The Traditional Latin Mass as Training for Heaven

Sometimes I’m asked “Why the Latin?” in regards to the Traditional Latin Mass, or more rarely, “Why all the rigmarole?” I remember a youngish nun (some thirty years ago now) asking in a very acidic tone, “What’s the point of praying in Latin?” Such questions, especially asked in that acerbic tone, remind me of a scene in one of those juvenile Austin Powers movies (I forget which one) where in Dr. Evil has concocted some bizarre method of doing away with Austin Powers, and Dr. Evil’s very American-like teenage son says in exasperation, “Just shoot him. Don’t go to all this trouble; he’ll likely escape anyway. Just shoot him.” (I’m paraphrasing from distant memory.) Dr. Evil stares in disgust at his son and says, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

I no longer remember now what I said to the nun, if anything, but perhaps, in that context and with that particular individual, this answer is as good as any: “You just don’t get it, do you?” In other words, she wasn’t disposed to hear a real reason; it was self-evidently stupid to her and she wouldn’t have been inclined to consider an explanation. It was inherently unreasonable to her. She was also a nun in the modern nun sense, no habit, no apparent religious status or affiliation at all. (I would never have guessed she was a nun if she hadn’t been introduced to me as such by an aunt.) But for everyone else in the world, for those Catholics or Protestants who might bring up why Traditional Catholics (and the Orthodox) prefer “all the rigmarole”, there is a very simple answer: the Mass is preparation for Heaven.

It’s not rocket science to figure this out, although it is spiritual science. God is a mystery; indeed, THE Mystery, and both humans and angels can easily spend all eternity in an eternal contemplation and communion with God and never remotely “know all there is to know.” (We can loosely “image” eternity with God, but we can’t really conceive it, any more than we can conceive of God.) That’s what the Old Mass – and of course the Orthodox liturgies – convey: we’re entering into the Eternal Presence and utter Mystery that is God. Yet it is essential to note that for Christians, God is in no way unknowable to us. In Islam, God is unknowable: the Islamic afterlife for men is a carnal one, and a man’s women from this life must endure forever their husband’s carnal frolicking with the legendary 72 virgins; but Allah is not there. Wherever Allah is; he’s far above the “Garden of Allah”. In the religions further Eastward, all human individuals lose their individual selves in maya, a spiritual non-existence of spiritual existence soup, with some of them perhaps to be reborn on Earth once again to do it all over.

In Christianity, however, God is a Person, indeed, Three Persons in one God, and we’ll spend forever in a most personal knowing – an eternal getting acquainted – of this Absolute Being. Angels do this already. Their minds are mirrored back to them in God, each of the nearly innumerable angels having his own presence in and with God. And they thus reflect the glory of God. The higher angels in the nine choirs shine more brightly than the lower ones because the hierarchy of Heaven gives each his unique place, closer in to or farther out from God, and of course all angels, being pure spirits, greatly reflect in their natures the received glory of the Absolute Spirit. (Even devils, according to one old tradition, can’t escape from the glory of God: the fires of Hell are nothing more than the very presence of God endured by those who have eternally rejected Him; I’ll pass on opining whether this idea is true or not, but it certainly makes sense: their rejection of God is eternal, but since God Himself is eternal, they can never escape His presence).

Human beings, those admitted to Heaven, can now participate in this Beatific Vision because of the Incarnation. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity is now a Man, both Man and God. But why was that necessary? God took on human nature in order to elevate human nature to the point where it could take on God’s divine nature, making us “new creations in Christ.” This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples: John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation.) St. Paul states it succinctly in 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” The chief of the Apostles puts it best in 2 Peter 1:4: “By whom He hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature: flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world.” “Partakers of the Divine Nature.” (BTW, St. Paul mentions the idea quite often: see Romans 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.) And to return to St. John for a moment, he goes into great detail, not only for the necessity of the Most Holy Eucharist in the 6^th chapter of his gospel, but – with this new creation idea in mind, reread the 3^rd chapter of his gospel about being “born again”.

In the Eastern Churches, this transformation in Christ is called Theosis, and in the West, Divinization, or more likely you’ll have encountered it as the “infusion of grace” by which we are saved. As “Divinization” may seem outlandish to some Catholics, recall St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460] and of course St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]. The Incarnation made this infusion of grace possible, as through baptism Original Sin is removed, and then through the Holy Eucharist, we can receive into ourselves God Himself, transforming our nature to a higher form, one that can endure the Beatific Vision experienced by the Angelic Host. God’s Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist is the New Covenant, for the New Testament isn’t the 27 books of the Christian Bible but the Holy Eucharist itself. (The New Testament came to be called that because it describes God’s saving work through the Holy Eucharist.)

Of course, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have their differences, which in a mostly cultural and linguistic way existed before the split in 1054, and which has grown since, but both are “Christianity of the Real Presence”, unlike Protestantism, which although it is a direct offspring of Catholicism, is proudly the Christianity of the Real Absence. From Luther and Calvin on, the Real Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist is denied: whereas in Catholicism Christ is ontologically present, in Protestantism Christ is present only in a  mnemic sense – the memory of His life and death on Earth 2,000 years ago, so it exhibits quite a different understanding of the importance for the Incarnation. Whereas Historical Christianity teaches we are changed in our nature, Protestantism (generally) teaches our nature remains sinful and fallen, but God allows us into Heaven even so: thus Luther’s famous Simul Justus et Peccator, simultaneously justified with God and going to Heaven, but yet a sinner in our nature, as in Luther’s analogy of a manure pile covered with snow. (N.B. C.S. Lewis contested this idea in his 10^th letter in his Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer.)

Now, all this is truly a Mysterium Fidei, a Mystery of Faith, and the old Mass (and Eastern Liturgies) are our introduction to it, just as in them we receive Our Blessed Lord intimately, in Holy Communion. The old liturgy seems to the newcomer – especially a newcomer raised in the New Mass of Paul VI or the generalized Protestant worship services – to be arcane, esoteric, impenetrable, and mysterious. Latin itself is only one element of all of this profundity. Yet the Old Mass existed to introduce you to the Mystery that is God. (And the New Mass exists to remove the Mystery. But that’s a subject for another essay.) God is all these profound mysteries to us, and far more. The Old Mass is our boot camp, our basic training, for God’s eternity. And just as God is not “plain English”, not something “taken in at a glance”, so neither is the Old Mass.

"So preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women."

"Weak men and disorderly women"? Sound familiar? Isn't that modern Western culture? 

So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville of European women on the verge of the French Revolution, quoted in an article here.

An excerpt:

Way back in the 18th century, Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and made an observation. It was at a time when the seeds of women’s equal rights were just being sewed. Men were beginning to see women as true equals, though obviously they hadn’t achieved that fullness yet. Equal rights would take many years, but America had a good start.

At that time, Tocqueville made an insightful observation when he compared America to Europe. The quest for democratic equality in Europe had taken a bad turn, as women were confusing equality with sameness (particularly in sexual relationships). “By thus attempting to make one sex equal [the same] to the other, both are degraded,” Tocqueville wrote, “and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.”

The main part of the article, America Needs More Ladies, by D. C. Mcallister, is about modern women in America. An excerpt:

Barbara Seaman, who wrote Free and Female, put it this way:

If there is going to be a breakthrough in human sexuality -- and I think that such a breakthrough might be in the wind -- it is going to occur because women will start taking charge of their own sex lives. It is going to occur because women will stop believing that sex is for men and that men (their fathers, their doctors, their lovers and husbands, their popes and kings and scientists) should call the shots.

This is the essence of modern feminism: women calling all the shots, in bed, in the home, in the workplace, and in politics. A woman is free to act however she wants to act, and men have to deal with it. As Madonna once said, “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”

The feminist attitude ultimately demeans men, reduces them to sexual predators, and fosters distrust between the sexes. Robin Morgan, editor of Ms. magazine, expressed her disdain for men quite bluntly: “I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”

Andrea Dworkin carried it to another level of hostility when she wrote, “I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”

Another charming quote from a feminist “lady” came from Mary Daly: “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”

Not all women feel this way, of course, but this is the tone of the feminist movement, and it has had an impact on women and how they treat men. Noonan spoke of respect and dignity. It’s very difficult for a man to show a woman respect when she doesn’t respect him and when she refuses to honor his dignity as a man. Even worse, she doesn’t respect herself or her own femininity, so why should a man?

 

"Oh brave new world that hath such creatures in it!" It that's not a simulacrum of Hell, what is?

An Préachán