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Sorry...I attributed it to you. :) When I said "Latin Rite" I meant both the New order of Mass and the old--technically they are both the Latin Rite even though the new Mass is in English. The way we use it anyway, rite and language are two separable aspects of the liturgy.

And you're 100% right about the old Latin liturgy. I attend it every week when I can, and its beauty and power is undeniable. I see much of the very same qualities in high Anglican liturgies (including the Anglican Use authorized by Rome not too long ago), and it has left me convinced that the vernacular was never the problem--it was how the vernacular was done.

Ahh, but our bishops don't seem to see this as a problem, sadly. So no thees and thous for the foreseeable future.

"...it has left me convinced that the vernacular was never the problem--it was how the vernacular was done."

Precisely. I would strongly argue that the vernacular is necessary, with the vernacular being defined as a liturgical language closely related enough to one's own native tongue to be able to be assimilated with little or no formal study by someone who attends the services regularly.

Russian and Serbian peasants with little or no education understood very well what the services were saying, even though they didn't speak in Church Slavonic.

The same was doubtless true of Italian and Spanish peasants vis a vis Latin -- but I daresay much less so for illiterate English or Polish peasants, especially with regard to variable propers.

This is of course of much greater importance in the Orthodox Church, where the full cycle of services tends to be done on a parish level, and where the volume of variable material is huge. These services simply can't be followed with the equivalent of a missal/libretto. One has to be able to understand the language "on the fly."

But one would hope that the Catholic Church will begin to recover its own daily office for parish use... with good liturgical vernaculars, of course... :-)

Sorry...I attributed it to you. :)

No insult taken here. Though "Mike the Geek" (he's a FReeper too) might. *\;-)

And you're 100% right about the old Latin liturgy. I attend it every week when I can, and its beauty and power is undeniable.

Some day I shall have to arrange to attend/observe, though my one year of Latin is almost completely faded. The goodwife knows it though (Latin is among her dozen-odd languages).