Starting a new series: Curmudgeon presumes to instruct Holy Mother Church on the proper form of the Mass

I'm not the Pope, although Pope Leo XIV is a kid from the Chicago area about my age. And a White Sox fan, just like me. We both completed our undergraduate degrees in 1977... but the similarities end there.... The Pope completed his math degree... I foundered on the shores of probability and statistics. The Pope didn't get kicked out of Altar Boys; I did. One reason -- almost certainly the primary reason -- was that I was no way going to get up for a week of 6:00 a.m. Masses... or 6:30... whatever. But, also, we both were supposed to learn some prayers in Latin in those days. No one told me that I could mumble my way through it. From what I've read, the future Leo XIV didn't need to mumble; he learned the Latin.

Anyway, bringing up Latin here is not random. It's actually foreshadowing. But, first, I have to get a couple of things out of the way for any non-Catholics who may stumble upon this page.

The picture here is Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper. That's where Jesus broke bread and gave it to his disciples, telling them, "This is my body." When supper was ended, He took a cup of wine -- a chalice, we say -- and gave that to his disciples also, saying, "This is my blood." He also said, "Do this" -- reenact this distribution of bread and wine -- "in remembrance of me."

Catholics believe that, when the priest consecrates the bread and wine at Mass, reenacting that Last Supper, Jesus is actually present in the bread and wine: It is His body. It is His blood. Smart people call this the Real Presence. I don't pretend to know how this works, and I can't prove to you by logic or argument that this truly happens, but I accept it. I acknowledge it. I don't have to understand it in order to believe it.

So that's one thing. The other thing you have to understand about Catholics is Apostolic Succession. We believe Jesus gave his Apostles the power to transform ordinary bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus; moreover, we believe that Jesus gave his Apostles the ability to confer this transformative power on others. Every priest ever ordained in the Catholic Church has received this miraculous ability because the bishop who ordained him received that ability from a bishop who obtained that ability from a bishop who obtained that ability... over and over again... down the centuries... but ultimately from one of the Apostles themselves.

Note that the priest's ability to perform this miracle does not depend on him being a good person. Or on the good character of the bishop who ordained him. No one -- not even my contemporary, the Pope -- will dispute that there have been some awful priests. And bishops. And a few popes, too. See, e.g., the Borgias. But, if we have to know the content of a man's heart, or the cleanliness of his conscience, before we can determine if the sacraments he performed were valid, we'd have chaos. You'd never know whether you'd been properly baptized. Was the priest even properly baptized? And, if the bishop who ordained him was a stinker, was the ordination valid? The whole chain of Apostolic Succession would collapse, irrevocably and irretrievably broken.

No, a priest who skims the collection, or takes a mistress, or even one who diddles with children, is still a priest (unless and until he is laicized -- kicked out of the priesthood). Ordination does not make a man better. If he was a jerk before ordination, he will likely still be a jerk after -- he may change after ordination -- I hope we can all improve as long as we are living -- but the improvement is probably not caused by ordination. Maybe it helped -- but there's no guarantee. Did you know that, in the Byzantine Empire, a general defeated in battle might not only lose his job, he might be ordained a priest and banished to a monastery? The sacraments this ex-general might administer, following this not-entirely-voluntary ordination, would be just as valid as those adminstered by a priest who (like Leo) felt the call to service from a very young age.

So any priest -- every priest -- in the Apostolic Succession can transform ordinary bread and wine into the actual Body and Blood of Jesus. He can bring about the Real Presence.

That, in turn, means that the lowliest priest in the poorest church in the most poverty-stricken diocese can summon the Real Presence of Jesus to the altar. Jesus is there just the same as he is in the bread and wine consecrated by the Pope, assisted by a gaggle of cardinals, in the splendor of St. Peter's in Rome. If you accept the Real Presence, then you must also accept that Jesus is not more present in a Mass at the Vatican than He is in a Mass offered in a country church in the middle of nowhere.

Now... and I think I am on very solid ground to this point... from here I presume to instruct the Church on a matter of seemingly never-ending controversy: The form of the Mass.

The Church has, down the centuries, approved many different forms of Mass -- all of them legitimate then -- sufficient to permit the priest officiating at that Mass to transform bread and wine into the Real Presence. If the form of Mass was legitimate then, even though the Church promotes and prescribes a different form now, it is legitimate still. If it is no longer legitimate, then it never was. However, the Mass in the vernacular, which the Church has made the norm since the mid-1960s, following Vatican II, is legitimate, too. How can we be sure? Because the authorities, who are authorities because of and through the Apostolic Succession, say it is legitimate.

The overwhelming consensus among the Catholic hierarchy is that the modern Mass -- the Novus Ordo -- is the form of Mass that all the Catholic faithful should attend. Some religious authorities go so far as to want to suppress the once-familiar Latin Mass -- the Traditional Latin Mass, or TLM -- despite the fact that the TLM is increasingly popular among younger Catholics. Pope Francis was clearly in sympathy with these views. A prominent Jesuit recently wrote that he "hates" the TLM.

I say this is all irrelevant and immaterial. It doesn't matter if the priest faces the congregation or the high altar only. It does not matter if the priest speaks in the language of the congregation or in Latin. The minor differences in the structure of the TLM and Novus Ordo are of no moment. Nor does it matter if the congregation sings. (Personally, I think congregational singing is a relatively harmless, but obviously Lutheran, innovation: Pope Leo, having grown up in the Chicago Archdiocese at the same time I did, can surely recall that most of the hymns in the missalettes, when these started to be published in the 1960s, were indeed written by Martin Luther. Of course, Luther was an Augustinian before he broke from the Church... but I digress.)

High churchmen have a preference for a the modern form of Mass. Some Catholics prefer a different form. It is still a matter of preference -- and, if the Pope feels closer to God when the Novus Ordo is said, that's great. Others among the faithful feel God speaks to them more clearly in the TLM. It's all window dressing -- and arguing over it detracts from the miracle that is at the core of any legitimate Mass. So my advice to Holy Mother Church, offered sincerely, is simply this: Let the faithful find God in any form of the Mass that they can. But always teach this: It is the miracle of the Eucharist that is important, not the orientation of the priest, his language, or the singing in the pews, or the incense, or any of the other myriad of details which you should stop fighting about. Immediately. Let both forms of Mass be offered freely.