Croatia has hosted for the first time in more than fifty years a solemn Pontifical Mass in Latin, celebrated by the Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone. The celebration took place on March 7 in the Church of St. Blaise, in Zagreb, as part of the international conference “Christ is King”.
According to LifeSiteNews, this is the first Traditional Mass celebrated in the country since the period before the Second Vatican Council, making the event a significant occasion for the faithful attached to the traditional liturgy.
A Pontifical Mass in Latin after more than 50 years
The celebration was framed within the third edition of the international conference “Christ is King”. The Mass, according to the traditional rite, marked a notable liturgical event in Croatia, as a solemn Pontifical Mass in Latin had not been celebrated in the country for more than fifty years.
Although in 2016 Msgr. Athanasius Schneider celebrated a Pontifical Mass in Croatia, that one was in ecclesiastical Slavonic. The one celebrated by Cordileone has therefore been the first in Latin in the post-Vatican II period.
Before the celebration, the archbishop gave a lecture in which he emphasized the importance of recovering the beauty of the traditional liturgy to promote a new evangelization.
“The Mass is the heart of civilization”
During his speech, Cordileone stated that the Mass is not only the center of Christian life, but also the cultural and spiritual foundation of Western civilization.
“The renewal of Western civilization therefore begins with the renewal of the Mass. The Mass is truly the heart and foundation of that civilization,” he affirmed.
The archbishop also emphasized the role of beauty in evangelization. As he explained, beauty has the capacity to touch the human heart beyond rational arguments and prepare the soul to receive the truth.
“People can argue by saying: ‘you have your truth and I have mine.’ But when it comes to beauty, the discussions stop. Beauty touches the person intuitively and prepares the ground of the soul for the seed of truth,” he noted.
The liturgical tradition attracts young people
The archbishop also noted that more and more young people are drawn to the liturgical, artistic, and spiritual heritage of the Church.
In his view, the Church does not need to seek new languages to transmit the Gospel, but to rediscover the value of its own tradition.
“It is often said that we must find a new language to reach young people. But we already have that language: it is the ancient one, or more precisely the classical, the timeless language,” he affirmed.
According to Cordileone, the beauty of the traditional liturgy not only has aesthetic value, but also favors moral conversion.