Today's news from the Vatican (and I honestly did not expect to begin with that phrase today or any other day): Pope Francis has renewed restrictions on churches and individual priests wishing to celebrate mass in Latin, using what is known as the Tridentine Mass.
This has little practical impact on most attendees around the world, who are quite used to mass in their local language. But it looks like another item in the list of push and pull issues between the Catholic Church's very conservative and comparatively progressive wings.
How can anyone be surprised that a church nearly 2,000 years old would favor slow change only (or no change at all) over quickly responding to the fashions and issues and trends of the day? Unfortunately, the American Catholic Church seems to have allowed itself to become immersed in our culture wars, with many bishops and rank and file church members somehow on the side of Trump and his clearly amoral behaviors.
On the surface, this seems to be rooted in abortion debates. When the bishops threaten a self-described devout Catholic president if he doesn't line up with official church positions on abortion, that says a lot. The logic appears to be that for some Catholics, at least, literally anyone who opposes abortion is someone to support.
It's hard to find the line here. Would a Hitler-style leader be a step too far? Or would the church be OK with the tradeoff, say, between banning all abortions and blatantly misusing power, stealing money and influence, etc.? Are we getting close to a future where Catholic clergy start supporting fascism, as long a nation bans abortion? Are we already there?
I was an altar boy before Vatican II, so I had to memorize quite a bit of Latin to use in responses when serving mass. We were not taught the meaning of the Latin, BTW, but learned everything phonetically. Good practice for raw memory, but not very effective in teaching.
Mindless repetition of sounds disconnected from meaning never really made sense, beyond the "performance" aspect of the rituals and services. To devoutly wish to return to such mindlessness makes no sense to me, but that's where we are.
Just more "us vs. them" rhetoric, with no thoughtful discussions to help anyone find new solutions to old problems.
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