You can read the whole interview here.
Reporter Jeremy Lott asks:
What are your thoughts on Pope Benedict expanding the use of the traditional Latin Mass?
Welborn: I think it's fascinating. It's very good. It fits right into what I understand about Benedict's thinking about liturgy and historical continuity and truth. What the motu proprio is essentially about is priests' rights. The essence of it is that any priest can celebrate this privately and so on. To me, it is about bringing things back to the way that they should be in terms of practice and what the clergy have the right to do in terms of the rite, and that's great.
It's interesting to watch the reactions to it. I think in the end it is going to be very beneficial. What it has already done since it was promulgated, and even in the year running up to it (during which it was rumored to be in preparation), has prompted all kinds of conversations about issues like reverence, what are we doing when we go to Mass, and sacrifice. It's prompting us to think about liturgical music in a different way than we have in the United States for the past 30 years, to reconsider Gregorian chant, and so on.
If part of the Pope's purpose was this cross-pollination, in which an openness about celebrating the Mass of Blessed John XXIII leads to reconsidering and reevaluating how we are doing the Novus Ordo, the Mass of Paul VI, then that is something that is very long overdue.
Last year I did a media day in the Diocese of Camden. I was talking to the communications director and the diocese had just completed a year-long self-evaluation process of looking at how things are going and what the people want and need. And the communications director, who had accompanied the bishop to all of the listening sessions, and gone over all of the evaluation forms, said that when it came to liturgy, the number one thing people said they wanted was "more Latin."
He wasn't sure that they exactly wanted more Latin. His opinion was that for them, what Latin symbolized was more reverence. They wanted their liturgies to be more solemn, more reverent. For them, Latin was a catch-all way of expressing that. I think that's true and this opening up of the celebration of the Tridentine liturgy is already prompting a lot of conversations that people wouldn't have been having 15 or 20 years ago in liturgical circles. You just weren't allowed to talk about things like chant and silence, so I think it's great.
Jeremy Lott is a contributing editor to Books & Culture and author of In Defense of Hypocrisy.
With thanks to Catholic World Report.
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