Mass in Latin

Recently His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI released Summarum Pontificum in which basically we are all witnessing the return to life of Latin at Mass, all be it this time on a voluntary rather than an imposed basis. I am very far off from being an expert on ecclesiastical matters and my view is simply that of a lay person. It is to me totally perplexing how we can have a situation where we honour and hail as a saint the Pope that worked tirelessly to reduce the importance of Latin and at the same time we seek to slowly but surely return to where we started from.

The prayer of Mass should be something from which we all gain spiritually and should not be simply and merely a Sunday tradition. Yet what is the point of having any Masses in Latin where only an incredibly small amount of people know Latin or are fluent enough in Latin to understand even a word of it. It beats the whole point of trying to avoid turning the Mass into merely a Sunday tradition. And to those who may argue that such a move may heal the rift with the St Pius X community, sadly for them the group has already made it clear that re-establishing ties with Rome goes hand in hand with withdrawing the excommunication imposed on the late Archbishop Levebrve.

Indeed the only rift which will be seeing a change through this move is the distance between us and those of the Jewish faith, for in a most insolent move, the old Latin liturgy has a prayer in which we pray to God to lift the veil from the hearts of all Jews. Why the Jews in particular and not some other faith which rejects our beliefs?

In this day and age I believe that for the greater good it would be more opportune to seek to reunite the Church between those who are steady in their belief and those who are feeling ever more disgruntled rather then adding a further reason for which one may feel further distanced from the faith.