The Pope, The Latin Mass and Judaism

Pope’s move on Latin mass ‘a blow to Jews’ | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited(-)

Here’s a difficult one: the Pope is under fire from Jewish groups, because his willingness to allow the Latin Mass to be said again means that on Good Friday Catholics will pray for Jews to ‘be delivered from their darkness’ and converted to Catholicism. The rite calls for God to ‘lift the veil from the eyes’ of the Jews and to end ‘the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ’.

Am I the only person to feel somewhere in the middle on this? As a Christian, I am a member of a missionary faith, and if I believe Christ is the light of the world, then I cannot but want anybody and everybody to know that. If the call is for conversion specifically to Catholicism (as it would have been pre-Vatican II), I obviously beg to differ, but I cannot deny even an unreformed Catholicism’s right to prosyletise and organise its spiritually appropriately, just as I would want to with my different convictions. There is also the question of how Christian converts from other faiths feel about moves to oppose evangelism across the faiths. In this specific case, there are many Jewish people who have concluded that Jesus is Messiah, and who will equally be upset.

At the same time, it is one thing to be committed to evangelism in principle, and it is another thing altogether how one goes about it. Here the history of Christian-Jewish relations especially bears upon the Jewish reaction to the Pope’s decision. The forced conversions of the past (for which today we condemn Islamists) and other atrocities understandably make Jewish people nervous about Christian evangelism. I want to pray that people may find the light of Christ, but one of the big problems is that we Christians are often those who have interposed darkness between people and his light. It simply isn’t right to cast liturgy and policy in terms that construe us as purely the goodies and everyone else as the baddies.

There are other problems with the Latin Mass, not least that it is in Latin. The Observer article linked to at the top of this post quotes a thirty-year-old Frenchman, Mathieu Mautin, on why he favours it. His reasons are illuminating:

‘I want my children to enjoy it too,’ Mautin said. ‘The liturgy creates
a universe that makes the mystery palpable. The fact that the priest
faces the altar signifies for us that he is leading the people of God.’

Everything about that is curious to me. I welcome the idea that liturgy creates a universe of palpable mystery. It is frequently missing in the clinical, rationalist worship of Protestants (can I still use that word?). There is a recovery of concern for a sense of mystery in alternative worship and emerging church circles. But mystery by putting things in a language that is not ‘a tongue understanded of the people’, as the English Reformers put it, defeats biblical worship. Paul’s very point in 1 Corinthians 14 about tongues and prophecy is that in public worship the content has to be understood by those present. We have to introduce mystery into worship differently – by symbolism and the creative arts, for example.

My other concern is Mautin’s notion of Christian leadership. If the priest faces the altar as a sign of leadership it means his back is to the people. For a Brit this is culturally rude – perhaps it isn’t in other places. But it codifies a sense of ‘Catch up with me.’ The leader on this model is Moses coming down from Sinai with the tablets, where no-one else has the same level of access to God. It stands for a deeply unreformed Catholicism.

At the same time the problem cannot be solved simply by the priest turning to face the congregation. That still gives what Alan Hirsch and others call a ‘Christendom’ model of church, where most of the Body of Christ are passive, watching a performance. In some congregations, woe betide the preacher who makes a gaffe and mistakenly thinks that we’re all family together. In today’s western culture, as Hirsch points out in ‘The Forgotten Ways‘, it makes the congregation into consumers, with all the attendant idolatry. Church leaders must not only face the congregation, but be part of it. Unlike Hirsch I still think there is some place for certain Sunday services that are led from the front – there are issues of group dynamics and how we use particular gifts that lead me to that conclusion. However his basic point is right, and in any case leadership is something that is led, not simply spoken. We could all do with a measure of self-examination.

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