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St. Vincent de Paul (R.C.), on Roncesvalles offers a Latin Mass on Sunday...it's the old school, east-facing, priest mumbling the prayers to himself, old ladies saying the Rosary kind of Mass. It's something I've never experienced and I figured I ought to see it, if only for education purposes. So today I (briefly) abandoned the Reformation and went undercover. Just call me the Crypto-Prot. The church building is beautiful. It's in the basilica style, meaning a large open space with a curved apse at one end. (It lacks the side arcades, but then so do many of the ancient basilicas, such as the one in Trier.) The ceiling over the nave is painted with symbols of the apostles, over the apse in a blanket of stars. The windows are large and there are no internal obstructions, so the effect is light and airy...none of the dark, shadowy mystery to which the Puritans reacted so violently. The Mass itself, however... The experience gave me a deeper appreciation for the Reformation. The Latin Mass has an absolute, timeless authority. There's none of the desperation to please that characterizes a lot of Protestant worship. No, we won't come to you. No, we won't make it "accessible." If salvation is important to you then you can bloody well come to God, and learn to pray in Latin. There is but one route to God and it flows through the One, True, Holy Roman Catholic Church. So deal. NOTE: Keep in mind; this is not where most of the Roman Catholic Church is now, at least not since Vatican II. OK, there's still some of that smug "we're the only way to God" bit, at least officially, but the Mass is now in the local language and some of the attitude is gone. As someone engaged in liturgical ministry, I had to admire the calm authority of a priest who "knows" that he's right. (At least, that's what he projected.) Whether he's right or not, it's not a confidence that Anglicans can muster...we don't tend to claim all the answers for our own. We're all too aware of our own limitations, not to mention God's immensity, to say that we have it all figured out. Not this fellow...even his acolytes looked more confident in their position than the most learned and high-ranking Anglicans I know. While part of me would love to feel that sort of confidence, it's not who I am. I don't think such placid (arrogant?) certainty is the proper role of the creature. Does the church have authority? Yes, but only as derived from and dependant on Christ. Assuming that our version of church, our interpretation, is the only one...that smacks of the sin of Adam. Cock-sure certainty is one of the things that turn me off to fundamentalism, too. How dare we claim to know anything about God? And yet God's will, what God "meant," is blithely tossed about as if any fool could find it by reading the Bible. Ultimately this is bibliolatry, turning the book into God - it has the answers, it can communicate all by itself. Why do I find this objectionable? As a priest friend of mine says, "Jesus didn't write a book, he founded a church." Christianity isn't about finding the "answers" in a book; it's about being a member of a faith community. OK, this went from Sunday worship review to theological treatise. Ahem. Sorry. So, the Latin Mass. Not only was everything in Latin, save the Kyrie (Greek, of course) and the sermon (English), the priest mumbled the Eucharistic prayer to himself. It was inaudible, a long period of silence during which people said the Rosary or leafed through the bulletin or just looked around. The operative theological statement (here I go again) was that the Eucharist, the central act of Christian worship, was something the priest did alone while we just watched...though even that was difficult, since it was an east-facing liturgy and the priest had his back to us. He could have been assembling Legos for all we knew. I felt like a spectator rather than a worshipper. Respecting the Roman Catholic injunction against non-RC's taking RC communion, I made it an entirely medieval experience and merely witnessed the Elevation of the Host. It was then that I suddenly understood the full force of what the Reformation accomplished - it gave the worship of God back to God's people. It reinforced the priesthood of all believers and, with that, our responsibility to serve God in the world, not just in the church. In fact it was a far more catholic movement than anything the Roman church was up to at the time. I did enjoy the experience. A sung Latin Mass is hauntingly beautiful and it does connect us to centuries of tradition, millions of faithful souls before us for whom the mystery of faith didn't require word-for-word understanding. I'm very glad I went, for educational reasons as well as the spiritual connection. Still, I'll be heading back to the Anglican fold next week. God bless Article 24 of the 39! It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church, to have public Prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments, in a tongue not understood of the people. |
