Old Latin past illuminates future for Catholic church

Tom Kelly felt like something was lost 50 years ago this month, when traditional Latin Mass was abandoned by the Roman Catholic Church with a Second Vatican Council ruling that Mass could be said in local languages with alternate choreography.

The intention was to make the ceremony more accessible, more understandable, simpler, but connection that lasted through centuries evaporated.

Holy reverence and awe seemed to be exchanged for colloquial comfort.

Now, though, the formal worship is making a comeback in South Carolina and at Catholic churches worldwide.

The daily Latin Mass held at Prince of Peace Catholic Church in Taylors – among services that also include English and Spanish Mass – led Kelly and his family to move to the area.

“It’s so very reverent,” said Kelly, a native of Long Island, New York, who moved with his wife Donna and children from Rutherfordton, North Carolina, to Taylors in 2005 to be closer to Latin Mass. “You can go to a Mass in New York, you can go in South Carolina, you can go in Rome, you can go in China and it doesn’t really matter. You’re attending the same Mass.”

“I can tell my children this is the Mass that all of the saints that they're learning about in school would’ve been at,” said Joel Raines, a Campobello resident who travels with his wife, Marty, and four children to Prince of Peace almost weekly. “From my perspective with my kids, I try to tell them that the Catholic faith is 2,000 years old, but the Mass that we were taking them to was kind of new. It had contemporary music. It was English. It was like handing them a penny and telling them it’s a 300-year-old penny, but it looks shiny and new. It’s kind of hard to buy into that if you’re a kid.”

Now, though, as the smell of incense rises through the sound of Gregorian chants, they more easily sense that they are part of a tradition that’s been handed down from the second century.

Prince of Peace Catholic Church, with more than 2,000 families as members, is one of the few churches in the nation to celebrate a daily noon Latin Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. It’s one of only two in the state – Stella Maris Roman Catholic Church on Sullivan’s Island is the other – to celebrate the Latin Mass on a weekly basis.

Father Christopher Smith, formally installed as the parish’s pastor just last week after three years as administrator, said it’s helping the church grow.

“I think that there are as many reasons that people come to it as there are people,” Smith said. “One of the things that we’ve found very interesting is that a lot of older people who grew up with the Latin Mass and then switched to the vernacular when they were growing up, a lot of them are just not really interested in the Latin Mass anymore. What we’ve found – and this is the case all over the world – a lot of younger people tend to be attracted to the Latin Mass.

“What they tell us is they see a great sense of beauty and reverence and devotion, and also a sense of historical continuity. You know when you come to a Mass that’s celebrated in Latin that you’re praying the same prayers that saints from 1,500 years ago were praying when they went to Mass, in the same language. There’s a great sense of connectedness, and I think a lot of young people are searching for something very concrete and very deep in their spirituality. The Latin Mass fulfills a need that many of them gravitate towards.”

Pope Benedict XVI decreed in 2007 that the traditional Latin Mass could indeed still, or again, be celebrated by churches, but Latin Mass was already being celebrated at Prince of Peace by then.

Pope John Paul II had given wider permission for its practice before Benedict XVI clarified that permission wasn’t needed, as long as there was a stable group of faithful who wanted it, Smith said.

Today, the number of regular attendees at Prince of Peace’s Latin Mass has grown from about 60 to more than 300.

“It’s like in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus talks about taking out of the storehouse treasures old and new,” Smith said. “There are people who are looking for that as a means to live their Catholic faith, and they’re attracted to the parish because of that. We have people who regularly come from as far away as North Carolina and Georgia who come for Mass on Sunday. We have people who have moved in from all kinds of different parts of the country to this parish for many reasons, not just the Latin Mass, because we do both the old Latin and the modern English at a very high level and very beautifully.”

Brian Mershon, who attends Prince of Peace with his wife Tracey and family, believes practice of the traditional Latin Mass is a key to progress for the Catholic church – providing a brighter future by relying more strongly on its historic past. Simply put, he said, he prefers worship in the Latin Mass because it makes him feel closer to God.

“I’m a father of seven children, and I’ve got fifth and sixth grandchildren on the way, and I want all of them to see the beauty and the truth of the church and to stay with it,” he said. “From a theological perspective, I think the more we have Latin Mass, regardless of whether people initially understand and recognize what’s going on, I think that’s one of the paths to rebuilding the church.”

Evidence of that seems to be accumulating worldwide.

“Interested Catholics now realize (Latin Mass) is not some peculiar thing tucked away in an embarrassed corner,” Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society based in the United Kingdom, told USA Today. “Once they’re in the door, the Mass speaks for itself.”

“There is a movement among young Catholics to know, discover and preserve their Catholic heritage, and the traditional Latin Mass fits in with that,” said Joseph Kramer, a Rome-based priest and longtime advocate of the Latin Mass. “I think they are drawn to the liturgical richness of the past.”

Though worldwide attendance figures on attendance at Latin Masses are not available, James Bogle, the president of the International Una Voce Federation, lay groups associated with the Latin Mass, said member organizations are growing all over the globe.

What was once lost is now being found, more and more, Kelly said.

“I remember Latin Mass and the changes in the 1960s (with the Second Vatican Council),” Kelly said. “My wife wasn’t familiar with it but fell in love with it immediately. It’s beautiful.”

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