The form is the language, the Latin of the Mass, which has the magic of the whole history of the Catholic church embedded in it.

Most congregations assume that the Vulgate is the language that Jesus (or, indeed God) spoke; others assume that the original language, God’s language, was their own language, in our case, English. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, for instance (or, if you prefer, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady), Professor Higgins is appalled to hear Eliza Doolittle massacring English, “the language of Shakespeare, of Milton, of the Bible.”

The language of the gods is, for each of us, the language of our childhood, the language in which we first learned the words of scripture. The generation for whom that is Latin is dying but not yet dead. It is often said that the Qu’ran is not the Qu’ran in any language but Arabic, and the ancient Indians memorized their sacred text, the Rig Veda, syllable by syllable forwards and then backwards, and with their headings nodding down for the low accents and raised up for the high accents, so that not a single syllable would be changed, since the words were literally encoded in their bodies. The text had a kind of magic that was in its music as much as in the ideas that it expressed. Latin has that same magic. Like all poetry, it is far easier to memorize than prose; the rhythms stain your mind and carry the meanings with the perfume of the sounds.

And if Latin is no longer a useful form of communication for most congregations, it still has the function of communion. That is, the Mass, in contrast with the sermon (which communicates, or at least tries to communicate, to convey new thoughts or information), has the function of communion; people participate in it not to learn something new but to relive, together, the words that they already know, words about themselves as a community (communion). Where communication is effective, communion is evocative. Where communication seeks to influence the future, communion draws upon the past.

Yet, despite the special power of Latin (and Hebrew and Greek), translation has been the very basis of proselytizing in Christianity, for communication, too, is essential, and for that one must have access to the meanings of the words. (One of the best ways to learn any new language is to get ahold of the Bible in that language—there always is one—and to read a text you know well, perhaps the 23rd Psalm, with your own simultaneous translation running in your head.) At the same time, one of the great injuries that colonization inflicted on the Third World was to force its inhabitants to function in someone else’s language, so that they were never at their best. Nowadays, many linguistic communities have become highly politicized, and blood is shed over the issue of which language will have the privilege of housing political and commercial power; hence the Tamil separatists in India.

My solution to the problem of form is Super-titles. Super-titles have been an enormous boon in the opera, which is, after all, very much like the church. It has been well said that Italians go to church as if they were going to the opera, and Germans go to the opera as if they were going to church. (One must take care, however, that the gap between the text and the super-title is not too wide, as it was for a production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser that I once heard/saw, in which, when the goddess Venus banishes forever, in German, the knight who adores her, the super-titles had her saying, in English, “Hit the road, Jack.”) The Latin words would supply the communion, the English super-titles the communication—the best of both worlds.

As for the content, there is a serious objection to using the old Latin Mass because it still retains the anti-Semitic prayer for the conversion of the Jews. Of course, the Mass is, alas, hardly unique among Christian scriptures in its anti-Semitism. Paul, for one, is much worse (worse for sexism, too), and I have known liberal Catholic priests who, discovering that the assigned weekly reading was from Paul, simply preached the Psalm. But one can either avoid or, better, retain as an occasion for criticism the anti-Semitic (or sexist, or homophobic) portions of the Christian texts; it is quite another thing to have such sentiments built into the actual liturgy so that the congregation must recite, or hear recited on their behalf, the offending words.

Here again, I think, super-titles are the solution. You could leave the anti-Semitism out of the super-titles, and keep it in the Latin, so that the congregation could hear/see the difference (or, as the case may be, not notice the difference, not realize that the Latin was saying something much worse than the super-titles. This is what actually happens when they televise the Kentucky Derby every year. As the horses come out onto the track, the audience rise and sing My Old Kentucky Home, and the words appear on the TV screen: “... It’s summer, the people are gay.” You can see the people singing and watch their lips saying Stephen Foster’s old racist words, “... It’s summer, the Darkies are gay.”)

Many churches—mostly Protestant, but also many Catholic churches—nowadays have state-of-the-art audio-visual systems. Many have signing for the deaf among the congregation, running parallel to the spoken Mass. The super-titles could solve the problem of the Latin mass just as well, mutatis mutandis.