Call me foolish if you will, but over the past few days I’ve been reading, with a somewhat bemused fascination, some of the pieces that have come out in the mainstream media regarding the old mass. Of course it’s to be expected that all kinds of foolish things have been said. The Holy Father’s action, so long-overdue in our eyes, can hardly help but be quite incomprehensible in the eyes of 99% of the western world; watching the American media try to tackle it is a bit like watching one of those episodes of Star Trek in which a primitive race tries to figure out what to make of the amazing starship Enterprise. Thinking about it that way, I find in spite of myself that many of the absurd attempts to make sense of what’s happened strike me as more cute than anything else.

Take, for example, this excerpt from a little op-ed piece found in a local Austin paper, The Daily Texan:

“The restrictions Benedict XVI reversed came about in 1965, when the Second Vatican Council, commonly known as Vatican II, updated the church for the first time in nearly 100 years.”

Wow, 100 years, eh? Those reforms really must have been overdue! He speculates that the pontiff is bringing back the “discriminatory attitudes” of an earlier era with the motu proprio. And why in the world would he want to do that? Clearly this poor, confused man has no idea… but what other possible motive could there be? Some of the people commenting on the article seemed incensed, but I can’t feel much animosity towards someone this befuddled.

Looking to the more mainstream media, we find the same general phenomenon (what in the world can he have been thinking?), but the suggested alternatives are slightly safer. Time, with its considerably larger and more diverse readership, presumably doesn’t want to come out swinging against the Catholic church. So in their piece (actually entitled Why the Pope is Boosting Latin Mass) they settle for the oft-repeated and comfortable suggestion: Pope Benedict is pacifying the geezers, those lovable but somewhat cranky die-hards who, half a century after Vatican II, are still complaining that movies used to be cheaper, meals better, music cleaner, and Mass in Latin.

“In practical terms, the vast majority of Catholics — even among the most traditionalist — are unlikely to relinquish the vernacular Mass. The number of priests who have the language skills or liturgical training for the old Latin Mass is small, and likely to get smaller. Undoubtedly reflecting his own personal experience, the 80-year-old Pope cites Catholics for whom the Tridentine rite “had been familiar to them from childhood.” As those generations pass there may be ever fewer faithful who are attached to the old Mass, and Benedict is simply providing a sort of bridge for the current over-50 crowd.”

Obviously the author of this piece has not supplemented his research by actually visiting some Latin Mass parishes, or he would know that, in many, the under-20 crowd is notably larger than the over-50. But to the American liberal, armchair research might seem quite sufficient to establish that one would have to be old, and very inflexible, to want something so archaic as the old mass! Perhaps Latin wasn’t a dead language yet when these folks were born?

Then there are the worriers, for whom it doesn’t seem to have hit home that, given the chance, traditional Catholics will contribute a lot more to the Church than they take away. Some articles buzz on about how great a burden it will be for the American priests (already stretched so thin!) to be asked to say Mass in yet another language. Well, first of all, you should tell that to the FSSP, which runs (I believe) the only seminary in America that regularly has to turn people away due to lack of space. (Somehow this never gets mentioned in any of the articles.) Traditional Catholics are not going to worsen the crisis in vocations, certainly not in the long term.

But the old mass could make matters easier for priests in other ways too. This piece by a Fr. Jordan in Manhattan is typical of the worriers; he bemoans the resources that may be lost in teaching priests Latin (of all languages!) when already it’s quite difficult to train priests in all the languages that might actually be spoken in each diocese. (He is particularly concerned about the shortage of Spanish-speaking priests in America, but he also mentions French, Portuguese, and Vietnamese as languages that are in demand.) Hmm, so, it’s difficult to find priests who can say Mass in all the vernacular languages of their would-be parishioners. Might I make a humble suggestion for another way to address this problem?

Somewhat less endearing are those writers who shamelessly misrepresent the state of the Church, blithely pretending that Vatican II has the effect that they would have liked for it to have. “Disingenuous” really seems too weak a word to describe any author who can write the following:

“Once Catholics entered into the mystery of the Mass as literate participants instead of as dumb spectators, an unprecedented renewal took hold. The vitality and warmth of today’s typical liturgy, involving intelligible encounters with sacred texts, has Catholic parishes surprisingly full, even in a time of widespread disillusionment with clerical leadership.

The structure of order that was embodied in the old tradition, and its language, turned out to be dead letters in comparison to the meaning and nourishment that now regularly draw Catholics to the Eucharistic meal. What Tyndale did for English, English has done for American Catholicism. And so with other vernaculars, elsewhere.”

His opinion (published here in the International Herald Tribune) is that the love of the Latin Mass is neither more nor less than an embracing of obscurantism; some words sound nicer when you don’t understand them, and using Latin makes people feel erudite and cool. Why else would they want to use a mysterious, dead language? He considers himself an authority on the subject in virtue of his having served as an altar boy in his (obviously misguided) youth. Ick. That story was not cute.

But the saddest was this piece from the opinion section of the LA Times. This author spends the first half of his piece nostalgically reflecting on the beauty of the older liturgy that he remembers from his Catholic childhood. He recounts his attempts to explain this to his nephew on Easter Sunday, and gently laments the complete lack of interest, so typical of the young, that his nephew displays. This is all familiar stuff, but he throws a curveball at the end, when he begins to have misgivings about the return of the old mass:

“Catholics my nephew’s age don’t remember when many non-Catholic Americans, even after the election of John F. Kennedy, regarded Catholicism as a mysterious cult partly because Catholic priests prayed in a ‘foreign language.’ Whatever its excesses, the English-language liturgy has contributed to interfaith amity. If the Latin Mass were still the norm, for example, would the Lutheran family of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist have felt comfortable with holding his funeral at the Roman Catholic cathedral in Washington, as they did in 2005? I wonder.”

Well, if it makes the Lutheran Rehnquists more comfortable, then by all means, stick with the Novus!

This writer speculates that Pope Benedict issued the motu proprio to appease his own sense of nostalgia for the old mass. But of course he doesn’t entirely approve, and his lukewarm compromise is somewhat disappointing: keep the new liturgy, but bring back the “smells and bells.” (His choice of phrase, not mine.) Most disappointing of all is his shining example of a successful best-of-both-worlds solution: a Sunday “Mass” he recently attended at… an Episcopal church! He notes that this is “ironic” and I quite agree. Ironic on many levels, but most of all because it gives the lie to the thesis of Time and others that the demand for the old mass is motivated primarily by nostalgia. This man is plenty nostalgic, and yet, as he rightly observes, smells and bells are available elsewhere if that’s all you seek. Why fight with obtuse Catholic bishops about it? You can simply troop over to the heretical church up the road, where incense and French vestments are readily available even if the Body of Christ is not.

Wading through so much silliness can be alternately amusing and tiring, but in the end, one cannot but feel a gentle compassion for so many people who really do not, and could not, understand what has happened to them, and what is happening now. Truly, the need for teachers is great! Our Holy Father is an eloquent spokesman, but he is only one man and the task at hand is a massive one. Friends, we have our work cut out for us.