“And those who like us”

Today I picked up flyers for the Eastertide Dance. I’m going to distribute them among Committee members to disseminate among their Catholic friends in places other than our diocesan TLM. For example, some might go the local Catholic Students’ Union, and some might go to supporters of the nearby SSPX. Some might go to the Cathedral–which reminds me that there’s a priest I need to email. After all, the Eastertide Dance is not just “for Catholics who love the TLM” but also for “those who like us.”

This literally means individual people who are the spouses, friends and family of Catholics who go to the TLM. But it is also a wry joke, as we Catholics who love the TLM don’t always feel very well-loved ourselves. If there are people out there who like us despite our Traditional-Latin-Mass-going, they should by all means come and dance with us.

The late Pope Benedict thought the “Ordinary Form” and the “Extraordinary Form” of the Mass could influence each other. Some Catholics who love the TLM are definitely in favour of the Ordinary Form being filled with as many Extraordinary treasures as possible. Others don’t see the point, as they believe there will eventually be more TLMs than OFs. (I think this may actually happen in France.) And nobody I know who loves the Traditional Latin Mass thinks it could be improved by elements from the Novus Ordo–except maybe the Three Hymn Sandwich. (There are lots of lovely old pre-1962 hymns, and we Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass should be allowed to sing them.) The whole idea of the OF and the EF learning from each other is most unpopular (and for the past 12 years very unfashionable). However, there is not a doubt in my mind that Catholics from different Mass communities need each other.

For example, Catholics who love the TLM can start getting a little too attached to customs and beliefs that actually have nothing to do with rubrics, traditional roles, or the perennial doctrines of the faith. I was shocked and horrified one Sunday morning when someone asked me to take around an offering basket. Had my mantilla slipped off my head? Had I been mistaken for a man? What was this gender-bending lunacy? But, in reality, it is only now that I realize there is probably no rule or custom anywhere forbidding women from collecting the Sunday offerings.

It was the thought of young Catholic women who go to both the Novus Ordo and my dances being shocked at my being shocked that makes me take stock of my own eccentricities. For it is true that sometimes we Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass get a little peculiar.

(Apropos of women’s roles, at various points during Church history, we have been banned from singing as choristers at Mass. In the first half of the 20th century, there was a a huge debate over whether or not Pope Pius X meant that women couldn’t sing at Mass in choirs or if we couldn’t sing in choir [i.e. in the sanctuary]. Meanwhile, bishops booted women out of choir lofts. Fortunately, the pendulum swung in women’s favour in 1955 when Pope Pius XII promulgated Musicae Sacrae.)

I am reminded also of the Synodal Path in Edinburgh which, not to put a fine point on it, was ravaged by highwaymen from the TLM community. That is to say, we–most of us much younger than me–came down like the wolf on the fold, and our cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, and the sheen of our spears was like stars on the sea when the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee (Lord Byron). In short, we didn’t want elderly hippies to speak for us, so we split up and joined other groups. And to my surprise and relief, I discovered that the main concerns of the people at my table were also heterodoxy and the mass apostasy of Catholic school pupils. The room was not full of bloodthirsty modernists baying for the convocation of Vatican III. It was all very edifying.

To conclude, I will repeat that one of the things I most loved about the 2024 Michaelmas Dance was all the dancers, be they from England or Scotland or Ireland or Malaysia and offer they their Sunday worship at the FSSP TLM or the SSPX M or the St. Patrick’s OF, singing the Marian anthem together at the end. Wherever we prefer to go to Holy Mass, we belong together.