Note to self
When reading stories on local Latin Masses online, it’s probably wise to ignore the reader comments.
What lurks down the street….
I contributed a picture of a church within walking distance of my house to the Terrible Tabernacle contest. I’m a bad person, but it’s an ugly tabernacle. Looks like a dollar-store Christmas decoration gone horribly wrong.
.
I thought that was pretty bad, but then I saw this picture of the altar. Which at first I thought was a timpani. The resemblance is hilarious.
I have to admit, when I saw pictures of this church on the Web site, I realized that it was not quite the parish for me. They have healthy attendance and a fine school…just not my “scene,” as the kids say.
Mixed blessings
I forgot to mention that on Sunday at the Tridentine Mass, there were a fair number of women with uncovered heads. Bad for the rite, but good in general. Why? Well, there were so many people that I think they ran out of loaner veils!
The indult parish is part of a group of three parishes (the Tridentine community is “non-territorial,” but the other two are regular urban parishes) together under one pastor, due to the dwindling number of practicing Catholics in the city, and the priest shortage. A wonderful priest in his eighties who is otherwise retired celebrates the Tridentine Mass, but the pastor has done it in the past.
For Sunday Masses, the indult Mass’s attendance is about 120, which is delightfully high for a service around here. People travel from three different states.
I love the aesthetic of it. Attending the cathedral’s long, solemn Novus Ordo Mass occasionally was a big step, and the catalyst of my reversion. It reminds me of what is special about being Catholic, as opposed to most mainstream parishes where the only glaring difference between that and Protestant services I’ve attended is that you don’t hear any female voices reading the Gospel.
Man, I’ve gone all rad-trad lately. I promise that I’ll be back to normal soon. I just finally absorbed how wonderful the old Mass is.
Mother-daughter outing at the indult parish
I’m a librarian. Thinking about how people search for things is what I do. One of my favorite things, especially on blog sites, is seeing what keywords lead people to my site.
One day on this blog was spectacular.
Things are well here. I’ve been busy and tired, and haven’t had a lot to say in general. I’ve had a lot to think about–some religious things, some not. I have some serious posts brewing, but they’re not ready yet.
On Sunday, I attended my third Tridentine Mass and managed to keep up in my missal the entire time. It was nice. My mother came of age around the time that the new Mass came into use, and she was initially surprised that I had an interest in doing something so old-fashioned. She’s intrigued now, though, and nostalgic. I think I’ve forced her to remember the Mass from her childhood that she didn’t think was still celebrated. She wants to attend one with me the next time one of us visits the other for a weekend, and even dug out her old missal from 1961, a gift for her 16th birthday. My hometown has an indult Mass, and an SSPX chapel. Going together will either be a disaster, or really cool!
I wish consecration killed germs. I think I caught a cold from the priest at the chapel I attended last week. He kept reaching under his vestments into his robe to get a handkerchief, and he clearly wasn’t well. (Though maybe people think that about me, and I just have allergies.)
In which satire gives me insight into my reversion
Spirit of Vatican II “Catholic” Faith Community makes me giggle hysterically. I admit it. I will read it and start laughing so hard that my atheist-raised roommate will look at me as if I’ve gone quite mad. I send her the pages I’m reading, but despite her abiding hatred of hippies, she doesn’t get the material or understand why so much of this blog is so wrong, but also utterly hilarious. I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t raised in this kind of Catholic church would get it, or find it nearly as funny as I do. I was talking this over with a convert friend, and she admitted that she isn’t sure what’s tongue-in-cheek and what’s real (or what’s exaggerated for effect and what really goes on in dissident parishes, I imagine.) I suppose she’s lucky in that way.
There’s a more serious side to why I find the blog (er, I mean the parish) so funny, though. The church I grew up in wasn’t quite so … nutty, but we had more than our share of forced hugging and group meditations during confirmation class, and I learned nearly all of the theology I know ten years after “graduating” from religious ed. Baptisms of children and adults were part of Mass and served the purpose of “welcoming infants/catechumens into our faith community.” Never mind exactly what that faith was in, which remained fuzzy and amorphous for me until well after I was confirmed. Doctrine, tsk! That’s so old-fashioned.
I found the forced camaraderie, the constant pressure to hug people I didn’t really like, the liturgical dance, the screechy syrupy recycled ’70s folk songs in our hymnals, .. everything…spiritually dry and sometimes even revolting. I liked participating as a guitarist (yes, folk mass. hush) and as a a lector. Indeed, a lot of things were nice about the parish I grew up in, and I also sometimes liked the bare-bones Mass we had in the Protestant chapel in college, but overall I just gave up on a certain level. I kicked around converting to Buddhism for a while, but that seemed like too much of a radical departure. Most of my college friends were neo-pagans, which didn’t appeal to me at all. I proclaimed myself “culturally Catholic,” and avoided Mass mostly in order to avoid my ex.
After I graduated from college, I tried to arrange my work schedule so that I was in the office during all possible mass times on weekends. It was a drudgery and I couldn’t stand going. I’d sooner pray on my own….provided that Anyone was listening, and as I became more lonely and depressed and discouraged about the present and about my future, I doubted that there was any deity at all. The parade of human suffering that I dealt with every day in the call center where I worked made a compelling case for that.
I moved to another city for grad school, but decided not to hang out with the Newman group on campus. I was 23, and they seemed so…young. After Pope John Paul II died, I felt compelled to attend Mass at the cathedral for some reason I didn’t quite understand. (So did a thousand or so other people, and a few local news crews. Mass attendance there is usually quite sparse.) I attended the cathedral parish on and off for about two years after that. I was drawn back even though I couldn’t articulate why. Now I realize that it was because the Masses there were reverent, traditional, and aesthetically pleasing. I attended the cathedral sporadically until sometime just after Ash Wednesday of this year, when something clicked in my brain and I knew that I needed to go back.
Poking around the Internet and reading blogs and forums made me realize–I’m not as weird as I thought. In the minority, perhaps, but not wrong. Not wanting to hold hands during the Our Father, disliking the Gather hymnal, or not having lots of sex with my youth group boyfriend were indeed not things that made me a bad Catholic, as my experience growing up had led me to believe. There wasn’t something wrong with Catholicism, or with me. The problem lay in the liturgically liberal, theologically moderate tradition in which I was raised–many people seem to find that fulfilling, but I don’t anymore.
The sadness I felt was in part a God-shaped hole inside of me, and returning to the Church according to her rules has left me serene and even content. If I want to be intellectually honest, I have to admit that I can’t ever be completely sure again that there’s a God or that he’s holding us to Catholic rules.
Maybe in time I can be sure of that again. I hope to. A total loss of faith is hard to recover from. I keep the rules and habits that I should, in hope that the doubt will disappear someday. Moral guidance is important, as is ritual, but transcendence and salvation are far more important.
What does it say about me?
I shouldn’t be surprised that so many of my friends and acquaintances are genuinely shocked that I’ve started attending Mass again. Educated single people with no kids don’t do that, after all! They know better!
I finally made it!
Last week I slept in and missed Latin Mass. Which is kind of sad, since it’s at noon. Today I slept through my alarms and somehow woke up twenty minutes before the start of mass. I hurried to wash my face and put decent clothes on, then grabbed my veil and missal but failed to bring my directions to the church. I had a vague sense of what street it was on, but I don’t know that city well at all, and I was traveling there more or less blind. And late.
Somehow I made an accurate guess as to where to get off the highway, then made a left turn, scanned the skyline for a familiar-looking steeple, and found a sign pointing to the church. Yay! There I was, with other people toting missals heading in late, too. I felt bad, but not as bad as I would have if I had been the only one heading in then.
Using missals is completely foreign to my generation of liberal Catholics. I’ve never had one before, and even with bookmarking the Pentecost pages ahead of time, I got a little lost, gave up, and just sat there absorbing the atmosphere instead of following along. I felt sort of secluded in my veil, which added to the meditative feel.
Receiving communion kneeling at a rail was a first for me, too, and like most of what went on during the hour and a half that the Low Mass took (!!), felt foreign but also somehow “right.”
The parish has a luncheon for Latin Mass folks to socialize. I grabbed lunch and ran away, not really talking to anyone. I hate being shy sometimes.
When I thought I couldn’t love Colbert any more, he came out against folk Mass.
“The point is, you should not apologize for your religion. You don’t see me apologizing for what Catholics did in the past: the Crusades, the Inquisition, guitar Mass….” - The Colbert Report, 5/14/07
Celebrate the Mass of the Ages
Zach at The Road to Reform posted a link to a short clip from a video sent from SSPX (”Letter to our brother priests”) to all of the priests in France, showing how to conduct a Tridentine Mass “on the eve of the liberalization of the Latin Mass by Pope Benedict XVI,” if I’m recalling the titles correctly. It’s interesting to note that nothing in the notes on Google about the film mentioned who produced it.
France is a strange case. If what the video claims is true, 20% of priests in France preside solely over Latin Masses. I don’t doubt this…only because of the large traditionalist population in France, and the relatively small number of French people who celebrate…well, regular modern Catholicism.
It feels strange that the priest in this video can’t be any older than I am. The music in the beginning sounds incongruously like something out of the new Battlestar Galactica series.
I’ve done a rough translation of the titles and voiceover in this video, which I hope will be helpful for Tridentine Mass fans who don’t speak French.
The Mass of ages:
Frequently banned
Never forbidden
One priest out of five ordained today in France celebrates exclusively the traditional rite of the Mass.
Numerous priests express the desire to discover the traditional Mass, and to celebrate it.
65% of French Catholics support wider use of the traditional Mass.
At a time when Pope Benedict XVI is on the verge of allowing wider use of the Tridentine rite of the Mass, the Society of St. Pius X proposes this high quality educational tool which will allow all priests to discover this rite.
CELEBRATE THE MASS OF AGES
Voiceover: He unfolds the altar cloth. The altar cloth is placed two fingers’ width from the edge of the altar. Several times during the duration fo the mass, the priest must place his joined hands on the alter, like this. His hands must not touch the altar cloth. At the words “A reading from the Gospel,” he places is left hand on the edge of the missal, and makes with his right thumb a sign of the cross over the spot on the page where the Gospel starts. Then, with his left hand on his chest, he makes the sign of the cross on himself with his right thumb, first on the forehead, then on the lips, and then on the chest. Then, he joins his hands together.
He takes the paten, and holding it in both hands at chest height, he raises his eyes for one moment to the alter crucifix. With his eyes focused on the host, he begins the prayer of consecration. To set down the host, the priest proceeds as follows. He lowers the paten, tracing with it a sign of the cross on the altar. He sets the host down on the altar cloth, taking the paten with his right hand and slides it halfway under the corporale.
He recites the [unclear] in a deep bow, joined hands placed on the altear. Then he bends down to the altar, stands back up, and then traces a sign of the cross on the host and over teh chalice. He then makes the sign over himself before joining his hands again.
This film is a production from the “Letter to our brother priests.” a means of connection between the Society of St. Pius X and the priests of France.
Un-Christian impulses
I went back to St. J. this evening since I didn’t manage to make it out of the house on Saturday. I thought I’d give them a chance when it wasn’t a holiday.
Well.
I have never walked out of a church with such an overwhelming desire to drag pastoral musicians out back and beat them senseless with their hymnals. (The guitar edition of Breaking Bread could probably do a number.)
If you’re going to miss cues, at least stay sort of remotely close to on pitch.
If you’re going to be wildly off-pitch, at least hand someone a tambourine so you’re all remotely on the same measure at the same time.
If you can’t accomplish any of that…just don’t pick songs that sound like theme songs to ’80s soap operas. (I’m looking at YOU, Haugen!)
There were a few things that would make people other than me cry “liturgical abuse,” and it bothers me profoundly that people there are not in the habit of kneeling during any part of the mass whatsoever.
Those are things I could almost overlook if the music there weren’t so wretched. As a former musician, it distracts me to no end.
