Jul 7, 2007

What about vernacular-Latin missals?

It would have been good if Summorum Pontificum had ordered the bishops in each country to print up vernacular-Latin missals and provide them to parishes and for sale to individuals.

Catholics who were around in the Sixties and before will tell you that OF COURSE the congregation could understand the Latin Mass, because they ALL had vernacular-Latin missals with them and because, having attended Mass all their lives, they understood all the steps of the Mass and they had come to understand much or all of the Latin anyway.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am old enough to have had just such a Latin/English missal from my grade school years and I have been praying the Mass from it for months. the prayers are truly beautiful and prepare my heart to receive my Lord.

9:37 AM  
Blogger Quintero said...

Dear Anonymous 9:37 a.m.,

That is wonderful! I hope everyone follows your example and finds the happiness you have found.

Thank you, and God bless.

10:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for your blog. Stumbled here by accident(well...maybe).

We receive the New York Times as our daily newspaper. Personally I'm "liberal" on many issues, and the Times tends to be heavily so, but I pretty much read it for the excellent arts and science and business reporting rather than political slants.

That said, I wrote the first long email ever to the Times a couple of weeks ago, incensed at the horribly biased(and innacurate)reporting on the then-possibility that the tridentine Mass would be encouraged by the Pope.
Every cliched untruth you've mentioned, the Times hammered home as fact--priest facing away is a slur on common people and alienating; latin leaves the people in confusion, unable to follow a word, etc. etc. In sum it was clearly suggested it would be a horrible thing were the latin Mass to be said more often.
I wrote a politely annoyed email delineating all the factual errors presented by the reporters, sometimes attributed to unnamed "experts" in the church(which I don't believe for a minute). I asked the editor if Hebrew was also an outmoded, antiquated language and if it also be abolished because few american jews use it in everyday life. Of course not-but Judaism is seldom written about in any paper with the disapproval that Catholicism is. The bias gets really, really old.

I've never heard the Mass said in latin, but only a fool would not realize that if you've attended mass for years you just might be able to follow it. Then I saw a clip from a news program where it was plain that the missals at a Boston parish had the latin on a facing page to the english translation...well, well, well...NO mention of that, of course, in the all the negative media coverage. Talk about shoddy reporting.
Anyway, again: thanks for your writing.

(btw the Times' public editor never acknowledged or replied to my email, nor was there any followup correction of misstatements in the article.)

11:23 AM  
Blogger Quintero said...

Dear Anonymous 11:23 a.m.,

Thanks very much for your kind words. Please keep coming back to this site!

Thanks for the news about you writing to the New York Times to keep them on their toes.

You never know, you might have educated the reporter or his editors and they might write a little better story next time.

11:26 PM  

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