More Latin

Everyone was all abuzz this morning at Mass about the pope's recent announcement loosening the restrictions on parish use of the traditional pre-Vatican II Tridentine Mass. The Tridentine Mass is the old Latin rite, and for the past thirty years, parishes have had to have specific permission from their bishops to use it, and that permission has been scant. Under the new rules, the pastor of a parish can decide to use the Tridentine service to meet the pastoral needs of his parish. So, given the fact that nearly two generations of Catholics haven't used the Latin rite, I really don't expect any parish to go 100% Tridentine, or even for every parish to offer a Latin Mass. But, it'll be nice to hear the Latin again.

On the way out after Mass, I asked the celebrant when he was going to start using the Latin, and he and the seminarian standing with him said maybe after September 14....apparently all of the priests have to go to school to get trained on how to do the services and how to pronounce the Latin correctly! LOL

Anyway, there were a lot of people in Mass this morning, a bit of a surprise for a July Sunday.

The Mass setting for today was basically the Proulx A Community Mass with the Gloria from Hurd's New Plainsong Mass, traditional plainsong for the Kyrie, Gospel alleluia, and Exaudi Christe; Isele's Holy Cross Mass for the Agnus Dei, and Gouzes' Non sum dignus.

Hymns were Crucifer for the processional, Hyfrdol (Those who love and those who labor) for the offertory, and Abbot's Leigh for the recessional. The choir did a responsorial communion hymn with Christopher Willcock's "Taste and see" antiphon.

The choir did a surprisingly nice job singing Vaughn-Williams' "O How Amiable" as a post-communion motet. I wasn't expecting much, since the summer schola is only a quartet, but this anthem sounded pretty good. The only thing I noticed was they cut the St. Anne (O God our help in ages past) verse at the end, but that was probably to shorten the piece, as the priest had already sat down and everyone was waiting. This is why back when I was cantoring, I always did the anthem first and then the communion hymn, since I didn't mind cutting the hymn if we didn't need that much filler music.