Good Arguments, and Bad Arguments

I greatly appreciate the Latin Mass, and have no resistance to it flourishing and continuing in the Church until the Second Coming of Christ. Clear? Now...some of the arguments used to support the celebration of the Latin Mass are good, but some are, well...less than good.

One of those bad arguments is when people say that there was a time when the Latin Mass was the only Mass in the Church and that you could go to any Catholic Church and have the Mass be the same. That is just not true; as much as it sounds good, it is inaccurate. If we exclude the first few centuries of the Church (which is not always wise to do), we have a number of centuries where the Latin was the most widely used Mass, but was never the only one in use in the Church. England had the Sarum Mass (our heritage in the Ordinariate) and the Eastern Catholics had their rites (the Mass of St. Chrysostom, etc.), and there are others.

Yes, it is true that the Latin Mass was predominant in Europe for a good deal of time. Yet to say that you could go to "any" Catholic Church and the Mass looked the same is not being honest. Even in the first century we know that the Apostles initially did not have Mass said exactly the same in all places. It did coalesce into one form for a while, but all the information we have says that it was still in Greek at that time; not Latin. The Church has almost always had more than one rite for the Mass; it is not new today that we have other forms that the Traditional Latin Mass.

In fact, were there to be, in the present day, only one form of the Mass for the entire Catholic Church, that would not necessarily be a good thing. Yes, it would show uniformity, but it would create problems that many do not realize. As Pope Benedict said the different forms of the Mass need to "enrich" each other, and Pope Leo said recently that the Eastern rites have a value in being able to "inform" the western rites. It is not only dishonest but it comes across as somewhat pompous to claim that "Latin Mass is the only Mass".

The question should never be absolute uniformity, but rather consistency. All of the rites need to be consistent with what was handed down by the Apostles (which is not necessarily the case today). In the past, whenever a rite was realized to have something out of accord with that tradition it was either corrected or eliminated. It is just as wrong to say that there used to be just one form of the Mass for the entire Catholic Church, as it is for anyone today to try to limit us to one form of the Mass (whether Novus Ordo, or Latin Mass, or something else). This is how the Church works: loyalty in brotherhood, consistency in liturgy, and unity in doctrine.