The Holy Father, in Fides et Ratio, says that in inculturation (when speaking of philosophical ideas of the East) involves two things: that the Greco-Roman Heritage not be displaced, and that native ideas that are compatible w/ Revelation be included. As regards the Mass, why should the Far East and Africans have the Tridentine Mass? Sure, language is one thing (as the Holy Father allowed for the Jesuits/Chinese during the 17th Century), but what are some practical things for the NonWestern Christians?
I had a colleague (a Lutheran professor of religion) ask a similar question: why should we saddle African seminarians with the history of the whole Christian Church with its Christological controversies, its Trinitarian controversies and its Greek philosophical conceptual apparatus (e.g., description of the relationship of Christ's two natures in terms of their "hypostatic union," etc.). My answer was that this is an essential part of the organic growth of the Christian tradition. To cut them off from it would be to deprive them of part of the living tradition of the Church. Furthermore, ignorance of Church history easily leads to having to re-fight the battles that painstakingly hammered out solutions and answers to heresies in the early history of the Church.
Similarly, I would argue that, while local adaptations to the traditional Roman Rite (often called "tridentine Mass") may be perfectly appropriate, as they were in the history of that Rite, a complete abandonment of it or "replacement" of it would be a presumptuous betrayal of the thousand-years-and-some-centuries tradition that the Holy Spirit has bequeathed to us.
Commenting by HaloScan
