Can't we all just be Catholic?

For the record, I do understand that 'Catholic' means universal - which in and of itself implies a certain level of diversity. That's why we have so many religious orders, so many different schools of spirituality (like Carmelite, Dominican, Jesuit, etc, etc).

But unfortunately, it seems like that diversity has made the Mass - the summit of our Christian worship - divisive, which is not a good thing. At least not to me.

Once upon a time, Latin rite Catholics had unity. There was the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, prayed in Latin. Sure, it had the possibility for abuse; a priest could hurry through the prayers, etc, etc. But all Latin-rite Catholics - regardless of whether they identified with Franciscan spirituality or Augustinian - all came together on Sunday for united worship.

Today, that's not the case. We have Folk Masses, LifeTeen Masses, Charismatic Masses, regular Novus Ordo Masses and, thanks to the Moto Proprio, Extraordinary Form (i.e. Latin) Masses. Today, people want their personal spirituality to be reflected in the Mass, rather than have one type of Mass that all people can unite behind.

As a result, we have division and in-fighting and people who think they're holier or "more Catholic" because they speak in tongues or can recite the rosary in Latin or whatever.

I just don't think that we can continue on the way we are, with the teenagers at LifeTeen Mass on Sunday nights, the charismatics at their own Mass at noon, the traditionalists driving 45 minutes to find an EF Mass and the other folks either loving - or gritting their teeth - through yet another Marty Haugen tune.

Now, I've only been to three EF Masses in my life, all of them Low Masses. I'm not necessarily arguing for a wholesale reform of the reform. There are some things I really like about the Novus Ordo. But the EF was the Mass for over 500 years and a heck of a lot of saints turned out just fine...

Something's got to give. And even Pope Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) might agree:

"Nevertheless I believe that in the long term the Roman church once again must have only one Roman rite. In practice, the existence of two official rites would be difficult for bishops and priests to ‘manage.’ The Roman rite of the future should be one, celebrated in Latin or in the vernacular, but completely in the tradition of the rite that was handed down to us. This could include some new elements that have been experienced as valid such as the new feasts, some new prefaces for Mass, an extended lectionary — with more choices than before, but not too many — a ‘oratio fidelium,’ that is, a fixed litany of intercessions that follow the ‘Oremus’ before the offertory, which is where it had been placed."

(from a letter to Heinz-Lothar Barth, a classics professor at the University of Bonn, Germany, in 2003)

Granted, I don't expect change overnight. That only confused and upset people in the post-Vatican II era. And I also think that a variety of spiritualities is a good thing - as long as the end result is not 4 different Masses and four different groups of people who don't worship together.

So I think change has to come, slowly but surely.

At least, that's my prayer today.