It concerns a tiny minority of Catholics, and yet, in some ways, it is symbolic of the biggest debate in the church.
It concerns a tiny minority of Catholics, and yet, in some ways, it is symbolic of the biggest debate in the church.
A s the cardinals of the Catholic Church go into conclave to elect the next pope, many of them are reading a dossier that lists the statements their brother cardinals have made on climate change, allowing women into the diaconate, and the status of the Latin Mass. It’s that last one that sticks out like a sore thumb. The last two papacies have found themselves partly consumed by the issue of the church’s form of worship and whether it’s permissible to use the books from 1962 or before. This concerns a tiny minority of Catholics, and yet, in some ways, it is symbolic of the biggest debate in the church.
Only about 4 percent of American Catholic parishes offer the traditional Latin Mass. And America is the country where the traditional movement is strongest. Latin Mass enthusiasts have been a tiny minority ever since the church adopted the new, vernacular liturgy in 1970. And yet, traditionalist Catholics have always punched above their weight in politics and the arts. William F. Buckley Jr., Patrick Buchanan, and Antonin Scalia in the conservative movement; English writers like Evelyn Waugh and Piers Paul Read; wild-man actor and auteur Mel Gibson; and so many artists (even non-Catholics) have expressed their devotion to the Roman Rite as it was, dating back to the original Agatha Christie intervention in Catholic liturgical debate or its sequel which featured Bianca Jagger and A. N. Wilson.
It is easy to imagine that many cardinals wish for this issue to simply go away. Two successive popes took wildly divergent attitudes and imposed wildly different legal regimes on this movement. Benedict XVI treated them as wrongly scapegoated victims, simply asking for their church’s patrimony. He gave individual priests permission to say this Mass wherever a stable group of faithful requested it — an unprecedented expansion of freedom to which bishops quickly adjusted. Francis talked about traditionalists as little Pharisees who suffer a “backwardist” mental hang-up. The former pope changed a presumed yes given to individual priests to a presumptive no, which can only be reversed in Rome itself. Bishops have been slower to comply.
Many cardinals, reeling from the conservative-liberal whiplash, are hoping for a pope who can put the authority of the church on solid ground. But if the Latin Mass continues to be a controversial topic, a third consecutive papal intervention — a reversal of the reversal, risks making papal authority look ridiculous.
And yet it is bound to be a controversy because it embodies the major question behind all other debates in the church. When Benedict XVI liberated the old Mass, he did so on the principle that “what earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or considered harmful.”
Can the church fundamentally change? Are the moral teachings of the church true forever, or are they partly a product of cultural prejudice, and thus can be revised in light of a new understanding? Did the Second Vatican Council really represent a rupture in church history, after which the church needed to impose a new understanding of religion and a modern liturgy to form us to that new theology?
Ultimately, I think the Latin Mass controversy is a debate about the nature of Christ’s act on Calvary. Was it a sacrifice that propitiates God’s wrath at our sin, reconciling us to him and allowing us to enter the true temple in heaven? Was it something God in effect owed to us? Or was it a commemoration of an event that heralds the final unity of all humanity around a common table?