I’m back to talk about my past and we’re still on the subject of religion. As mentioned previously, I was raised Catholic. And there were big changes in the church during my youth. One of the biggest was that we finally got to say the Mass in English. Of course, I took it in stride, because having been raised in a military family with a strict Catholic mother, when orders came down from the top, you followed them. After all, it wasn’t as though we were being asked to do something illegal or immoral.

But surprisingly, I now find, 60 years later, thanks to a kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, that there are people who are still upset about allowing the Mass to be said in English, and they want to go back to the Latin mass. If we’re wanting to go back to origin languages, shouldn’t we be looking at Hebrew or Greek? In its day, when the church was rising, Latin was merely the equivalent of English today. It was the language of the world and commerce. Educated people spoke and read Latin. But the ascendancy of English changed all that, and the Church, never one to really embrace change, only caught up to the fact in 1964.

It's another lesson that while we acknowledge change is inevitable there are still those among us who resist. Some folks want the Latin Mass to come back. Others want schools re-segregated. Some people hate diversity. Others regret giving women the vote. Another group wants gays back in their closets. There’s even a tiny group who think cars and telephones are evil. There’s not much you can say to those people except to smile, be kind, and remember that it took the Church 350 years to acknowledge that Galileo was right.

Part 16, Living in America, An Old Man’s Journey into His Past