Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

I'm old enough to remember when the Catholic Mass was in Latin. I'm old enough, in fact, to have been an altar boy and memorized all the Latin responses. The priests in our parish were pretty fierce about the Mass and brooked no mistakes, so when serving at Mass it all went like lightning, as we were always paying absolute attention to what was going on. The consequences of not doing so were unthinkable.

However, most of the time we were out there in the congregation, fidgeting with our peers. (At our school we began every single school day with Mass. Fidgeting was an art form.) The Mass itself was mostly incomprehensible, even if you were an altar boy. The translations in our St. Joseph Daily Missals didn't track the Latin with great precision, and in any event we were not taught Latin systematically.

So there was this 45 minute daily challenge (a full hour on Sundays) of what to do while God was at work up there at the altar, in a foreign language. Nuns (on schooldays) and parents (on Sundays) kept a tight lid on moving around and/or talking to our peers. About all we were left with was our imaginations...and our missals. The missal was a fat book full of prayers, but it had other things as well, including short bio clips of the saints who were significant enough to get their own feast days. We read them out of boredom, and some of my friends paid close attention to the juicy details of how some of the martyrs were offed, which came up now and then in playground conversation. The Romans, for example, cut poor St. Agatha's breasts off in the process of killing her. One of the other saints had her teeth yanked out, again by those ever-creative Romans. I skipped past such stuff; I got nightmares enough watching bad monster movies like The Crawling Eye on Channel 7 Thursday afternoons. Interestingly, the newer missals given to school kids in sixth grade (1962-ish) omitted such details, but the mid-1950s missals that our class had, well, it was all there.

I've picked up a number of other Tridentine-era missals at bookstores over the years, and some of them are packed full of things to browse through, not all of it prayers. The 1949 printing of Benziger Bros' Saint Mary Every Day Missal is an amazing thing. It had everything our St. Joseph missals had, plus a history of the Catholic Church, a history of the United States, and (for that matter) a history of the world. Most oddly, sprinkled in amidst the saints and the prayers like "easter eggs" in modern software were short histories of the Catholic Church as it evolved in each American state. Delaware, for example, was tucked right between St. Boniface and St. Norbert. My copy has no index (though the pages at the end are loose and it may have fallen out); if you wanted Illinois, I guess you simply had to hunt for it. (I haven't found it yet.) The type on this additional material was astonishingly small, smaller than anything I think I've ever seen on the pages of a book intended for the general public. The pages were 3 1/2" wide and 6" high—and there were 1,335 of them! To get an example of just how small the type was, keep that page size in mind and download this scan of a typical page spread. (2.8 MB jpg.)

I suspect that the Powers within the Church knew all about this problem (they had, after all, been kids once) and when the Second Vatican Council redid the Mass and translated it into English, the emphasis was on following along and participating. Not long after that, fat-book missals left the Catholic experience entirely for several reasons. Most importantly, the post-VCII propers (Scripture readings and associated prayers) were three times as long and difficult to fit into a single book, but I think the notion of missal-as-distraction was right up there somehow, heh.

Nonetheless, I think a lot of us learned about the saints out of sheer boredom, and I certainly picked up more Latin than some just by trying to correlate the mysterious Latin prayers with their (loose) English equivalents. Maybe those of us who still go to church could increase religious literacy among kids by bringing back missals and not requiring that they follow along with the grown-ups. It worked in 1961. I don't see why it wouldn't work today.