For instance, how the Vatican 2 mass gives a lesson on the challenges of learning a new language. I refer especially to pronunciation issues, we being in parts a missionary country, served by those who came into their Catholicism thanks to missionaries, relieving our priest shortage.

It’s not brand new. The “FBI priest” in the 60’s was foreign-born Irish, serving us thanks to St. Patrick, who planted seeds in his adopted country that became flowers blooming in another.

Evelyn Waugh’s story about nuclear war-devastated London, mass being said, in a near-wrecked church, where the priest turns around at one point, he’s a man with “a black, bland face,” come from Africa, where missionaries had done their work, to a new missionary country.

So for us, where priests from Kenya and Venezuela are here in our parish to minister to us in a time of priest shortage.

This in a time of the priest being much with us, as performer extraordinaire, in our hearts and minds — I almost said face — much more than before.

Before? Oh yes. I forget sometimes in my extended time how much has happened since I broke air in the early 30’s and later in that decade began my personal history of mass-going.

Those were the days, my friend? We thought they’d never end? No sirree. But . . . they did end, did they not?

Come the 60’s and Vatican 2 and the 70’s and the new mass, a strange new “we gather” moment arrived, and the priest no longer looked at God but at us. And we look at him. He became the center of things, the focus, imprinting on us his idea of the mass.

Father Riordan in the 40’s might have been known to some for his 18-minute weekday mass. A giant of the old school, he did everything in a hurry. Covered all fields, left, right and center, in softball games in Finn’s lot across Austin Boulevard from the church.

Beyond that, he was a mass-sayer, surprising no one with improvisations. Egad, inconceivable, out of the ball park. As if he told us this game, two strikes and you’re out.

He served 20 or so years as assistant pastor to Monsignor Maguire, who had been chancellor of the archdiocese, and the word was, had a tryout once with the Cubs.

My father entered the church vestibule one Sunday, forgetting he still had a cigar in mouth, and the monsignor, greeting people, spotted it and saved him from doing something he did not want to do. I got that from my father, who was clearly pleased at his doing it and how he did it.

I speak of mass before Vatican 2. Yes.

Priest at altar looked towards God, not people. Communion was at altar rail, kneeling, on the tongue with an altar boy holding a plate in case the host fell.

Latin was Greek to almost all of us. Didn’t matter. Was not the issue.

Calling this old-time mass Latin is not the best way in this. Rather, call it the Reverential Mass or God-first-people-second or priest facing same way as people or altar-rail-communion — when not all went, by the way. Could be assumed the abstainer had eaten or drunk something after midnight.

Enough for now . . .