Jim McCrea has just emailed me (and others) a copy of Jerry Filteau’s NCR commentary on the Tridentine liturgy that Bishop Slattery celebrated at the national shrine of the Immaculate Conception on 24 April. It’s fine commentary, indeed, with its sharply insightful conclusion that such liturgy is “an elaborate ritual manifestation of ecclesiastical rank, not a Mass in conformity with the fundamental Vatican II mandate for full, active participation by the faithful.”
And yet I find myself cold after reading this account of Slattery’s Mass, and I’m wondering why. I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s the Latin.
And yet I find myself cold after reading this account of Slattery’s Mass, and I’m wondering why. I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s the Latin.
The piece opens with an introduction in the kind of dog-Latin that passes for Latin in church circles—perfectly correct Latin, grammatically speaking, but hardly Latin at all, when compared to the subtle ablatives and adroit, economical use of cases in Latin written by, say, Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, Martial, Catullus, Marcus Aurelius, and countless others.
And there’s the rub, for me. Long before I encountered church Latin—before I had become Catholic or had been introduced to “the” Catholic outlook on the world—I had learned to read the Latin of those Roman orators, philosophers, and poets. And in doing so, I had imbibed their worldview in ways I only now begin to glimpse, as I compare that worldview with the one that now passes for “Latin” in Catholic circles.
Get a girl or a boy hooked on Latin when (s)he is fourteen, and (s)he’ll be hooked for life: so went the reasoning of those traditional schools like my town’s public school that still offered four years of Latin to students in the 1960s, when I went through high school. “You’re not learning just to parse and decline,” Mrs. Sallie Chambers loved to intone as she displayed her Roman profile with its plumb-straight nose and high bun against a blackboard covered with Cicero and Catullus. “You’re learning to think like a Roman, to understand why the Romans approached the world as they did, with fortitude, reason, and a determination to act honorably in all their dealings with others.”
And so the countless hours we spent in our four years of high-school Latin reading aloud and then translating by sight the texts in our hands—one after the other; everybody had his or her chance every class period—were complemented with lessons about Roman custom, Roman history, and above all, “the” Roman outlook on life.
Which, we were given to understand, was to be our outlook on life henceforth. And whose cardinal rules were: die, if necessary, to defend your honor and that of your family and friends; fight to the end for your family and friends, because no one is more despicable than one who betrays one’s circle of affiliation; do what is honorable at all cost, especially when it is costly; value your word and your integrity more than any riches; endure the inevitable ups and downs of life with fortitude, and, if you can muster it, with grace; seek the right proportion in your actions and decisions, and you will abate some of those inevitable ups and downs.
But where integrity, honor, your word, and those you are obliged to love and defend are concerned, there is no proportion: there is only a single place to stand. Stand anywhere else, and your life will be founded on quicksand. You may enrich yourself and gain power unimaginable, but all you succeed in building apart from that single solid foundation will count only as dross in the end. It will not last.
That, in a rather sketchy précis, is what “the” Latin outlook on life meant to me, when I first encountered it in those all-important formative years of early adolescence. And it’s what it has continued to mean to me as I’ve drawn on the lessons I learned in those years, throughout my life.
And somehow that worldview seems worlds removed from the Latin worldview I encounter now as I read about Latin Masses, pomped birettas, and cappae magnae 20 yards long. And so I am caught—forever, it seems, a fly trapped in amber—between the Latin worldview instilled into me as a boy coming of age, and the Latin worldview my church claims to be retrieving at this point in history. In which all the lessons I learned at Mrs. Sallie Chamber’s knee—lessons about the futility of pomp and circumstance to cover over the emptiness inside, when we do not live with honor and integrity—seem nowhere to be found.
And there’s the rub, for me. Long before I encountered church Latin—before I had become Catholic or had been introduced to “the” Catholic outlook on the world—I had learned to read the Latin of those Roman orators, philosophers, and poets. And in doing so, I had imbibed their worldview in ways I only now begin to glimpse, as I compare that worldview with the one that now passes for “Latin” in Catholic circles.
Get a girl or a boy hooked on Latin when (s)he is fourteen, and (s)he’ll be hooked for life: so went the reasoning of those traditional schools like my town’s public school that still offered four years of Latin to students in the 1960s, when I went through high school. “You’re not learning just to parse and decline,” Mrs. Sallie Chambers loved to intone as she displayed her Roman profile with its plumb-straight nose and high bun against a blackboard covered with Cicero and Catullus. “You’re learning to think like a Roman, to understand why the Romans approached the world as they did, with fortitude, reason, and a determination to act honorably in all their dealings with others.”
And so the countless hours we spent in our four years of high-school Latin reading aloud and then translating by sight the texts in our hands—one after the other; everybody had his or her chance every class period—were complemented with lessons about Roman custom, Roman history, and above all, “the” Roman outlook on life.
Which, we were given to understand, was to be our outlook on life henceforth. And whose cardinal rules were: die, if necessary, to defend your honor and that of your family and friends; fight to the end for your family and friends, because no one is more despicable than one who betrays one’s circle of affiliation; do what is honorable at all cost, especially when it is costly; value your word and your integrity more than any riches; endure the inevitable ups and downs of life with fortitude, and, if you can muster it, with grace; seek the right proportion in your actions and decisions, and you will abate some of those inevitable ups and downs.
But where integrity, honor, your word, and those you are obliged to love and defend are concerned, there is no proportion: there is only a single place to stand. Stand anywhere else, and your life will be founded on quicksand. You may enrich yourself and gain power unimaginable, but all you succeed in building apart from that single solid foundation will count only as dross in the end. It will not last.
That, in a rather sketchy précis, is what “the” Latin outlook on life meant to me, when I first encountered it in those all-important formative years of early adolescence. And it’s what it has continued to mean to me as I’ve drawn on the lessons I learned in those years, throughout my life.
And somehow that worldview seems worlds removed from the Latin worldview I encounter now as I read about Latin Masses, pomped birettas, and cappae magnae 20 yards long. And so I am caught—forever, it seems, a fly trapped in amber—between the Latin worldview instilled into me as a boy coming of age, and the Latin worldview my church claims to be retrieving at this point in history. In which all the lessons I learned at Mrs. Sallie Chamber’s knee—lessons about the futility of pomp and circumstance to cover over the emptiness inside, when we do not live with honor and integrity—seem nowhere to be found.
And so woe is me, that I am condemned to sojourn in a strange land within the church I chose as my religious family at the end of those crucial formative years of a high school Latin education. A strange land, but one full of other sojourners, I’m finding, seeking, as we all seek, integrity, truth, and, above all, love and mercy.
About which much is written, I believe, in the texts proclaimed at those Latin liturgies at which clerics sport stiff black caps and little girls wear lace mantillas.
But texts some of us are having trouble hearing, precisely because the red silk and dog-Latin seem, when coupled with the behavior of some of our clerical leaders, to obscure the message, when all is said and done.