![]() ![]() Some missed the familiarity of the Latin Mass. ![]() Change was not just a reality of life but something to be welcomed in the Church. Variety was going to be the spice of life. The Church, Pope John XXIII had told us, wasn’t ‘a museum to be guarded but a garden to be tended’. We embraced it – ducks to water, as we say. Indeed in a short time there was almost a consensus that ‘the new Mass’, as we called it, made great sense. While a few voices were raised about the loss of Latin, we didn’t really miss it. Latin was soon relegated to the equivalent of the Vauxhall League or the Murphy Cup. It was the thin end of the wedge.īefore I left the college, the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) had come and gone (1962-5) and Mass in the vernacular (in the language of the people) had arrived. I served my time on the altar and discovered when I went to the college in Ballina that a ‘Dialogue Mass’ – where the congregation was encouraged to join in the responses – was the coming thing. I can still, if I get a bit of a run at it, deliver the responses with some ease: Dominus vobiscum/Et cum spiritu tuo and so forth – though the De Profundis would still defeat me. To tell the truth, it was impenetrable and unintelligible but in no time at all we could rhyme off the responses – in slow-time to the PP, Canon Maloney more moderately to Fr Michael Keane, CC and in quick-time to Fr Sean Durkan, chaplain to the Mercy Convent. Sr Perpetua Hynes, a gentle and benign presence, who taught in the Girls’ N.S., had the doubtful privilege of guiding me and my colleagues through the unfamiliar pronunciations and intonations of the Latin language. Around 1957, I graduated as a fully qualified altar-boy in Ballycastle, no mean feat in those long-gone days. ![]()
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