HOLY MASS FOR EVERYBODY ALL AT ONCE

Now brace yourselves.  This is going to be one of those PG-17 kinds of things.  I'm going to say things the way they were and I am going to take some poetic liberties.  OK, ok, some non-poetic liberties which in the good old days would fall under the heading, "bad prose."  Yes, I went to church this evening.  Catholic Church, actually, which is where I always go.  By choice.  Oh yes, by choice.  That too is another story.  So let me take you through my thought processes of the evening.  
On the left you see a scanned copy of the pamphlet that the people of the parish designed to help the faithful get through a Mass in which there would be 5 different languages used.  Four of them are named on the top portion of the the cover page.  The 5th is the Latin hymn, "Pange Lingua Gloriosi".  Now as I walked into the church which was packed to the rafters, by the way, I could not help but notice that if there were a dozen, maybe a baker's dozen, but not more, of us pointy nosed, round-eyed Caucasians, it would be something to write home about.  So, I'm writing home.  Here's the way it was when I was growing up.  When we went to Mass, we knew what we were going to get.  None of this multi-cultural stuff.  No, no, no!  We had many churches that hard-working, blue collar, blood sweat and tears immigrants put up on their own, for their own.  So, in every church, at every Mass there were always two languages for everybody, Wops, Pollocks, Harps and Frogs all got their language and Latin.  That was it.  I, personally, never gave it a thought.  As far as I know, no one else ever did either.  That's the way the world was.  In fact we used to hear it just about two or three times a month from the religion teachers, "Who loses his mother tongue loses the Faith."  I'm sure that the other kids from the other language groups got the same thing.  Never questioned it.  So, I still have my mother tongue, so maybe that's why I still believe.  Really?  I would go out on a limb and say that I don't think so.  If anything, I think that now that I know the Hail Mary and the Our Father in five or six languages it probably wouldn't be a reason to lose my Faith.  Right?  So, anyhow, tonight I go to Mass with the Voice from the Kitchen and I can hear MJT Dion saying through the walls of three rooms, "Hurry up, you kids, the Mass at the Immaculate Conception starts in 15 minutes."  Sheeesh!, we children want to say.  St. Patrick's is just 3/4 of a mile down the street, why don't we go there?  It's because it's the "Irish" Church and we don't go there.  Correction, SHE don't go there.  We heathens, EFR Dion and I go there every Sunday to the 5:30 AM Mass.  He was more Catholic than the Pope and I was happy to go early so that I could have more time for other things.  Then, my brother and I would also go to the Immaculate Conception for the High Mass at 11:00 AM.  Good thing I was young and sharp then.  If it were now, I would have put my Faith somewhere between the two churches and never been able to find it again.  
So, tonight, we have Mass in English, Vietnamese, Spanish and Tagalog.  The hymn for the procession to the Repository was in Latin.  I have to say, I was impressed.  I was a little troubled about letting my Faith wander in that real foreign Viet Nam environment.  Fortunately, we weren't there for too long and it came back.  The people who got their feet washed were of all colors too.  I sat there and wondered about the changes in my life over the last 65 years.  Of all the thoughts that I ever have, NONE has ever been a yearning to revisit the "Good Old Days."  I thank God for that because it makes it easier to live a happy life with a blessing of that nature.    I wonder what i'm going to think of tomorrow.