An emotional magnet
For a determined minority of Catholics, Latin Mass still a powerful draw
A theological battle was recently resumed in Chicago, 500 years after it was fought in Europe. Like Martin Luther’s challenge to the 16th century papacy, the opening salvo of the rerun was marked by a notice posted on a Catholic church:
“As of August 1, the celebration of public Masses is suspended,” a sign on the chapel of the Shrine of Christ the King announced to its stunned parishioners this year.
Since 2004, the church at 6401 S. Woodlawn Ave. had celebrated the Mass in Latin. So, too, did other Roman Catholic churches from 1570 to 1962, when the Second Vatican Council decreed that masses were to be celebrated in the vernacular: English in America, French in France, etc.
The reform was intended to give lay people a role in the Mass. That required them to know what was being said. The priesthood had monopoly over the Latin Mass. A priest said it with his back to the congregation, facing an altar at the sanctuary’s rear wall.
Vatican II ordered the altar moved closer to the congregation. Standing behind it, the priest now faced the congregation. Lay Catholics could carry the offering, the wine and bread, to the altar. Women could deliver the scriptural reading.
Being associated with sudden and dramatic changes, many Chicago Catholics found the abandonment of the Latin Mass incomprehensible.
“Those of us who attended Catholic schools must now believe that all we learned was bunk,” Marty Serbrick wrote in a 1983 letter to the Tribune.
Six decades after Vatican II, the Latin Mass remains an emotional magnet for a tiny but determined minority of Catholics. An estimated 1% of American Catholics, and smaller numbers in other countries, have been attending Latin Masses.
“It spoke to me, even though I didn’t understand a word,” said Alexandra Morgan, who is studying Latin at St. John Cantius Church at 825 N. Carpenter St.
It offers an array of courses in Latin, even as the courses have become scarce in liberal arts colleges, where they once formed the core of a classical education.
Nick Chapello, who directs St. John Cantius’ language program, reports that its Latin masses, the only remaining ones in the Chicago Archdiocese, draw South Siders who formerly attended Christ the King.
What prompted the Woodlawn congregation to cease offering Masses?
“It was their choice to do so,” Susan Nelson, an archdiocese spokesperson, told the Hyde Park Herald on Aug. 8.
Christ the King supporters say it had no choice. Cardinal Blase Cupich had ordered churches offering the Latin Mass to substitute the vernacular mass on the first Sunday of each month, Christmas, Easter and other holidays. That wasn’t feasible for the Institute of Christ the King, which champions the Latin Mass.
The face-off left Matthew Talarico in the ecclesiastical equivalent of suspended animation. As provincial superior of the Institute of Christ the King, his authority encompasses its congregations in Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Ohio.
But as rector of Christ the King, he can’t publicly offer the Mass in the Chicago church where he is based. He has chosen not to speak to reporters. Fidelity to their bishop, in
this case Cupich, is required for priests. But others have spoken about the dispute.
“The bishop has the key that unlocks a priest’s ability to perform the Mass,” David Black, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, which adjoins Christ the King, told the Hyde Park Herald on Aug. 8. “(Cupich) is basically withholding that key, as well as changing the fundamentals of the form of worship as it has existed at the Shrine for years.”
Black is a Protestant, the collective name for Christian denominations that descend from Martin Luther’s break with papacy and substitution of German for Latin as the language of prayer. The break triggered a gap between Protestant and Catholic services.
The common denominator is something Jesus said to his disciples at the Last Supper: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
By Catholic belief, that is literally true when a priest celebrates Mass. His words transform wine and bread into Jesus’ flesh and blood. Protestants think of their services as symbolical representing Jesus’ prophecy.
Between the two, the words used are more critical to the Catholic view of its services. “The words of the Mass are magic,” Andre Mendoza said to a recent Latin 1 class at St. John Cantius.
The Tribune heard a corollary proposition in 1975. A Catholic woman said: “All the mysticism (that) sends goose bumps up and down you” had gone out of the Mass in English.
Currently Chapello explains to his Latin students at St. John Cantius that the magic of the Latin Mass is due to the nature of the language. It is magisterial, having evolved in the courts and administrative agencies of the Roman Empire. Its vowels are distinctively pronounced, like the metallic tinkling of church bells. English is peppered with diphthongs — one vowel sliding into another one, and taking the hard edge off a word.
A French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, had denounced Vatican II’s reforms as satanic. “Keep the Mass of all time!” he thundered, referring to the Latin Mass. Warned by the papacy that he was fostering a schism, Lefebvre was excommunicated in 1988. While visiting Chicago three years earlier, he told the Tribune that the vernacular Mass was a “heresy.”
Who would have thought Lefebvre’s crusade for Latin would be taken up in Woodlawn? An impoverished neighborhood, it was losing its Catholic heritage. It had been populated by white, working-class families and professors at the nearby University of Chicago.
Christ the King’s building was constructed in 1928 for the parish of St. Clara. As Woodlawn became a Black neighborhood, other Catholic congregations merged with St. Clara, and it was renamed St. Gelasius, in honor of an early African pope.
In 2002, the archdiocese was about to close St. Gelasius, which had been devastated by several extra-alarm fires. But preservationists got it designated a Chicago landmark and Cardinal Francis George asked the institute to renovate the church, which later became Christ the King. Some $5 million had been subscribed by alums and Chicago history buffs for the renovation.
That put the institute downwind of the Vatican, where breezes were shifting. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI, a conservative, relaxed some of the restrictions on the Latin Mass. The Tribune reported in 1985 that a Gallup Poll found that 53% of Catholics would attend a Latin Mass if one were available.
“The Mass was watered down to suit Protestants,” said the Rev. Richard William Richardson, who represented Lefebvre’s dissident movement in the United States. “It was similar to taking the dynamite out of a hand grenade.”
But in 2021, Pope Francis revoked Benedict’s decree, and Cupich followed suit, ordering all parishes to use the vernacular on the first Sunday of each month, and major holidays.
Instead, the canons of Christ the King celebrated a final Mass on July 31, 2021. Then Matthew Talarico, the rector, led a procession of congregants around the block where the church sits. When they passed by First Congregational Church, Black’s flock joined them.
The group walked east on 64th Street, south on Kimbark Avenue, west on 65th Street and north on Woodlawn Avenue back to 64th. For perhaps a half-hour, they symbolically resuscitated the church’s unity before Luther’s followers went one way, and the pope’s followers went the other.
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