To the lovers of Latin: go fight for your rites

FROM THE age of seven I have recited much of the Divine Office. My choir school in Indiana had been founded to preserve classical values.
In our household compline was daily recited. Vespers and the night office were for me festal treats which I shared with my pious uncle. I still know the "Tridentine" Pius V Mass verbatim in Latin. I use these beautiful prayers privately when I assist at public worship adding from our Sarum Rite the exquisite salutation: Ave in aeternum sanctissima taro Christi mihi ante omnia et super omnia summa dulcedo.
I offer an eirenic suggestion that in colleges .and religious communities latin may continue. Missa Normative in. Latin should suffice all but intransigent purists.
If a recondite esoteric cypher is demanded for an elitist oligarchy the "dead" language should be Greek. The Western Church had enough scruples trying to render into the barbarous idiom of the Roman soliery the niceties of theological exactitude and collegial definition.
The underlying motive for excluding a vernacular liturgy is far from Catholic. In the third century Rome adopted Latin because it was the vernacular. We are still bound in duty to evangelise creation.
Since television has become available Missa Normativa in the vernacular is intelligible to shutins and fortuitous denominational viewers. Unless paraded in triumphalist arrogance it is scarcely identifiable as the panoply of Babylon.
In its Americanised journalese it sounds as innocuous as Moody and Sankey or Crimond. I have entreated officialdom in England for a vernacular Mass: same time, same day, same channel, every week on Sunday.
We are commanded to proclaim the faith with which our Lord sent Saint Paul to Rome. Our Lady has counselled us: what
He says do it. There are perennial programmes for Hindus and Moslems and in the Keltic dialects but Catholic bureaucrats temporise in pusillanimous apprehension rather than joining battle for our Mission.
There is a Wild West maxim which applies. God Almighty hates a quitter. Re Missa est you are sent on mission.
Marian Edward Konter Stockport
Cheshire WHEN I became a Catholic three years ago, the thought of listening to the banal and flat language of the liturgy was unappealing. Now, having listened to perhaps a couple of hundred Masses, my views have changed almost entirely. I now appreciate how carefully each word has been chosen and weighed to make the result dignified, yet simple and unforced.
The only exception is the first Eucharistic Prayer — the translation of the old Roman canon — which sounds so rhetorical and overblown as to make me wince.
This is not surprising since English is a language sympathetic to economy and restraint, and much that sounds well in Latin cannot be expressed in the same manner in our tongue.
I would like to see Latin retained — perhaps for the greater feasts. I cannot comment on the Tridentine rite since I have never heard it, but, being of a conservative bent myself, I can understand the distress at the abruptness of the change.
It would not be so wrong to allow a few churches in each diocese to celebrate the Tridentine rite weekly, for those who genuinely feel they cannot adapt, as long as it did not replace one of the main Sunday Masses between 8am and Ipm.
Ian Campbell Edinburgh