Latin, SSPX, and the Liturgy

OK, ok, I'm going to do my (hopefully) one liturgy post. This is something that tempers tend to flare around, with charages of heresy against anyone that disagrees with someone over the liturgy. I'm simply going to say that, in all honesty, I don't have very strong feelings about it. The same way I don't have very strong feelings about archaeological digs in Japan, the internal temperature of the sun, or exactly what the point of 2001: A Space Odyssey was. Basically, I don't have much knowledge of the development of the liturgy, and whenever I read anything about it on either side it tends to just devolve into quote-offs with very little substantive arguments being made. I will say that I only know two people that experienced both the Tridentine Rite of the Mass and current Ordinary form of the Mass, and both of them say the Ordinary form of the Mass is the best things that ever happened to it. These two men are my two grandfathers who both had roughly 40 years with the Tridentine, and 40 years with the current Mass. I recall a few years ago a friends of mine telling me about a Mass he went to in Rome with the Pope. It was very elaborate and the played Mozart or something, and he quipped "Sitting there listening to Mozart, it was hard to believe we gave that up for out of tune guitars and bad singing." And it occurred to me, that we didn't. According to my grandfathers, we gave up an out of tune organ and bad singing in a language no one understood. Now, you can make a comment if you'd like about the loss of Latin knowledge in the general population, or the current state of American education, or whatever; but the point remains that most people couldn't understand Latin. And not every church had a full orchestra and 40 voice choir. In fact most had an out of tune organ, that was old and sounded terrible, and a cantor that couldn't sing very well. I have no doubt that a Mass by Mozart, or Haydn is a truly moving experience, I just don't think many people experienced that every week at Church.

Which leads me to another pet peeve of mine. People are constantly complaining about terrible music at Mass, and how awful the singer is. they usually get very personal like the cantor is out to specifically ruin their experience of the Mass. Does it ever occur to these people that perhaps the cantor loves god just as much (or more) as the person complaining? That maybe, just maybe, the singer's singing has less to do with ruining someone else's experience and more to do with trying to render something beautiful to the Lord regardless of the gifts he or she may have been given? Like a child giving a crayon drawing to his father, and being delighted to find it on the refrigerator. I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time being mad at people trying to live good lives, even if they screw up and aren't the most gifted people. God distributes his gifts in mysterious ways, for mysterious pruposes known only to him. My advice for all of you, is that the nest time you think about how terrible the singer is, pray for that person. Forget about you, and think about someone else for change.

Finally, the SSPX. Again, I'm just going to say that I don't know much about the situation, so i'm not going to try and second-guess the Pope. I will say, I don't understand the obsession with Latin that some people have. In fact, I really don't understand the Latin craze much. If someone would like to explain it to me, please do. Here's my thing. The Old Testament is written in Hebrew, ther New Testament in Greek, and Jesus would have spoken Aramaic. The earliest Christian writings are almost universally in Greek, and so are the oldest records of the Liturgy that we have. So, my question is, where does the Latin come in? Imean, I can understand from an administative viewpoint that having one language being an official language of the church, particularly a dead one whose meanings aren't going to change, is a good thing. It means that there's no real ambiguity, as meanings of words aren't going to change over time. I just don't get why it's Latin, and why Latin is consoidered "God's own language." If somebody wants to explain to me, please do, as I'm more than willing to learn and be corrected. But nobody's ever done it before.

As for my opinions on the liturgy itself, I look at myself and my opinions as relatively unimportant. For what it's worth, I consider any Mass that I go to where my mind doesn't start wandering to homework I still have to finish, or how I'm going to pay my rent next month, as a victory. Anything beyond that is just gravy to me. Maybe I'm not good at the Mass, but that's how I feel (I know I'm not good at prayer). If the Church wanted to keep it in the vernacular, that would be great by me. If they wanted to go back to Latin, that's fine too. If the Church chooses to have the Mass in Finnish, I would consider that extremely odd, but would deal with it.

Ite missa est