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The pope's language lesson
A senior Vatican official has confirmed that sometime soon Pope Benedict XVI will expand permission for use of what's popularly known as the Latin Mass, the service that was standard before the Second Vatican Council. Though some details remain vague, one point seems all too clear: When the decision officially comes down, its importance will be hyped beyond all recognition, because doing so serves the purposes of both conservatives and liberals within the church, as well as the press…
In the end, the normal Sunday experience for the vast majority of Catholics will continue to be the new Mass celebrated in the vernacular. (It's worth noting, however, that the new Mass can also be celebrated in Latin, with all the "smells and bells" dear to the high-church set.)
Many on the Catholic left, meanwhile, will make a cause célèbre out of the document because, to them, it symbolizes a broad conservative drift in Catholic affairs. They will read it as another sign of a "rollback" on Vatican II.
That argument, too, depends on selective perception. While Benedict certainly wants to call the church back to some Catholic fundamentals, evidence of a systematic lurch to the right is hard to come by. This is the same pope, after all, who scandalized Catholic traditionalists by jettisoning limbo and by praying alongside the grand mufti of Istanbul inside the Blue Mosque in Turkey. On the political front, Benedict has demanded debt relief for impoverished nations, said that "nothing positive" has come from the United States-led war in Iraq, and denounced capitalism as an "ideological promise" that "has proven false."
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