Last week over on Facebook, I happened to mention that I had attended a Tridentine Mass, and that I left with a renewed appreciation for the Novus Ordo.<\/strong><\/p>\n From every corner, from every persuasion, Catholic friends spoke up in raging defense of one form of liturgy or another.<\/p>\n To which I say:\u00a0 It\u2019s all good.<\/strong><\/p>\n Visiting in the Virgin Islands<\/strong> in the late \u201890s, my husband and I were amazed by the devotion of the people\u2014as evidenced by their voices raised in robust praise.\u00a0 Coming from the United States, as we were, we were all too accustomed to liturgies at which people mumbled their responses or lip-synched the hymns.\u00a0 It was refreshing and rejuvenating to join our voices with hundreds of others who were joyful, exuberant worshippers.<\/p>\n Years later, we traveled through Europe\u2014attending Mass in the native Italian or German<\/strong>.\u00a0 Oh, how we longed for a familiar Latin phrase so that we, with all the peoples throughout the world, could join our voices and recite the Pater Noster in unison.<\/p>\n In the movie For Greater Glory<\/em>, Father Reyes Vega celebrated Mass for the Cristeros atop a mountain, in the open air<\/strong>.\u00a0 That\u2019s what happens in many parts of the world still today:\u00a0 in African villages<\/strong>, on tiny islands<\/strong>, at Wyoming Catholic College<\/strong>, even\u2014stop and think!\u2014at papal liturgies like the recent papal mass in Beirut.<\/strong><\/p>\n There is not just one way to pray.<\/strong>\u00a0 But to emphasize that point, take a trip down liturgical memory lane to that 1966 meme, the Folk Mass, where Ray Repp sings and strums \u201cSons of God.\u201d\n
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