You can do a very devout Novus Ordo mass...but it is true that so much of the sense of the sacred is weak, particularly with the crop of middle-aged priests aiding and abetting the flakiness...
I haven't been to a Tridentine mass since I was about 6, and that as a visitor long before I was catholic, but they need to act before Latin is totally lost as a liturgical language, with fewer and fewer people around who could say the mass without having to learn Latin from scratch...
If people could see what true reverence looks like, they would be attracted! We want that, there's a hole in the psyche that wants the transcendent moment where we can look up to God, something so often missing with the wreckovators have done with all the liturgical committee silliness and sometimes outright heresy...I know of two churches in this town I won't go near to on Easter unless out of dire necessity because of "liturgical movement" performances.
I mean, I know I'm not the only person who's ever had to go to confession because of uncharitable thoughts about the music or other thing that should have been something that lifted me closer to God instead of causing me to sin...
/rant off
I dedicated my prayer and fasting this Lent to the clergy and bishop in my diocese because of that, seeing maybe I got led here just for that sort of thing...but another one of my prayers is, Lord, if the Holy Father is going to do this, please let it be soon!
You never really needed to KNOW Latin to hear Mass. If you had an English/Latin Missal, you had the responses there in front of you, and most folks learned them phonetically at first, then they learned the translation by reading the English on the facing page. It will not be a huge burden to people, it will just be different.
The beauty of the Latin Mass is that no matter where you go in the world, Mass will sound the same.
Our daughter and I went to Japan to visit friends and the first weekend, attended Mass in a Parish that was Japanese language. Our daughter understood some Japanese, and related the fact that the Gospel reading, and the sermon was about the mustard seed. My friend asked if I got anything out of the Mass, not having understaood the language, and I told her that even though I didn't understand Japanese, I knew the Mass, so yes, I did get something out of it. It actually was kind of neat, not understanding the language, but knowing what was going on, anyway.
I am impressed by a young priest in our parish who is busy teaching himself Latin, or at least enough to say the Mass. Every week we get a few more words in Latin (in the NO, of course).
There's another aspect of the liturgical language, and that's political. I go to Spain a lot, and they have long been squabbling over two minority languages, Basque and Catalan, which were really revived for political reasons. When the Mass was in Latin, this wasn't a problem, and only the homily would be in the minority language (although it usually wasn't, at that time). When the Mass went to the vernacular, then suddenly the entire Mass was said in these minority languages, for purely political reasons. It was abrupt and insulting to Spanish speakers (the majority of the congregation), and in many cases was done as an expression of the left-wing views of the clergy. It would be as if Mahony ordered that all Masses in LA should be in Vietnamese or some other language spoken in the diocese. In the case of Spain, this had even less cause, since everybody spoke Spanish and the revival of these minority languages as official languages was artificial and politically motivated. The imposition of these languages in the Mass was done for political reasons and to exclude.
I think that an unexamined aspect of the use of the vernacular in the Mass is the extent to which it aided in the politicization of the Church and its being dragged into left-wing causes in the 1970s.
Put at least the ordinary back into Latin. That won't prevent these groups from doing the propers in whatever language they wish or, obviously, the readings and the homily, but it will blunt the effect and provide at least some reminded that this is a religious act and a language is simply a vehicle for it, and not a political statement.
My wife told me that she once spoke to the priest in the confessional about how upset she was at the loss of the Latin Mass. The priest's response was, how about me?
Priests who want to say the Latin Mass deserve our sympathy and prayers, even more than do the lay people who miss the reverance and transcendence of the old Mass.
Amen.
So true....what younger priests even KNOW how to speak Latin? Maybe they could do a more solemn Mass with tradional music.