It’s a sad thing. All yesterday I had a good, meaty philosophical post that I want to write bouncing around in my head, waiting to be written. I never got around to it. Now I’m leaving on a short trip, so it looks like this isn’t going to happen right away. (I can hear the general sighs of disappointment!) But to tide you all over, I thought I should post an overflow question from the last thread that really calls for further attention.

The issue is with the term ‘Novus Catholic.’ It’s just a standard term within circles of Traditional Catholics for referring to anyone who primarily assists at the Novus Ordo Mass. Sometimes it is used just as a term of abuse, though I don’t use it that way on this blog. But even while discouraging insults and childish taunts, I recognize the need for having a term to refer to this group of Catholics. Admittedly they’re the much larger group, as compared to Traditional Catholics, but that’s irrelevant. It’s a group of people, they have significant commonalities among them, and we sometimes have reason to refer to them (I mean in normal conversation, not in name-calling.)

Now, I was basically happy with the term ‘Novus Catholic.’ Since the official name of the Mass they like is the ‘Novus Ordo Mass’ it seems natural enough to call them ‘Novus Catholics.’ True, I can’t recall hearing any Novus Ordo devotees calling themselves ‘Novus Catholics,’ but of course they wouldn’t because they don’t call themselves anything. To them, Traditional Catholics are such a fringe group that they rarely feel a need to distinguish themselves from it, and if they ever did, negation would seem to suffice. “I’m not a Latin Massgoer,” or “I don’t go to the Old Mass” or for the most savvy, “I prefer the Novus Ordo/ordinary form of the Mass.” They don’t think of themselves as a group per se.

To those who stand outside of it, though, they seem clearly to be a group, with distinguishing characteristics and cultural trends and so forth. Particularly if you looked at them in the development of all Catholic history, they would definitely stand out as a group with their own defining characteristics. So even if they don’t need a word for themselves, we need one, just for purposes of ordinary discourse. We picked ‘Novus.’ But now it seems that a lot of them aren’t happy with that choice.

A few different sorts of objections arose in the last thread. One seemed to be mainly an objection to labeling Novus Ordo Massgoers as a group at all, merely because they are large and diverse. I reject that one. Obviously you’ll find a fair amount of variety in a group so large, including some exceptions to almost any ‘trend’ you might identify. But that’s true of almost any group we might name, and part of being a sensible language user is learning how to deal with generalizations of this kind. That objection is thrown out.

A second objection involved pragmatics. One person claims that it is confusing to talk about people as ‘Novus’ when it is properly the name of a Mass. It doesn’t seem that confusing to me — usually the context makes the meaning fairly obvious — but I guess it could cause some confusion when the adjective is inserted into a phrase without much context.

But the third objection is more complicated, and does touch on some issues of significance to both groups. The term ‘Novus Catholic’ suggests a break with the traditions of the past. It implies that a new kind of Catholic was invented at Vatican II, not in continuity with the Catholics of the past. Traditional Catholics will be inclined to answer that indeed, Novus Catholics have in significant ways broken continuity with the Catholics of old, and thus the name is fitting. I think that’s true to a great degree, and to anyone sensible of the sadness of being a “New Catholic” we might give a helpful suggestion: become a Traditional Catholic! There was never a better (or easier) time to jump on the bandwagon!

Still, insofar as their “newness” is one of the least happy characteristics of these Catholics, I suppose it’s not entirely unreasonable to ask that we not name them for it. Those who understand the implications will be offended, and those who don’t will be trained to think that “newness” isn’t a bad thing at all, which is already what’s happened to a significant degree merely from the existence of “the new Mass.” We don’t normally like to reinforce people’s worst qualities by turning them into names. Some may want to keep using the name precisely in order to make the people of the Novus Ordo Mass uncomfortable, but if that’s really the main reason, I’m prepared to let it go, in the interests of establishing better relations.

I don’t want to turn this into a fight about just how new the New Catholics are. There’s no black-and-white answer to that; they’re not so new that they cease to be Roman Catholics at all, of course, and thus they really are rightful heirs of our long and glorious Catholic history. Still, the discontinuity is significant enough that a host of customs and devotions have been basically lost to most American Catholics, and the strong and recognizable Catholic culture that once existed in America has been reduced to a pale shadow of its former self. Traditional Catholics aren’t worked up over nothing when they distinguish themselves from that group, but their counterparts are still not wrong to insist that they too have a share in the heritage and tradition of the Church.

I guess for me, at the end of the day, the counterbalancing factors are 1) convenience, and 2) courtesy. For the first, the bottom line is that it would be nice not to have to make up a whole new name when most Traditional Catholics are already used to this one. Single-handedly changing language is never easy, and the mere fact that people have somewhat agreed on this one is itself a powerful reason to keep using it. Perhaps I should reiterate here that this is the official name of the preferred Mass of the people in question, so it’s hardly as if it were chosen as a taunt. It may have been a mistake on the Council’s part to choose that name for their missals; a quote offered from Pope Benedict at the end of the last thread suggests that it probably was. But anyway, it doesn’t seem like the best way to fix that problem is by fussing at the Traditional Catholics who merely pick up the name from the missal and apply it to the users of that same missal.

On the other hand, I am swayed by considerations of courtesy. It’s not very nice to go on calling people by a name if they don’t like it. I don’t like it when people use these ‘EF’ and ‘OF’ terms to refer to the different Masses (in part because they’re too cute-sounding, and in part because that division seems designed to mark the Traditional Catholics as ‘extraordinary’, a term that can be laudatory but in this case is more likely to be heard as a synonym for ‘freakish.’) I don’t want to antagonize others unnecessarily by saddling them with a name that they really hate.

However, I simply cannot change the practice unless there’s some kind of reasonable consensus on an alternate name. I’m not going to go around using awkward, wordy phrases in all my posts just to avoid dropping the ‘N’ word. I insist that there needs to be a name, and it must be a name that isn’t prejudiced against Traditional Catholics, either. The only suggestion I’ve heard so far is “Nordite”, offered by Maximilian Hanlon — I’ll leave it to him, if he likes, to explain why that name seems appropriate. Any other ideas? Those of you out there who do actually assist at the Novus Ordo Mass have a chance to shine here. What would you like to be called?

As I may or may not have internet access in the next few days, I beg you all to be as civil as possible in my absence. I authorize my fellow contributors to establish order on the thread if it should prove necessary.