LATIN MASS TURNS PILGRIMAGE INTO POWERFUL UNITY

As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, so too will Catholics on social media re-litigate anew the debate over Mass in Latin vs. Mass in the vernacular. The latest iteration of this discourse concerns Catholic unity: does Mass in the native tongue foster greater unity (because more Catholics understand what the Mass is) or does Mass in Latin (because we all pray in one common tongue)?

Far be it from me to attempt to resolve this debate on objective theological grounds; that is beyond my pay grade. But if I must pick a side, I will go to bat for more Latin in the Ordinary Form. There was a time when I would have said the opposite, but one experience changed my mind completely.

Ten years ago, my family made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, and it was there that I first experienced the full universality of the Catholic Church. Thousands of visitors from every country in the world filled the grounds of the apparition site. Volunteers and employees wore name tags that included small flags—Great Britain, France, Italy, etc.—for pilgrims to easily identify who spoke their native tongue. The scheduled Masses at the grotto—the very spot where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette—were all said, one after another, in different languages. I thought, This is what a worldwide church looks like, sounds like, feels like.

One evening, we joined the nightly rosary procession. In a massive line of pilgrims walking across the grounds, we prayed a multi-lingual rosary—the leader would begin the prayer in his or her native tongue, and we would all finish in our own: “Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce…Holy Mary, Mother of God…” Every decade, we’d switch to a new leader’s language, and every prayer during the rosary procession followed that format.

Every decade started with all of us praying in unison: “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.” Suddenly, we all spoke the same language, and we all knew what the words meant.

That intrigued me, but I didn’t recognize the full weight of what it meant until later, when we attended an international Mass. There, we made do with similar half-measures to overcome language barriers in the congregation. But then the sign of peace arrived, and I was in a real pickle. How might I “offer the sign of Christ’s peace” to my foreign pew-neighbors?

📰 Via Catholic