Checking the St. Louis archdiocese website (and St. Louis Catholics are generally a pretty conservative bunch) I count five parishes out of nearly 200 that offer any Latin service at all.
And as for the Nicene Creed, my local Lutheran church uses both the Apostle’s and Nicene creeds. Our version of the Nicene is “We believe.” I suspect it’s more a quirk of translation than it is any specific theology.
You could go Lutheran, although you won’t get the High Mass ritual still sends shivers down my spine. Choose your synod carefully, though, otherwise you may lose the ritual but still get misogyny and homophobia.
Heck, my parish offers a mass in Swahili a couple of times a month (we have a number of African immigrants in the parish, including our pastor). It doesn’t mean that the Church is going to move to Swahili as its official language.
About twenty percent of my Episcopal congregation came to us from Catholicism. A handful are divorced and remarried, but for most the move was about the treatment of women and gays. You’d be in good company.
Meant to add as a data point that in Rite 2 of the Episcopal tradition, which I believe dates from the Book of Common Prayer issued in 1979, the correct response to “The Lord be with you” is “And also with you.” In Rite 1, prior to that, it was “And with thy spirit.” At any parish gathering people can get everyone’s attention by bellowing “THE LORD BE WITH YOU” whereupon everybody instantly stops talking long enough to say “AND ALSO WITH YOU” except a couple of eight o’clockers who say “AND WITH THY SPIRIT”
There is nothing of Protestant (or even non-Catholic) Theology in the Novus Ordo, so making that reference indicates a misunderstanding of what it means.
Trent was a sixteenth century reaction to the Reformation. It got a lot of things right (when it corrected abuses) and a number of things wrong (when it declared that the sixteenth century expressions and interpretations of theology were cast in concrete as if the church could proceed and develop in its understanding of God for 1500 years and then come to a screeching halt). Most of the opposition to Vatican II has been the result of people who were ignorant of (the changes in expression) in the first 1500 years of church history believing that the pronouncements from Trent were carved in stone that expressed the church teachings going back to the first century. The desire to hold tightly to the Tridentine mass indicates a belief that Trent was the final way to view God. There is beauty in the Tridentine mass, but it does not communicate the actual message of the church, today.
Back when I was forced to go to church, I recall attending a few masses where at least some part of the proceedings were spoken in Latin - I think these were special occasions though, like Christmas or Easter Mass. I remember being even more annoyed than I normally was at attending since the priest, of course, used church pronunciation, or faux Italian. I had been taking Latin since freshman year of high school and man did this annoy me.
My mom is still Catholic, despite her dabbling with just about every other Religion on the planet, and she says none of the Masses she has attended featured Latin, she doesn’t go very often though, but she does go to both Spanish and English language mass.
Ha, I still recall a bit of dialogue from a St. Elsewhere episode one year at Christmas time. Dr. Westphall’s daughter and her boyfriend were planning to go to Midnight Mass and decided to go to the Episcopal instead of the Catholic church because you’d get “all of the pageantry and none of the guilt.”
I was an altar boy while the Mass was still in Latin and then through high school (it was a seminary even!) during the changes. These days, I guess I’m completely devoid of any religious faith. Still, I don’t understand the folks who want the Latin Mass. It just makes no sense. They must be clinging to ritual and pomp over any kind of actual meaningful worship.
Indeed. The only sense it makes to me is that people of many languages can join into a common mass. But that really only makes sense if Latin was a true lingua franca today. Very few people understand it. I was going to make a comment about the homily, but I actually have no idea. Were pre-Vatican II homilies at least in the native language of the congregation? I would assume and hope so.
Nah, there’s nothing particularly special about Latin itself, other than for sentimental and traditional reasons (it was after all the language of the western church for many centuries until very recently).
The differences I have observed are that in Latin mass parishes, there is a reverence that is lacking in most Novus Ordo parishes. Examples would be the Priest being ad orientam, most women wearing chapel veils, many families that take Church teaching re: contraception seriously, etc. Also, communion at the altar rail while kneeling. There’s just less opportunity for liturgical abuses in the old rite.
Those things can happen in NO parishes too, and sometimes do, but the Church clearly lost something in the switch.
I do believe the NO can be done well with utmost reverence, but for some reason it rarely happens.
I just want more for my children. I want them to learn to worship, to learn that the mass is not about them, but about giving God what is his due.
With all of the freedoms that Priests have in the NO, my experience has been that the Priest tends to be too concerned with pleasing everyone.
[Moderating]
This thread appears to have drifted from “Is the Church shifting back to Latin?” to “Should the Church be shifting back to Latin?”. And while that’s a perfectly fine topic for discussion, it’s not a GQ topic.
[Not moderating] EscAlaMike, I can see your argument that those practices are more reverent… but is that why the people in those parishes are doing it, or is it just because that’s the way they’ve always done it?
By way of example, it’s customary, among observant Catholics, to genuflect towards the Tabernacle when entering the Church, or passing in front of it. This is meant as a token of reverence for the Eucharist. But if you go to church on Good Friday and pay attention, you’ll still see a lot of Catholics genuflecting towards the Tabernacle, even though, on that day, it doesn’t contain the Eucharist. So what are they really showing reverence to on that day? And what are they really showing reverence to on all of the other days?
A couple of years ago, one of the kids my SiL got for First Communion Catechesis was the son of a married lesbian couple who attend Mass regularly, unlike several hundred different-sex-married couples I could mention. SiL started to protest and the priest told her “we’ll be sorry to lose you as a catechist”. That was the end of the protest.
The only times I’ve seen Latin Mass offered semi-regularly in Southern Europe, it has been in the kind of locations that have a bazillion tourists and offer Mass in half a dozen languages. I think that in general US Catholics tend to be on the conservative/retrograde side compared with those in Southern Europe because it acts as a specific marker; the same might apply to Canada. Conversely, in Latin America the Evangelicals are picking up a lot of the conservatives, thus leaving an RCC that’s more lefty.
Chronos, a lot of people don’t have the slightest idea why they’re genuflecting/bowing towards the altar; many will do it so even if the box holding the Eucharist is to the side, or as you mention when the light is off or the box is open and showing clearly empty.
I’m not EscAlaMike, but I will venture to say that it’s because they’ve always done it. In my experience these, the beloved Little Old Italian and Polish Ladies of my youth, are not people with deep theological educations. When they were young the Sisters told them to do that, saying it’s Jesus’ house, so they do it today.
Regarding the genuflecting, I’ve noticed the same thing and don’t have an answer except to agree that it’s probably just habit mixed with ignorance.
I can’t really answer either for Latin mass attendees, but would venture to guess that there is less theological ignorance among that crowd for the simple reason that most people attend TLM intentionally, even driving over an hour every Sunday for it. Since Latin mass parishes are so rare, one has to seek them out to find one for the most part, and is not generally just the closest neighborhood parish.
You ever try arguing with a babushka who wants to take Mass HER way? Anyway, I’m tempted to go so I can tell my kid, “I had that whole thing memorized.”
The same is valid for “people who regularly attend an inconvenient* and out-of-parish Mass” regardless of language used. As you said yourself, there’s nothing particularly magical about Latin; apparently there does be something magical in your perception of it, and in the perception of your Latinophile peers, since you seem to think that having to learn to pray in a foreign language will improve your children’s theology and piety.
Stuff such as attending at Mom’s parish after spending the night at Mom’s or before lunch with Mom doesn’t count as much.
