Photograph by Marian Brickner
Slowly, solemnly, the procession moves toward the heavy doors of the Saint Louis Cathedral Basilica. It’s 1 p.m. on June 15, and the sun’s so white-hot it fades the color even from brilliant magenta vestments. A guy with a TV camera runs ahead, sweating, to catch the spectacle from the front: at least 40 priests, many who have traveled from Italy and France for the first U.S. ordination to the young order of the Institute of Christ the King. Pair by pair, they enter the basilica. Those at the back of the line are still on the sidewalk, far from the massive doors, when they bow. No matter, they’d know this ritual blindfolded.
A young woman waits to enter, a lace veil pinned to her blonde hair, a prayer book in her hand. Flashes strobe, and the heavenly strains of Bruckner’s “Ecce Sacerdos” fill the vast space. (“English translation, sung in Latin,” the program announces, wrinkling a few brows.)
Hearing a blessing—in Latin, but unmistakable—those in the pews turn toward the side chapel. I kneel for a dutiful second, and by the time I rise, the photographers have lined up in front of the chapel, blocking the view, capturing it forever. On tiptoe, I strain to see the priests handing the garments of the Mass to Archbishop Raymond Burke, “vesting” him. I think about all the cloth in liturgy: albs, stoles, chasubles, altar linens—and the social fabric, so easily torn.
Catholic St. Louis is taking sides on the Latin Mass, seeing its resurgence as either a return to mystery, reverence and tradition or an absurd reversal of the reforms of the past four decades.
Today’s Latin Mass marks the archdiocese’s official stance—and the Institute of Christ the King’s first ordination in this country. Burke brought this order to the United States, and he brought its priests and those of another order, the Canons of the New Jerusalem, to St. Louis from La Crosse, Wisc., his former diocese. Both orders celebrate the Latin Mass that was the norm before Vatican II—and that some would like to see become the norm again.
On this weekday afternoon, the vast cathedral is packed—women and girls in dresses and Communion veils, men and boys in dark suits. All sit patiently through what will be a four-hour service, thrilled just to be present.
Trumpets blare. People rise uncertainly, in a sweet fugue of incense. A woman in a black veil walks down the aisle and chooses a pew, babe in arms and four more children, perfectly behaved. She snaps her finger lightly when the little boy, who’s ahead of her, walks too far. He turns on a dime.
Pax vobis. Et cum spiritu tuo.
Latin’s very sound is holy to my ear; its formality spells civility. No impulsive, casual utterances are possible; no messy deviations or weird improvisations. Everything said has been thought and rethought for ages.
I savor the calm of it. And then I grow weary of not understanding. I was still a child when Vatican II changed everything. The Latin Mass feels remote and ethereal—yet reassuring. God must be very big indeed, to be seen from such a distance.
The two men to be ordained lie face down on the marble floor. The sung litany begins. I skip ahead to my favorite phrases: “ab insidiis diaboli,” “a spiritu fornicationis,” “a flagello terraemotus”—obviously sins to be avoided. As for “ut animas nostras fratrum, propinquorum, et benefactorum nostrorum ab aterna damnatione eripias,” I haven’t a clue.
Out in the cathedral vestibule, a mother rocks an infant too young to find solace in these phrases. Lorene Palm has come all the way from rural Wisconsin with her husband and children. Why, I ask, thinking of that road trip on a weekday with kids in the back seat. “Because we love the institute,” she says. “They have provided the Latin Mass for us, and it is the joy of our life.” Tears well up. “When the world is crazy, and you don’t know what is going to happen from day to day, you have someplace that is ordered and peaceful,” she says, her voice cracking, “and you know that God is there, and you can be with Him.”
Three weeks after the St. Louis ordination, Pope Benedict XVI published a document freeing priests to use the pre–Vatican II Tridentine rite (usually called the Latin Mass, although any Mass can be said in Latin) whenever they like, without requesting permission from their bishop. Burke was one of two American bishops present when the pope explained his decree, which sealed a devotional movement that’s been building for years. In 2005, Burke assigned the priests of the Institute of Christ the King to St. Francis de Sales “Cathedral,” a majestic Gothic revival church on Ohio Avenue, with a 50-foot-high altar and a 300-foot-high steeple. The church is now an oratory—meaning that it does not have the geographical boundaries of a parish but exists for all—with Latin Masses and devotions daily. Even before the highly publicized Latin Mass ordination, attendance at St. Francis de Sales had risen from 300 to well over 800. After the ordination, it shot up again; today, as many as 1,000 attend every Sunday, the collection basket’s brimming and a campaign is seeking donations to repair the steeple—which is leaning away from the rest of the church.
“Young people are starved for this,” says Keri Frasca, who went to her first Latin Mass at 28. “I had been raised Catholic, but I really wasn’t practicing my faith. I went to the Latin Mass and—it was sublime. So beautiful, so supernatural. I had made a lot of mistakes in my early twenties. I thought this would give me self-discipline, inner peace, a higher purpose—a way to live beyond this world, with all its disappointments.
“I’ve heard the same words every Sunday for seven years, and I never tire of them,” she continues. “It touches a place inside you that nothing earthly can. I think when you have the Mass in the vernacular with the priest facing the people, it becomes more about the people than it does the real presence of God. It allows greater variation, more abuses. Some of the hymns are just so—I hate to use the word, but banal. There are a lot more distractions; there’s a greater immodesty in dress. Talking out loud. Communion in the hands.”
What about one St. Louis priest’s objection, that “most priests in the United States have not studied Latin, and it’s awfully close to blasphemy to presume to offer a Mass in a language in which you don’t understand a word”?
“We all have English-Latin missals,” Frasca points out serenely. “And when you see tiny little altar boys who are able to follow and understand, it’s quite humbling.
“The Novus Ordo [New Order, a reference to the church after Vatican II] is struggling to have priests and closing parishes, while the Latin Mass is growing exponentially,” she adds. “I think it will be restored, it will be Catholicism again, and you’ll be able to walk into any church on any corner and find a Latin Mass.”
Before the Council of Trent in the 16th century, the Mass was celebrated in many different languages with varied prayers and rituals. Perhaps remembering the Tower of Babel, council members established the Tridentine Mass as a single, universal rite to be celebrated—always in Latin—all over the world. And so it was, for four centuries. Then, in 1963, Vatican II said the rite should be “reformed in accord with the latest historical and theological knowledge,” says a St. Louis priest, a renowned scholar who asked not to be quoted by name. “Perhaps the most important, and in some sense intrusive, reform was that the Mass could again be celebrated in the vernacular, because Latin had been the language imposed by the council.” Other changes: The priest could face the people, instead of facing in the same direction toward a back altar; a greater variety of scriptural passages could be read, and sometimes by laypeople; and a homily was encouraged, connecting scripture to everyday life.
Now the Vatican II Mass was the universal Mass—“and that hardened the positions on both sides,” the scholar says. “The Latin Mass became the symbol of resistance to many of the other changes of Vatican II. And today, conservative Catholic families are seeing in the Latin Mass a way to protect their children from the dangers of the world. The desire is to be commended. The means, I think, is foolish. I think the archbishop is pursuing a chimera, a figment.
“I also worry that this will just further encourage the younger seminarians who are increasingly conservative, almost cultic,” he adds. “Psychologically, that is a most interesting development. There has been so much upheaval. People can take only so much of that, and then they seek solace in something they have heard was an established, definite, beautiful certainty. The bells of St. Mary’s.”
Others see the shift as more political than psychological. “It’s a power thing,” snaps a devout Catholic with a graduate degree in theology and strong feminist sensibilities. “Only the boys who know the language know what’s going on. They’re saying the words; if you can’t answer, so what? They’re battening down the hatches.” She takes a deep breath. “Yes, the mystique of Latin takes people to another world. But it’s a world that doesn’t exist.”
Fr. Karl Lenhardt, vice provincial of the Institute of Christ the King and rector of the oratory, says he’s aware of no controversy over his order’s presence in St. Louis, just a very warm welcome. “We should not be disturbing souls, we should be adding tranquility to people’s lives,” he remarks. “Society goes forward, but it may be a little bit forgetful of its own roots. The Latin Mass connects us with all those who have shared the faith before us, all the way back to our own Lord.”
Why choose Latin as the universal language instead of, say, Aramaic? “Latin became the language of the Western church because it was the language of the whole Western culture,” he explains, adding that even though Latin is no longer the common language, “the Romanity of the church is part of its universality.”
The most painful controversy in the resurrection of the Latin Mass is its Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, assured reporters on July 21 that the problem could be resolved “with a decision that is valid for everyone,” perhaps by using the Good Friday prayers approved by Pope Paul VI to avoid any chance of offense.
Lenhardt says he finds it difficult to understand why the prayer is offensive in the first place. “Every Good Friday the church prays for the Jews,” he says, “because we know very well our Lord was a Jew. This prayer doesn’t reflect anything but respect for the Jews.” Before the changes of Vatican II, the prayer used the Latin adjective perfidus, which can have a negative connotation in some languages, Lenhardt concedes. But in today’s Latin Mass, he says, the only sticking point is a prayer that “refers to a quote from St. Paul, who writes that a veil is put over the hearts of the Jews.” (In 2 Corinthians 3:15, as recorded in the Latin Vulgate Bible, Paul writes of the Children of Israel, velamen positum est super cor eorum—“a veil is still set over their heart.”)
“Without any doubt, that is not a brutal or unfriendly expression. The prayer prays to God that he may lift this veil. It is simply a reference to the New Testament, and the church feels bound to the New Testament. If Catholics truly believe that Christ is the redeemer, then from their perspective it is something good to pray for the conversion.”
Rabbi Mark L. Shook, senior rabbi at Temple Israel and an adjunct instructor at Saint Louis University, isn’t convinced. “My reading of the phrase ‘remove the veil from the eyes of the Jews’ is that it indicates a defect, like a cataract. Yet it was understood with the language of Pope John Paul II that both Jews and Christians are in covenant with God, and that this covenant did not require Jews to become Christians. So why is it necessary to keep that phrase?
“The other thing that’s going on here is a dynamic that is very dangerous,” Shook continues. “In the old days, pre–Vatican II, there was a sense that Christians needed to help their Jewish brothers and sisters see the truth—and the reason they did not see the truth was because they had not been instructed in the truth—so it was the Catholics’ job to instruct them. Now, what happens when Jews say, ‘I’m not interested’? Then they are being willful in their denial of the truth. And the next step is anti-Judaism. The minute you assign a defect to a community—i.e., that the community is not in a proper relationship with Christ—your relationship from that point on is one of superior to inferior.
“It is not up to me—thank God!—to determine what language the Mass is said in,” Shook adds. “As someone who has seen the resurgence of Hebrew as a unifying factor all over the world, I think there is a tremendous value in having a language of the faith. But when you have gone to the trouble, after 2,000 years, of transforming the relationship between the church and non-Catholic religions, why would you want to take a leap backward?”
Another question burns: What role will women be allowed to play in the Latin Mass? Female altar servers are not allowed, Lenhardt says, because serving is considered an early step on the way to the priesthood. “But that doesn’t mean discrimination or exclusion,” he adds quickly. “We must remember: Priesthood is service. If we discuss the priesthood only in terms of power, that will guide us in the wrong direction.”
As for the sea of lace at Latin Masses, the covering of the woman’s hair goes all the way back to an injunction from St. Paul. “It is a beautiful expression of active participation in the liturgy,” Lenhardt says. “It is a kind of modesty, and it is an expression of the dignity of women, because if they were not beautiful, they would have nothing to cover.”
Frasca says the power and grace of the Latin Mass are “beyond words.” And that may be the point. “After Vatican II, we lost a great sense of the importance of silence,” says another St. Louis priest, this one trained in the history and theology of liturgy. “The renewal turned into verbiage, so much talking, with the priest an emcee greeting everybody like it’s a quiz show. We got too sloppy. Now we are back to being too rigid. And as Thomas Aquinas says, virtue lies in the middle.”
Long before Vatican II, he adds, there were attempts at reform: “The church had shifted from a Mass of the people to something the clergy did on behalf of the people, who had kind of a passive role. There was a lot of pompous devotion and a sense of mystery, and medieval and French connections had added the kind of ceremony that surrounded the king and courts.” For many Catholics, progress meant stripping all that away. And now it’s back.
“One young man said to me, ‘Father, the Latin Mass just speaks to me; it’s what I’m looking for,’” the priest says with a sigh. “That’s what feeds his spirituality, and no one can argue with that. Some say it’s a growing effect of culture, things getting too casual, too mundane, hymns focused on ourselves as people of God, worshipping our own good feelings. The younger generations grew up in a time of broken families and moral confusion; they are looking for something that was sure and stable and beautiful. So we’re in Retroville.
“What we used to talk about—but it’s a hard thing to teach—was ‘worship in noble simplicity,’” he continues. “The trouble is, instead of noble simplicity we got casual simplicity. Now those moving toward the Latin Mass are saying worship has to be truly noble. And they have lost the simplicity.”
