Tenemus nuda nomina, fudge boxes
As you know, it's hard to be Pope. But the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today's Pope Benedict XVI, is not a feel-good pontiff like his predecessor; some of his recent official remarks have been interpreted as cantankerous.There's his pronouncement that all forms of Christianity that are not Roman Catholicism are in fact perversions of and subservient to it (take that you Catharist punks).
And then there was the motu proprio, or formal direction, that it was OK to bring back the Latin mass, the one celebrated prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, or Vatican II, or v. reloaded, in 1962.
The Latin mass was not for several years delivered in "High Latin" but instead the vulgate, or "church" Latin, the form that was more palatable to speakers of the Romance languages from which English is partially derived, characterized particularly by pronouncing Vs like Vs instead of Ws (Elmer Fudd never liked church Latin).
Allowing the Catholic mass to be performed in a parishioner's native language would, you'd think, open up the experience to billions more people who didn't have access to Latin teachers Don Bailey and Grace McDermott of Lowell High School, like I did.
But Pope Benedict XVI, who was there at Vatican II's opening ceremonies in 1962, said that things got lost in translation.
"...in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity (emphasis added), which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear," he said.
For me, taking Latin was one of the most beneficial choices of my life, and I almost realized it at the time. The structure of the language was even a back door to the structural rigors of math, which I'd always had trouble with.
Around the time I was learning to love Latin I was learning to distrust the Catholic church. For various youthful indiscretions I was made to read the Bible, which I'm sure to my parents' regret made me distrust the church even more. For one, I was surprised to find that most Catholics of a certain age had never read the Bible themselves, but instead were content to have parts of it spoon-fed to them.
My elders finally admitted to me, defiantly, that "the priests know what they are talking about so we don't have to read the Bible."
The reason for this is that many Bible passages are contradictory to Catholic dogma, and that actually reading the Bible lays bare those contradictions. The only people allowed to interpret the Bible, then, are the professionals. And even they might get it wrong in the myriad translations of the mass, hence the call for a return to form.
In the Catholic tradition there are several "Holy Days of Obligation" during which the faithful are required to go to church. These include Christmas and Easter, of course, but also feasts like the Assumption of Mary, celebrating (on August 15) the assumption, body and soul, into heaven of Mary, mother of Jesus.
This event was not mentioned in the Bible, which I was taught was the entirety of the Word of God. The veneration of Mary came about much later, when there arose a need for it, and the Assumption was folklore until it was infallibly decreed as a genuine event by Pope Pius XII in 1950.
I remember being shocked by this as a teen, and equated it to my infallibly decreeing that my invisible bear, George, was the one who had eaten all the fudge when I was two.
"George ate the fudge," I remember saying, and sort of believing it, fudge all over my face in my crib, a box denuded of fudge nearby.
What's more, when I mentioned the Assumption assumption to the people most invested in making me go to church in those years, I was told that Yes, the Assumption was in the Bible, and that I just hadn't read the Bible closely enough.
That about wrapped it up for me and the church. I suppose if I had been forced to read "Jaws" and then got shot down when I said that Amity was a town on Long Island and not an island unto itself like the movie portrayed it to be, I'd also be a lapsed ichthyologist.
My hometown was an early ground zero for the scandals that have recently rocked the Catholic church in America and Ireland. Luckily for me, I was an unattractive child.
But I remember the words of my Literature of the Beat Movement professor from the University of Lowell (now the University of Massachusetts at Lowell), Charles Jarvis. He had known Jack Kerouac as a boy and I guess that was the reason the University gave him a course to teach. Because of his class I got great discounts on a lot of books.
"I still pray to my childhood saints," he said once.
It's a line I think of when anyone introduces himself as a "lapsed" anything; it's hard to forget what you grew up with and part of you still wishes all of it was true. It's big trouble when everything is open to interpretation.
"(An) insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires," the pope has said. Better to have someone else check your thoughts for you (this also applies to the Electoral College).
It's not surprising that the first thing kids learn in Sunday school is the story of Adam and Eve, bottom line: Don't ask questions. Bringing back the Latin mass not only ensures that more people will just take the priests' word for it but also, I'm sure the thinking goes, will keep the priests from getting too "creative".
It is hard to contemplate. The imposition of a language in this way is a means of restricting deviant or parallel thinking. It is similar to the way the church discouraged people from reading the entire Bible.
But for me, Latin encouraged critical thinking. I don't know what to believe anymore.
All I know is that the Latin root of Amity is "amicus", or friend, and Amity, as you know, means friendship.
See also: The Ordinary of the Mass; Open hearts to Latin mass, Benedict says; Buy "Visions of Kerouac" (Charles Jarvis); U.S. Study of "Dead" Latin Making a Comeback; A "traditionalist" Catholic blog; Pope: Evil not necessarily exciting
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by Marty Barrett at Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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