Indian Church welcomes return to Tridentine Mass (Catholic Caucus)

Fr. Z's commentary:

ASIANews has a good story on the reception of the Motu Proprio in India. My emphases and comments.

Indian Church welcomes return to Tridentine Mass
Nirmala Carvalho

Mumbai (AsiaNews) – The Indian Church has expressed its satisfaction and hope that it “can take care of the pastoral needs of the community” following Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum released last Saturday. ...

According to Mgr Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Mumbai, the Motu Proprio will “have two important purposes.” [Qui distinguit, bene docet. ... He teaches well, who makes distinctions.]

“One very important purpose will be to renew and enrich the liturgy, reclaiming the liturgical form that existed before the Council, which is a great heritage in the history of the church,” said the prelate who is also an expert in Canon Law.

“The Motu Proprio is a sign that the Holy Father wants to make available to the Church all the treasures of the Latin liturgy that have for centuries nourished the spiritual life of so many generations of Catholic faithful.”

“Secondly,” he explained, “it is a response to the pastoral needs of the faithful. In Mumbai, Cardinal Ivan Dias (Gracias’ predecessor) had shown much pastoral sensitivity in allowing the Tridentine Mass. However, there may be practical challenges since there are not that many priests who know Latin.”

On the long run, such an obstacle should be overcome. “In the Archdiocesan Seminary, Latin had already been reintroduced and is being taught; not because of the Motu Proprio, but because knowledge of Latin is essential and important for Ecclesiastical Studies,” Archbishop Gracias said. [Mirabile dictu! Yes, without Latin we can’t get past the bare surface of theology, history, law, etc. Without Latin, we are slaves to what other people tell us texts mean. Without Latin we miss significant dimensions of the original content. Latin provides not just information, but a forma mentis.]

Finally, he announced that he would “inform the priests and faithful of this Motu Proprio” and “would exercise pastoral sensitivity in explaining and implementing it in the appropriate way.”

Behold the good shepherds.

They acknowledge the problems, and they see beyond the usual chestnuts of "turning back the clock" and "causing division".

Note the enlighten recognition of the importance of Latin in SEMINARIES.

Catholic ping!

At least it is being recieved well around the world. I get the sense that the American Church is becoming more or less like a problem child, and in special way after I read articles that this new document has not been recieved well in America.

Yeah, the other “problem children” are many of the European churches.

True, the European Churches are the other “problem children” that are not talked about as much as the American Church. But as Europe starts to see that tensions have begun to increase because of the growing presence of Muslim upstarts, more of Europe could end up starting to look much more closer to its spiritual roots or heritage in the event things come to a blow.

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A Mass in Latin makes perfect sense in a country where there are over 30 major languages. To say Mass in one liturgical language will greatly enhance the success of the Missionary.

From what I understand, Latin was also seen as a great blessing in parts of Africa, where there were multiple tribes. The Mass in a vernacular in the 60s meant placing one tribe’s language over that of another, which led to friction and hostilities between the ‘favored’ tribe and the other tribes.

In India, most people have to learn three languages in school- Hindi, English and their mother tongues(this part isn’t that hard, given that most of India’s languages only have slight alterations to the script and/or accent, all mostly derived from Sanskrit). I wonder how the addition of a fourth language, in Latin would work out.

People who know Sanskrit might find it a bit easier to understand Latin, given the similarities both these languages have.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the use of nothing but the vernacular is that it let linguistic nationalism creep into the Church - and not just in India.

Certain politically active Catalan and Basque Spanish bishops just could not wait to order that all the masses had to be in Catalan or Basque, regardless of the fact that while a certain percentage of their diocese did indeed speak these languages (in addition to Spanish), the ENTIRE diocese spoke Spanish. It was done purely to assert a left-wing political position and to PO the Spanish speakers.

The payback is, alas, that these dioceses have the lowest numbers in all of Spain for both vocations and regular Mass attendees. Not that the bishops care. But think of all the souls that have been lost.

I’m going to Spain tomorrow and I will be very interested in seeing the reaction to the MP.

Basque separatists?

given the similarities both these languages have.

Really? I didn't know that, although it makes sense in light of other things I've been told by my Hindu monk friend.

THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE FAMILY

While in 1786 Sir William Jones suggested that similarities among languages such as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Gothic were so striking as to suggest that they were sprung from a common, no-longer existing source, by the nineteenthh century, August Schleicher's Stammbaum had modeled the relations among the Indo-European languages as the branches of a tree. Since then, two new branches have been discovered, Anatolian and Tocharian.

The tree here is very different from that of Schleicher. Already in the early part of the twentieth century Antoine Meillet suggested that Greek (Hellenic), Armenian, and Indo-Iranian were more closely related to each other than to any one of the other languages, and linguistic similarities among Celtic, Italic, and Tocharian are now thought to go back to a closer prehistoric community, while Germanic was isolated very early. Only later, in northern Europe, did Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic speakers come back into contact.

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's Indo-European and the Indo- Europeans, (pp. 349-350: Johanna Nichols' 1995 English translation of the 1984 Russian 1984 original) suggested layers of groupings beginning with two original groups which they call areas A and B. In the unseparated group, area A, they put the ancestors of Anatolian, Tocharian, and Italic-Celtic, while in area B they placed a grouping, Germanic-Balto-Slavic together with Indo-Iranian-Greek-Armenian before subsequent splits. Their update attempted to incorporate the discoveries of Hittite and Tocharian at the same time taking account of interacting dialect zones that would have developed over time creating ever new layers of areal interactions. Recent concerns for integrating factors of time (chronology of the languages) and space (location of the speakers during periods of their history and prehistory) must factor into re-evaluations of all models.

Etymological pages here, indexed by Semantic Fields and by PIE Lexical Roots, group languages loosely as GERMANIC (alone), BALTIC, SLAVIC, and ALBANIAN (each alone but closer to each other and to GERMANIC because of later contacts in Northwestern Europe); ANATOLIAN (alone); WESTERN (Italic, Celtic, and Tocharian each with different later contacts), and EASTERN (ARMENIAN, HELLENIC, INDIC, IRANIAN again with later contacts).

Views concerning the breakup of the initial language family into groups are often related to hypotheses about where the Homeland was. One major view is that it was on the steppes of southern Russia north of the Caspian Sea, that successive migrations to the west brought speakers into Europe, others south into Anatolia, and south or southeast into Iran and India. Another major view places the Homeland in Anatolia with migrations northwest, northeast and north, and east. Models of language history will also affect what we eventually accept as most likely.

Updated: 11 Jan. 2007 AJC; 12 Feb. 2007 CFJ

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/iedocctr/ie-lg/ie-lg.html

Not necessarily. All bishops got into lefty politics after VatII, and the Spanish, probably because of their connections with Latin America and “Liberation Theology,” plunged into it head first. They were panting to be seen as au courant and anti-establishment, and the linguistic thing was made to order for people like that.

Put it back in Latin and none of this will be a problem. Of course they can preach or read the Gospel in whatever language they want; but the faithful will be reading it in Latin or in their own native language, and as for the preaching of the bishops and their clergy - it was usually political and wasn’t worth listening to anyway. No loss.

Oh okay. Thanks!

My friend said Alexander the Great took some Brahmin with him on his return trip from India. He said there has been cross pollination of language, philosophy, etc for a very long time.

No, Sanskrit is much older than the time Alexander invaded what is now Pakistan.

Yes, I realize that. I was just saying there has been an ongoing cross pollination of cultures for a very long time.

Yes, there has been exchanges of culture, but usually limited to visceral things. Language goes much deeper, and unless large-scale migrations occur, with transfer of genetics, those kinds of changes don’t happen.

The relations between Sanskrit and Greek(and by correlation, Latin) are quite well-studied, researched and documented. The overwhelming conclusion is that both are independent languages with a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. Sanskrit goes back beyond the time of the Vedas, centuries before the Greeks knew about India, or the vice-versa.

I’m going to Spain tomorrow and I will be very interested in seeing the reaction to the MP.

Have a safe trip and please let us know what you find out.