12/18/2007

Why I will not “say Mass” in Latin

The rumor that the diocese may give permission to use St. Rose Church in Quincy (closed since 2004) to a group that wants to offer the Latin Tridentine Mass has made me examine my conscience. After all, I love Latin. After six years of it in the seminary I kept reading it until today, and now I am teaching it at Quincy University (to two students). Why shouldn't I offer my services to Catholics who want to experience the Mass in that ritual?

Throughout my years as a priest I have tried to pray with people, even when their styles of prayer were not the ones I would have preferred. I sang songs like "Here we are" and "Kumbaya." I have joined in Masses in Spanish and in youth Masses, Masses with Black Catholics that went on for three hours, charismatic Masses in which people spoke in tongues, and Christian Family Camp Masses where I had to worry that the card table altar would be shaken by children at the wrong time. Why should I not preside at Latin Masses when my background is so well suited to it? Is my reluctance mostly political, because I think liberal Catholics would object?

The problem I would have with presiding at a Tridentine Mass is that it would make me relate to the congregation in a way that I can no longer accept. It is true that turning my back on the congregation and facing the east (though there are certainly old churches in which the priest does not face the east, among them St. Rose in Quincy) would not in itself separate me from sharing in the people's worship. But that action would be for me a symbol of a relationship in which the people's role becomes silent and secondary. I have become used to a Eucharist in which I listen to a variety of lay people play a variety of roles in the Mass. The phrase used by the Vatican Council was "full and active participation" by all the people, a phrase that has roots in Pius XII's 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei. I process from the back of the church, through the midst of the congregation, singing with the congregation. Lay people, sometimes very young people, read some of the Scripture. Lay ministers help distribute Communion. All this I would lose in a Tridentine rite.

I do miss SOME of the Gregorian chant. My Liber Usualis is one of my prized possessions. Few pieces of music move me more than the Gregorian Pentecost sequence (Veni Sancte Spiritus. . .), and I love the Gregorian Kyries, Glorias, Sanctus's, and Agnus Dei's. I even tried once to translate one of those Sanctus's into English in the hope that I might be able to use it with people who do not know Latin. I do not miss the Sunday "proper parts" (Introit, Gradual, Offertory, and Communion), which were seldom familiar enough to allow me to sing them with devotion and pleasure. Even in the seminary, where we had a congregation who knew Latin and had to practice beforehand, singing them was usually an ordeal.

People speak of missing the atmosphere of awe and reverence in the Tridentine rite. My memory is of a priest rushing through the prayers at the foot of the altar so fast that I could get out only the first two words of each server response. Solemn Masses can be awesome, but I did not experience a solemn Mass until the sixth grade, because it took three priests and we only had two. Too many high Masses featured an organist ripping through the sung parts (by herself) so that the Mass would not take more than a half hour. (The priests and sisters at St. James in Decatur were not guilty of such carelessness.)

Priests and people can be reverent in any rite, and careless and irreverent in any rite. I like the theology of the Vatican II rite, and will not return to a theology that I believe was rejected by that Council. Pope Benedict surely believes that the Tridentine rite is compatible with that theology. I think that in the context of the ordinary parish in this country, it would not be.