Reviving an old insult to the Jews

AS THE priest began his sermon, he had trouble with the sound system, and muttered, "There's something wrong with this microphone." To which the congregation automatically replied, "And also with you."

That joke, told to me by a priest, takes off from the ritual exchange between priest and Mass-goers: "The Lord be with you," answered by "And also with you." It assumes a certain level of communication between clergy and congregation - the use of a common language.

The second most important change to take place in the Catholic Church in my lifetime was the substitution of vernacular tongues for Latin in the Mass. When it is the whole people saying, "And also with you," instead of a solitary altar boy reciting "Et cum spiritu tuo," nothing less than the democratic principle is being affirmed. The liturgy is not the private property of the clergy, with the laity mere observers. Instead, this worship is an action of the entire community, one of whom is the priest, who serves as its facilitator. From a seemingly incidental shift in language followed profound theological adjustments, as well as the start of a new structure of authority.

The Latin Mass is at issue again, with the Vatican having last week formally reauthorized the so-called Tridentine Mass, a Latin ritual the rubrics of which were set by the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Any open-minded person can affirm a diversity of practices in a worldwide organization like the Catholic Church, and, as the classic musical compositions show, there was a stark beauty to the ancient liturgy. But more is at stake in this return of Latin than mere aesthetics. Those pushing for a reauthorization of the Tridentine Mass want to roll back the whole Catholic reform, from nascent democracy to the theological affirmation of Judaism.

The first significant vote that the fathers of the reforming Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) took concerned the use of Latin. The Council of Trent had emphasized Latin precisely because the Protestants had repudiated it, especially in biblical texts. The Reformation was defined by nothing so much as the capture of sacred texts and worship by the vernacular - Luther's German, Tyndale's English. So conservatives at Vatican II knew what was at stake in the proposal to abandon Latin. But when the document on the liturgy was put before the council, including approval of the use of the vernacular, the vote in favor was 1,922 to 11. One theologian said, "This day will go down in history as the end of the Counter-Reformation." Pope John XXIII, watching the proceedings in his apartment on closed-circuit television, said simply, "Now begins my council."

And so it did. The Eucharist was no longer understood only as a "sacrifice," enacted on an altar by the priest, with the laity present as mere spectators. It was a meal, like the Last Supper, to be shared in by all. The altar was refashioned as a banquet table and moved away from the far wall of the church, into the center of the community - "facing the people."

Great questions were at stake. Could any thing in Catholic life or belief change, or was the Church changeless? Historical consciousness itself was at issue. It was as if Jesus were remembered by conservatives as speaking Latin, when, of course, he spoke Aramaic.

The most important change in Catholic belief involved recovering the memory that Jesus was a Jew, and that his preaching was an affirmation, not a repudiation, of Jewish belief. Vatican II's high point was the declaration "Nostra Aetate," which condemned the idea that Jews could be blamed for the murder of Jesus, and affirmed the permanence of God's Covenant with Israel. The "replacement" theology by which the church was understood as "superseding" Judaism was no more. Corollary to this was a rejection of the traditional Christian goal of converting Jews to Jesus. The new liturgy of Vatican II dropped all such prayers.

But the Latin Mass published by the Vatican last year resuscitated the conversion insult, praying on Good Friday that God "lift the veil" from "Jewish blindness." Catholics and Jews both objected. In last week's formal promulgation of the Latin Mass, the Vatican stepped back from that extreme language, but Catholics are still to pray that God "enlighten" the hearts of Jews "so that they recognize Jesus Christ, Savior of all mankind." This is a drastic retreat from the most important theological development of the modern era. Something is wrong with that development, now say Vatican reactionaries. To which the people reply, "No. What's wrong is you."

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.