A Roman Rite Pontifical Mass in Church Slavonic

Here is an interesting thing I just stumbled across via a friend on social media, a video of His Excellency Bishop Athanasius Schneider celebrating a Pontifical Mass in the Roman Rite, but in Church Slavonic, rather than Latin. The Mass was celebrated in Friday, September 16, 2016, for the feast of St Ludmilla, a martyr of the very early years of the conversion of Bohemia in the later 9th century.

One week before this Mass was celebrated, we published an article about a Glagolitic Mass, as it is called, celebrated in Croatia: https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2016/09/glagolitic-mass-celebrated-in-zagreb.html. This tradition of celebrating the Roman Mass in a Slavic idiom rather than Latin goes back, of course, to the missionary activities of Ss Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs. On Monday, I wrote about a Saint named Procopius who is very important in Bohemia, and whose religious community in the later 11th century may very well have celebrated the Roman Rite in Church Slavonic. Without prejudice to the importance of Latin, or to the importance of preserving its liturgical use, as both St John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council wanted, this custom can be a useful reference point for continuing the essential work of correcting the botched post-Conciliar reform, since it uses a form of “vernacular” without compromising the ceremonial or textual tradition of the rite.