by Randall Smith
When I get exasperated by some of the failures in contemporary liturgical practice and annoyed by the perpetual arguments over it, I am tempted to exclaim: Okay, that's it. We need to return to the traditional Catholic liturgy!
You know what I mean. The Mass in Greek. Every other liturgy is a later translation and not always a reliable one. There are good reasons why the Latin translation of the original Greek Scriptures was called "the Vulgate." It was the vulgar (that is, common) language of Italy.
Translating the text and the liturgy from its original form to the "vulgar" Latin of the common people was always questionable. Did they do it just because people couldn't understand Greek anymore? Does anyone think that's a justification for translating the liturgy? Who thinks it is important for people to hear and understand the words of the Eucharistic prayer?
I am open to those rites, such as the Maronite, that may have preserved the original Aramaic of Christ. But since the Scriptures are in Greek, I can see no reason that the liturgy shouldn't be done only (or mostly, other than the Aramaic) in Greek. The Roman form of the liturgy in Latin probably wasn't commonly used before the fourth century.
Some people claim that later liturgical changes were made "in continuity with" the earliest liturgies of the Church. But that's just silly. Can anyone imagine that Peter, Paul, James, and John never spoke the Mass out loud when they traveled from village to village? Does anyone think they whispered quietly to themselves while people knelt or wore black beanies with a little puff ball on the top and did mass at a huge, gilded altar festooned with multiple golden cherubs and candles? You wouldn't have found such things even in the medieval church.
Anyone who has ever been to a Gothic cathedral in Europe likely knows that those elaborate golden altars in the back of the church weren't added until the Baroque period. Most are tacky additions that don't match the aesthetics of the building. If the popes of the time hadn't been weak or corrupt, they would have prohibited them.
And even to speak of continuity in the Mass, as though it was a monolithic entity, is absurd. There have been over a hundred different rites in the history of the Church. Six of them are still in use. And many who attend the other five resent the notion that the Latin rite is the Mass
All one need do is attend the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom to realize that the "continuity" between that rite and the Tridentine liturgy is significantly less than what exists between the Tridentine and the Novus Ordo.
I'm not a fanatic. I am open to some of the developments that occurred up to the time of Thomas Aquinas. He would have said Mass using the Dominican rite, which differs greatly from anything you would find today. But to my mind, anything after the thirteenth century is suspect and probably shouldn't be allowed.
All the golden falderal added after 1500 are obvious corruptions. Read St. Bernard's letters about gold in churches, and you'll find that he wouldn't have tolerated it for a moment.
It was probably only allowed because some of the more disreputable bishops at the Council of Trent were over-reacting to Protestantism. If you look at some of the participants at Trent, the character of the corrupt Renaissance popes who reigned during its deliberations, and its unwarranted duration (no other council comes close to its eighteen-year duration; the next longest being four years), doesn't all this put enough doubt in your mind to suspect it might not have been a real council like Nicaea - enough to conclude we need not be bound by its so-called liturgical "reforms"?
No, I insist; it's obvious: it must be Greek or nothing. Everything else is just bad liturgy and makes a "different church." I have no doubt that if we returned the liturgy to the original Greek the churches would be full, and young people would return in droves.
Now, to be honest, ...
