Bringing Back the Latin Mass

Here's a nice piece by George Weigel that appears in this week's Newsweek. In it, he discusses the rationale behind the pope's appreciation for the Latin Mass and his efforts to reintroduce it to Catholics. When, at first, I saw just the title of the article, I cringed at the thought of the banal observations that might appear in the piece, but after seeing that Weigel was the author, I was greatly reassured.

In the decades between Vatican II and his election as Benedict XVI, Ratzinger became a leader in what became known as "the reform of the reform": a loosely knit international network of laity, bishops, priests and scholars, committed to returning the process of liturgical development in the Catholic Church to what they understood to be the authentic blueprint of Vatican II. Seeing a Gregorian chant CD from an obscure Spanish monastery rise to the top of the pop charts in the 1990s, they wondered why much of the church had abandoned one of Catholicism's classic musical forms. Finding congregations that seemed more interested in self-affirmation than worship, and priests given to making their personalities the center of the liturgical action, they asked whether the rush to create a kind of sacred circle in which the priest faces the people over the eucharistic "table" might have something to do with the problem.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/142217