Welcome to the Latin Mass
Why it Endures
“Verily, thou art a hidden God.” If you ever went to a Latin Mass, you were probably given a red hand missal. In that missal were some preparatory prayers for Mass, and one of them concluded with this saying from the Prophet Isaiah. Its a weird prayer, based on a weird passage of Scripture, concerning itself with futuristic prophesy, on how the ways of God are hidden from the hearts of man. Except a few verses later God declares himself a God who speaks publicly, not in hiding. You follow? I never got it either.
As I sat thinking about what to write, this paradox came to my head. God is both hidden and very open. His voice (through the Church) spreads to all people and all nations, yet He invites us to ponder His words in the depths of privacy from the world. I think this paradox also explains the Latin Mass, and why it endures.
Why it Doesn’t Endure
If you want to know why the Latin Mass endures, you can start by throwing out every explanation offered by Church authorities, who are truly clueless in this manner. As we’ve mentioned before, Pope Francis’ idea that the growth of the TLM is primarily a project of priests imposing the Mass upon the faithful is an absurd fantasy. Yet another big reason I also suggest is false, or at least misleading. In the same explanatory letter for why he believes it is the crusade of our day to enforce artificial liturgical conformity among every Catholic in the Roman Rite, Pope Francis says the following about what can draw people to what he views a dangerous threat to the unity of the Church:
At the same time, I am saddened by abuses in the celebration of the liturgy on all sides. In common with Benedict XVI, I deplore the fact that “in many places the prescriptions of the new Missal are not observed in celebration, but indeed come to be interpreted as an authorization for or even a requirement of creativity, which leads to almost unbearable distortions” …
There is some truth to this, but it was mostly during the era of the 1980’s to 2000, when the Novus Ordo really was in a state of constant experimentation, and liturgical rubrics were mere suggestions. Today this is far less of a problem. Thanks to better catechesis, papal legislation, and multiple spiritual extinction level events that wiped out the faith of millions, the Church of 2023 is a far smaller Church, but a Church that in many ways really does “say the black and do the red”, to borrow a phrase from the liturgical wars of that era. When Cardinal Sarah wrote about the damage the liturgical wars did, it was mostly a past event. Even after the Pope’s attempt to launch a new liturgy war, most people weren’t buying what he sold. There are always abuses, but there will always be abuses this side of Jerusalem.
Liturgical abuses are way down, yet the Latin Mass continued to grow. Why? Liturgical abuse can show a lot of bad things about the modern liturgy, modern priests, what we hold sacred, etc. Yet many people who are revolted by liturgical abuse don’t go to the TLM as a response: they go to a different parish where the Novus Ordo is offered more to their liking. There is something deeper at work, and in addition to exploring The Springtime of the Laity, I want to explore this.
Why it Does Endure
I think the answer lies in that statement about God being hidden. In the Latin Mass, we are called to experience something unlike anything else going on in society. The otherness of the Latin Liturgy has always been a feature, not a bug. Even when “Latin was the vernacular” (it really wasn’t, but for arguments sake), the Latin of the liturgy was dramatically different from the Latin of the provincial. Far from reflecting the local culture, the liturgy borrowed liberally from a variety of Western European cultures, mixed with a heavy dose of Judaism. (The Latin Mass might be as close as you can get to ancient Jewish worship a Catholic can get.) It didn’t reflect the latest theological minds of its time: its canon was famous for having a very primitive understanding of the Trinity compared to later liturgies and the theological works that came after. When the reformers saw this, they viewed this as reasons that required dramatic reform. What if they were wrong?
What if being a fossil is why it has endured, as so many modern ideas about worship have shown themselves to be fads? The Novus Ordo as promulgated in 1969 is horribly dated. The folk songs that formed its original introduction in the West are now the butt of jokes among young Catholics formed in the Novus Ordo. Most Catholics today look at the Catholicism of the 1970s as the relic that needs updating.
What if the very familiar “language of the people” was really just the language of the university professors who drafted the liturgical texts? Why go to Mass to get an expression of your national culture, when there are far better ways to do this? What is even our national culture in America? Hasn’t the Church looked skeptically on nationalism historically for a reason? As for reflecting the latest in modern thinking, is the Mass a theological journal of debate?
I think the Latin Mass endures because it is none of these things. What is the Latin Mass? It’s an invitation to “Come and See.” The highlight of the Latin Mass is prolonged silence, because as Elijah found out, you experience God in the stillness. The point of the Latin Mass isn’t that it speaks to you: it’s point is precisely that its not made for you. The Latin Mass is made for God. All the weird and sometimes inexplicable rubrics (at first sight at least) exist because the rubrics are meant to preserve an experience where the worship of God is the highest and principal end of the experience. It doesn’t reflect the latest in modern thinking because the point is to reflect what is necessary to worship God in the Eucharistic sacrifice, no more, no less. Ironically, I’d argue this makes the much-discussed active participation easier at the Latin Mass. (More on that later.) What will you get out of the Latin Mass? That’s up to you. The rubrics aren’t engineered to get “active participation” out of you. The rubrics are engineered to promote that the worship of God the Father through the sacrifice of God the Son is the most important act of creation. Do you need the Latin Mass for this? No. Yet the endurance of the Latin Mass is a stark reminder that a liturgy rooted in modernity will always struggle to stay relevant.
It’s Now Okay
As the Latin Mass grows, it experiences its largest growth among the young. While the reasons above have a lot to do with it, I think another one is: they no longer have to tell themselves the status quo is the only option. For those of the Vatican II and Pope Francis generation, they are now in their 80s. Their entire life has been centered around the idea not so much of presenting Christ and him crucified, but that, before them, nobody else was doing it right. To admit they got something wrong is to admit that previous generations might have gotten something right. They might have gotten something right they got wrong. Like all revolutions, it requires the consistent demonization of everything that came before it, because the fear of return to the old ways is ever present.
That works for the generation who fought for the change or implemented the change. The generation after has a disposition towards the new status quo. The second generation after the revolution? They have no concept of what life was like in the ancien regime because they weren’t born yet. They can’t compare the status quo to the old days, either as an eyewitness or from a secondhand source. The desire to defend the status quo via fear isn’t as strong. It’s a lot easier to admit what modernity gets wrong, and what the past might have gotten right. That doesn’t mean you revert to the past, but you learn your lessons. The Pope Francis generation can’t learn that lesson, because how many in their 80s want to close out their life considering at length what they got wrong? As the institutional hostility passes with the Pope Francis generation (the first to live the first days of the post-conciliar reform), don’t be surprised when the endurance of the Latin Mass continues to surprise. Its okay to come and see, and I hope more and more do.