Magnum big deal.

Magnum Big Deal

IT IS A pity that the Roman Catholic Church, probably the most self-assured institution in the world, should announce its authorization of the Tridentine Mass in language suitable to the elders of the town of Niagara specifying conditions under which they will permit someone to roll over their Falls in a barrel. If press clippings are to be believed--and why not? in this case--the old Latin Mass in the Tridentine Rite can be celebrated only after a) the relevant priest takes an oath to the effect that he does not consider the modern vernacular counterpart heretical; b) ditto the attending parishioners; c) the Mass's entrepreneurs give their reasons for requesting that form of the Mass, reasons that d) must be satisfactory to the bishop. It is presumably unacceptable to give as a reason for preferring the Tridentine Mass in Latin merely that the new Mass, in English, is less conducive to prayerful meditation, and is written in an idiom composed by monks somewhere in a monastery reserved for the tone deaf.

The notion that it is impious to desire the same Mass that sustained four centuries of Catholics, including martyrs who died in order to attend it, which Mass was celebrated by a half-hundred popes, must derive from a fetishistically exclusivist devotion to the new number, which devout Catholics endure if only to be reminded of what life must have been like in the catacombs. Well then, the Church bureaucracy has caught up with the scientific bureaucracy. It is, as of this writing, about equally difficult a) to schedule a Mass in the Latin Tridentine form and b) to construct a nuclear power plant.