Your Excellency, let’s pause with that statement for a moment, “Our ancestors heard the Mass in Latin every Sunday but never understood it.” Because once you really think about what that implies, it’s not just historically sloppy, it’s frankly insulting to the entire spiritual inheritance of the Church. If that’s true, then the unavoidable conclusion is that for well over a thousand years, the Church was forming saints who were apparently confused, disconnected, and spiritually malnourished. And I’m sorry, but history just does not back that up at all.
Because if they “never understood,” then I guess we should pity the lay saints, right? We should feel bad for St. Dominic Savio, a teenage boy who lived heroic virtue, deep Eucharistic devotion, and radical holiness in a world where the Mass was entirely in Latin. Poor kid, apparently he had no idea what was happening at the altar. Or St. Maria Goretti, an uneducated farm girl whose grasp of sin, grace, and forgiveness puts most modern catechized Catholics to shame. She must have been spiritually disadvantaged too. And what about St. Isidore the Farmer, a literal peasant who ordered his entire life around daily Mass? Or St. Gerard Majella, a lay brother with almost no formal education. Or St. Benedict Joseph Labre, homeless, poor, itinerant, and obsessed with the Eucharist. Were all of them just standing there blankly, week after week, while somehow becoming saints by accident?
The Church has never taught that “understanding the Mass” means mentally translating every word as it’s spoken. That’s a modern, hyper-rationalist assumption that would have been completely foreign to Catholic tradition. The Mass is not a lecture. It’s not a Bible study. It’s not a commentary track. It’s a sacrifice. And sacrifices are understood through signs, gestures, repetition, silence, posture, orientation, and ritual. These things speak directly to the soul, not just the intellect. The Roman Canon wasn’t silent because people were being excluded. It was silent because what was happening was holy. The silence taught. The unchanging words taught. The priest facing God taught.
The calendar taught. The altar taught. The very fact that the language was sacred and set apart taught that something utterly different from ordinary life was taking place.
The claim completely collapses when you look at how Catholics actually lived. For centuries, ordinary laypeople knew exactly what the Mass was. They knew it was a sacrifice. They knew Christ was truly present. They knew the priest was offering the Sacrifice of Calvary in an unbloody manner. They knew heaven and earth touched at the altar. They knew when to kneel, when to be silent, when to adore. That knowledge didn’t come from instant word-for-word comprehension. It came from catechesis, culture, repetition, and immersion in a liturgical world that never changed every decade.
What’s especially ironic is that today we have everything in the vernacular, microphones, projectors, missals, commentary, and explanations, and yet belief in the Real Presence has cratered. So clearly language was never the magic solution. The real collapse came when formation collapsed, when reverence collapsed, when the sense of sacrifice collapsed. You can translate every syllable into English and still have no idea what propitiation, atonement, or sacrificial priesthood actually mean.
So when a priest, bishop, or even a cardinal says our ancestors “never understood the Mass,” what they’re really saying is that the Church failed for over a millennium. Failed to teach. Failed to sanctify. Failed to communicate the Gospel. And yet, inconveniently, the historical record is overflowing with saints, martyrs, missionaries, and heroic Christian families formed precisely by that so-called “misunderstood” Latin Mass.
Latin didn’t prevent understanding. It protected the Mass from being reduced to something casual, horizontal, and disposable. It preserved universality. It preserved doctrinal precision. It reminded Catholics everywhere, from Europe to the Philippines, that this wasn’t their liturgy to customize, but God’s sacrifice to receive with fear and love.
So no, I don’t pity our ancestors. Not even a little. I admire them. I respect them. And honestly, I think many of them understood the Mass far better than modern Catholics who can follow every word yet no longer believe what’s happening on the altar.