That's holiness. That's the sacred

By Scott Hahn in Catholic Pages

Just about seven years ago when professor Tom Howard entered into the Church, Christianity Today, the leading evangelical news magazine, came out with a cover story about Tom Howard's pilgrimage into the Roman Catholic Church. They tried earnestly to make it seem as though it was kind of a warm fuzzy feeling that led him back to Rome because he was so enchanted with the liturgy and he spoke of the worship and this sort of thing. They spoke of it as just kind of an emotional attraction where he was attached to these external rituals.

When you talk to Dr. Howard you discover, on the contrary that if that was really his motivating force, he would've remained an Anglican. In his own Anglican parish there was far more ritual, but there was something missing. There was something missing of the antiquity and the ripe incarnational humanness of Catholic worship. The more he studied, the more he recognized that the historic, apostolic liturgy is what really belongs by birthright to the Catholic Church.

This is something I'm discovering. I've only been a Catholic five or six years now, but I've discovered this in many ways. I've been on Opus Dei retreats now three times where they have celebrated the New Order, the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin - not a lot of smells and bells, just a certain holy simplicity. But I've walked away from these celebrations thinking, That is powerful; that is holy. There is so little in American life where you can go and say, "That's holiness; that's the sacred." I came away from those Latin Masses with that sense. Then I discovered afterwards in the documents of Vatican II, the express declaration that pride of place belongs to the Latin language in our liturgies. I'm not somebody who goes around crusading for Latin. Deep down, I was raised in the public schools. If I was raised in the 80's, I probably would have watched MTV. But I know in my heart of hearts that there is something of the transcendent, there's something of the sacred and of the holy, in the way the Mass is often celebrated with Latin. It isn't necessary; it isn't guaranteed. You can do a trashy job with Latin just like you can with English or any vernacular language. Likewise you can do a very adequate job of expressing the transcendent, and the sacred in English as well.