From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
A Matrimonial Quest
For our wedding we wanted a Latin Mass. It wasn't easy.
Rumors are furiously circulating that Pope Benedict XVI will soon grant Catholics broad access to the Tridentine Latin Mass. Based on ancient sources and codified in 1570 after the Council of Trent, the Tridentine Mass was in use for centuries before the Second Vatican Council called for its reform. After the close of the Council in 1965, a reform commission produced the new Order of Mass we have today. For many Catholics, the cadences and rituals of the traditional Latin Mass were a profound part of their religious devotion. There may have been wisdom in the church's attempt to "update" the Mass. But many Catholics felt a loss, too, when their traditional form of worship was all but banished.
Since the Council, those devoted to the Tridentine Mass have pleaded with the church to restore their right to that venerable form of worship. In 1988, a sympathetic Pope John Paul II asked that bishops provide "wide and generous" access to the traditional liturgy. But stingy clerics, who regard devotees of the old Mass as retrograde, often ignored this request, a form of defiance that the current pope is obviously well aware of and determined to correct. If the latest rumors are true, Pope Benedict will allow the Tridentine Mass to coexist with the new Mass, bypassing bishops and giving individual parishes freedom to use either rite.
Maybe, as a result, others will be spared the ordeal we went through to have a Tridentine Wedding Mass. We are members of an often ignored wing of the Catholic Church, parishioners who favor the old-fashioned ways and their external signs: confessionals, statues, missals and scapulars. Many of the powers-that-be seem embarrassed by our continued presence, as if a whiff of the old pious practices might reverse what they call the liturgical "progress" of the past four decades.
Thus the greater New York metropolitan area is currently permitted only a handful of weekly celebrations of the Tridentine Mass. Unfortunately, finding a parish for our own nuptial Mass was a painful process. A priest at one such parish in Manhattan told us that the rector and his parish council were not interested in having more old Masses celebrated there. A parochial vicar in Long Island nearly chortled at the suggestion that any additional Tridentine Masses would be allowed in the diocese that he serves. The secretary of Edward Cardinal Egan, the Archbishop of New York, responded to our impassioned plea by offering us the ugliest church in the borough.
Finally, however, we were welcomed into a church in Manhattan by a pastor who, happily, cares little for the antitraditional biases of his ecclesiastical colleagues. And so on July 22 we were wed at the Church of Our Saviour, with all the rich trappings of a traditional Catholic Nuptial Mass--from the ethereal strains of Latin chant down to the lace trimmed hems of the priests' vestments.
We discovered that finding the accessories for the wedding was remarkably easy. Numerous small retail and not-for-profit agencies have sprung up to serve the growing numbers devoted to the old Latin Mass. For our female guests, we purchased saucer-sized chapel veils from an online retailer. A group of laymen based in Illinois supplied us with dozens of inexpensive paperback Latin-English missals. A parish in Pequannock, N.J., outfitted the priests with elaborate hand-made vestments.
Especially dear to us were four young men from the area who volunteered as altar servers for the intricate Solemn High Mass ritual, a task requiring attention, practice and pious reverence. Each had memorized special responses to the prayers and enacted choreographed duties that assist the priest's sacrifice at the altar. The ritual of the Mass depended on these four men as much as it did on the three priests. They provided their own transportation and sacral clothing; the only reward they sought was the privilege of serving at such a rare event.
These experiences betoken a movement filled with charity and community, and, of course, they meant a great deal to us. But we would like to think that such traditional customs--if they are allowed to flourish again--would also enrich the devotional life of many other Catholics. The broader church may want to nourish this movement back to a timeless faith. Even if the bishops and baby boomers wish to persist in their ways, the time is ripe for them to give us young fogeys a seat at the table.
Mr. Wyman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. Mrs. Wyman is a graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto.
