Like many others of my generation, I was raised in a Catholic household, had a basic understanding and love of the faith, but fell away as I grew older. Put simply, my faith didn’t grow with me. As a young teenager, I felt bored during Mass, and much of what I heard from the altar during homilies sounded distant and often cheesy.
Up to the age of seven I attended Latin Mass, but as the years passed, my family started to attend the Novus Ordo nearer to home.
Looking back, I can see how something about losing access to the beauty and reverence of Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) was for me like the uprooting of the anchor of my faith. There’s something about Latin Mass that I can’t quite put into words.
I’m by no means a theologian, or an expert in matters divine, but if I could offer you one piece of advice, it would be to go and experience it for yourself.
In a letter to his son Micheal, J.R.R Tolkien spoke of the “complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires”. Here he touched on something fundamental about Latin Mass: the sense of transcendency.
When one attends Latin Mass, all five senses are engaged by the same stimuli that our ancestors experienced for hundreds of years – assuming of course that they were Catholic.
I had often questioned how people had the conviction to suffer, or even die for their Catholic faith, but at a certain moment, I felt that I somehow understood.
While watching a plume of incense rise up above the altar, I thought of my grandparents, my great grandparents, and all those who went before them whose names and faces I don’t know.
What I do know about them is that they heard the same bells, they admired the same beautiful vestments, sung the same Latin hymns, prayed the same prayers, and that the incense smelled the same now as it did when they were alive.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” – John Keats.
Not so long ago, I had a conversion with two dear friends, one a practicing Catholic, and the other a self described “agnostic”.
The topic turned to the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, or in lay man’s terms, the belief that Jesus Christ bestowed the ability on his priesthood to transform pieces of bread and wine into the true substance of His body and blood.
My Catholic friend said that she didn’t believe this dogma, with the agnostic agreeing that he didn’t know “any Catholic” who does.
J.R.R. Tolkien described the Eucharist as the “one great thing to love on earth”.
In the same letter to Michael, he wrote the following: “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste—or foretaste—of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.
Why do some Catholics not believe in transubstantiation anymore?
There’s no panacea of an answer for this, but I believe that one major reason might be ‘Communion in the hand’.
I don’t think anyone can honestly argue that Novus Ordo practices confer the same amount of reverence on the Eucharist as Latin Mass traditions do. They just don’t.
Up until 1969, when the New Mass was rolled out, only a priest or – if I’m not mistaken at least a deacon – could handle the Eucharist.
Human hands had to be consecrated to God in order to perform this task. Critics may see it as ‘exclusionary’, however this tradition reflects the sacred nature of the Eucharist. To make a rather base analogy, you can’t just prance into Chanel and start mauling the handbags.
Whether or not one believes in Catholicism – or any of the over 40,000 Protestant denominations – to believe that there is a God, that He became incarnate in human flesh, that he was brutally tortured and crucified only to rise from the dead, and ascend into heaven after 40 days, but to believe that this same God can’t fundamentally alter the substance of bread and wine doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
A Protestant, or indeed a Catholic who rejects the fundamental dogma of transubstantiation, might argue here that God can or could do this, but simply doesn’t.
“While they were eating, He took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, ‘Take it; this is my body.’ Then He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.'” – Mark 14:22-24.
Of course there are many other references to Jesus describing Himself as “the bread of life” in the Gospels, and – as you probably know – the crux of the argument comes down to whether or not this statement was meant literally.
If you really believed that the Eucharist was the body and blood of God incarnate, then it seems to me that the only appropriate way to approach this would be in a posture of reverence.
The care a Latin Mass priest takes to ensure that not even a morsel of a consecrated host ends up anywhere it shouldn’t be offers an insight at why receiving on the hand is not allowed.
Latin, as a language of worship, unites Catholics regardless of language and cultural barriers.
Having spoken about how Latin Mass transcends time, it’s important to point out that it transcends borders.
The same Mass was said by priests wherever in the world there were Catholics, be this Japan, Italy, Ecuador, or anywhere else. Latin is a language that was meant to unite the faithful and to transcend the barriers of language.
The church I attended in South Korea had a roster of priests from Japan, the US, France, Austria, and other countries. It didn’t really matter if nobody present shared a common spoken language because we could all follow Latin and were therefore all on the same page (pun intended).
One of the objections I frequently hear is, “But I don’t understand Latin”, that’s fine, and when you were born, you didn’t understand English either.
As the contents of every Mass are largely repetitive, it doesn’t take long to become familiar with the contents of the liturgy, and translated booklets are provided on site.
If you’ve seen Braveheart, you may remember the scene where William Wallace speaks before the Princess of Wales. Her advisor tells her in Latin, “He is a bloody murdering savage, and he’s telling lies”, to which Wallace replies, in perfect Latin, “I never lie. But I am a savage.”
The scene beautifully communicates how, for hundreds of years, Latin was the language of the learned.
Being exposed to Latin is a fantastic opportunity to improve our understanding of the root of so many English words and how their use has evolved over time. We have to challenge ourselves in order to grow.
A sense of wonder and mystery which distinguishes prayer from the outside world.
If you’ve ever watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you might agree that one of the reasons the scenes depicting conversations in Elvish are so captivating, is due to the sense of mystery and wonder not understanding the words elicits.
Latin creates a ‘divide’ between the outside world and the state of consciousness necessary to place oneself in the right mindset to offer worship.
English being used in this situation, for me at least, can feel dry and prosaic.
While there are those who seem to take offence at the fact that, during a traditional Mass, the priest faces away from the congregation, when you think about what the Catholic understanding of Mass actually is, this becomes a bit silly.
For believers, Mass is a reenactment of the scene at Calvary. All those present face towards one focal point, namely Jesus on the cross, in order to offer the Messianic sacrifice to God the Father in atonement for the sins of mankind.
When you think about it, the priest is like the captain of the ship or a pilot. I wouldn’t be too happy if a pilot was facing the passengers while flying the plane.
As I stated at the beginning of this article, there is so much that I can’t put into words, it’s difficult to condense such a rich history, spanning back to the 6th century, into a relatively short article, but I hope that these words have at least made you curious.