Off the Track

This month's The Tablet, an international progressive Catholic weekly published in London since 1840, includes a small, three-paragraph piece from Rome on the end of the Tridentine Rite.

The Tablet reports that Fr. Reginald Foster, a top Latin scholar at the Vatican, saod that fans of the Tridentine Rite were doing harm to the Church. If Pope Benedict XVI, says Fr. Foster, continues to encourage such Latin-loving groups, a schism could ensue. "It's not the Latin, it's the mentality. These people think things were better before the [Second Vatican] Council," he told The Tablet. How alarmist and how uncharitable toweards those who love the old rite!

In fairness to Fr. Foster, he did conclude his comments by saying that it was a shame that so many young priests today could neither read nor understand and translate Latin. Priests, he said, should receive training in the "mindset that goes on from the Vulgate and Augustine and Jerome all the way to this present age."

Does the 68-year-old priest not see a connection between the Church's official retreat from the Tridentine Rite and the inability of younger priests to understand Latin? He seems confused, his comments sound somewhat contradictory, and frankly, he doesn;t seem to be doing such a good job as the Vatican's foremost scholar of Latin. One would think that such a position would necessarily entail a stalwart defense of Latin and its continued use in the Tridentine Rite that more than a few kooks on the Right appreciate and enjoy. (Here is a list of religious communities for men and for women that still use traditionalist Missals.)

The Tridentine Mass, by the way, was the Mass liturgy of the Roman Rite until the Second Vatican Council of 1962. It is called Tridentine because it refers to the Council of Trent (1545-63) which laboriously stipulated Church doctrine on the Sacraments and the nature of salvation, and which standardized the liturgy of the Mass, eliminating local and regional variations.