Latin - Ignorance or Bigotry?

A Letter to the Editor in this week's St. Louis Review, the St. Louis Archdiocesan Newspaper

Latin Mass convention

Editor:

Your June 16 article telling of the Latin Liturgy Association’s upcoming convention speakers, including the LLA’s founding chairman, a history professor, brought to mind a poem by Walt Whitman, "To a Historian," addressing him in its first line, "You who celebrate bygones!"

While the LLA’s stated goals are prudently more modestly stated, I fear what at least some of its members really seek is return to the universal Latin Mass and abandonment of Mass in the vernacular. My fear is based in part on years as a reading subscriber to Adoremus Bulletin.

Whitman’s address to the historian is doubly, even trebly, prophetic.

If anything ever deserved to become a bygone, it was the universal Latin Mass. The universal Latin Mass was a verbal rood screen separating the people, the vast majority of whom did not know Latin, from active participation in the Mass.

My concern is that some in LLA want all of us to resume celebrating this bygone. For those who do not know Latin, the Latin Mass is essentially elitist and exclusive. The last thing the Roman Catholic Church should be is elitist and exclusive.

James F. McCarthy
Des Peres

What to say, where to begin...Mr. McCarthy does not say if he is a member of the Latin Liturgy Association (LLA), but he has inferred, it seems, that there is a movement afoot by the LLA and Adoremus to deprive Catholics of Masses which have mundane and banal vernacular translations in favor of Latin - which remains the official language of the Church.

As a reader of Adoremus for a number of years, I can recall no instance where it called for an abandonment of Sacrosanctum Concilium allowing for some use of the vernacular in the readings and such - Adoremus, A Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy, seeks only to promote authentic reform of the Liturgy of the Roman Rite. It's unfair to blame Adoremus for his fear of an "abandonment of Mass in the vernacular."

Mr. McCarthy states that the Latin Mass deserves to be a "bygone" - confined to a dusty old locker of historical irrelevance. I'm not certain to which Latin Mass he is referring. However, as anyone who knows what a "Roman Missal" is or who has recently witnessed the Holy Father celebrating Mass - these are in LATIN!

He further states that "for those who do not know Latin, the Latin Mass is essentially elitist and exclusive". Could we not say the same thing about any Mass celebrated in a language which we do not know? I once attended a Mass in Polish, and knowing not one word of Polish, I never thought for a moment that it was "elitist and exclusive." Perhaps with a Polish/English Missal, I might have been able to follow more closely.

If one has a current missal (Novus Ordo or Tridentine), one will usually see Latin on one side and English on the other. Is the Latin portion "elitist and exclusive"? I think Mr. McCarthy needed something to complain about.