A liturgical anorak writes...

“The use of Latin is to be preserved in the liturgy”, said the Holy Spirit in the first decree of Vatican II (1962 – 1965), and the use of vernacular was also allowed. It was changes made by bishops in the immediate wake of the Council that saw the vernacular used everywhere and the use of Latin discouraged, which Traditionalists see as an Orwellian interpretation of the words of the Council. Soon afterwards, the Ordo and rubrics of the mass was revised yet again (being revised in all several times in the decade before and the decade after the Council). Traditionalists responded either through Una Voce (http://www.unavocescotland.org.uk/) [or in England and Wales, the Latin Mass Society (http://www.latin-mass-society.org/masses.htm)], which held out for a return to the “old rite” of the “Tridentine” Mass, or the (somewhat less diehard) Association for Latin Liturgy (http://www.latin-liturgy.org.uk/), which was willing to countenance the use of the “new rite” of 1970 but in Latin. Bridging the gap but leaning to the diehards is the Centre International des Etudes Liturgiques (http://www.ciel-uk.org/).The followers of Lefebvre, who say mass according to the Tridentine Rite, are schismatic, but there has existed since 1988 a legitimate order of priests, established in response to the schism, which trains its seminarians to say old rite masses with the bishop’s approval, the Fraternity of St Peter (http://www.fssp.com/). Archbishop Rifan was schismatic, but is now reconciled with Rome, and the last Pope ruled (in Ecclesia Dei) that mass not just could be but should be said in the “old rite” wherever the faithful required it.

The “Mass” bit of the phrase, “Latin Mass”, is probably more important than the “Latin” bit. Part of the “liberal” resistance to Rome’s wishes comes from the fact that for some people, especially among Lefebvrists, the use of Latin is totemic, and forms a political statement, especially in France. Perhaps some people go to “Latin Mass” because they are interested in Latin, but really the notion is that God is to be approached in a language that does not have mundane associations for us. Strictly, He does not need our prayers, but we need to pray to Him, and a sacred language that cannot provoke thoughts of Safeways or the workplace during the effort to pray is helpful to us, even if it would make no difference if we, instead, were the Deity – and perhaps this is so especially when, ironically, one cannot understand the language better than a little! Underlying this point is the conviction that knowledge of God is primarily of a personal and not an intellectual kind and that the function of liturgy is to form an individual’s and a community’s character in repeated gestures and attitudes rather than to take the place of catechesis or religious education by a process of instruction and assent.

For Orthodox Jews, the same principle of “sacred space” applies, but for Hebrew; for Muslims, in the case of Arabic. Conversely, there is a generation among the Orthodox who would like to take away Church Slavonic that is as conscious as the 1960s liberals were of the social and structural changes that liturgical reform would signal. Many liturgists, often Jesuits, wonder if globalisation means that our lives are now too fragmented for rhythmic and seasonal “formation” to work any longer, in any language. Even if a technocratic and instrumentalist attitude to language was responsible in the 1960s for a misunderstanding of the real, spiritual purposes of liturgy, their argument is that the diagnosis and prognosis for liturgy would be the same, now that ignorance has had its effect, and manners and understanding been altered (lex orandi, lex credendi).