When you’re a priest in a parish, you pretty well do as you are told. Or, at least, that was what we all did in ‘the good old days’. And even if we were doing something else liturgically (because we were not all equally pious or obedient) no one knew. But we all remember preferring Father Soand-so’s Mass because it was always shorter than another. As long as the variations served our preferences, we didn’t mind them. But, with the end of the council we knew and we could see and we began to have the same opinions on what we knew and saw as we did about a soap opera or a newscast or a concert or a standup comedian. From almost every corner of the world there arose once cry: Why don’t they just go back to the way it was leave us alone? But that ‘leaving the people alone’, thought the Council Father’s was exactly what had allowed pious, Church-going Catholics to decide to kill each other and assume that God was ‘on the killer’s side’. If people could just be persuaded to ‘take a stake’ in what the Church was about, that stake would transform their citizenship in the world into an authentically Catholic citizenship. The Conciliar expression of this conviction is this: The sacred liturgy is the summit of all the Church’s activity and the source of all her energy. This is what I call an ‘ecclesiological’ perspective on the liturgy. It is not shaped by a desire to make people ‘feel’ anything; but it does exist to make them aware of who they are as a single Church, what God wants of them and for them as a single Church and how critical it is that act as members of this single Church even in their individual lives. So much energy was poured into this project, that a lot of music that had made people feel good, a lot of religious art that had seemed pretty and inspirational, and a lot of ‘popular practices’ fell away leaving folks with a very cerebral and ‘abstract’ experience of church-going. Although there had always been a fair number of non-attenders at Mass, their number suddenly swelled – fed, as often as not, by those who had seemed the most pious, who now ‘got nothing out of’ Mass. They would even date their departure to ‘the council’ or ‘the English Mass’. As a kid, I set myself the task of learning enough Latin that I could read the ‘right’ page of my Daily Missal. I succeeded and got fond enough of Latin that I fought strenuously against every notion that the Church would – or could – ever give up such a splendid tradition. There is a rich irony in this; there are some prayers that I still say in Latin and a lot of grammar that I know because of snips and bits that I recall from that Missal. But I was never under any illusion that the Missal was a prayer book of private devotion. It was always from some “us” to God, or from God to “your people”. It was always about the Church! Really and truly and vernacularly yours, tm