Recessional at the Catacomb Mass...

The lucky cleric has a tenure in Rome. Perhaps he is a French seminarian or an American priest. But why are these faces covered?

Did you know that punitive sanctions could be levied against these clerics if their superiors knew that they were praying a Mass (in Latin) in Rome? Everyone knows that these sometimes nefarious superiors have an agenda that is not always in synch with the tenets of the Catholic Faith. After all, why be mean-spirited as it’s just a Mass (albeit in Latin), right?

Sub Petro et cum Petro: everyone has a different reason to attend a Mass in Latin. Perhaps one person is tired of the banal English translations. Or perhaps another is simply tired of the antagonism of the rabid rubrical innovations that we laity have to float under.

The malevolence of seminary faculty and hostility of diocesan chanceries is well-known to all of us (as we hear about it all the time). The disreputable treatement of a seminarian who attends a Mass in Latin speaks of how ill-qualified much of our ecclesiastical leadership is, right?

In this post-conciliar epoch we stand on Sacrosanctum Concilium (a mystical document), and we pray in Latin in what the Church in Her wisdom has given to us and to the enemies of Mother Church we declare in Her tongue: Roma locuta!