Early in 2007, I sat on a red couch at a home near the seaside in Stamford, Conn. The man who summoned me there was asking a bit about my background — the schools I had attended, my parents’ lives, and my pending engagement to marry. He even asked for my worst opinions about him and his life’s work, which he met with laughter or sorrow as it struck him. And finally he came to my religious views. I reported to him that I had started searching out the old Latin Mass in 2002 and had been looking for it in the few tucked-away parishes where it was offered at deliberately inconvenient times. And then he — William F. Buckley Jr. — brightened up and immediately asked if I would like to go with him to the chapel at St. Mary’s at 3 p.m. I was in full rebellion against the mainstream Catholic Church’s modern liturgy. Buckley simply resented it.
Later that year, Pope Benedict XVI would confirm that the old Latin Mass was never “abrogated” — never abolished. In fact, he all but said it could not be. “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful,” he wrote. The painful post–Vatican II deprivation of the beauty and mystery in the Mass of Ages — from priests who wanted to say it, and the faithful who wanted to hear it — was ended before Buckley died. I was married in that rite. And since then my children have been baptized in the old rite too.
All of a sudden this summer Pope Francis has completely reversed and contradicted Benedict. In Traditionis Custodes, he envisions that all people who are devoted to this form of worship will in due time be made to give it up. To do this, he sets up the ecclesiastical machinery for suppressing it forever, saying that it is a source of division.
The document that effects this change is premised on a lie about Francis’s still-living predecessor’s intentions and the facts on the ground. Francis holds that Benedict’s generosity was aimed primarily at encouraging unity and has failed, leading only to division. But Benedict premised the freedom of the old Mass on the truth that it was still holy and good for the faithful. And doing so dramatically decreased the rancor between liturgical traditionalists and their bishops. By bringing us in from the margins, Benedict allowed the traditionalist movement in the church to mature, and to grow into real communities that had peace with the larger church.
This papal act now means that in the past two decades my attendance at the traditional Roman rite of the Mass has gone from being vaguely suspect under Pope John Paul II, to welcome and increasingly mainstream under Benedict, and back to nearly criminal and seditious under Francis. For a church that claims extraordinary consistency in its authority and brags about “thinking in centuries,” the past two decades of turmoil over the traditional liturgy suggest something more like manic episodes. The Barque of Peter — the Catholic Church — is tacking and jibing in a way to make passengers like myself seasick. Some of us suspect that the man at the helm has been given too much grog.
But we need to be clear that we are talking about more than the Latin language. Often people born after 1970 mistakenly think that the old Mass and the new Mass available at most Catholic churches are the same ritual, the second merely translated into our spoken language from the first. It is not so. While still in the flush of fervor after the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI instituted a new liturgy for the Roman rite of the Catholic Church. It was an unprecedented thing to do; previous popes had tended to endorse and consolidate changes already extant in Christian worship, not replace wholesale the central act of worship with a synthetic creation by committee. Almost all traditionalists acknowledged the validity of the new Mass, but that was just about all they’d say — it was legally valid.
Of the prayers said throughout the year in the old Mass, not even 20 percent survived unchanged into the new liturgy as translations. Perhaps more consequential were the ritual changes. The old is ordinarily performed “ad orientem” — with the priest and people facing the altar together, as opposed to “versus populum,” whereby a priest effectively hosts the congregation across the Lord’s table. The priest’s prayers in the new Mass are chattier, and more hortatory. It’s often unclear whether they are meant as instruction for the faithful or as petitions aimed at the Almighty. In the old Mass, the priest is too busy addressing himself to God to insert his personality or “take” on the Mass; this is a welcome restraint. The old rite gives wide berth to the people attending it to prayerfully enter into the mysterious drama unfolding at the altar. And in that space, the great treasury of the church’s traditional music — Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony — fits in. Considering this vast sweep of historical development — its connection to the saints, its antiquity, and the culture it produced — I have tended to follow one dear priest who calls this liturgy “the actual Roman Rite.”
For the Love of the Latin Mass
“In the old Mass, the priest is too busy addressing himself to God to insert his personality or ‘take’ on the Mass; this is a welcome restraint.” Enough Happy Clappy at Mass