The Rite of Mass

On 7th March the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) carried a piece by the celebrated German author, Martin Mosebach, among several others on the same subject. Sadly, the original does not appear to be on the internet, but here is a translation, kindly provided in this case, by a Cathcon reader. Please pray for the donor!

The text.

The question regarding the significance of the old Latin Rite of Mass may be considered under two main aspects. The first is of importance for Christians and especially for Catholics, the second may carry weight for non-Christians. Christians must ask themselves if the rites - the old Latin one, as well as the various Orthodox and Oriental rites - are an essential or merely an accidental part of their religion. Does one need the rite in order to be a Christian?

The Orthodox and - until recently - Catholics have always held this conviction: Yes, there is a need for a rite. The core of the Christian religion, the “Word becoming flesh”, is an objective event and must be commemorated in an objective, and that means in a received, rite devoid of subjective effects. This view entails a rejection of subjectivity and “inwardness” which may appear absurd or scandalous to our contemporaries, but which has stood the Christian religion in good stead through many deep ruptures in its two-thousand-year history.

There are, however, also people with only a faint link, if any, to Christianity who secretly derive consolation from the continued existence of the received rite. Our theories of history, which have as their subject unremitting and irreversible revolutions and which posit an unrelenting evolution of humanity in historically graspable epochs, are countered by the hallowing corrective of a living rite which stems from the world of antiquity but whose roots stretch back to the Old Testament of the Jews and to the Second Old Testament of Pagan religions and philosophies. Conceiving of one’s own age as being wholly new and disconnected from history is an expression of an historical totalitarianism which carries political totalitarianism in its knapsack.

The existence and practice of this age-old rite in the centre of major cities, in the basilicas and cathedrals built for its celebration, relativises the hegemony of the present with its horrors and promises of happiness, refuting the one with innumerable demises, the other with innumerable resurrections in the past. The old Latin Rite - together with the Greek Orthodox - is the red thread running through the stations of world history; the place beyond history from which history may be contemplated. And not only history: in the changing course of time the objective rite makes the immutability of God discernable to the religious, that of Man to the non-religious.
Translated from the German by Philip Savage

The then Cardinal Ratzinger,