Dear friends,

As mentioned briefly on the discussion forum last night, yesterday evening Amanda and I decided to take ourselves off to a Latin Mass that is offered up in our neck of the woods each Sunday. I went along expecting to find the Novus Ordo Mass celebrated in Latin and was surprised to find that what we were celebrating was the far older, Tridentine Mass, with not the slightest deviation from how it was celebrated when I was a very young child.

	Yes, the Mass we attended was just like in this picture except the altar servers were a bit older and there were four of them. The congregation was small though and this Tridentine Mass is celebrated every Sunday night at 5.00 pm in the same Church in the Blue Mountains.

I have to confess I had quite forgotten just how "unfriendly" this version of the Mass is to the congregation with the priest's back to the people. Our modern understanding of theology is that Jesus is as much present in "the people assembled" as he is in the host, or "far away" in the East where our churches point to. In hindsight, I now appreciate my memories of the Latin Mass are more associated with that brief period where change was in the air and the "Dialogue Mass" was introduced that did call for some participation and involvement of the congregation.

The funny thing is that I used to be an altar server like the kids in the illustration at right and when we served at Mass for the Jesuit priests saying their daily Mass on the side altars of the chapel at my boarding schools, we had to know all the Latin responses off by heart. There was no congregation behind us to remind us of the lines if we forgot them. Even when serving Masses on the main altar the altar boys received no assistance from the congregation behind. It was only last night that those memories were retrieved from somewhere deeper in the recesses of my memory.

For large sections of the Tridentine Mass yesterday one could not even hear the priest so it wasn't even a matter of "not understanding the Latin" — we couldn't even hear it!

Honestly, I would not want to return to this form of worship and remembrance of God and Jesus Christ in a million years. The experience was valuable though in that it gave me a far keener appreciation of the liturgies we have today and why the reforms of the 1960s were so desperately needed.

Someone made a cutting remark to me a week or so ago after having seen a whole lot of the new breed of seminarians favoured by a certain unnamed prelate gathered in one place. The friend said: "if you went through all of our schools and gathered together the social misfits in each class and assembled them together in one place you couldn't have done better". The Latin Mass we attended yesterday was also a little like that. This is not a Mass for the mainstream in society. It's something that seems to appeal to the social misfits in society today.

I honestly do not believe the chief problem the Church faces today is to do with liturgy. Most parish liturgies I attend these days, even the very worst of them, in communication terms are light years removed from what I experienced last night. They are far, far more effective as communication endeavours — both in terms of communicating what this entire "worship" business is about and in terms of that other important word linked to the word "communication", building community or communio.

Our liturgies have improved enormously over the course of the last half century. If we have a problem it has not been in the effort put into improving our liturgies, it has been that our liturgies today have so much more to compete with.

Liturgy has to be something that comes from the people. Ultimately it is their "reaching out to God" expressed "from the heart". Ultimately, I believe, liturgy is more an emotional experience rather than an intellectual experience. It's richly involved with symbol and sign as we (the people) endeavour to express our deepest spiritual hopes and aspirations and as we seek solidarity with one another and a sense of collective connection to this Mystery we label as "GOD" who sits at the core of our lives and binds us together as a human family. Liturgy is not about "rules". Neither is it something "static" — unless one is considering it in the context of a certain sector in society who place a premium on certitude as against the search for a God who is in dynamic relationship with an ever changing world and cosmos.

I believe modern men and women are not becoming less religious, or less spiritual. If anything, the very opposite is the case. The challenge we face though as a worshipping community is in adapting our signs and symbols so that while they retain "the wisdom of the ages" in the insights they are trying to convey to us, at the same time, they remain fresh and emotionally appealing. In a sense the very purpose of liturgy is to bring "the wisdom of the ages" into "the now"! We cannot do that if we are stuck in a mindset that suggests the future is behind us, or that our hope and salvation is in the past instead of the future. Liturgy has to be dynamic and alive. In a very real sense it is one of the most important devices we have in all of our lives for connection "our past to our future through the present".

As we see so often in modern society, if the churches become incapable of delivering people "liturgy that is relevant", the people will go out and demand it from governments and commercial producers who will deliver some secular substitute. They'll even go and create it themselves. We all hunger for "sign", "symbol" and, I suggest "sacrament" in our lives.

	Sean Patrick Cardinal O'Malley Archbishop of Boston and fast establishging a reputation as the Blogging Bishop! www.cardinalseansblog.org

Cardinal Sean O'Malley (Archbishop of Boston) in his blog brings to our attention a briefing that he and other leaders received in Rome recently from Cardinal Tissone Bertone on the initiative of His Holiness to make celebration of the Tridentine Rite much easier, or with less restrictions. In his blog the Cardinal says: "The Holy Father is obviously most concerned about trying to bring about reconciliation in the Church. There are about 600,000 Catholics who are participating in the liturgies of the Society of St. Pius X, along with about 400 priests. The Holy Father was very clear that the ordinary form of celebrating the Mass will be the new rite, the Norvus Ordo. But by making the Latin Mass more available, the Holy Father is hoping to convince those disaffected Catholics that it is time for them to return to full union with the Catholic Church." (emphasis added)

I don't think most people have objections to the Church being more flexible in its rules to allow for special interest groups — and for traditionalists, conservatives or the insecure who attracted to these older liturgical styles — to access liturgy in the ways they find comfortable. That is not the principal issue for discussion in the life of the Church at the moment. I don't believe either, that it is the principal reconciliation challenge the Church faces today. That rests with the hundreds of millions who have become distanced from the Church today. If the Pope is to run around making these enormous gestures to the "traditionalists, conservatives and the insecure" he surely has a responsibility to be engaging in a far greater expenditure of energy to be reaching out to mainstreams of society who have become disaffected. Perhaps he thinks he is already doing that through initiatives like World Youth Day. Frankly, I am not convinced. World Youth Day has been operating for a couple of decades now and I honestly fail to see where it has arrested the decline in interest in the broad masses of younger people.

What does worry me about what I experienced yesterday evening though is not any sense of "threat" that is posed by allowing the re-introduction of the Tridentine Mass. Honestly, there is just no way on God's good earth, that the vast masses of people are going to be attracted back to that style of liturgy. It will always remain something only of interest to a small and particular psychological subset of the mainstream population. What is a deeper worry though is the theology that is part and parcel of that form of liturgy. The only place where this really came through in the liturgy we experienced yesterday was in the homily and the prayers in English that ended the Mass (The Hail Mary', the Hail Holy Queen, etc.). I honestly do not believe reconciliation is possible between the mindset that operates out of that space and the theological mindset that was encouraged as a result of Vatican II. The theologies, the mindsets that are involved are literally "mutually exclusive" and incompatible. They are drawing pictures of what this entire "spiritual quest" or "religious endeavour" is all about. They both cannot be correct. I do not believe this is something where some "compromise" is possible.

The challenge the institutional leaders face today (in re-evangelising, or evangelising, the world) is not principally a challenge of liturgy. It is a challenge in theology — in explaining what the core objective of our worship and our thinking and acting in life is. The challenge the Holy Father faces is not going to be overcome by constantly wanting to appease the dissident elements on the extreme conservative fringes of Catholicism. It is going to be overcome by pastorally sensitive teaching and explanation that leads these people to "the promised land" rather than behaviours that constantly cave in to their insecurities and these "theologies" that, I suggest, end up leading nowhere rather than to any "promised land".

Brian Coyne is the editor and publisher of Catholica Australia.

We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum.

Brian Coyne can be contacted at: Brian Coyne <editor@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Brian Coyne

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