Sermon at a Latin Mass

Extract

Profert de thesauro suo nova et vetera: ‘he bringeth from his treasure new things and old’. (Matt. XIII 52).

We have come together tonight, not only from different Christian traditions, but from different areas of thought in our own Church. We have come together to celebrate Mass, the holy mysteries in which, as Our Lord commanded, we shew forth his death and rejoice in him, our risen Saviour. But we have come together, for all our differences, in another way too. We have assembled here to celebrate Mass in a tongue that links us with a remote past older than Christianity itself, and in a form that was for centuries a distinguishing mark of the ancient church of the West. Our ceremony tonight would have been recognised at once by Pascal, by Thomas More, by Cuthbert Tunstall; and, with almost equal ease, by Bede, by Cuthbert, by Gregory. Yet in order that you should join in and recognise the ceremony yourselves, you have needed to assemble from many parts to this place—almost as a new gens lucifuga in its catacomb. It is this paradox that has prompted the reflexions I offer you.

Liturgy—the leitourgia, the public work of worship—bears on itself the marks of time and of ages that are past. Examples are easily found. Just as the outstretched hands of the priest recall the frescos depicting the earliest Christians, so his hands folded in prayer are reminiscent of a later age, and of the medieval gesture of homage. In action and posture, in phrase and word, in the very artefacts of worship, the course of our history, as Christians and as men, has left its mark.