Why should anybody care what I think about the Latin Mass? But I have cared about it ever since a sometime hero of mine, John XXIII, tried to silence it in the early sixties. The attack, beginning in those days, on the canon was not, after all, limited to the secular canon. In religion, the communion of the faithful with each other and with what they call God has much to do with a long past and the mystery called "the great chain of being." The intellectual historian A.O. Lovejoy wrote a sublime history of the idea. I myself, who am not a proper believer, still feel a certain shiver of truthfulness when I hear or read these lines from Jacob Glatstein, the Auden of Jewish poetry:

Our whole imagined people
stood at Mount Sinai
and received the Torah.
The dead, the living, the unborn,
every soul among us answered:
we will obey and hear.

Actually, an ancestor of mine, one of the founding triumvirate of Yiddish literature, I.L. Peretz, also not exactly a believer, wrote a drama (1907) called Die Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain) which was first performed in 1920 in America. And it cautioned about the unraveling of spiritual continuity. In any case, as I saw the shock of my most liberal Catholic friends when they faced the prospect of vernacular liturgy, I sensed that this would alienate more people from the church than it would bind. And so it has been. As it happens, Pope Benedict has given new life to the Latin Mass, and he has moved spiritually to reconnect with those who have moved during the last near-half-century away from the mainstream. Some of those with whom Rome wants to re-establish bonds are surely of the old reactionary church, like the followers of the now-deceased Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. But the mainstream itself has suffered massive hemorrhaging, and it is my observation that these losses have not only wounded the church but also wounded those who have left it, or left it, sort of. Paradoxically, this mainstream was theologically more lenient and tolerant than the hierarchy. But it wanted its church services to be true to the old tradition which is at once memory and comfort. It's why, I think, orthodoxy is now the fastest growing branch of the Jews. Or, as a good friend insists, "The synagogue that I do not go to is a strictly observant one." Or, as the father of a friend of mine used to put it, "I am a non-observant orthodox Jew." Those sentiments are also a bit past-tense. More and more--Catholics, Protestants, Jews--want their rituals not to be modern and quotidian. They want them to be--how does one say this?--traditional. Listen to the Verdi Requiem and just think about it in English.