At a dinner party this August, someone raised a question that surprised me. “What do you think about the restoration of the Latin Mass?”

As I recall, the questioner was not Catholic. However, I discovered long ago that what the pope says and does often attracts attention from huge numbers of people who do not belong to his church. In fact, sometimes the latter seem to attach more importance to him than do we Catholics.

In July, Benedict XVI, announced a change in the conditions under which priests are allowed to say the so-called Latin Mass. As of mid-September, they will no longer require the permission of their bishop to celebrate this liturgy in the Latin language.

This change, initiated by the pope, will presumably be welcome to people who long for the language and ritual of an earlier day. To have this older Mass close at hand will please those Catholics who are dissatisfied with the liturgy in use since 1965.

You might possibly expect me to be among those who welcome this revival. I do not. For me, it strikes a blow against the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

What that council accomplished in the years 1962 to 1965 transformed my inner and outer world. I felt overjoyed at the actions of the more than two thousand bishops who came to Rome from all over the world. With the positions they took on both church teaching and practical life, they brought the Catholic Church into the modern world.

Hearing Mass in English especially pleased me because it made the sacred words and actions more accessible to a far greater number of people. Like others around the world who now heard Mass in their own languages, we Americans could more easily grasp the meaning of what was said and done.

Mind you, I am not badmouthing what went before. The old liturgy also brought Catholics like me into vital contact with the beauty and mystery of our faith. And I had the advantage of having studied Latin for four years of high school so, from adolescence on, I could understand at least many of the words spoken ritually by the priest.

But I welcomed having the priest face the people instead of turning his back to us. I was glad to hear passages from the Hebrew Bible read aloud, along with a greater variety of selections from the New Testament. And it pleased me to see some basic parts of the Mass restored in keeping with what scholars had discovered about the liturgy of the early church.

Some critics of the Vatican II liturgy, then and now, make it seem a violation of tradition. However, they fail to recognize how it embodies parts of an earlier tradition, far older than the Latin Masses of my youth.

Many features of the Mass with which I grew up came from the Council of Trent. This 16th century gathering of bishops legislated a Mass that contained some features not as faithful to the older tradition as is the current post-1965 liturgy.

As a Catholic who has traveled widely since the middle sixties, I have taken part in the Mass in many different places. My impression is how well it usually works. Attenders answer the prayers much more actively than they did in the past.

I like to think my reaction to the Vatican’s recent action is representative of my age peers. No one knows for sure, of course, but I suspect that surveys would show Catholics of my age to be highly in favor of the Vatican II liturgy.

You will not find many of us elders wanting to return to the Mass as it was when we were growing up. Unlike some younger enthusiasts for the liturgy in use from the 16th century to the 1960s, we remember only too well how badly priests often carried out those rites.

The priests in my parish, in Belmont MA, admirable as they were in many other ways, used to mumble the Latin words. This made them unintelligible even if you knew that ancient language. I remember their liturgical style as an obstacle to full appreciation of the sacred actions.

In not clamoring for the Latin Mass, my Catholic age peers show how well they have adapted to social change. For the last 40 years we have felt comfortable in worshipping using liturgical forms different from what we knew before 1965. Only a statistically minute number of us have lobbied for the old approach.

Acceptance of this change, among many others, gives the lie to the widespread stereotype of people advanced in years being resistant to change of all sorts. Whether research supports this view I have been unable to discover, but I consider older Americans’ flexibility and adaptability to change quite remarkable.

Richard Griffin