You hear this a lot from TLM proponents. First, it's a category error to suggest that church doctrine has a goal of maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass. But second, no, it really isn't. The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
>maximizing the number of people to that turn out to mass
Mark 16:15.
Hebrews 10:25.
The Church organisation is very distinct from the church. And anything that increases their participation is in line with scripture. Both growth and attendance are important.
There's already evidence it works. And it's something that sets the church apart.
Romans 12:2 indeed.
In Antioch [Acts 11:26] people were first called Christians. They weren't the regular people of that time. But people with something that made them visibly different from the Hoi Polloi.
What really is the point of a consecration that doesn't change you? What are you being set apart from?
I just find this sentiment really kind of funny, given how small the number of people who are passionately committed to it, vs. people who attend folk-group mass. But I'm not here to convert you!
For me it's not just about the in practice Latin suppression and the pretense it's not happening.
My reply is primarily about Church growth and the importance of fellowship.
Wherever you go, don't imagine this sentiment is American/Western only as many have claimed/alluded.
If Christ doesn't change you nothing really has changed.
Proselytizing by active action and being examples by our (different/changed post conversion) behaviour are duties of everyone in Christ. As is fellowship.
As exemplified by those who do it in countries and areas where it might mean death like where I live today.
The approach of some recently arrived evangelists has been slammed by some Aboriginal leaders, including Labor senator Pat Dodson.
"They are a type of virus that has really got no credibility," he said. "If they really understood the gospel then the gospel is about liberation.
"It's about an accommodation of the diversity and differences that we have in our belief systems."
He believes the destruction of traditional culture is "an act of bastardry".
"It's about the lowest act you could perform in trying to indicate to a fellow human being that you have total disdain for anything they represent."
compared to:
But the born-again Christian converts have defended their beliefs and practices, saying it is their decision to make, and finding God has brought them peace and happiness.
The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects (2019)
The obvious objection would be that I linked to a story of poor behaviour from Tongan evangelicals rather than Catholics ... the counter being there's no shortage of truly appalling tales of Catholics destroying culture while expanding their flocks .. they are better known for other atrocities hereabouts though, eg:
Regardless of whether you who is outside the church see it as good or bad, it's a necessary part of Christian life for every believer. As is regular attendance in fellowship with other believers.
These new links are even more irrelevant from that perspective.
> The idea that a great way to get lots of ordinary people to become practicing Catholics is to literally conduct services in a dead language nobody understands is an extraordinary claim.
Lots of religions have liturgical languages which are nobody's mother tongue any more. Orthodox Judaism has Hebrew (Reform/Conservative/etc too, albeit with variably greater use of vernacular): many diaspora Jews have limited Hebrew proficiency, and even for those who speak Modern Hebrew, the liturgy is in mediaeval Hebrew, which has significant differences. And some of the prayers (including quite important ones like the Kaddish and the Kol Nidre said on Yom Kippur) are in Aramaic. Most Muslims pray in Arabic despite the fact that less than 20% speak it natively, and even for those who do, modern vernacular Arabic has diverged a lot from the classical Arabic of the Quran and the prayers. The Russian Orthodox Church prays, not in Russian, but in Church Slavonic, which is a (somewhat Russified) descendant of mediaeval Bulgarian, which comes from a different branch of the Slavic language family. The Greek Orthodox liturgy is in mediaeval Greek, not modern Greek – many Middle Eastern Greek Orthodox have Arabic as their mother tongue, and many ethnic Greeks in Anglophone countries have quite limited Greek proficiency, yet still attend services in the language. The Coptic Church still uses Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian, for its liturgy. The Ethiopian Church uses Ge'ez. The Syriac Churches use Syriac/Aramaic. (And what I just said of those Eastern churches is also true of many Eastern Catholics.) Many Theravada Buddhists pray in Pali. Many Mongolian Buddhists pray in Tibetan (there are many Anglophone Buddhists who pray in Tibetan too). Many Hindus pray in Sanskrit.
Having a special language set aside for prayer, a holy tongue (Lashon Hakodesh, as many Jews call Hebrew) is something a lot of people find spiritually beneficial, across numerous unrelated religious traditions. It can give people a sense of an encounter with the deep past of their own tradition. It can make a religious community feel more unified despite being divided between different mother tongues. And most Catholics, pre-1970, thought the same thing.
It wasn't like people couldn't understand it – they followed English-Latin parallel prayer books, just like people follow English-Hebrew parallel books in many synagogues today. Globally, very many Catholics have a Romance language as their mother tongue, which is historically descended from Latin, which helps with understanding some of the words. Even though English isn't, the heavy infusion of Latin (both directly and via French) into English helps achieve some of the same thing.
I think if I'd grown up Catholic with Latin instead of the vernacular, my understanding of Latin would be a lot better. I feel like I missed out on something there.
So one definitely doesn't have to be a regular Latin Mass goer – I've never been to one in my life, I've thought about doing it but its always just been too out of my way – to wonder if the Church has lost something by throwing away so much of its linguistic heritage. Personally, I'd be quite happy with a kind of compromise in which Latin was much more heavily used but the majority of Masses were still vernacular. Which I actually think is what Vatican II intended, I think the Council's original vision was closer to majority vernacular / minority Latin, than the almost-all-vernacular / almost-no-Latin which actually evolved afterwards.
And this is a separate issue from the Tridentine liturgy – you can say the Mass of Paul VI in Latin and you can say the Tridentine Mass in English (Roman Catholics never have, but some Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and schismatic Catholic churches do it)
You mistake me. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with saying the mass in Latin. I'd kind of like to go see one! Put my 4 years of Jesuit Latin to use! But no, I don't think that's going to be a big draw for ordinary people to join the church.
My Greek Orthodox friends growing up definitely spoke Greek!
It would definitely attract some people. An old friend of mine (from our Catholic high school), who almost never goes to Mass, told me he’d be willing to venture back if it were in Latin, just for the experience. We started looking into it, we were going to go together, but lost interest in the idea when we realised there weren’t any convenient to attend. I don’t know how common that attitude is, but I’m sure he’s not the only person like that.
And the fact is, if Latin doesn’t attract many ordinary people, will anything else? Catholicism (and Christianity more broadly) is full of grand evangelistic plans to “get people back to church”, the vast majority of which produce very little results. If anything, niche offerings such as Latin masses or Anglican Use or Eastern Catholicism at least have a bit of a ”it’s different” factor to draw people in with.
There are clearly people who are interested very specifically in the Latin mass. But even though the church is losing practicing members, it's still huge; normie Catholics dwarf tradcaths.
But again: drawing people isn't the point. Francis didn't crack down on TLM because he thought it was a bad way to get people to show up at mass! He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird. It's a doctrinal thing, not a marketing strategy.
> He did it because things in the church with TLM were getting weird.
What’s “weird” is in the eye of the beholder - a lot of stuff Francis saw as “weird”, JP2 and B16 may have seen as significantly less “weird”; conversely, JP2 and B16 may well have seen some of Francis’ own decisions as “weird”.
I know one of the big complaints against TLM communities is that many of them question the validity of Vatican II. But, given B16 as a young theologian authored his famous (in the rarified subfield of Catholic/Orthodox ecumenical theology) “Ratzinger proposal”, that reunion with the Orthodox should not require them to accept post-schism councils as binding - which implicitly downgrades the authority of all 13 post-schism councils from Lateran I to Vatican II inclusive, [0] maybe he’d view doubting Vatican II a bit more charitably than Francis ever could. And, among the more liberal/progressive-leaning Catholics (for whom Francis rather obviously had a significant degree of sympathy), there’s a long tradition of questioning the validity of Vatican I - and I suspect Francis was much more sympathetic to doubting the first than the second.
And then there’s also the Eastern Catholic followers of the late Lebanese Melkite archbishop Elias Zoghby, who rejected the ecumenicity of Vatican II (despite being one of its Fathers) on the grounds that a genuinely ecumenical council would require full Orthodox participation, hence denying that status to all post-schism councils - I suspect Francis would have seen that as much less “weird”, despite its superficial overlap with traditionalist views on Vatican II, since he’d be more sympathetic to the motivations behind it. Zoghby’s opposition to Vatican II’s validity wasn’t solely a matter of abstract theological principle, it was also about its substance - at it, he argued that Eastern Catholics should be allowed to observe the traditional Eastern leniency on divorce rather than being forced to conform to the Latin Church’s principled opposition to it, but he lost that argument-but yet again, likely something Francis had more sympathy for than the Latin traditionalist objections to the council’s substance
[0] there is also the problem of the 8th council, which is a pre-schism council; there are two competing claimants to the title of “Fourth Council of Constantinople”, the first in 869-870, the second in 879-880; Catholics accept the first as the 8th ecumenical council and reject the second as invalid; Orthodox reject the first as invalid and accept the second, but disagree among themselves as to whether to class it as the 8th ecumenical council or as sub-ecumenical; and then there’s also the Quinisext Council of 692 (aka Council in Trullo), which many Orthodox view as quasi-ecumenical, Catholics as local to the East; and then the fact that some Orthodox claim one of their own post-schism councils as ecumenical (the fifth council of Constantinople, 1341-1368) - Ratzinger’s proposal didn’t address these conciliar esoterica, but maybe they aren’t that important given so few get worked up about them
I'm just going to point out that it's not surprising that laypeople and clergy who reject Vatican II also have an unusual habit of faceplanting into antisemitism, given that Nostra Aetate was a product of Vatican II.
The Vatican first condemned antisemitism by name in 1928, so I don't think disagreeing even with Nostra aetate necessarily has antisemitism as a consequence. The perennial problem with antisemitism, however, is nobody (Jews included) can agree on how to define it, and how essential Nostra aetate is to ruling it out for Catholics may depend on how broad or narrow a definition of it you adopt.
