Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/107

Rh and interruption by musical accompaniment. The High Mass only differs from the daily Low Mass in the number of assistants and the musical rendering. It is supremely incongruous, from a purely religious point of view, for the celebrant to interrupt his solemn rites whilst he and his congregation listen to the florid strains of Haydn or Gounod, operatically rendered by soulless singers who have no idea of the meaning of their words, and are very frequently non-Catholics. Leo XIII. did make an effort in the direction of reform, but he must have realised that it is the éclat of the ceremony which fills Catholic churches all the world over, not the mysterious and unintelligible Mass.

At the same time it must be said that the Church does not do all in its power to make the Mass (and other ceremonies) appeal to the priest. In its stolid conservatism it retains a number of vestments, rites, &c., which have become absolutely unmeaning. The humeral veil, which is worn by the subdeacon at Mass and by the priest at benediction, is an undignified survival of the once intelligible custom of drawing a veil across the sanctuary and at the most solemn moments; the maniple, an embroidered cloth that dangles at the priest's left elbow, is not only unmeaning but gravely inconvenient. The practice of solemnly facing the people to sing the epistle and gospel in Latin, and other such survivals of early custom, are interesting from an archæological point of view, but