Back to "smells and bells"
– Is this thing supposed to smoke like that? – I don’t know. The instructions are all in Latin.
As most of “Upper Italy’s” readers will know, the Vatican today formally confirmed that as of mid-September the traditional Latin Rite will again be an acceptable way of celebrating Catholic Mass. This is officially described as a “liberalization,” and it is in the sense that the most conservative element in the Church of Rome has now been freed to get its own way.
The “Latin” or, more properly, “Tridentine” Mass – this second term derives from the name of the 16th Century Council of Trent, which codified the ritual – was gradually abolished beginning on December 4, 1963, when the Second Vatican Council decreed:
“The rite of the Mass is to be revised … the rites are to be simplified, due care being taken to preserve their substance. Parts which with the passage of time came to be duplicated, or were added with little advantage, are to be omitted. Other parts which suffered loss through accidents of history are to be restored to the vigor they had in the days of the holy Fathers, as may seem useful or necessary. The treasures of the Bible are to be opened up more lavishly so that a richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God’s word … A suitable place may be allotted to the vernacular in Masses which are celebrated with the people …”
The process culminated in the 1970 revision of the “Roman Missal,” which, though itself written in Latin, prescribed a new kind of simplified vernacular Mass, a rite that the faithful might actually be able to understand. The fundamental objection of conservatives since then has been a simple one; From the moment when more Catholics began to grasp what the teachings of their Church actually were, there has been a dramatic erosion in the Faith.
From the 1960s onwards, fully coincident with the introduction of the “Vatican II” ritual, Western countries have experienced a drop in Mass attendance (in the United States, from 75% of Catholics attending in 1958 to 25% attending by 2002). These same countries also saw a decline in seminary enrollments and in the number of priests (in the United States, from 1,575 ordinations annually in 1954 to 450 in 2002)
A 1992 Gallup poll of American Catholics is often cited as proof by conservatives that “understanding the words” may be a hindrance to Faith. It showed that 70% of Catholics who attend what the latinizers prefer to call the “Novus Ordo” Mass do not believe they are literally receiving the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, under the appearance of bread and wine at Holy Communion. That is to say, only 30% believe in the “Real Presence”. In case you were not listening closely, this is one of the fundamental Protestant heresies.
Though globally there are in actual fact more priests and seminarians now than ever before (in 1970, there were 72,991 major seminarians worldwide; in 2002, there were 113,199), the conservatives have resisted the suggestion that the decline of Catholic practice in the West is due more to the general influence of secularism and liberalism on Western societies than to any error in having made the Faith more generally comprehensible to its followers.
However that is, beginning on the 14th of September, individual priests will be free – without the need to seek any kind of permission from their Bishops – to perform as obscure a ritual as they desire. The way the new norms are written appears in fact to strongly suggest that they do so if any part of their congregation at all expresses support for the idea. This is how that is put: “In those parishes in which there stably exists a group a faithful who adhere to the preceding liturgical tradition, the Priest is to voluntarily accept their request to celebrate Holy Mass according to the rite of the Roman Missal published in 1962” – that is, before the vernacular mass came into general use.
The form of the decision is interesting, having been applied through a decree “motu proprio” – in essence, Latin for “because I say so” – by Pope Benedict XVI. Much care is taken in the Pontifex’s cover letter to His Bishops that accompanies the document to explain how this return to the past should not be taken as undermining the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which had decided, ah, differently.
We have pointed out that the use of the “new” rite is not obligatory. The choice will be a kind of local option. As a result, it is quite easy to imagine two substantially different kinds of Catholicism emerging over time and having to learn to coexist. This would be something like the “smells and bells” distinction in the Anglican/Episcopalian faith in which the elaborate use of incense and the ringing of altar bells of the “High” Church is not a model for the rite current in the “Low” Church. But that is not going to happen. Pope Benedict, once again in his letter to the Bishops, explains rather oddly that this cannot occur because it would require “a certain measure of liturgical training and access to the Latin language, neither of which are frequently found.”
In other words, new internal divisions will not be a problem for the Roman Catholic Church because most priests don’t understand Latin either.