Posted on 09/18/2010 5:21:57 AM PDT by markomalley
As Pope Benedict was heading to the British Isles he was asked if he thinks the Catholic Church needs to change to be more attractive to an increasingly secular British culture.
This is what he said:
Any well-instructed Catholic knows what’s going on at Mass—they are pretty much the same all across the world for 2000 years. If you took me to a Mass in Chinese I could tell you exactly what was going on, even though I don’t speak a word of Chinese.
And it’s not like it is in many non-liturgical churches, where you just go to hear bits of Scripture and an extended homily. Every Mass to us is not only the hearing of the Word, but, more importantly, a Holy Sacrifice. So even if I can’t understand the Word as it’s proclaimed, I can still participate in the offering of the Sacrifice and Holy Communion.
Oh, and the other thing is, Latin ain’t so “foreign” if you’ve grown up hearing it your entire life. Maybe you don’t have 100% comprehension, but you do learn the basics.
For the most part Latin.My church here in Detroit also does a mass in German every fourth week of the month. I have been working on both languages. As if English wasn’t bad enough :)
>>But what if I go to a mass, it’s all in some foreign language and I can’t understand what is being taught? Why would I stay?<<
At the time of the traditional Latin Mass, Latin was taught in high schools. Most people understood some words, Catholics understood them all.
This was the part of the general dumbing down of society.
We’ve at Cyril’s in Sterling Heights.
I have no problem going to the Slovak Mass or the Wednesday morning Latin NO.
“Any well-instructed Catholic knows what’s going on at Mass”
Well that’s just it isn’t it? I can go into pretty much any protestant church in this nation and understand the spoken Word and understand what is being taught. It’s hard (unless you already know latin) for a non-Catholic to say to himself, “I’m going to check out a Catholic mass, maybe it’s for me” and wind up understanding what is being taught unless that non-Catholic already knows Latin. For all the good that is doing, you might as well be speaking martian.
“And it’s not like it is in many non-liturgical churches, where you just go to hear bits of Scripture and an extended homily.”
I don’t understand what you mean by “non-liturgical” or “homily”
“Oh, and the other thing is, Latin ain’t so “foreign” if you’ve grown up hearing it your entire life.”
Which as I said earlier....does nothing for a possible new convert that speaks only his or her native tongue.
Common Latin Mass questions here:
“Grunthor wrote:
But what if I go to a mass, it’s all in some foreign language and I can’t understand what is being taught? Why would I stay?
And another:
dartuser wrote:
Non-catholic here ...
What exactly is a Latin Mass? Is everything spoken in Latin or just certain key parts?”
Okay, let me try to tackle this - I am a boomer who bridged the Vatican II changes, which occurred when I was in high school.
The traditional Latin “Tridentine” Mass was divided into to main parts (as is the Novus Ordo “New” Mass):
The “Ordinary” of the Mass is comprised of the prayers that are the same in each Mass - these were said in Latin, with the exception of the Kyrie, which was said in Greek. The Ordinary includes the central focus of the Mass, the Consecration.
The “Proper” of the Mass is comprised of the parts that change from day to day: The Epistle, Psalms, Sequence, Gospel. Although these were said in Latin during medieval (and later) times when educated people actually knew enough Latin to understand them, in modern times, these were in the vernacular, as was the priest’s sermon.
To answer the question about going to a religious service in a foreign language, we all used Missals: the prayers were written in Latin on the lefthand page, and in English on the righthand page.
Thus, although the Altar Boy’s responses (given from memory, I might add) were in Latin, we in the congregation followed along in English and Latin, using our Missals. After a brief time, you didn’t need to consult the English, since you knew the gist of the Latin passages. I should add that the congregation made few responses: the Altar Boy represented us in the Mass.
It you went to Catholic School, you were taught enough Latin that you could likely translate much of the Ordinary of the Mass on sight. (Okay, some of us could translate it on sight.)
I should say that although in retrospect, it might seem quite impressive that a 7 or 8 year-old boy could recite every response in Latin from memory for an hour-long Mass, it was nothing special in those days!
The beauty of the Latin Mass was that one could go to Mass in a foreign country, and, except for the 10-15% in vernacular, you understood the entire thing. Since we Catholics travelled with our Missals when out of the country, we could read the appropriate “Proper” Old and New Testament passages in our own language while the priest was reading them in the langusge of the locality.
You did miss the sermon, but much of the time, that made little difference, since we could reflect silently on the readings.
So, in practice, the New Mass results in our understanding less, not more, when we attend services in a foreign land.
There is another aspect to the Latin Mass - it is very reverent, and the formulaic rubrics of the Mass have a beauty that is reminiscent of the stylized Japanese Kabuki. And, in my estimation, the simple, stark beauty of Gregorian Chant is the audible equivalent of the fragrance of incense rising to Heaven, carrying our petitions to God with them.
I hope this clarifies things somewhat.
“At the time of the traditional Latin Mass, Latin was taught in high schools. Most people understood some words, Catholics understood them all.”
But we have passed those times by. To pretend that high schools still teach latin and live your life in that fantasy seems ridiculous. It reminds me of a debate going on in my family right now. My wife of almost 3 months was raised in the Church of the Nazarene as was her mother and so forth. I was saved in 2005 and Baptized at a Pentacostal/Charismatic church. I’ve changed churches three or four times due to moving but always kind of stuck with the charismatic (fun, non-boring) churches. I’ve been to my wife’s church and it seems stuck in the 1950’s. The message is wonderful but the worship music is hymnals and 90% of the people there are 65 and older. They worry that younger people no longer come to services there. The place is dying. The words that come to mind are “old, slow, boring and sad.”
I believe the message should never change but perhaps the delivery, environment...atmosphere.....in America today if you bore “me” I’m out. Holding on to the past in terms of delivery, environment and atmosphere might be important to some but is it more important to watch one’s church die or to swallow some pride and modernize everything EXCEPT the message?
The church I currently attend is three years old next week. We have 500 at fellowship every Sunday. It is anything BUT old, sad, boring and slow but the message is straight out of the Bible, nothing watered down and nothing left out so as to not “offend.”
My wife wants us to go to her church and see if there is something that we can do to save it. Unfortunately the blue hairs that currently inhabit the place are so entrenched in the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality that I think they would rather die as a church than change enough to bring new and younger people in.
I started out by saying “But we have passed those times by. To pretend that high schools still teach latin and live your life in that fantasy seems ridiculous” I think that in some dying protestant churches, they don’t see that the times have passed the hymn books by. I believe that we can get so stuck in our little box that we cannot think outside of it.
It sounds profound, but really isn't. Religion and Culture are not two separate things. They're deeply intertwined. They move together like birds in a flock and change over time.
>>To pretend that high schools still teach latin and live your life in that fantasy seems ridiculous”<<
LOLOL!!!!
Honey, you don’t know many homeschoolers, do you?
A Latin Mass is not for you, go where you are happy.
I don’t really care for the TLM but have attended. There are more young families than old people. Our Latin New Order (modern) mass is REALLY packed.
If you want happy fun, then it’s not for you. It’s that simple.
The conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod to which I belong has a strong German heritage....stemming from the time of Pastor Martin Luther.
Utilizing a small example, even if we of this generation don't understand German we know the phrase "Stille nacht, heilige nacht" means "Silent night, holy night".
As the poster, Claud, states above, we understand this German phrase and we need no translation because it's understandable to us by the natural "osmosis" he refers to. We know the meaning because we've heard it from baptism through confirmation lessons and beyond. It's just part of our little grey cells.
Many Latin phrases are also ingrained in the Lutheran context....and we understand them completely and treasure them, also.
I fully understand the love Catholics have for the Latin mass. It's their heritage to love it and understand it.....the same as I love and understand my religious heritage.
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Leni
>>and if time permits I get down to St. Joseph’s in Detroit. <<
Ooooo, my girls sang with their Latin choir there.
LOVE that church. The organ was gorgeous and the young ladies were thrilled to death to be in a real choir loft!
Selah
There is some truth to this. Which is why the Church even before the 1960s was becoming increasingly tolerant of different languages in the liturgy, and why almost all of the Masses in this country are now in English. I am a big fan of Latin in the Mass. But I don't pretend it's a panacaea, and I'm glad that there are English Masses as well now.
I don’t understand what you mean by “non-liturgical” or “homily”
For our purposes, "liturgical" means you have a structured set of fixed prayers and rituals attached to a calendar. So I can look in a book and know exactly what the readings will be each day, what the variable prayers will be, etc. Not only Catholics and Orthodox but also Anglicans/Episcopalians, Lutherans, and I think also some Presbyterians have liturgical services. Non-liturgical is much less structured, it means a pastor getting up and just winging it week to week, without really any sense of a yearly calendar or anything.
The homily is the part of the service where the priest stands in the pulpit and discusses the readings for the day. This is always in plain ole English--well, generally in the U.S. anyway. :)
>>Which as I said earlier....does nothing for a possible new convert that speaks only his or her native tongue<<
I think, what you don’t understand is, Catholics don’t have a mass for “possible new converts”. The Eucharist is a true sacrifice, not just a commemorative meal, as “Bible Christians” insist. We have Jesus right there, if you want to come join Him, come. If you don’t, that’s okay with us.
Leni
Your comments are correct for most non-Catholic Christian churches.
However, they do not really apply to Catholic Mass.
Unlike other Christian church services, the teachings of the Bible are not the central point of the Catholic Mass: the central part of the Catholic Mass is the commemmoration and actual re-creation of Christ’s Sacrifice, the central act of Christian Salvation.
While we do read Old and New Testament passages during each Mass, and the priest teaches us from the pulpit, the Sacrifice is why we attend Mass.
The bulk of Catholic instruction is done in many different settings: during formal preparation (these are actually the equivalent of “courses”) for the Sacraments of Baptism (for those baptized after infancy), Penance, Holy Communion, Confirmation, and Matrimony.
At each period of life, when preparing for the Sacraments, the Catholic is taught scripture, dogma, and doctrine, each time building on what has come before.
In contrast, at Mass, the “teaching” done by the priest is merely an ad hoc “refresher” using the day’s readings as a stepping-off point.
Yes, all excellent points MinuteGal...and I fully understand (I bet Benedict does as well!) the attachment to liturgical German. Actually, the Catholic Church in Germany even before Vatican II had a tradition of the Singmesse—of singing German hymns during the Mass.
And as far as “dead” usages, don’t we use them in English too?
“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name”
Right there you have a panoply of extinct/archaic usages: “art”, “hallowed”, the subjunctive/hortatory “be”, and “thy”. But should we get rid of that phrase? Should we get rid of “Auld Lang Syne”? Or any of those old hymns?
In one sense, yes, it’s a “dead” usage, but I’d argue that it’s not really dead if it become so much a part of the tradition and the culture. To just toss these relics overboard when we are still using them is, I’d argue, crazy. Ecclesiastical languages/dialects are a natural, venerable and very old part of human culture all over the world. We shouldn’t be fetishistic about them, but they definitely should be encouraged and preserved.
Leni
Well, the teaching takes place in the homily, which is delivered in the vernacular. The rest of what goes on you can read from a book.
But the Latin Mass requires a bit of a perspective change. It's not, centrally, about "teaching" you anything. It's not there to entertain. Good liturgy is not teaching or entertainment or even necessarily emotionally uplifting. It's worship, and it's supposed to bring you to the threshold of heaven ... and in heaven, the question "What do I get out of this?" is basically nonsensical.
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