Latin in DC

The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in Washington, DC, has announced that it will host the celebration of a Pontifical High Mass in the Extraordinary Form (Traditional Latin) of the Roman liturgy.  The Mass will be celebrated by Dario Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, President Emeritus of the papal commission for the Tridentine liturgy and those who celebrate it. The event will be the first time that the Tridentine Mass has been celebrated at the high altar of the National Shrine in some 40 years. The Mass will be offered on Saturday, April 24, at 1 p.m. in honor of the fifth anniversary of the Holy Father's enthronement upon the Chair of Peter.



So what does it all mean?  The story hasn't gotten the mainstream media's attention like the Holy Father's general indult for the Tridentine Mass, or like that received by the Holy Father's establishment of a new way for Anglicans to return to the Catholic Church en masse.

This sort of thing is what I predicted in 2006 when the indult was given for any Roman Rite priest to celebrate the Tridentine (Old Latin) Mass. There will be no bum-rush of Tridentine Masses.  The desire for revolution or reform in the Church is much smaller than it was in the 1960s, or at least directed by much  wiser heads.  Instead of throwing everything out that's come since the 1969-71 Mass of Paul VI, what we are going to see is a gradual reintroduction of the Tridentine Mass.  It will appear in the big, beautiful churches, and the more conservative-minded or traditional dioceses and parishes, and it will appear sporadically, for special occasions.  It will become more common until at last it stands alongside the vernacular use of the Paul VI Mass, which is all anybody under 40 or 45 years old has ever known, really.  The Tridentine will be the Mass of the more traditionally minded.  The Paul VI will be more of a "people's Mass," and used for catechetical purposes, as an introduction to liturgy, and for common worship among Catholics of varying liturgical backgrounds.  The Mass of Paul VI will, by its analogy to the Tridentine Mass, help those who attend the Tridentine Mass to understand and appreciate it better.  The Tridentine Mass, by its analogy to the Mass of Paul VI, will help those who attend Paul VI's Mass to understand it better.  At least, those are the desires of the Holy Father as he articulated them in The Spirit of the Liturgy, published in 2000.