It has become axiomatic to the study of modern literature that the work of James Joyce, a bitter apostate from the Catholic faith, who infamously refused his dying mother’s wish that he would kneel and pray at her bedside, would have been unthinkable without the indelible imprint left upon his mind by his formation as a Catholic. Joyce was an artist who as a young man decided he could not live with the faith—as an adult, he proved completely incapable of 
doing without it, drawing upon the raw materials of Catholic life, thought, and liturgy, and weaving them inseparably into his writing, even (or perhaps especially) into its most discomforting depictions of the lower bodily functions.
The very first page of Joyce’s great prose epic Ulysses begins with a parody of the words and actions with which the old Catholic Mass begins, Latin words that millions of Catholics heard every time Mass was said for centuries, from Nagasaki to Warsaw to Dublin to the Spanish missions in the Sonoran desert. Any Catholic or apostate-Catholic reader in Joyce’s day would have recognized it at once: Introibo ad altare Dei, “I shall go in to the altar of God,” intones the brash Buck Mulligan as he climbs the stairs up to the roof and raises the profane shaving basin (upon which a mirror and straight-razor lay “crossed,” like a chi-rho) up above his head, before giving a mock-blessing urbi et orbi, wearing not a gold chasuble held up by an acolyte, but rather “a yellow dressinggown, ungirdled…sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air.” Irreverent, perhaps even blasphemous—and the work of a high literary intelligence, shaped in the school of the Mass.
I wonder if it was the very strangeness, the foreignness of the words of the old Latin Mass like the above-parodied entrance rite that imparted them with a special power to sink into the minds and burn in the hearts of the faithful over a lifetime without their being conscious of it, and to become as given, as natural to the Catholic mind as the rising and setting of the sun. Of course, anyone who learned to serve Mass in the old form, like Joyce did, would have had to memorize and practice long Latin passages in dialogue with the priest, thus imparting an especially indelible stamp upon the young mind above and beyond that of the ordinary laity. (A few years ago, film critic Roger Ebert wrote about such an experience as an altar boy in his memoir, and reposted it on his blog here, declaring “I believe I could serve Mass to this day.” I don’t doubt it.)
I recall my first jarring encounter with the strangeness of a remembered phrase from the Catholic liturgy, at second-hand and outside the context of the Mass: a high school teacher of mine made a spoken acknowledgement of a grading error on an exam with the striking words mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I grasped the bare meaning—but the strangeness of the Latin and the repetition burned it into my mind upon first hearing. As an apology, it seemed a bit much.
It was more than 10 years later that I learned from a Latin-English missal that this memorable triplicate formula of self-accusation was actually a part of the Mass, and had been obscured by deliberately bad translation, deformed into the completely unremarkable, forgettable “through my own fault” (thud). Of course, with the new and corrected translation of the missal, this memorable Latin tricolon has finally undergone its long-delayed birth into the vernacular: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault has a chance now to enter into our thoughts and words and unconscious sensibilities, and has good prospects for doing so, precisely because of its strangeness, its DISTANCE from ordinary, everyday, prosaic language.
Thanks be to God. Catholic Christians need a great multitude of things to help us live out our lives as exiles in the Babylon of earthly life, things both supernatural and natural. I submit that among the latter we need memorable and powerful words to clarify our thoughts, to remind us of our obligations, and to help anchor our souls amidst the storm of meaningless and mendacious language thrown at us by the culture industry. The corrected translation of the Mass gives us much more of these: a new treasury of strange and memorable words to form us, words that are memorable and efficacious precisely because of their strangeness, because of their distance from the discourse of ordinary life, not only in their content, but in their form as well. Alongside familiar strange and powerful Catholic words like Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and Now and in the hour of our death, and Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil, we now have many more:
Consubstantial with the Father.
Was incarnate of the Virgin Mary.
Be pleased to look upon these offerings with a serene and kindly countenance.
He took this precious chalice in his holy and venerable hands.
I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.
It is not just Catholic artists and authors who need memorable forms and words to make use of, or even to make fun of à la mode du Joyce: all of the faithful need liturgical language that is unforgettable, powerful, and that, after we have heard it, makes us say, like the two disciples at Emmaus: Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures? (Lk 24:32)
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