Why I Love the Latin Mass but Wonder About the Pope's Motives
Hic, haec, hoc…huis, huis, huis…
When I was in high school—a diocesan parish Catholic institution—all honors students had to take four years of Latin. This was in the late 1980’s. Old-fashioned or not, Latin was the official tongue of the Catholic intellectual tradition and therefore part of our preparation to go out into the wider world according to the nuns that ran my school.
This made sense to my Italian Catholic mother and grandmother, both of whom remembered the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass well, and, in my mother’s case, had endured long years of schooling in Latin growing up in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This is not to say that Mom and Gram did not enjoy the mass in the vernacular, but there was something about it that the more familiar, informal English language version couldn’t quite capture, they used to say.
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