What is Pope Francis doing?

The Latin Mass for non-Catholics

For several weeks now, various online Catholic communities have been buzzing with reports that Pope Francis is about to ban the Latin Mass.

Why should you care if you’re not a Catholic? Or indeed if you are?

I’m going to try to explain what this controversy is about and why it matters to the wider world - writing as a scholar of religion rather than a religious believer, although what I write will be informed by my history as a Catholic. This article is aimed at people of all religious persuasions and none.

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The Mass is the central ceremony of Catholic worship, in which bread and wine are believed to metaphysically become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. ‘Latin Mass’ is a shorthand term for the form of the Mass that was used until the liturgy was reformed in 1969. This reform was the main outward sign of the modernisation process which the church undertook following the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 (a process which remains incomplete).

The Latin Mass was a cornerstone of Catholic observance and culture. It was performed by priests across the Catholic world, from Vietnam to Ireland. The rite was essentially unchanged since 1570, and its historical roots were deeper still. A time traveller from the Middle Ages who wandered into a parish church after World War II would immediately recognise what was going on. Some of the texts of the Mass appear to go back to the early centuries of Christianity - to the days of the Roman Empire, when the faith of Christ had still not fully replaced paganism.

The Latin Mass is one of the major cultural artifacts of Western civilisation. The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe were built to provide a venue for it. Uncountable thousands of altar paintings and sculptures have been created to provide a backdrop to it. Numerous composers have written settings of the Mass texts, including some coming from Protestant, Jewish, agnostic and other non-Catholic perspectives.

The Latin Mass was replaced with the modern, reformed Mass in 1969. At that time, Pope Paul VI was persuaded to allow occasional celebrations of the old rite in England and Wales. This was in response to a petition signed by numerous prominent figures in the literary, musical and academic worlds - many of whom were not Catholics or Christians. The signatures of the Jewish virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menhuin and the esotericist and poet Kathleen Raine appeared together with those of the pagan novelist Robert Graves and two Anglican bishops. There is a story that the Pope granted the petition when he saw that one of the signatories was Agatha Christie.

Paul VI’s permission for continuing the use of the Latin Mass was subsequently expanded to the rest of the world, on looser conditions, by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The restrictions began to be reimposed by Francis in 2021, and the rumour is that he may be about to tighten them much further, banning all celebrations of the Latin Mass outside a small number of religious orders that were set up to preserve it.

Nobody knows if Francis is an Agatha Christie fan, but there have been public appeals to save the Mass by the great and the good this time too. The most prominent of these was published in The Times in early July. It was signed by a list of respected public figures and Tom Holland.

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The differences between the Latin Mass and the modern rite of Mass are visible even to the naked eye.

The old Mass was solemn, esoteric, sacerdotal, doctrinally rigorous and almost invariably celebrated in Latin. It is the Mass that you see in old films. It looked like this:

The modern rite looks like this (you’ll have to imagine the priest speaking in English):

You can see why some people think that the modern Mass is a bit Protestant. (Whether that is a good or a bad thing is another question.)

The differences between the two rites can be exaggerated. The modern Mass is somewhat similar to the old Mass. Quite a lot of the ritual text and structure was retained with little or no change. The modern rite can even be celebrated in a way that looks and feels very like the old Mass - using Latin and Gregorian chant, for example - although not many priests choose to do that.

The main justification for the reform - and it was a very good justification - was that the old Mass was remote from ordinary Catholics. Most people couldn’t understand the Latin. The altar boy usually made the responses to the priest on their behalf. The priest spent most of the ceremony facing the altar in the east wall of the church, and hence with his back turned to the congregation. If there was no music at the Mass - and there usually wasn’t - there would be long periods of silence punctuated by the ringing of a bell.

Some people love this sort of thing. Most don’t.

But the reformed Mass has its own problems. True to its origins in progressive postwar Europe, it elevates text over symbol and transparency over mystery. It turns the Mass into a mixture of a school lesson and a polite social event. People even shake hands awkwardly with each other before the climatic sacred moment of Holy Communion (or at least they did before Covid). The modern Mass is middle-class. It is the Mass of the suburbs.

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The aesthetic qualities of the Latin Mass are well known. They are perhaps the strongest argument in its favour.

The Latin Mass is, above all, beautiful.

The hypnotic quality of the Latin. The silken vestments. The incense. The intricate motions of the priest, making up a sacred dance. The musical settings by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The pervasive atmosphere of reverence.

The beauty of the rite can be seen as not merely aesthetic but spiritual. For many people, it brings them close to God like nothing else.

Indeed, it may be a mistake to consider aesthetics as a separate category from the spiritual. Beauty can be truly transcendent.

What kind of barbarian would want to ban such a thing?

Well, firstly, we have to recognise that an appreciation of the beauties of the Latin Mass can collapse into a kind of self-indulgent Romantic connoisseurship. Going to Mass becomes a sensual experience, on a par with drinking a single malt in an oak-panelled library while listening to Furtwängler conducting Mahler’s Fifth.

To normie Catholics, people who make a point of going to the Latin Mass for such reasons can come across as eccentric and slightly tedious, in the same way as people who make a point of letting you know that they understand wine vintages or insist on listening to vinyl records rather than Spotify.

And worse - this sort of thing can shade into something quite nasty. For some, the Latin Mass is not just a cultural icon but an icon of cultural narcissism - not a ceremony of prayer and devotion but an assertion of cultural (or racial) supremacism. This is Western civilisation in the ‘bad’ sense.

Latin Mass congregations have a reputation - only partly deserved, but nevertheless partly deserved - for being insular and even cult-like. They may have a larger minority than usual of political extremists. Not just the familiar tribe of diehard conservative Catholics, but people who are really quite weird about Trump, vaccines, and so forth.

It is a matter of real regret that something so beautiful is preserved in the most viciously reactionary parts of the Catholic world.

This is probably a major reason why the Pope has been thinking of suppressing the rite. It’s not just about the ritual, it’s about the fact that it (sometimes) generates a radical and radicalising subculture around itself.

And yet uncountable millions - billions - of people through the centuries have been fed by this rite; people of every class, culture, nation, ethnicity and political persuasion. It appeals to neurotic weirdos - and also to kings, peasants, saints, scholars, social reformers and martyrs.

Perhaps it was easier to be fed by the Latin Mass before modern times.

The rite itself is determinedly anti-modern.

It is marked by the interlocking themes of masculinity, authority and guilt.

The ritual is based on gendered and hierarchical divisions. Male clerics are separated from the body of the laity and sent to approach a barely approachable deity - a God of power and majesty, whom the priest supplicates with humility and contrition. The text is pervaded by references to God as male and metaphors of masculine power - God as Father, God as King, God as Dominus or Slave-master (see also ‘we your slaves’, ‘this offering of our slavery’, ‘the obedience of my slavery’ - the text is not squeamish about such things).

From the start, the rite is framed as a sacrificial offering to an exceptionally holy being by sinful creatures. It repeatedly expresses a sense of human iniquity, sometimes through the vocabulary of purity.

This can, of course, be seen as fairly typically Catholic - but it is a Catholicism of a kind that the modern church tends to be uncomfortable with.

One thing that the revisers of the Mass did in the 1960s was to go through the prayers and Bible readings and delete the more robust references to sin, divine anger, punishment and damnation. They did this because they saw a real problem. To celebrate the Latin Mass is to worship a wrathful, vengeful deity as a member of an authoritarian, patriarchal church. But then we are talking about prayers that go back to the dying days of the Roman Empire. Is it any wonder that they struggle to reflect the faith and life of people today?

Some parts of the liturgical text are bizarre or offensive. There is brutal terminology referring to non-Catholics and non-Christians: the notorious prayer for the Jews on Good Friday is the best-known example. There is a prayer for no less a person than the Roman Emperor himself. And you could write a thesis on this protocol for what should be done if the priest has a wet dream the night before celebrating Mass:

There is even an instruction which tells the priest what to do if one of the hosts - the pieces of bread which are believed to become the body of Christ - disappears due to a miracle.

But the Mass is not just a collection of ignorant or outmoded anti-modern sentiments.

Hell and damnation do get mentioned. But the emphasis is on God’s forgiveness.

The prayers repeatedly look to God for mercy, with a view to obtaining salvation in eternal life. The Mass is a plea for infinite bliss, one that Catholics believe that God is ready to answer.

It may be said that the reform of the Mass solved the problem of the harsh antiquated language at the expense of creating another one. The dogmatic rigidity of the old prayers was exchanged for texts which have a tendency to breathe the shallow optimism of the 1960s. What should a liturgy convey to the worshippers? A sense of comfort and hope, no doubt - but perhaps also the more challenging messages that they are accountable for their actions, that the spiritual life is demanding, and that the world has a dark side. If the emphasis is wrong, they are not uplifted but merely infantilised.

If the old rite posed real problems, the modern Mass was a poor answer to them. At its best, the Latin Mass is numinous, sacral, beautiful and other-worldly. It is no bad thing that it makes greater demands on its attendees in terms of comprehension, nor that the mostly passive role of the congregation allows for silent meditation and private prayer instead of the constant effort of keeping up with the responses. As for the elaborate external ceremonial, it can be genuinely uplifting on more than just a sensual level. It was the closest thing that our peasant ancestors got to a physical glimpse of heaven.

And there must be - surely - a sense of sadness that 1,500 years of history were swept away so abruptly.

I have no neat conclusion for this article - I can only reassert the contradictions. The Latin Mass can be a rite of transcendent beauty, arty Romanticism and bigotry; it is the prayer of saints, martyrs and fascists; sexist and authoritarian; with a message of supreme hope and salvation.

I don’t envy the Pope, because in his place I’m not sure I’d know what to do with it either.