LATIN LITURGY AN OBSTACLE TO CONVERSION?

By JOSEPH THALIATH, K.S.G.
Mr. Thaliath, a Catholic of the Syro-Malabar Rite, is a former Chief Justice of the High Court of Travancore. One of his nine children is a Carmelite priest and a daughter is a nun, a member of the Congregation of Apostolic Carmel. IT is commonly said nowadays that the Catholics in the world number more than 400 millions. Probably there may be so many baptised Catholics: but how many among them are practising Catholics?
I suppose in these 400 millions almost all the South and Central Americans, who number more than 120 millions, and most of the 40 million French are included. Hoy, few among them, however, attend Sunday Mass, the real test of a practising Catholic? Their number may not exceed 10 per cent. It was the measured verdict of Fr. H. C. Chdry, 0.P., that in France 90 per cent. of the baptised are absent from Sunday Mass.
Richard Pattee wrote in the
November and December, 1945, issues of the Holy Name Journal two articles relating to the Catholics of Latin America. The very heading of the articles was "The Apostacy of the Masses." For his articles he took figures of Sunday churchgoers published by a diocese in Porto Rico. I shall mentian only one figure. In a town of 33,453, on an average, only 850 go to Mass on Sunday. Other figures show more or less the same proportion.
Slow conversion
OF the 400 million Catholics a good many are good enough for statistical purposes alone. I mention this to show the relative numbers of those who are in the Church nominally and otherwise and those who still remain outside. Those who remain outside— and they constitute four-fifths of the entire population of the world —are mainly in Asia, especially in China and India.
For nearly 350 years there have been intense missionary efforts in China; but the results so far have been negligible. Let us see what the Chinese missionaries themselves say about their problems.
In the April, 1951, issue of the Clergy Monthly (India) we read : "In the China Missionary Bulletin they speak of the application of this method (viz., practise of criticism and self-criticism) by the Communists. Missionaries are naturally anxious to find the reason why 350 years of intense missionary effort have produced such meagre results. Some frank criticisms have been voiced and discussed which are of interest to us in India as well. An editorial singles out lack of adaptation as one of the reasons of past failure : 'We have lacked adaptation in the presentation of the Christian Message, in the adaptation of our Liturgy to make it understandable and living.' " (My italics.) The same view is expressed by the Rev. N. Maestrini, secretary to the Catholic Truth Society, Hong Kong, who wrote in America of April 2, 1949: "To the Chinese the chief obstacle to embracing the Catholic Faith remains the fact that it seems essentially a foreign religion in its origin, its language, its customs."
Again, Fr. Charles Bourgeois, Si., in his pamphlet Reunion with the East (Catholic Truth Society, London) writes: "As to the Chinese and the Hindus—Latin will ever be to them the language of Europe's religion."
Sterile methods
I ET me now quote a much 'higher authority.
On January 20, 1940, Archbishop Celso Costantini, Secretary of Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith and one-time Apostolic Delegate in China, wrote in the Observatro Romano: "What is the method used by the missionaries of the apostolic and sub-apostolic age? Do we use their methods? We use quite different methods, which seem to us more perfect, but which the experience of four centuries have shown to be rather sterile. The missionaries of these first ages constituted the Church with a Heirarchy native to each country and they used for the liturgy the language they found in common use. . . . We have tried to win the Orient with a foreign Heirarchy and with the Latin tongue, and the Orient has not been won. . . .
"How many missionaries have spent their life preaching the Gospel in these regions where a very ancient culture flourished ! They make a mighty army; and among them sanctity, zeal, learning, the favour of the political powers has not been lacking. But what are the results? Et era: videre miserim.
"For the whole of Asia we can scarcely count nine million Christians as opposed to 10 hundred million pagans. . . If. in the Far East, the Catholic Church increased yearly by 200,000 Christians, the number of pagans and Mohamedans increased by birth at least 10 millions.
"When will the problem be solved? The conclusion is plain to see. We must take up once more in missionary work the methods of the Apostles: Riportare le Missioni al metodi apostolici."
'Colonial' stage
D OM CELESTINE LOU, one-time Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of China, in his memoirs observed: "The civilisation of the Far East is that of a people whose history as a nation goes back 4,000 years, and who alone represent half the population of Asia and a quarter of mankind. Four hundred and the same race and same spirit, fifty million men and women of
among whom, as in the case with
the whole of the population of Asia, there is not a certain 1 per cent. that is Christian; whether Catholic or Protestant. The language of this people is by itself the language of a third of mankind: a linguistic feat unique in the world and without any possible comparison."
Excepting the question of language all that is said of China is equally applicable to India also.
Concerning India, this is what Professor Thomas Srinivason, of St. Joseph's College, Trichinapoly, wrote: "Our religion ought to find expression in ways that are onrs—our music, our sacred architecture, our apologetic. It ought to be thoroughly Catholic and withall utterly Indian. Then only can we say that our religion has aclimatised in our land—taken root among an honourable people."
He further asks : "Can we he satisfied with the existing state of things in any of these respects? Are we still in the colonial stage so far as the cultural expression of our religion goes?"
Another distinguished Indian who has been pleading for the vernacular in the liturgy for many years is Mr. L. Sen, retired Assistant Secretary to Government, New Delhi.
imaginative effort
THERE was a time when all
newly discovered territories in the world were divided between Spain and Portugal. But today Spain has not an inch of ground west of the imaginary line where they were expected to be the masters. The position of Portugal is not so bad; that is all.
Although Spain and Portugal went down in the struggle for existence, it was still some other European nations that were controlling (till the other day) the destinies of the world. All these must have had their repercussions.
In discussing the use of vernacular in the liturgy the Editor of THE CATHOLIC HERALD has made these significant remarks: "I would venture to contribute the point that the discussion of these matters is largely in the hands of people who do know enough Latin and who are used to missals. Anything approaching action would depend still more on the erudite and also probably on those who habitually use a tongue largely of Latin derivation.
"I believe, therefore, that a very great imaginative effort must be made to try to put ourselves into the position of those (the vast majority) to whom Latin is Chinese and, indeed, of Chinese and other faithful of the distant parts of the earth to whom Latin is, well, Latin!"
Great hindrance
IIOES it require so much of an ROES effort for one to realise that services in an unknown tongue must be a great hindrance for anyone to enter our Church, and that for those who are in it already it stands as a serious obstacle for taking an active part in the services?
The faithful who are born Catholics do not generally bestow any thought at all on these matters. They and their parents were brought up in a particular atmosphere and they do not think there is anything strange in it. In fact, they do not know how much they are missing.
Had I not attended the vernacular Liturgy according to the SyroMalankara Rite, of which His Grace Mar Ivanios is the local head, in one of their important centres, I myself would have gone to my grave in the full conviction that the proper thing is to conduct services in some dead language, even though it is unknown to the faithful.
Change now?
NE must be very unimagina tive indeed if one were to think that services conducted in Latin are the best suited for the vast millions in Asia and that they would be satisfied with it till the end of the world.
If one day the services have to he in their vernaculars, is it not better to introduce the change earlier than late?
"The greatest scandal of the 19th century was that the Church lost the working classes." These
words of Pius XI are strikingly true with regard to France and many other Western nations. To regain them to the Church some of the French clergy are making heroic efforts, and as an aid to their efforts they are keen to have the Mass in their vernacular.
The complaint voiced by the Chinese Missionary Bulletin that we have lacked in the adaptation of our liturgy to make it understandable and living can with almost equal emphasis be said of many Western nations.
Who can say that an unintelligible liturgy to the faithful has not contributed its quota for the existing estrangement between the common man and the Church in the West?
Should things in mission countries be allowed to drift till in these countries also similar estrangements come to prevail between the Church and the common faithful?
All Church historians are agreed that if some necessary disciplinary reforms had been introduced in time the Protestant revolt would not have assumed the proportions it actually did.
Mass in vernacular
I N many of the rituals the ver nacular will come to be used very soon in India. But in my humble opinion the introduction of vernacular in the Mass is more essential than the usc of vernacular in the rituals.
Marriage, Extreme Unction, funerals, etc., are quite rare events when compared with the daily Mass and the Sunday Mass of obligation. Mass on week-days may be as short as it is now; but on Sundays the faithful, if they -really begin to take an active part in the celebration, would, I feel sure, be glad to spend some considerable time in church.
It is a good thing for us to know the time our neighbouring disident brethren, the Jacobites, Marthomites and others, spend in their churches for their Sunday devotions. One can hear furlongs away their congregations singing in the churches; indeed their voices resemble the "roar of the ocean waves."
Their Liturgy is in the vernacular and all the members of the congregation, men, women and children, take an active part in the Liturgy.