Benedict Ambrose and I have been worried about our local Latin American restaurant. It has excellent steaks at affordable prices and dulce de leche cheesecake. Before lockdown it was busy on weekends but usually rather quiet during the week. After lockdown it was deserted, of course.
Now that lockdown has been greatly eased, we decided to abandon parsimony for an evening and have a meal at the steakhouse. B.A. put on his tweed jacket, and I put on my Sala Stampa dress, and off we went. To our surprise, the restaurant was rather busy.
The new femme maitre d' was cheerful behind her plastic visor and informed us that the restaurant has been popular since it reopened. We professed ourselves happy to hear this and ordered supper. B.A. reacted with exaggerated expressions of shock when I ordered a hamburger instead of a steak. It was delicious. Replete and satisfied that the restaurant would survive if we didn't have dessert, we decided not to have the dulce de leche cheesecake. Instead we went home to sleep as well as we could, given the entire bottle of Montanes we drank. I woke up at 5 AM.
(An aside: what is the point of eating beef and drinking red wine at 7 PM - 9 PM at night? Wouldn't it make more sense to have these things at lunchtime, so as to tackle the rest of the day with vim? Or at least to have them for supper only if a night of dancing or some other vigorous activity is planned?)
I have finished reading Kwasniewski's Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Tradition, and in it he asks the reader to invite as many people as possible to the Traditional Latin Mass, so that they too can worship God in this beautiful and fitting way. He begs us to be nice to the people who arrive with purple hair or black fingernails, suggesting that they will get the hang of correct dress in time.
(Another aside: whereas purple hair strikes me as banal, I don't mind black fingernails myself, even on men. If a tall Goth-like chap in a long black trench coat and shiny black nails turns up at Mass, I will certainly buzz up to him in the carpark afterwards and invite him into the parish hall for a cup of tea.)
I agree with Kwasniewski's pleas, and one of my proudest accomplishments is evangelising people with my blog. One would-be convert, shocked by her local Mass, went online to find out about Latin Masses and found my blog. She was inspired by my descriptions of the TLM it to seek out her local Oratorians. The Oratorians take would-be converts very seriously, and so today this lovely girl is a Catholic.
However, I feel that I must add somewhere that a TLM can be incredibly off-putting for the first-timer.
TLMers can also be incredibly off-putting, too. Thirty years ago (!) I was surprised at Mass in the ordinary form when a party of pro-lifers I knew suddenly knelt beside me while I was standing. I had stood at that part of the Mass all my little life. If I remember correctly, one of the pro-lifers my age tugged at my hem so I would kneel too. She explained later that the Mass itself was wrong, and I thought she was off her rocker. She explained about there being an Old Mass and that the Old Mass was the Right Mass, but I still thought she had gone over the edge into the Extreme.
However, I was curious enough about the Old Mass to go to one in my incredibly ugly and banal parish church. My childhood parish used to have a beautiful cruciform church on the principal street of our city. It was built around 1949. The land it was on, unfortunately, was worth millions by the 1980s, and so it was sold and a squat new church complex was built for us on a side street. Its only architectural connection with the old church is the stained glass windows. I'm very fond of those windows, and I learned about the Seven Sacraments from them before I could read.*
My pastor was, I now realise, a crypto-trad, and he had arranged (or allowed) for what was then called the Indult Mass to be said in his church once in awhile on Sunday afternoon. So one day I went, and it was the most boring thing ever. There were no instructions to be found. If I remember correctly, there was no sheet of paper with the readings. I didn't know such things as TLM missals existed. The church, being hideous, didn't raise my mind to heaven. I was disappointed and, what's more, didn't see the point. I didn't set foot in a TLM for the next 18 years.
The only reason why I went back to the TLM at all was because I went on holiday to Scotland and my host, who was about to be received into the Church, was a TLM enthusiast. I found everything very strange, and even rather frustrating, but I was very impressed by the intense silence. Everyone there seemed to be intently focussed on what was happening at all times. Having been liturgically brought up to focus on the community, I was very impressed by the piety of this community. Then I married my host, so good-bye to Bugnini.
Peter Kwasniewski thinks the Catholic Church is doomed without the TLM, and I suspect it will certainly be doomed in the West without the TLM. I will one-up Kwasniewski and say I think the West is doomed without the TLM because the TLM provides the spiritual foundation for parents bringing their children up in the classical tradition.
If there's anything we should have learned from the ecclesiastical debacle of the 1960s and 1970s, it's that a culture cannot survive having its foundations removed. B.A. and I want our neighbourhood to thrive, and so we spend our money in local businesses. Wanting our Church to survive (and souls to thrive, we support the TLM.
*Nobody should underestimate how much theology children pick up from church art and architecture. My parents unintentionally went to the most lefty church in town when I was an infant and the wooden stations of the cross are carved into my brain. The 1970s baldacchino--a large ring set with light bulbs hanging from the ceiling--reinforced my impression that whatever was happening at the altar was very important.
No comments:
Post a Comment