THE ABSURD AND WIDESPREAD SUPERSTITION among "traditional Catholics" is that the "Latin Mass" that their right-wing, turn his back on the People priest says is in any way "original" or, as one particularly ignorant online "expert" told me, "it's the mass that St. Francis said." To start with, St. Francis wasn't a priest so he never "said mass" and the mass that St. Francis knew was a far different liturgy than the "Latin Mass" as I might have hoped my generation would be the last to remember. I don't remember it with affection, not even when it was a priest I liked who I remember celebrating it. Dear old, rustic, Quebec peasant Fr. A, beloved by all. To be replaced by the terrible Jansenist, fire and brimstone Fr. D who I don't remember with any affection at all. It just so happened that the Jansenist was the one who had to live through the liturgical reforms of Vatican II which I can't imagine he liked one bit.
In arguing with these superstitious right-wing "traditionalists" I've looked at the development of and constantly changing Roman Catholic liturgy which has been more consistent in having a tradition of rather constant change, constant but changing at different rates at different times and in different places and was never really uniform.
The long history of reforming practices in place might have been invisible to almost all of the Catholic laity, or, rather, inaudible because up until the fairly recent time, you had to know Latin rather well to be aware of the changes that were made.
One of the things I found interesting in this recent dip into that history was the 1940s "reform" of the Latin Psalter under Pius XII which was almost immediately found to be a bad idea, removing the meaning of them by the "correcting" of the Latin into a school-room Ciceronian style. Urban VIII, the arch-villian in the the Galileo trails, infamously led a "reform" of the Gregorian hymns to make them match a then fashionable "improved" Latin style, as well. With regrettable results. Such stuff has been happening, almost all of it probably unknown to most of the Catholics of the day just as the online "experts" in the Latin Liturgy are stunned to discover that the 1962 mass their "originalist" priests were authorized to say was, itself, not the "original" Latin mass. The meaninglessness of what was being said making those constant changes incomprehensible.
The c. 1962 Latin Mass that Benedict XVI rather stupidly permitted to be said to please some far-right, fascists in schism with a promiscuity that even John Paul II knew wouldn't be a good idea, was hardly the mass that had been said a century earlier, it, itself, was the product of that constant change. Change which, since the 19th century was being pushed toward more vernacular language being used SO THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH COULD UNDERSTAND WHAT WAS BEING SAID AND WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE SAYING. It matters not at all if incomprehensible words are not understood or what those are, they may as well be listening to Latin translations of sit-com scripts as listening to whatever reformed Latin text authorized under this or that pope.
Since the retired Benedict is the center of the cult of the Latin mass, You might want to read this book, which, when he was JPII's enforcer, Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote a foreword to. It gives a short and abbreviated history of the constant change in the Latin mass liturgy which was under constant change because it was constantly found to be inadequate and anything but perfect. The pressure for The People to have the mass in a language they could understand it in started a lot earlier than I'd guessed. At least in the hierarchy. As I said a while back I was rather shocked to realize that the arch-conservative Pius X even played a role in liturgical reform, though he was mostly concerned with the incredible vulgarization of the liturgy in 19th century Italy under the influence of opera. Show biz directed liturgy doesn't seem to be a good idea.
Protestants, of course, will find this kind of odd if not funny because their criticism of the incomprehensibility of the liturgy and, especially, the availability of Scripture in the vernacular was among the central reforms of Christian worship they embarked on. With varying degrees of success, some quite good, often superior to Catholic practice, some regrettable (as with the Latin liturgy as noted above). Nothing anyone does in this area is going to be "perfect." When People approach this area the achievements are bound to fall short. In all areas, actually. Simple and sincere is better than impressive and impersonal.
I doubt People can ever achieve any such thing as a perfect liturgy, not if the actual meaning of what's being said matters which, if You don't understand what's being said, You can pretend doesn't matter because if You don't understand what's being said, it won't. It will be an empty spectacle, what most Latin mass fans want it to be, They don't want it to mean anything more than that.
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