The Latin Mass

[Butchyrestingface]

Has anyone been/goes?

I've been lapsed since my early teens and now, in my late 40s, have of late started to experience certain ... stirrings (could be peri-menopause). Only really attend for weddings, funerals, baptisms and occasionally Christmas these days.

Not a huge fan of the traditional Catholic mass these days after all the prayer updates and am really curious to try out TLM. My parents were old enough to remember pre Vatican II days and raved about how much they loved TLM (couldn't speak a word of Latin between them).

There is a weekly Latin mass in my city and I'm keen to go. What I want to know is, do female worshippers generally wear the mantilla? I don't want to be the only bare-headed woman there if so.

It's the basis for most European languages though, so it's ' pronounced as seen' as far as I can tell. Lots of Catholic stuff is in Latin anyway. I went to an English mass today and we sang in Latin and did a couple of prayers in Latin. If you are brought up in the Roman Catholic ( as opposed to the Asian /Syro Catholic churches) church you hear a lot of Latin.

Latin has been in continuous use for religious purposes though. Like Hebrew being used in Synagogues long after it went extinct. Or classical Arabic in Mosques.

And all masses were only in Latin up until the 1960s

Latin was always spoken in the Vatican and priests had to speak it for the mass until the 1960s. Regions have Latin pronunciation differences too. 'Church Latin' is simply Latin with Italian pronunciation.
Latin was spoken by the intelligentsia until the late 18th Century in Poland, Hungary and other places. It was how they communicated with the other European elites.
Scholar know how Classical Latin was pronounced due to jokes Latin writers made of speakers with weird provincial alphabets as well as misspellings in the writings of regional speakers. Late Latin too..

I once went to Christmas midnight mass in Bethlehem many years ago. The various prayers were said in different languages, and each person prayed the Lord’s Prayer in their own tongue. Then bang on midnight, everyone sane ‘Adeste Fidelis’ in Latin - the Babel of different languages all resolved as everyone sang together using the same words. It was a spine-tingling experience.

Latin used to be the RC lingua franca, so wherever you were in the world, the mass was familiar. I get all the objections to it as a symbol of ultra-conservative, reactionary cultishness, but if you set that aside, there’s a lot to be said for having one worldwide religious language as something that unites believers everywhere. It’s a great strength in Islam and Orthodox Judaism, too.

That sounds like the most amazing experience.