so on. There’s certainly a degree of sense to the point that what “came first” in this respect was the Protestant services, but the explanation is more complicated that simply to say that the modern Mass “copied the Protestants.” Most of the elements of a usual celebration of the current Mass, such as the use of the vernacular, proclaiming the readings to the congregation rather than to the wall, and so on, were adopted because people liked them and they seemed like good ideas. Unsurprisingly, those are also the reasons that the Protestants adopted them after the Reformation, when they were no longer locked in to following the dictates of the Vatican.
So it is not that the Church decided to “copy the Protestants” in, for instance, using the vernacular, it is that both groups decided it was a good idea to use the vernacular, and the Protestants happened to do it first. When we got around to it, the motive was not to “be like the Protestants,” it was to celebrate Mass in language the people could understand. If Protestants all suddenly switched to Homeric Greek, we would still keep using English, because we adopted the vernacular for reasons that had nothing to do with the Protestants – it just so happens that they were the same reasons that
apply to the Protestants, which is why they made some of the same choices that we did (and did so much earlier). The same goes for many issues of congregational participation and the like.
One would expect some evolution in the say the liturgy meets the needs and concerns of a congregation over a four-century stretch of time. In the Catholic Church, that used to happen routinely, but after Trent (1570 to 1970) it did not. It only stands to reason to some of the same developments that the Protestants – who were not locked in to one historic expression of the Mass – saw as beneficial would be developments that we, too, would see as beneficial and would adopt of our own accord once we had made up our minds to allow changes to the Mass again, as we used to.
I have expressed in other (lengthy) posts my view that it was the fact that the liturgy was frozen for so long that caused such a flood of changes to burst forth after Vatican II. When you keep anything pent up for four centuries, that is abnormal – certainly an aberration in the twenty-century history of our Church – and it’s going to make a bit of a mess when you finally open the floodgates. We’re still in the process of cleaning up that mess, and it’s a tiresome chore, so tiresome that we sometimes can get deluded into thinking that it would have all been better if we had ignored it and kept everything pent up. I happen to disagree (and apparently so did the 2,147 bishops who signed
Sacrosanctum Concilium calling for substantial changes to the liturgy of the kind that hadn’t been seen in centuries, so I guess I’m in somewhat decent company).
- And in fact the Protestants have copied our modern Mass in quite a number of ways. When we developed the modern Lectionary (the cycle of readings), for instance, it was adopted by a great number of Protestant churches who recognized its merits. Many Protestant congregations use our hymns, prayers, and general order of service as well.