Fr Martin Sirju

Over the past few years there has been a fairly constant stream of letters on the topic of Latin and the Church’s liturgy since Vatican II. I have always wanted to add my own thoughts on the matter and alas I have gotten down to doing so.

Some years ago Fr Michel de Verteuil presented a paper at our Caribbean Theology Conference on the theme of the conference of that year – Ritual. In that paper he mentioned a very important point; he said that when people engage in ritual they are taken back to time immemorial and they rest in the conviction that things have always been done that way.

 Even though that may not be entirely tenable historically it is natural and good for them to think that because people must have psycho-spiritual stability about what they do as they enter the realm of the sacred to make connections with the past.

I have always felt the force of that statement as regards the Mass of Pius V, more commonly called the Latin Mass or the Tridentine Liturgy. The use of Latin in the Church stretches back to the time of the Latin Fathers of the West like Augustine, Cyprian, Tertullian and others.

The Tridentine liturgy itself was what obtained after the Council of Trent (1545-63) as the Church sought to tighten up on things in the wake of the Reformation. Some of the Tridentine reforms were good, like the complete overhaul of the training of priests.

Many priests before Trent were poorly educated and the reforms in seminary education gave birth to the seminaries of today. One disadvantage, however, was the need to control and homogenize. In an institution as ancient and global as the Catholic Church, control and supervision are easier when things are done the same way everywhere.

The Latin Mass was the most classic manifestation of this. As writer after writer to the Editor have said, one could be in China, India or America and the Mass was celebrated the same way and the responses of the faithful were all known.

Vatican II changed all that. I myself think the Council (1962-65) was the greatest religious event of the last century, but that doesn’t mean that everything the Council did was prudent.

In hindsight we can see that the Council was guilty of an anthropological naiveté i.e. the Council Fathers (periti) were experts in theology and related disciplines but not in anthropology.

The changes they recommended were necessary and good but they did not have a keen enough sense of what the changes in the Mass would do to people’s psycho-spiritual stability.

In one clean sweep radical changes were made overnight: the liturgy was now in the vernacular (i.e. Latin excised), the priest faced the people, the tabernacle was moved to the side, the high altars and altar rails dismantled and, God forbid! women were allowed on the sanctuary.

Benedictine liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh writes regarding this anthropological oversight: “Left unmentioned were problems caused by the quantity and rapidity of the reforms themselves, problems that reflect perhaps the greatest of all the reform’s weaknesses, namely, the almost total absence of any anthropological dimension in the approach to revision of so massive and long-standing a ritual system.

For ritual patterns, which have much to do with sustaining identity and the social bond, are for these reasons essentially conservative and normally need to change slowly….the anthropological dimension seems never to have crossed anyone’s mind.”

From personal observation over the years I think these radical changes affected men more than women. I have met several men over the years who are still Catholic but do not come to church anymore.

Most of them don’t seem bitter but clearly something was lost, and overnight! They still hark back with excitement to the days of the Latin Mass and recite many of the Latin responses by heart. With the loss of Latin went also a sense of mystery. Did the Council do these men a disservice? I think so, and thousands others.

Could this debacle have been avoided? Perhaps not. Radical changes hardly proceed smoothly as we can see with the French Revolution. It is always a messy business. I think Prof Howland Sanks SJ was right when he said that the Council brought many changes but it did not prepare the people for them.

The challenge I think is not to run from Vatican II or have a “reform of the reform” but to explain it more fully and to implement the reforms the Council had in mind in a spirit of dialogue and respect.

Vatican II is still a foreign word to the average Catholic in the pew and the hierarchy must bear some responsibility for this. Parishioners seem to know the Catechism of the Catholic Church more than the Vatican II documents.

However, the latter is more important than the former: one is a conciliar document, the other is not. I think if we have a clearer idea of what the Council intended then we might have a better idea what direction to follow.

There has been too much animosity among those for and against the Council, too much recrimination over the Latin versus the vernacular. The way forward would require compromises on both sides.

Having said all this we need to ask: should we give the Latin Mass as much weight as the Mass in the vernacular? My answer to this is no. Why? Because it not the more ancient tradition of the Church and it suffers from a lack of scriptural warrant.
This I will pick up next week.