Interesting blog post on the Catholic Mass
Readers here might be interested in this blog post.
Even an anticlerical secular Frenchman could see and understand the (old) Mass as religious ritual. That is because it is objective, formal, scripted, precise, and totally focused on the object of devotion — such being a description that can be given for any religious rites known to man, and such being, too, in a curious way, a description suited to any artistic process worthy of the name of art.
The new Mass can hardly be recognized as a pure ritual in this sense: it varies from (in a best-case scenario) a rather weak and exiguous ritual to (in a worst-case scenario) a free-for-all that, sociologically speaking, is no different from any secular gathering for secular purposes. This is why it is utterly incapable of inspiring great art and, in particular, literary art. No one would be able to find the slightest interest in a novelistic or poetic description of the new Mass (imagine Zola trying his hand at it!). But the old Mass has inspired every artist who has ever come into contact with it, as one can read about at length in the book The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals (which I reviewed here).
