Thank God for Vatican II

Since coming to Oxford, I’ve been attending weekly mass in Latin at a church called the Oratory, run by a religious order not common in the United States (the name escapes me; the professor with whom I’ve been going could tell you all about it). The church is large and elegant, adorned with rich paintings and ancient statues. The pews are plain wood, smoothed by thousands of worshippers. The ceiling arches high above the sanctuary until it comes to the altar, when it becomes a painted dome.
Mass begins with a small herd of priests and acolytes processing from the right side of altar to the end of the church, up the centre aisle, all the way back up to the altar. All the while, we sing a hymn in English, generally a plodding, tedious sort of thing, accompanied by an organ high at the back of the church.
The priest begins the service singing, a capella, in a lovely, rich voice, Latin words ringing out over the church. We, the congregation, answer, also singing, the Latin words from the small purple Order of the Mass booklet. I have not been attending the services long enough to predict which melody is to be used for each response—and haven’t the breath or the voice to sing well in any case—so I follow along more softly.
Through the service, I follow along in the purple booklet, learning each week how to better distinguish the individual Latin words, and to identify them with the printed text, which is sometimes confusing and requires quick darting from page to page at some parts of the service. There are very few parts of the mass where it matters, though—besides short responses, the congregation speaks only the Confiteor, and sings the Credo and the Pater Noster. The rest is left to the choir.
The choir, though, is magnificent. Voices—bass, baritone, tenor, alto, soprano, and all the ones in between that I don’t know names for mingle, separate, stand out alone, then come back together, sweet and magical and overpowering. The Gloria, the Agnus Dei, and the Sanctus are the only hymns to which the congregation has words, and the harmonies make it difficult to follow anyway. It is the music, and not the language within it, that has the effect. Listening to the priest speaking or singing alone in Latin has a similar effect. I know the English words, and can sometimes pick out cognates. The oddest part is the Litany of the Saints, each familiar name given a Latin twist—Felicitate for Felicity, Agnete for Agnes, Matthia for Matthew, Barnaba for Barnabas.
But at the same time, I feel separate from all the events, even with my little purple book. As beautiful as it all is, it feels as foreign as though I’d stumbled into a room full of people discussing nuclear physics.
Fortunately, the homily is done in English. Unfortunately, the Greek-speaking, disgustingly well-read, wittily erudite priest at my own lowly, American, English-speaking parish has rather spoiled me for other, less educated priests. I find the man standing in a real pulpit at the top of a spiral stair something of an anticlimax. Still, I’ve managed to glean some amusement—Sunday two weeks ago, I was told that, “God is like a parent who enjoys watching his children play outside, but knows they must come inside to have their tea.” I missed the spiritual significance of this (if ever it had any) in laughing at how utterly British that sentence was. I should like to see even God persuade American children drink tea.
Despite all the formality and the majesty of the service, I have never seen a more disorganized taking of communion. Instead of rising row by row and filing to the front of the church in neat lines, the entire congregation rises en masse and dives into the centre aisle as though it were a train about to leave. People must manoeuvre to get a spot in which to move forward to the communion rail, and really, it seems a bit of a miracle that anybody ever gets sorted out and back in their seats.
Mass is ended first with announcements—some of them invitations to the church’s parish centre for alcoholic beverages—then with a plodding, tedious hymn in English. As often happens with songs with words I can understand, they seem either to make little sense, or far too much, as in the hymn in which Jesus is a vampire: “Hail, Jesus, hail! Who for my sake / Sweet blood from Mary’s veins didst take.”
All in all, it is an enjoyable experience, but one I am glad will not be repeated every week—I can come back to English (and a little ancient Greek) and a priest with an IQ containing more digits than there are persons in the trinity.