Still flourishing …

… The Millions : Counter and Strange: Contemporary Catholic Literature. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I was surprised to read Robert Fay’s 2011 article here at The Millions, where he claims a “literary vacuum” of contemporary Catholic writing. While I strongly disagree with Fay’s overall thesis that postconciliar liturgical retranslation led to a decline in Catholic art, his short essay introduces important points. Fay writes elegiacally about the postconciliar shift from Latin to English, or local, Mass: “what for centuries had seemed eternal, mysterious, and rich in symbolism — the very marrow that feeds artists — was suddenly being conducted in the same language as sitcoms, TV commercials, and business meetings.” Was Fay’s observation convenient hindsight, or lived reality?

Well, it was certainly a lived reality in my case. I was a Catholic of suspended observance for a good 30 years. The banality of the English Mass, while hardly the cause of that, certainly made it easier. The real problem with the vernacular Mass is the snobbery underlying it, the assumption that the poor people in the pews just couldn't wrap their feeble minds around the Latin and the ritual (though they had managed to do so for centuries, and it was only the intelligentsia (those schooled beyond their intelligence) who had any problem with it (and that was because they thought if the Church became more Protestant, by dropping Latin, Protestants would be inclined to grow more Catholic — or something like that). The same snobbery underlies modern translations of the Bible. For centuries the only book many people read was the Authorized Version of the Bible. Didn't cause them any trouble. But the smart people wanted it dumbed down anyway, because they thought the ordinary people weren't getting it.

I might add that I'm not sure there are any Catholic writers. There are, rather, writers who are Catholic. Even if they no longer practice their faith or have become hostile to it, it must still inform much of their thought and feeling, whether for good or ill.