The Tridentine Mass

Commonweal, Sept 8, 2000 by Bill Shuter

Recently, for the first time in more than thirty years, I had an opportunity to attend the Tridentine Mass of my youth. It was celebrated at a parish church in Flint, Michigan, by the pastor of the university chapel in Ypsilanti of which I am a member.

The Mass left me with a set of strong but conflicting impressions. Of course, some of my impressions are personal or peculiar to Catholics of my generation. For the first half of my life, the Tridentine Mass was the only Mass I knew. What to younger Catholics today might seem strange and perhaps alienating, impressed me at the Flint parish as familiar and even reassuring.

Personal associations aside, I was struck by the power of the old liturgy. Even nonbelievers like Carl Jung have acknowledged that the Tridentine Mass is a solemn rite of extraordinary power. The very entrance of the priest, bearing the veiled chalice and paten and preceded by servers, announces that an action of extraordinary importance is about to be reenacted. It may be reenacted daily, but it is no everyday action. From the repeated allusions to offering, oblation, and victim, it becomes clear that the action is a sacrifice. By its nature the Mass is always a sacrifice, but its sacrificial character is more insistently affirmed and articulated in the Tridentine than in the present rite.

The present Mass is a good deal shorter than the Tridentine rite. The inessential accretions of centuries have been removed. Inessential they may be, but many of the omitted parts were beautifully apt and of great devotional value. I'm thinking, for example, of the priest who may have celebrated Mass every day for forty or fifty years introducing each Mass with the psalm "Introibo ad altare Dei" (I will go unto the altar of God) and of the response of the server (who was always an altar boy): "Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam" (Unto God who giveth joy to my youth). Or of the imposing coda with which the old rite invariably concluded, those magnificent opening words of the Gospel of John: "In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum."

Latin, of course, is the language of the Tridentine rite. Most of my older Catholic friends are grateful for the change from Latin to the vernacular, and most of the younger Catholics I know take the English Mass for granted and are unable to imagine attending a liturgy in a language other than the one they speak. A vernacular liturgy has much to recommend it, but there are several things still to be said for Latin. If eloquence is a quality we ask of the public prayer of the church, it must be acknowledged that the contemporary English version is lacking in rendering either the exaltation or the concision of the climax of the Gloria, "Quoniam tu solus sanctus. Tu solus Dominus. Tu solus altissimus," or the so-called Common Preface, "Per quem majestatem tuam laudant Angeli, adorant Dominationes, tremunt Potestates."

Hearing the Mass in Latin rather than in English, we are also reminded that we are as intimately associated with the generations of earlier Christians who once celebrated it as we are with the present generation, that the church is very old as well as perennially young. As the church existed before the formation of modern nationalities, so Latin, the language it officially adopted, preceded the tongues we speak today, a number of which it mothered. Because it is no longer in colloquial use, Latin, like ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek, is said to be a "dead" language. To be sure, every human language is, in fact, mortal, subject to modification and change and destined at some point to perish. But precisely because it is no longer a "living" language, ecclesiastical Latin has, in a sense, passed beyond the reach of change and enjoys a linguistic immortality that renders it a particularly suitable idiom for a liturgical action instituted by Christ and repeated by the church "until he comes again."

Probably the most striking difference between the Tridentine and the present rite is the position of the priest, who, in the Tridentine ritual, faces the altar away from the people rather than toward the community. Nothing seems stranger to younger Catholics. Even an older Catholic friend remembers the priest as "turning his back to us." Certainly, I do not remember thinking of it that way at the time. That priest and people faced in the same direction signified to me that they were engaged in a common action, because people engaged in a common action focus their attention on that action, not on each other. In the case of the Mass the people assemble and, led by the priest (in persona Christi), approach the throne of God together. I recall reading a poem in college by Charles Peguy in which God describes his vision of prayer. It reminded me of the Mass:

   Just as the wake of a beautiful ship grows wider and wider until it
   disappears and loses itself, But begins with a point, which is the point of
   the ship itself. So the huge wake of sinners grows wider and wider until it
   disappears and loses itself, But it begins with a point, which is the point
   of the ship itself, and it is that point which comes toward me, Which is
   turned toward me.