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.
Learning this “dead language” as a high school student, a task I originally approached with the kind of loathing only a teenager can muster, somewhat surprisingly awoke in me an appreciation for its ancient, formal use for Catholic services.
Brother Michael, our gentle, enthusiastic teacher (who I will never forget), instilled an unlikely affinity for declining verbs and identifying the genitive, accusative, and ablative cases among various nouns among me and my all-female classmates. It was not uncommon that, on a nice day, he’d take us out onto the playing fields, separate us into two teams and proceed to lead us in a game of “steal the bacon” but with Latin nouns. We’d race to the center of the field in our Catholic plaid to see who could grab “puella” (the nominative for the word girl) from the ground first. In between those sunny mornings and translating “Cupid and Psyche” or “Jason and the Argonauts,” we’d play what Brother Michael called “Latin Baseball” and he’d have us running in circles around the center square of desks as he pulled flash cards while we stood ready.
Latin wasn’t so dead after all.
Between the matriarchs of my family and Brother Michael, the Latin Mass began to speak to me—not as something old-fashioned and oppressive, a sign of a long era when a high and mighty barrier existed between lay believers and the hierarchy (all things that are true)—but instead of things wonderful and awesome and that which had somehow, strangely, become something I could claim as my own as well.
For many Catholics, the Mass is as much about mood as it is about message. The Mass is a performative act designed to transport a believer from the profane of the everyday into the mysteries of the holy. My grandmother especially heard the Latin service like a piece of familiar, beautiful, classical music—she knew enough of its meaning to appreciate its melody and allow it to carry her off into the realm of sacred things.
For all these personal reasons and many other theological ones I heartily support Pope Benedict’s encouragement of its celebration. Reviving the Latin Mass only expands the ways in which Catholics may choose to worship, re-opening the possibility for many to experience what can be a rather haunting, ethereal service for the first time.
Of course, while I may agree with the message, I do wonder about the Pope’s motives and whether he feels that somehow, the wider celebration of the Latin Mass is a first step back into the past on many other issues the Catholic Church feels threatened by in these contemporary times, and which, for now, I will resist enumerating.
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