Refugees From the Vernacular Mass

By Tom Bethell I see there's a new book out, Why Men Hate Going to Church (Nelson Books). David Murrow, a television writer and producer, decided to write it after years of attending Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and evangelical churches. He found that "no matter the name on the outside, there are always more women on the inside." I haven't read the book, but according to Peter Steinfels, who wrote a column about it for The New York Times, Murrow cites surveys showing that in most forms of church-related activity women constitute a great majority of participants, generally from 60 to 80 percent, and that most churches are "dominated by women and their values."

I read somewhere that Catholic Mass attendance in America tends to be about 60 or 65 percent female, and that corresponded to my own impression -- until my wife and I started going to the Tridentine Mass in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

It is celebrated at 9 AM every Sunday at St. Mary Mother of God Church, on 5th Street NW. That's in downtown Washington, close to Chinatown and the new MCI Center (a sports arena). Ever since the indult was granted in 1990 by the Archbishop, the congregation has been growing. The pews are mostly full, and I would guess that there is an actual preponderance of men. There are plenty of young families with small children, and young women wearing chapel veils. They are not there for nostalgic reasons, obviously. They are too young to have grown up with the old Mass. Some come from the adjacent Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, where permission for the Tridentine rite has never been granted.

A friend of mine who lives in San Francisco and recently attended the Tridentine Mass across the Bay in Oakland tells me that she found very much the same thing in the congregation there -- lots of young families with many children, plenty of men, women wearing chapel veils, and the pews mostly full. The Oakland Tridentine Latin Mass is held at St. Margaret Mary Church every Sunday at 12:30 PM (a Novus Ordo Latin Mass is held every Sunday at 10:30 AM).

In the San Francisco Archdiocese, Archbishop William Levada, now Rome-bound to take over Cardinal Ratzinger's job at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, never granted an indult for the Tridentine Mass. Why not? In 1999 Catholic writer George Neumayr tried to find the answer. "There is no groundswell of support," the archdiocesan spokesman told him. Archbishop Levada "is not going to move forward on a timetable set by you." Translation: Levada knew that conservatives in the liberal stronghold of San Francisco could safely be ignored, while his own circle of senior priests would disapprove of any retreat from the progressive path that a restoration of the Latin Mass would imply.

I won't elaborate on the San Francisco situation because I plan to discuss Archbishop Levada's tenure in greater detail in a forthcoming article for the NOR.

The Tridentine Mass was reinstituted in Washington, D.C., by Archbishop William Hickey and it has flourished. I hope that Pope Benedict XVI will make it more widely available. He said in his book, Salt of the Earth (1997) that "the old rite should be granted much more generously to all those who desire it. It's impossible to see what could be dangerous or unacceptable about that. A community is calling its very being into question when it suddenly declares that what until now was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden and when it makes the longing for it seem downright indecent."

A year or so later he told an Italian publication that the Church needs a new generation of bishops open to the Latin Mass and that prelates should see the yearning for it as a desire for "divinity."

Well, now he is in a position to do something about it. He could do so in a non-coercive way, a friend pointed out, by ruling that pastors who wish to say the old Mass do not need to get their bishop's permission. Isn't that what the liberals keep telling us -- that we need more choice at the local level? I wonder how many liberals would support such an idea. Not many, I imagine. Maybe at some point they will appreciate the extent to which the bishops, far from being the lackeys of Rome, have in their broad resistance to the Latin Mass been the compliant tools of the progressives, Levada-style.

I was raised with the Tridentine Mass in England, and, as far as I am concerned, rediscovering it has been a blessing. My first impression, after many years in the wilderness, was that I had forgotten how much quieter the old Mass is. The faithful are more on their own -- more reliant on their missals or their private prayers. They have more scope to contemplate the sacrifice of the Mass rather than the performance of the pastor. I certainly prefer it that way. Progressive Catholics are forever talking about "community," but my guess is that a greater sense of community prevails in a Tridentine congregation than in its vernacular equivalent.

The hum-drum leveling of the new Mass, its touchie-feelie "sharing," its "reaching out," its condescension, its attempts at something called inclusiveness, its sing-song ditties that supplant the great music of the past, its brightly smiling altar girls -- some seem on the verge of saying "hi" when they serve the priest -- I find disconcerting and grating. All this contributes more to a sense of alienation than belonging. Lots of men may well feel the same way.

The Latin language is and always was wonderful, and should be broadly revived. Pope John Paul II frequently advocated "unity," and there could hardly be anything more unifying than a shared language in a universal Church whose members speak a hundred different languages. The vernacular, in contrast, is divisive. Church Latin is not hard to learn, either, and the effort is rewarding.

But there is a much stronger argument for the restoration of Latin. It is well suited to ecclesiastical purposes precisely because it is a dead language. A language that is no longer in use is inherently an obstacle to all innovations and feverish updating. The Church is concerned with the permanent things, and a language without even a vocabulary for modern things is a natural barrier to every fad. You can see why Latin, and the Tridentine rite in particular, do not appeal to those who are working for a politicized Church that keeps abreast of the latest cultural trends.

The pastor at St. Mary's in D.C. is Fr. David Conway, who is by no means young, and is possessed of a curmudgeonly demeanor. He would surely have met with Evelyn Waugh's approval. I gather he was once a Benedictine monk. His sermons are brief and to the point, and based on the Gospel of the day, not the latest movie or topical sensation. I am growing tired of pastors who think that only topicality can make their sermons "relevant." What could be more relevant than the Four Last Things that face us all? (Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven, for those who were wondering.) Perhaps bishops should remind their priests from time to time that churchgoers are more likely to be looking for an escape from the culture that surrounds them rather than reminders of it.

St. Mary's itself is traditional and quite beautiful. For decades, that part of D.C. was in a state of increasing decay, and only in recent years has it recovered. I am told that the church was never "wreckovated" because the parish was so poor. The vandalism and destruction -- tearing out the main altar and so on -- that have been so widespread in the post-Vatican II American Church were simply too expensive to contemplate here. Now the church has been tastefully restored, and the good news is that any archdiocesan official who might be tempted to sell it to capture the value of the land will be unable to do so. The Van Ness family that donated the property stipulated that if it ceases to be a church, the land reverts to the heirs. Good for them.

After Mass there's an enjoyable coffee in the basement, provided by Frank Kelly and his wife. The pastor is too busy for such diversions, but some of us counter-revolutionaries get together in the corner and plot the overthrow of existing regimes and a glorious restoration. I won't reveal names, but a few well-known public figures show up from time to time. But their wives never seem to be there. I tell you, this is a church that men don't hate going to.

[Tom Bethell is a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. His article, "Refugees From the Vernacular Mass," was first published in the Last Things column in the New Oxford Review (September 2005), pp. 40-42, and is reprinted here with permission from New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley CA 94706, U.S.A.]