A young relative spent the end of her summer holidays with her uncle and me in Scotland. Naturally we took her along with us to the Traditional Latin Mass and then to the Tea-and-Coffee-Hour in the parish rooms. I introduced her here and there, and she was amused and pleased to see the numerous infants crawling, toddling, or just throwing their arms about.
She had two principal observations about our TLM community: first, there are a lot of children, and second, her uncle and I seem to know everybody.
“We like children in our community,” I bragged, thinking not only of the babies but of the legions of ankle-biters running around the car park and the lawns. The more, the merrier. As Head Tea Lady, I was careful to time when I refilled the biscuit plates for fear that that Sunday would be the Sunday a child threw up on the carpet.
As for the fame of the McLeans, it is not quite true that we knoweverybody who goes to the Ravelston TLM. However, after about 20 years’ attendance by Mr McLean and 18 for his Missus, we are now most definitely part of the church furniture. We used to bounce into the wooden edifice, full of vigour, and take possession of the choir stalls. Now Mr McL rolls up the ramp at the sacristy door, and I limp in on my bad knee. We have succeeded the Old Guard of 2008 in more ways than one. “Youth’s a stuff will not endure,” innit.
“And I organise dances,” I added. “I think that if you do stuff for a community, you get better known.” It definitely helps if you make scenes in the tea room by loudly flogging tickets or inadvertently exacerbate a local scandal by allowing Dr. Peter Kwasniewski to publish your thoughts.
But what is a community? The young relative and I were waiting for her holiday art tutor in a Portobello studio, which gave us time and an opportunity to reflect on the idea. A community, I opined, is a group of people who share the same beliefs or interests and either meet together regularly or live together. I didn’t want to bang the Traditional Catholic drum too loudly, so my first example was the Scottish Communists who, in the mid-20th century, even had Communist Sunday schools. However, I soon reverted to Catholicism by discussing religious communities, like the Franciscans, and how the ones that work publicly, not cloistered, also become part of the wider community.
My relative, being interested in the poor, seemed charmed by the idea of being called Sister Mary Male-Name and being hailed on all sides by down-and-outers on the pavement. However, she also admitted to being attracted to the notion of cloistered life, which is what happens when you send your daughter not to a Fun Aunt but to the Strict Religious Aunt instead..
But to return to the idea of community as regularly shared beliefs or interests, I generally think of Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass. A myriad of Catholics share this love, and since there is not a lot of official support for it these days, we tend to find support from each other. Also polls show that devotion to the TLM also seems to go hand-in-hand with maintaining traditional, orthodox Catholic beliefs like the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and keeping marriage open to life. That means TLMers understand a lot of important things about each others’ lives. No explanations, let alone defences, needed.
This second example touches on the tender issue of relationships between men and women, which is becoming all the more fraught in Britain, as newspapers publish revolting photos of undocumented migrant men leering at English or Scottish girls clad in skin-tight black leggings. (Would the stateplease perform its primary function? And could weplease return to the median between the abaya and the body stocking?) However, it is most unlikely that any young person who goes to the Traditional Latin Mass will attempt to meet new friends and potential spouses “on the street,” the boys being almost as appalled by the girls in lycra as the girls are by foreign men shouting “Where are you from? I like you!”
The most obvious place to meet new members of the TLM community–and therefore people who share our beliefs and interests–is the parish rooms after Mass. However, that cannot be the be-all and end-all of social life.
Years ago, Mr McLean and I belonged to a kind of Sunday Lunch club, in which choice spirits would take turns holding dinner parties for crowds of up to 15, sometimes lasting until 3 AM. They were not ideal for people who don’t enjoy talking for hours on end, however, and even we would sometimes put down our glasses for some exercise: marching around a field, or along a beach, or up and down a hill.
One of the social strengths of these parties was that the ages of revellers spanned from 18 to about 63, which meant that everyone had the benefit of the experience of other generations. One of the pitfalls, however, was the expense of feeding 15 people every six weeks or so, even when all of them brought a bottle of wine.
There are, of course, pious societies as well, like Juventutem, and in cities or university towns there are opportunities to go to lectures of interest to tradition-loving Catholics. And sometimes there are well-regulated dances, like our Michaelmas Dance (Saturday, September 26, 7:30 pm. Buy now!/Kup teraz!), in which men politely ask women to dance, and women dress becomingly. These also have the social strength of being multi-generational, and thus real community events. The whole point to the dances is that the community–which expands to include Catholics who prefer to go to Mass at their own parish churches–come together in merrymaking traditional to Christian Europe.
Of course, not everyone in the TLM community goes to these dances. After all, we have many parents of children too small to enjoy them. However, I am happy to organise them for as long as our community wants them, and I hope it always will.