The Future of the Liturgy

From The Missive:

We attend the Latin Mass because it is, to us, where Holy Mother Church feels most alive and most like Herself: a wise Mater et Magistra unaffected by passing fads and cheap, trendy gimmicks but beautiful and wonderful and complicated as life itself.

I am not a child or young person, so I’m not sure how I would fare under Fr. Reese’s proposal. But I suspect he wouldn’t appreciate that my registering at an FSSP parish is not out of nostalgia. I was born in the early 1970s after the liturgical change. I have no memory whatsoever of the traditional Mass. In fact, I was initially quite resistant to it and once argued the superiority of the new liturgy to my future wife–quite unsuccessfully, I might add.

My love for the Mass of the Ages came by lived experience, by attending it and then sorting out in my own mind whether the Missal of 1962 or the Missal of 1970 was best suited to my Catholic life.  Nor am I the only one that had this transformative experience; at every traditional community one will find people and families who could tell very similar stories.

We laity of the traditional movement have gotten used to being the black sheep of the larger Catholic world. On a personal level that may be a frustrating space to inhabit, yes, but it seems a small price to pay for the spiritual treasures we have discovered in our parishes. Think us weird all you like–just let us sing the Asperges and sit in quiet reverence during the Roman Canon.

Apparently, though, the “live and let live” philosophy we hear bandied about ad nauseam nowadays can’t quite suffer us to continue existing.

To some, we are more than an oddity: we are a constant irritation. It is not enough that many traditionalists are walled off into dedicated liturgical ghettos, separated from our fellow Catholics by whispers, suspicions, and distrust of those crazy people who go that church. It is not enough that we have, effectively, a grand total of 3 FSSP parishes that can adequately serve us in the entirety of eastern Pennsylvania–and we’re even lucky to have that many.

Apparently, the ghettos need to be dismantled, and the 3 parishes need to be zero.

Perhaps Fr. Reese is not aware of the depth of the laity’s commitment to the traditional liturgy. So let me state it quite directly. As for my wife and I, we plan on attending the traditional Latin Mass until we lie in repose under the solemn tones of the Requiem and the Dies Irae. Moreover, as long as our own “children and young people” are under our parental care, they will be at every Latin Mass with us: serving at the altar, wearing veils, and learning the language that is their liturgical birthright and that my wife is diligently teaching them. I am not sure why anyone thinks they are capable of not “allowing” my children to do all this. But as an indication of our familial resolve, permit me to quote another character from the Narnia series:

“My own plans are made….While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.”

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