Letter to the Editor

Published: August 23, 2007

To the Editor:

This is an open letter of thanks to Pope Benedict XVI for the recent text (Motu Proprio) permitting more frequent celebration of the Tridentine Mass.

On behalf of an estimated 400,000 baptized American Catholics who drifted away from the church in the decade following the abandonment of the Tridentine Mass, allow me to express our deepest and most profound gratitude for this gift. Many of us do not know as yet that we have reason to be thankful. Few are interested in returning to the Extraordinary Rite itself. Nor would we find much in it that we could immediately grasp. Yet, the effect of re-establishing this ancient rite—and the Latin which gives it such profound sanctity—will extend its influence into the Novus Ordo in ways that my generation of prodigals desperately needs.

In the 1970s, many of us found the Mass and what we were hearing from the pulpit so altered from what had been before that moral clarity became difficult to discern. As we entered high school and college, exposure to the Protestant message that all churches were equal and that we could choose from which worship styles suited our individual personalities best began to gain saliency. We found it more and more difficult to find anything within the Mass and the church of our baptism to give us identity as something unique and profound. The sanctity that we had known in our childhood was no longer patent. And so, we lost our reason to stay. The majority of us have not come back yet.

I rejoice at the issuing of the Motu Proprio as one who, when God finally took pity on her senseless wandering, was called back to her first Mass six years ago. It was a Novus Ordo Mass with many of the ordinary prayers being said in the Latin. No, I did not understand them. I could not say them with the congregation. But that did not rob them of their transcendent beauty. In fact, they touched me so deeply that I began to crave learning them that I might draw such beauty closer.

So, I say thank you on behalf of those whom God will soon call home to His church. I know that in a few years many will find themselves entering a Catholic Church. They will find themselves remembering how to pull down the kneeler quietly. They will smile to themselves to realize that their knees suffer more than they used to do from this use. They will look up around at the quietly gathering congregation. Here and there they will see individuals praying the rosary. They might see a handful of women wearing lace veils or scarves or hats. In the quiet reverence, they will begin to feel the difference. They will begin to feel once again the Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament as He waits quietly in the tabernacle. Then, as the Novus Ordo Mass begins, they will stand to hear once familiar Gregorian hymns. They will sit to listen to the Old Testament, Epistle, Psalm and Gospel read in English before being tied together in a homily as Christ did with his disciples on the road to Emmaus that first Easter. The rite will seem both familiar and new. They will feel comfortable, yet a touch awkward. Then, as the congregation stands and begins to sing the Agnus Dei in Latin, their hearts will unexpectedly swell … and swell … and swell. Their eyes will overflow with the gift of tears St. Teresa of Avila describes. They will fall to their knees and know they are home. At last.

Forty years of wandering in a wilderness will finally be over and they will know the joy I have found in coming home to the true Faith with all its mysticism, profoundly meaningful traditions and transcendent beauty.

Thank you Holy Father. Thank you not for taking us back, but for moving us all closer to God.

Pamela C. Garrett, Woodstock