The Latin Mass
I received a book catalog with a quote (not my ellipsis) from Cardinal Ratzinger: "By incessantly inventing new Eucharistic prayers...we have sunk farther and farther into banality." And it occurred to me that there has been a rather large hole in my hit-and-miss education. I have little idea what a pre-Vatican II Mass consisted of. I've been to two Tridentine liturgies but in the distracting newness of it I didn't get a complete sense of what was actually being prayed.
If we are what we pray, then the Liturgy to some extent forms us. (Of course, you have to pray it to be formed by it and I've heard it said that few back in the '50s paid much attention to it and instead said their own prayers & private devotions.) But here the Church was formed for hundreds of years by a liturgy I was completely unfamiliar with! For history's sake alone I should have read the text of the Latin mass before. But fortunately, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I was able to here.
The Mass seemed more expressive of our mutual dependence; there are more mentions of and prayers to the saints (and our dependence on God was expressed visually by the priest facing the same direction as the people). There was more focus on sinfulness of course. But oddly, given how clerical the pre-Vatican II church was and how the priest is seen as an altus Christus, there was an equality in the confessions of priest and people. The priest alone expresses sorrow for his sins, before God and the laity, offers an act of contrition and the parishioners respond, "May almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins, and bring you to everlasting life.". The laity then identically express their contrition and the priest responds with the same prayer asking God's forgiveness.
Update: I found this interesting post.
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