Cathedral finds enthusiastic audience for Latin service
By John Quinlan, Journal staff writer | Posted: Sunday, January 20, 2008
Jim Rehal, left, and Dominic Loutsch help the Rev. Al McCoy as he leads the Latin Mass at the Cathedral of the Epiphany. (Staff photo by Jim Lee)
"In nomine Patris et Filii
et Spiritu Sancti. Amen."
The words are spoken by the Rev. Al McCoy at the start of the weekly Latin Mass every Sunday at 7:30 a.m. at the Cathedral of the Epiphany in Sioux City. About 90 Catholic worshipers gathered last week to hear these words and many more recited in Latin as they were 50 years ago, 100 years ago, even 1,500 years ago.
The celebrants begin arriving about 7 a.m., but most arrive within 5 to 10 minutes of the starting time, as is common at most Catholic Masses, McCoy noted.
The grandly restored church with its German Gothic design looks as if it could have been the home of the Latin Mass for hundreds of years.
There were a few young people scattered among the celebrants. Too young to have witnessed the Latin, or Tridentine, Mass in its glory days before the Second Vatican Council replaced it with the Novus Ordo, which is the Ordinary form of the Mass told in the vernacular of the people, soon after the council ended in 1965.
McCoy, 79. and most of the congregation members are of an age to recall the Mass in those days before English replaced Latin.
Many, such as Jim Rehal, 69, of Sioux City were "altar boys" in the 1940s or 1950s. And they gladly welcomed its return to Sioux City in 1994. Rehal, who has been an altar boy -- they're now called servers -- nearly every week since the Latin Mass returned, recalls the date clearly.
"I petitioned the bishop back in 1993 and I worked to get the petition signed around the Sioux City diocese," he said. "Got hundreds of them and got the Mass approved back in the early spring of 1994. And we started the first Mass July 10, 1994."
Before that, Rehal was a regular visitor at a church in Omaha that had a Latin Mass.
The Latin Mass was allowed to return under limited circumstances, including a bishop's approval, by Pope John Paul II in a motu proprio issued in 1982, and reaffirmed in 1988. A motu proprio is basically an executive order.
Last July, Pope Benedict XVI issued a motu proprio authorizing a wider use of the old Latin Mass, emphasizing that the current Mass, which was approved in 1970, would remain the standard one and that he did not expect any widespread return to the old rite. Thus far, he has been proven correct.
No new requests
David Lopez, chancellor of the Diocese of Sioux City, said he knows of no other requests in the Diocese for the Tridentine Mass which, he noted, is officially known as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. So said Pope Benedict, simply emphasizing that this rite is not the "normal" one.
McCoy agreed that the Mass attendance hasn't grown since the Pope's last message but remains steady at more than 85 people per week. He also noted that it is impossible to even find a later Latin Mass time at the Cathedral which might make it easier for curious Catholics to experience the Latin rite, what with the English, Spanish and Vietnamese Masses all vying for a time slot there.
Mary Helen McElroy, 78, who is the organist and cantor for the Latin High Mass -- which is held the second and fourth Sunday of each month, said attendance has grown significantly over the years. "It's pretty much always over 100," she said. "I can tell by how long it takes to do that communion hymn.
"And Father McCoy maintains that the only reason they have a crowd is because they want a short Mass and they want to get out of there in a hurry," she said, a nod to the priest's good humor and comfort with the Mass.
McCoy knows his Latin well. The readings zip along. Last Sunday's Mass clocked in at just over 30 minutes, about half as long as the usual Sunday Mass. "After so long, people don't listen to you," said McCoy, who is famous for his brief sermons.
Today, they are called sermons. Back in "the old days" when Latin ruled, they were sermons.
Re-learning Latin, McCoy noted, was akin to getting back on a bicycle. "There's a few of us old fogeys around that can still do it," he said, noting that when he is not available the Revs. Ray Weiling and Hieu Nguyen have filled in ably. When the bishop asked him to volunteer for the job, McCoy was happy to do so -- at first just twice a month, now weekly.
For a while, during renovation of the Cathedral, the Mass was held at 3 p.m. "And that was the hardest because people wouldn't remember it," McElroy said.
But those who have found the now-regular 7:30 Latin Mass are thrilled.
Loving the 'solemnity'
"I love the Mass, the very ritual," Rehal said. "I love the solemnity of it and, of course, I understand and love Latin, too. That's the official language of the Roman Catholic Church."
Returning as a server was a bonus and a "privilege," Rehal said. "I love serving the Latin Mass. I feel such a closeness to God, serving or attending Latin Mass," he said. Rehal, who served alone the first eight years, also trained the three other servers working the Mass with him last Sunday, all of them young enough to be his grandchildren.
Ten-year-old Dominic Loutsch, a student at Remsen St. Mary's, has been a Latin Mass server for about a month, following in the footsteps of his older brothers. He said it didn't take him long to learn the requisite Latin.
His sister, Jessica Loutsch, 15, said her family has been attending the Mass for a few years. "It's just the right Mass to go to and it's the traditional way," she said. "I think it's just more prayerful. It makes me feel closer to God. Stuff like that."
Louise Wilmes, 65, of Sioux City said she likes the reverence of the Mass and finds it kind of nostalgic.
"We grew up with this Mass and we really like it," she said. "My husband was an altar server when he was young, and I think the prayers in this rite are very beautiful, too. I just think it's a very reverent way to praise the Lord."
Bill Rush, 71, of Sioux City has been attending the Latin Mass almost since its return to the Cathedral.
"I remember when all we had was the Latin Mass," Rush said. "And this, to me any more, is the Mass. It has the piety and reserve that I love. The regular Novus Ordo Mass that they use today is a very valid Mass, but it's just not the same thing to me as what this is. I love this."
Rush even loves the early hour. "After you come to Mass, you've got all day to do ... even if you do nothing, you've got all day to do it," he said. "And there are a lot more young people coming in, showing up, which is our future."
One of those young people is Matt Hittle of Sioux City, a 21-year-old student at the University of South Dakota.
"I started coming when I was a junior in high school, just to check it out," he said. "And I immediately fell in love with the reverence and, I guess, the quiet contemplation that this Mass offers as compared to the normal Catholic Mass -- the new Mass."
So when he's in town, he doesn't miss the Latin Mass.
Not just the Latin
It isn't just the Latin that makes the Mass different. There's the pomp and circumstance. Rehal cited the Gregorian chants and music, the extensive use of bells by the servers, as well as more singing and genuflecting. Also, the celebrant faces the altar -- and not the people as is customary with the new Mass.
Lopez explained that the priest isn't turning his back to the congregation. "It's that the priest and the people face the same direction," he said. "They face together the direction from which the Christ is going to return to the world in glory. But if they're facing together, obviously he is in front. The way it was done in 1963 is the way it is done for that Mass."
Kathy Rehal, Jim's wife, said it's a language that never changes. "That's what's awesome about this Mass," she said. "And it's so peaceful and sacred and holy. We just really love it. I'm not against the Novus Ordo at all. I'm just saying that this is our traditional language of the church.
"The Holy Father has always wanted it. It never was supposed to be taken out of the Mass. Even when the Mass changed, Vatican II, they were always supposed to keep the Latin in the Mass. Always. That's why it's being allowed now. And lots of people want it."
The wonderful thing about it is that Catholics have to right to go to the Latin Mass, but it isn't the only rite available, Jim Rehal said. "We also go to the Novus Ordo on the holy days and other week days when we can," he said. "So we appreciate that and the fact that we have the Eucharist present at all Masses."
He then mentioned the other rites of the Catholic Church, in addition to the Novus Ordo and the Tridentine, such as the Eastern rite, the Melkite rite and the Maronite rite.
"I can go on and on," he said.
But he didn't.
Not after his wife reminded him: "We have the right to remain silent."
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. An English Amen.
Latin: Lost in translation
Latin was not supposed to disappear from the Roman Catholic Mass with Vatican II, said David Lopez, chancellor of the Diocese of Sioux CIty. But the changes instituted were so rapid, the old language could not survive. Though Latin was no longer the language of the people in the 1960s, or even the 1860s, and few people in America could understand it, it will always be the official language of the church, he said.
The Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965 laid out an agenda for what it would like to see in the liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church, and that agenda is in the document, Sacrosanctum Concilium, which is one of the four most important documents the council produced, said David Lopez, chancellor of the Diocese of Sioux City.
It is a document that called for the continuation of Latin in at least part of the new Mass after the council concluded its work.
"It's a very clear and balanced sort of thing," he said. "A Catholic Mass has two parts. There's one part that doesn't ever change. That's called the Ordinary of the Mass because it's always the same. Then there's another part that changes from day to day or week to week depending on where you are in the calendar -- the readings from the Old Testament and New Testament, the Gospel, the collect of the day, the particular prayers for that day, the comments or the points in the Mass, the prayers of the faithful. It changes from Mass to Mass. That's called the Particular.
"So the parts that don't ever change, basically the idea was that we should still have those parts in Latin because our music is in Latin, the music that we've used for hundreds of years."
But it didn't happen. Somehow, Latin got lost in the translation.
Earlier in the 20th century, he explained, the Church in the United States had gotten permission to do parts of the Mass in English. Many hymns had been in English decades before the Second Vatican Council. Permission was granted because knowledge of Latin in America had never been as great as that knowledge in Europe. Latin as a second language never made it in the U.S. So when the new ideas from Sacrosanctum Concilium were being laid out, English ended up replacing Latin across the board, This made eliminating Latin altogether a little easier.
The Council ended in 1965. The first missal in 1967 was a Latin missal. But by 1971, the first translations had been completed, and English was in the mix.
"There was this rapid implementation between '67 and '71 where bits and pieces were coming down," Lopez said. "So by 1971, you had a full thing in place. Those changes took place really fast. You had three generations in the Church, assuming there's grandparents, parents and children, who for their whole lives had had everything done according to the old way of doing things. And in four years, everything changes.
"The Mass is reorganized. Things that used to be over here are over here. We've got three readings instead of two. It's English instead of Latin. We've moved the altar. We've changed the decorations. We've done everything differently. Very, very quickly."
The Mass had undergone change, a streamlining of sorts, over the centuries, but nothing this big, nothing this all-encompassing, Lopez said.
Right from the beginning, there was a group of people who said the Church was going too fast with its changes and urged it to slow down. "Some of them said, 'We don't want to do it this way for theological reasons,' Some of them said 'We don't want to do it this way just because it's too fast and we need to make more time,'" he said.
Some members of that first group, led by Bishop Marcel Lefebvre of France, broke away from the Church because they refused to accept the church's authority. Eventually the Lefebvrists were excommunicated.
Many in the second group accepted the authority of the documents but still didn't see the need to change the liturgy, Lopez said. And eventually they got permission to use the old liturgy that was in place at the beginning of Vatican II. In the meantime, the Latin Mass had been revised a bit due to complaints from Jews that portions of the Mass were anti-semitic.
"There was some wording in just a couple of the prayers for a couple of the days, Good Friday being a particularly significant sort of day for the relationship between Christians and Jews," he said. "But there were prayers drawn from some of the sources of the Christian tradition which were composed at the moment of some of the worst relationship between Christianity and Judaism. So naturally they don't say very complimentary things about the Jews."
That ongoing tension within Christianity over how to deal with Judaism ebbed and waned over the centuries. But in the wake of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe, the church had to make some changes "to make sure that what we say can't possibly be misinterpreted as having anything to do with this over there," he said.
The Latin Mass today incorporates all of those changes.
et Spiritu Sancti. Amen."
The words are spoken by the Rev. Al McCoy at the start of the weekly Latin Mass every Sunday at 7:30 a.m. at the Cathedral of the Epiphany in Sioux City. About 90 Catholic worshipers gathered last week to hear these words and many more recited in Latin as they were 50 years ago, 100 years ago, even 1,500 years ago.
The celebrants begin arriving about 7 a.m., but most arrive within 5 to 10 minutes of the starting time, as is common at most Catholic Masses, McCoy noted.
The grandly restored church with its German Gothic design looks as if it could have been the home of the Latin Mass for hundreds of years.
There were a few young people scattered among the celebrants. Too young to have witnessed the Latin, or Tridentine, Mass in its glory days before the Second Vatican Council replaced it with the Novus Ordo, which is the Ordinary form of the Mass told in the vernacular of the people, soon after the council ended in 1965.
McCoy, 79. and most of the congregation members are of an age to recall the Mass in those days before English replaced Latin.
Many, such as Jim Rehal, 69, of Sioux City were "altar boys" in the 1940s or 1950s. And they gladly welcomed its return to Sioux City in 1994. Rehal, who has been an altar boy -- they're now called servers -- nearly every week since the Latin Mass returned, recalls the date clearly.
"I petitioned the bishop back in 1993 and I worked to get the petition signed around the Sioux City diocese," he said. "Got hundreds of them and got the Mass approved back in the early spring of 1994. And we started the first Mass July 10, 1994."
Before that, Rehal was a regular visitor at a church in Omaha that had a Latin Mass.
The Latin Mass was allowed to return under limited circumstances, including a bishop's approval, by Pope John Paul II in a motu proprio issued in 1982, and reaffirmed in 1988. A motu proprio is basically an executive order.
Last July, Pope Benedict XVI issued a motu proprio authorizing a wider use of the old Latin Mass, emphasizing that the current Mass, which was approved in 1970, would remain the standard one and that he did not expect any widespread return to the old rite. Thus far, he has been proven correct.
No new requests
David Lopez, chancellor of the Diocese of Sioux City, said he knows of no other requests in the Diocese for the Tridentine Mass which, he noted, is officially known as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. So said Pope Benedict, simply emphasizing that this rite is not the "normal" one.
McCoy agreed that the Mass attendance hasn't grown since the Pope's last message but remains steady at more than 85 people per week. He also noted that it is impossible to even find a later Latin Mass time at the Cathedral which might make it easier for curious Catholics to experience the Latin rite, what with the English, Spanish and Vietnamese Masses all vying for a time slot there.
Mary Helen McElroy, 78, who is the organist and cantor for the Latin High Mass -- which is held the second and fourth Sunday of each month, said attendance has grown significantly over the years. "It's pretty much always over 100," she said. "I can tell by how long it takes to do that communion hymn.
"And Father McCoy maintains that the only reason they have a crowd is because they want a short Mass and they want to get out of there in a hurry," she said, a nod to the priest's good humor and comfort with the Mass.
McCoy knows his Latin well. The readings zip along. Last Sunday's Mass clocked in at just over 30 minutes, about half as long as the usual Sunday Mass. "After so long, people don't listen to you," said McCoy, who is famous for his brief sermons.
Today, they are called sermons. Back in "the old days" when Latin ruled, they were sermons.
Re-learning Latin, McCoy noted, was akin to getting back on a bicycle. "There's a few of us old fogeys around that can still do it," he said, noting that when he is not available the Revs. Ray Weiling and Hieu Nguyen have filled in ably. When the bishop asked him to volunteer for the job, McCoy was happy to do so -- at first just twice a month, now weekly.
For a while, during renovation of the Cathedral, the Mass was held at 3 p.m. "And that was the hardest because people wouldn't remember it," McElroy said.
But those who have found the now-regular 7:30 Latin Mass are thrilled.
Loving the 'solemnity'
"I love the Mass, the very ritual," Rehal said. "I love the solemnity of it and, of course, I understand and love Latin, too. That's the official language of the Roman Catholic Church."
Returning as a server was a bonus and a "privilege," Rehal said. "I love serving the Latin Mass. I feel such a closeness to God, serving or attending Latin Mass," he said. Rehal, who served alone the first eight years, also trained the three other servers working the Mass with him last Sunday, all of them young enough to be his grandchildren.
Ten-year-old Dominic Loutsch, a student at Remsen St. Mary's, has been a Latin Mass server for about a month, following in the footsteps of his older brothers. He said it didn't take him long to learn the requisite Latin.
His sister, Jessica Loutsch, 15, said her family has been attending the Mass for a few years. "It's just the right Mass to go to and it's the traditional way," she said. "I think it's just more prayerful. It makes me feel closer to God. Stuff like that."
Louise Wilmes, 65, of Sioux City said she likes the reverence of the Mass and finds it kind of nostalgic.
"We grew up with this Mass and we really like it," she said. "My husband was an altar server when he was young, and I think the prayers in this rite are very beautiful, too. I just think it's a very reverent way to praise the Lord."
Bill Rush, 71, of Sioux City has been attending the Latin Mass almost since its return to the Cathedral.
"I remember when all we had was the Latin Mass," Rush said. "And this, to me any more, is the Mass. It has the piety and reserve that I love. The regular Novus Ordo Mass that they use today is a very valid Mass, but it's just not the same thing to me as what this is. I love this."
Rush even loves the early hour. "After you come to Mass, you've got all day to do ... even if you do nothing, you've got all day to do it," he said. "And there are a lot more young people coming in, showing up, which is our future."
One of those young people is Matt Hittle of Sioux City, a 21-year-old student at the University of South Dakota.
"I started coming when I was a junior in high school, just to check it out," he said. "And I immediately fell in love with the reverence and, I guess, the quiet contemplation that this Mass offers as compared to the normal Catholic Mass -- the new Mass."
So when he's in town, he doesn't miss the Latin Mass.
Not just the Latin
It isn't just the Latin that makes the Mass different. There's the pomp and circumstance. Rehal cited the Gregorian chants and music, the extensive use of bells by the servers, as well as more singing and genuflecting. Also, the celebrant faces the altar -- and not the people as is customary with the new Mass.
Lopez explained that the priest isn't turning his back to the congregation. "It's that the priest and the people face the same direction," he said. "They face together the direction from which the Christ is going to return to the world in glory. But if they're facing together, obviously he is in front. The way it was done in 1963 is the way it is done for that Mass."
Kathy Rehal, Jim's wife, said it's a language that never changes. "That's what's awesome about this Mass," she said. "And it's so peaceful and sacred and holy. We just really love it. I'm not against the Novus Ordo at all. I'm just saying that this is our traditional language of the church.
"The Holy Father has always wanted it. It never was supposed to be taken out of the Mass. Even when the Mass changed, Vatican II, they were always supposed to keep the Latin in the Mass. Always. That's why it's being allowed now. And lots of people want it."
The wonderful thing about it is that Catholics have to right to go to the Latin Mass, but it isn't the only rite available, Jim Rehal said. "We also go to the Novus Ordo on the holy days and other week days when we can," he said. "So we appreciate that and the fact that we have the Eucharist present at all Masses."
He then mentioned the other rites of the Catholic Church, in addition to the Novus Ordo and the Tridentine, such as the Eastern rite, the Melkite rite and the Maronite rite.
"I can go on and on," he said.
But he didn't.
Not after his wife reminded him: "We have the right to remain silent."
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. An English Amen.
Latin: Lost in translation
Latin was not supposed to disappear from the Roman Catholic Mass with Vatican II, said David Lopez, chancellor of the Diocese of Sioux CIty. But the changes instituted were so rapid, the old language could not survive. Though Latin was no longer the language of the people in the 1960s, or even the 1860s, and few people in America could understand it, it will always be the official language of the church, he said.
The Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965 laid out an agenda for what it would like to see in the liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church, and that agenda is in the document, Sacrosanctum Concilium, which is one of the four most important documents the council produced, said David Lopez, chancellor of the Diocese of Sioux City.
It is a document that called for the continuation of Latin in at least part of the new Mass after the council concluded its work.
"It's a very clear and balanced sort of thing," he said. "A Catholic Mass has two parts. There's one part that doesn't ever change. That's called the Ordinary of the Mass because it's always the same. Then there's another part that changes from day to day or week to week depending on where you are in the calendar -- the readings from the Old Testament and New Testament, the Gospel, the collect of the day, the particular prayers for that day, the comments or the points in the Mass, the prayers of the faithful. It changes from Mass to Mass. That's called the Particular.
"So the parts that don't ever change, basically the idea was that we should still have those parts in Latin because our music is in Latin, the music that we've used for hundreds of years."
But it didn't happen. Somehow, Latin got lost in the translation.
Earlier in the 20th century, he explained, the Church in the United States had gotten permission to do parts of the Mass in English. Many hymns had been in English decades before the Second Vatican Council. Permission was granted because knowledge of Latin in America had never been as great as that knowledge in Europe. Latin as a second language never made it in the U.S. So when the new ideas from Sacrosanctum Concilium were being laid out, English ended up replacing Latin across the board, This made eliminating Latin altogether a little easier.
The Council ended in 1965. The first missal in 1967 was a Latin missal. But by 1971, the first translations had been completed, and English was in the mix.
"There was this rapid implementation between '67 and '71 where bits and pieces were coming down," Lopez said. "So by 1971, you had a full thing in place. Those changes took place really fast. You had three generations in the Church, assuming there's grandparents, parents and children, who for their whole lives had had everything done according to the old way of doing things. And in four years, everything changes.
"The Mass is reorganized. Things that used to be over here are over here. We've got three readings instead of two. It's English instead of Latin. We've moved the altar. We've changed the decorations. We've done everything differently. Very, very quickly."
The Mass had undergone change, a streamlining of sorts, over the centuries, but nothing this big, nothing this all-encompassing, Lopez said.
Right from the beginning, there was a group of people who said the Church was going too fast with its changes and urged it to slow down. "Some of them said, 'We don't want to do it this way for theological reasons,' Some of them said 'We don't want to do it this way just because it's too fast and we need to make more time,'" he said.
Some members of that first group, led by Bishop Marcel Lefebvre of France, broke away from the Church because they refused to accept the church's authority. Eventually the Lefebvrists were excommunicated.
Many in the second group accepted the authority of the documents but still didn't see the need to change the liturgy, Lopez said. And eventually they got permission to use the old liturgy that was in place at the beginning of Vatican II. In the meantime, the Latin Mass had been revised a bit due to complaints from Jews that portions of the Mass were anti-semitic.
"There was some wording in just a couple of the prayers for a couple of the days, Good Friday being a particularly significant sort of day for the relationship between Christians and Jews," he said. "But there were prayers drawn from some of the sources of the Christian tradition which were composed at the moment of some of the worst relationship between Christianity and Judaism. So naturally they don't say very complimentary things about the Jews."
That ongoing tension within Christianity over how to deal with Judaism ebbed and waned over the centuries. But in the wake of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe, the church had to make some changes "to make sure that what we say can't possibly be misinterpreted as having anything to do with this over there," he said.
The Latin Mass today incorporates all of those changes.
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Sad wrote on Jun 13, 2009 7:05 PM:
ray wrote on Jan 24, 2008 6:59 PM:
mark0 wrote on Jan 24, 2008 6:51 PM:
Chuck Leipold wrote on Jan 22, 2008 9:50 PM:
I must travel 155 miles over two mountain ranges in order to attend God's most perfect gift to mankind, the Traditional Latin Mass. It is absolutely worth the effort and it is my sincere hope that sometime, in the not to distant future, the Church will come to it's senses and restore the Mass of all time to it's proper place. "
Scott wrote on Jan 22, 2008 7:32 PM:
We should never stop praying for the conversion fo the Jews as Christ commanded us to do this. However, they need not pray as they currently do for us "Oh God thank you for not making me a Gentile."
Who is being uncharitable now? "