The Tridentine Mass
I became a Catholic less than a year ago, I have always been a Christian, but came very late in life to Catholicism, for many reasons. There are a lot of things to get your head around in Catholicism. The first being that not all Catholics know what their religion is about. Many I have found do not even appear to understand the basics. They seem to take a very protestant point of view, which I find, deeply disturbing. When deciding to become a Catholic I had to learn the Catechism and understand the Apologetics and what it means to be a Catholic. None of which was as alien as I had thought it would be, although my priest certainly made me work for it. There was a great deal of reading and a lot of understanding to be done.
The things I have struggled with and in some cases still do are those which I believe many genuine Christians have always had trouble with, such as, Abortion and birth control; The role of women in the church; Homosexuality; Obedience; Education; The role of celibacy in the clergy and religious; Clerical politics; The ‘worship’ of Mary and the Saints; The Pope and Papal Infallibility. As someone who grew up in the fifties and sixties all of these things have had a profound affect on my life and probably everyone else’s too and I certainly had a lot of ‘knowledge’ which simply wasn’t true. It was perceived and often through the eyes of the media. When learning about Catholicism I fully expected to find a lot things which I just simply disagreed with, but this was by no means what happened.
Some things when explained were to me more than reasonable, I just had not understood them, I had taken the prevailing protestant ideology and assumed I knew all about Catholics and Catholicism. I did not and much of what I had learned was as I have said down to the media. One of the first things I learned was not a shock to me of course, the Media is anti Christian and vehemently anti Catholic. The first real shock for me was the Mass. I had been going to the Latin Mass with my son and he said it would be a good idea if I went to a Novos Ordo Mass. Well my friend in the protestant church was right when she said “why do you want to become a Catholic their mass is exactly the same as ours”. Oh dear she was right it was. Even down to the awful handshaking. I do not doubt that there are many very devout Catholics who attend Novus Order Mass, either by choice or lack of choice, but it is so much like the Anglican Mass it’s not very Catholic is it? I could not then and still struggle now to see the difference in the Novus Ordo Mass and the High Church Mass I had previously attended at my Church of England Church.
There also seems to be a belief in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that the Tridentine Mass is somehow dangerous, the mass that has held Catholic faith together for some 1400 years. Again I am mystified. You have to have permission from the Bishop to hold a Tridentine Mass and many refuse to have them. I really do not understand this attitude. The Tridentine Mass is the traditional Mass surely that is the one which should take precedence. Everyone, including the Catholic Church, bangs on about respecting traditions but it appears that they do not respect their own. They want to dispense with something which has held the faith of the Catholic church together for over 1400 years, something that stems from 2000 years of history and tradition. What is the reason for this bewildering attitude. When the Mass changed I believed, probably because of the way it was reported at the time, that the Catholic Church was simply doing their traditional Mass in English, not that the Mass was being changed dramatically from its traditional state. For goodness sake they even moved the altars. The priest faces the congregation not God. In my opinion and the opinion of many other Catholics, this is not a proper Catholic Mass, but most people seem to fear voicing their opinion, for fear of what the senior Clergy (generally the Bishop) may say about this and that if they ‘rock the boat’ their traditional Mass will taken away from them because they are being ‘difficult’. Unlike many of my friends in the Church I am not a born into the Catholic church. I chose this faith. I want to understand why its senior Clergy want to make it more Protestant. The reason I chose the Catholic faith was because, it, I believed, still worshipped and revered God in a very traditional and ancient manner. They still held tightly to the scriptures and Commandments of God. To me those Commandments are precious, they are what stop us from becoming mere creatures, acting in venal and animalistic ways. The Mass should be traditional if you make it something which is changeable and ‘moves with the times’ you are just handing over your faith to the Devil. Modernism is all about making things easy, not worrying about doing the right or the wrong thing, not caring if you are doing the right or the wrong thing as long as it suits you. YOU become the most important thing in the world. I am not stuck in the past, I have moved with the times like everyone else, but I still hold on to my personal Christian values. I do believe in tolerance and kindness. But as someone who has chosen to become a Catholic I do not believe that it is about me, it is about God and believing and worshipping and striving to be the very best Christian that I can be. I am also striving to understand those who want to change and destroy a Mass which has lasted for so long, which has held out over so many brutal periods and times of destruction.
I will keep on trying to understand how my chosen religion works, what I am getting right and wrong and I will keep on asking questions, even if those questions sometimes upset and disturb people. I want to have discourse with people who have different views, I want to understand a different perspective. I do understand that I am not always right and that I get things wrong. But if I don’t ask the questions how will I know?
MC