Touching the Sacred

For Holy Thursday, I decided to attend Mass at Saint John Cantius. Saint John Cantius is a special parish here in Chicago, dedicated to preserving the Latin Mass and Catholicism's sacred tradition. If you are Catholic, you should attend a Latin Mass occasionally. It is a wonderful way to reconnect with our past.

Here is a bit of video from Wednesday night's service (nothing from last night is on the net yet):




This may be a shock to any Protestants or modernist Catholics reading this, but the Latin Mass is one of the great glories of the Catholic Church. And the Mass last night was not a Tridentine High Mass but rather an Ordinary Mass, partly in English, mostly in Latin.

The choir at St. John Cantius is incredible. And given the mode of Mass, the people joined in the Gregorian Chant Now I know that Church is a special one. Most of the members have joined because they have a special devotion to the Latin Mass and to traditional Catholic sacred music. I know that all of our Churches were not all like that in the old days. But whenever I attend a Latin Mass, I wonder what we as Catholics have lost.

I am very much a child of Vatican II. I have no memory of the days when the Tridentine Mass was the primary mode of Catholic worship. Nor do I wish to really go back to those days. But listening to the choir sing old Gregorian chants you could almost touch the sacred. That feeling is, I fear, too often missing from Catholicism today.