In my last blog I wrote about how the Latin Mass helps keep most of us priests humble, because few of us are Latin language experts. I wrote how my altar server corrected my Latin the other day: “In your in nomini Patris the third person of the Trinity should be in the genitive rather than the dative.” Reading this post later I saw a mistake in the words in nomini Patris but didn’t correct it so that you, my loyal readers, would have the chance to call me on it. But nobody did, perhaps because you are excessively polite. Can anyone spot what’s incorrect with “in nomini Patris”?
On to another subject: let’s talk about hate. It’s a seriously overused word today. Everyone is accused of hating someone, it seems, but really: we can’t all be haters. A few years ago, I discovered I was a “hater” myself. How did I learn of my new status? I had announced some modest liturgical changes to Sunday Masses, and some parishioners were discussing these over a meal at a restaurant one night. The couple at the next table, also Catholics but not members of the parish, began arguing with them. A bit of a heated discussion ensued about the purpose of the Divine Liturgy and the nature of sexual distinctions. As my friends were leaving the restaurant the other couple hurled this epithet their way: “We would never be part of a parish motivated by hate!”
It reminded me of an incident with one of my nieces, who was 12 years old at the time. Her parents would not let her do something she wanted to do, so she stormed out of the room crying “you all hate me!” Often tweens don’t have the intellectual or emotional capacities yet to discuss what confuses them rationally. They resort to calling other “haters.” A healthy person grows out of that stage by mid adolescence. The excessive use of the word “hate” in our time is perhaps a manifestation of the prolonged adolescence of a great number of people. To help tweens grow beyond this stage, their parents and priests must provide solid education in rational thinking and consistent formation in prayer, which trains the mind and the heart to get beyond the “hater” stage. This is why, I’m putting my time and energy into both a classical Catholic school and a deeply prayerful parish at Star of the Sea.  

Yesterday my astute altar server, a canon lawyer of the archdiocese and a competent student of the Latin language, corrected me. “In your in nomini patris the third person of the Trinity should be in the genitive rather than the dative,” he murmured demurely after Mass. “Remember that the noun Spiritus is of the fourth declension.” I was saying “Spiritui Sancti” rather than “Spiritus Sancti” when I made the Sign of the Cross. I thanked him and thanked God for providing a Latinist for the parish.

So this morning I took a few deep breathes: all I had to do was change one letter in one word. You can do this! So as Mass began today I focused intensely on saying Spiritus instead of Spiritui. I managed to do it, but the effort threw me off balance. I started thinking about all the other word endings I have been saying from muscle memory for years now, and that’s like thinking about what your feet are doing when running down a flight of stairs. I got confused, and lost my confidence, and stumbled, and messed up some other words that I’ve never had problems with before….

Praying in Latin certainly keeps a man humble, at least if you think about the words from time to time.  A priest can run through the Mass in his own tongue without effort and think to himself: “I’m pretty good at this. I understand the Mass and I can do it well.” A priest can think this way about the Latin Mass too, but at moments of such complacency the Latin Mass will box his ears. Both in its language and its form, the Latin Mass says to the priest: “You think you understand these mysteries? You think you can speak the language of Cicero and Augustine? Just let me remind you, buster, that you don’t know nothin!”
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It’s essential that true worship remain mysterious, beyond our complete grasp, and veiled. After all, we are attempting to pray to a mysterious, unknowable, and hidden God. It is He, not us, who chooses the time and the manner of His revelation. To keep us from fashioning a god in our own image, the Sacred Liturgy keeps one step ahead of us, so that we can never grasp fully the mystery, but keep striving, keep seeking, keep longing for the Infinite One. 

Isolation on earth is hell, and hell is isolation: to be cut off, to feel the terrifying emptiness of rejection, to sense that one’s own mother and father have no interest in one’s life. The overused word “exclusion” and the contemporary acronym FOMO (“fear of missing out”) manifest this essential fear of being left out. As healthy social structures collapse (especially the family and the “village”), technology promises to fill the vacuum. Corporations that are making lots of money on our loneliness tell us that a smartphone “connects” us to others. And yet, we are a city of isolated single people. Might I recommend a better way: religion. Of course, religion has a bad name these days, especially when some religious leaders are revealed as the most isolated of all people. But consider the very meaning of the word. “Religion” comes from the Latin re-ligare, literally to “re-tie” (“ligare” means to attach or connect, as in “ligament”). True religion reconnects us with God and each other, but it too has a cost. We must spend an hour in Church, in the presence of God and other people. We must also spend time and money on the “Domestic Church,” meaning Mom, Dad, and the children. If you don’t yet have a family (and God calls almost all of us to marriage), be faithful to some kind of godly community: a young adults group, a book club, a service group. Families, however, will always be the backbone of every village. I struggle every day to pastor a parish with so few families. The sense of isolation in our city parishes terrifies me. Every family is a treasure, which is why I am so grateful to those brave enough to get married and have children. The Feria family, for example, is a backbone to my church. Bud, Lorna, and their five children provide such a sense of stability. The Feria’s have never given up on each other, and, in a declining Catholic culture, they have been a radiant Domestic Church at Star of the Sea for thirty-five years. Their youngest, Fergus, just received his First Holy Communion and gratefully opens his mouth each Sunday to receive Jesus at the 9:30 Mass. May God bless us with many families like theirs! Ryan and Mary-Rose Verret are another family with five children. Authors of the Witness to Love marriage apostolate, they have given most of their adult lives to building up families. They will be staying at my parish this week while they speak to the Archdiocese and the famous Napa Institute. We are privileged to receive them!