Those conditions were more common during the indult era, in the '90s. Back then the indult Masses in Boston, Hartford, and New Haven were in churches struggling to stay open, surrounded by industrial buildings or run-down public housing, in neighborhoods where most residents didn't speak English; and with odd scheduled times (noon, 2 pm, 5 pm). But some of that's changed now, since some TLMs have relocated and others have been added.

@Liam
Well, that's one way of shutting down the discussion. Isn't "blaming the victim" another feature of epistemic bubbles? ;)

I really have no idea whether or not the TLM is "the future" - most likely not in the conventional sense of the biggest numbers and the most buildings.

I do know it is the future for me and my family. It may go the way of "fads" like Catholic Workers or the charismatics, but something tells me that a thousand years of tradition may have a bit more staying power. . .

"Well, that's one way of shutting down the discussion. Isn't "blaming the victim" another feature of epistemic bubbles? ;)"

No.

None of that is true in my area.

Whereas it is true in other areas.

I will agree that it's not as bad as it used to be as Chonak mentioned. I am also not suggesting that in every situation that a diocese was intentionally trying to sabotage the TLM (although I do know of an instance in which this was the case) or that the bishop was even hostile in the slightest. In fact, some of them have been supportive.

However, given that the churches available to put under the care of certain societies of priests are often older churches in areas of town which have become dilapidated (and thus changing demographic), those are the churches which many of the TLMs ended up being at. This also is the reason (often) for the disrepair. I would point out, however, that in many of these places, the TLM has become flourishing despite the initial circumstances -- something which the NO was unable to accomplish.

As far as the time, that tends to happen with diocesan TLMs. Again, I am not attributing it to intentionally sabotaging the TLM. After all, many of the pastors of these parishes want the TLM, but they don't want to remove a time slot from another Mass and anger the parishioners. The result is weird times for the TLM. I can think of one instance of a pastor changing a current NO Mass to the TLM rather than adding one.

In the most remote part of the diocese is because in certain dioceses, certain trouble-making (hint: staunchly Catholic) priests get sent out to the boondocks to be forgotten by the majority of humanity. There, they are sometimes left alone because they surely can't do much damage at a parish that is 30 miles away from anything else.


And again, it may not be true in your area, but it is/was true in places that I have been.

EDIT: I am also aware of a diocese (I'm sure there are more) in which the bishop has forbidden his priests from offering the TLM. So that happens, too.

My guess is that a lot of those inconvenient placements for indult TLMs were motivated by a practical reason, the need to find a church that would not be inconvenienced by adding another Mass. In Boston, the arranged marriage worked out: the small German-American congregation and the larger Latin Mass community kept the church open for 15 years.

In most American parishes, changing Mass schedules is a fraught business. Many parishes are better understood as a collection of parishes, each with its own preferred worship time on the schedule (there are people who float, as it were, and people involved in ministries and, if extant, parochial school, but they are not typically the majority). So, changing that without consulting those whose habits may get disturbed is a great well to self-generate a mighty and long-lasting headache. I've never understood in terms of practical realism the apparent assumption of some TLM folks that they were likely to automatically obtain a slot in an existing parish's Mass schedule unless it was a slot with few people already attached to it.

For all the thought that went into Summorum Pontificum, it and the instructions that followed never touched the issue of expressly permitting trination to meet additional needs. It's not like the issue was not raised before the MP was issued; it was just elided/ignored.

by this Apostolic Letter we decree the following:

Art. 5, §1 In parishes where a group of the faithful attached to the previous liturgical tradition stably exists, the parish priest should willingly accede to their requests to celebrate Holy Mass according to the rite of the 1962 Roman Missal. ...

Art. 7. If a group of the lay faithful, as mentioned in Art. 5, §1, has not been granted its requests by the parish priest, it should inform the diocesan bishop. The bishop is earnestly requested to satisfy their desire. If he does not wish to provide for such celebration, the matter should be referred to the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei.

Art. 8. A bishop who wishes to provide for such requests of the lay faithful, but is prevented by various reasons from doing so, can refer the matter to the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, which will offer him counsel and assistance.

I know any priest can say the TLM but where does it say that any bishop has to provide diocesan property, parish churches, or reschedule any or all masses to accommodate it?

Nobody here said anyone had to do that, so quit insinuating it.

Nobody here said anyone had to do that, so quit insinuating it.

No one is insinuating anything. These are some things I have wondered about and haven't really been answered. Worst case scenario but could it happen? Seems loopholes abound in the documents.

Has the proposal been cooked up to drive tradition-minded Catholics into conflict, so that the German bishops can look OK when they implement the heretical proposals of their fake "synod"?

Good question. That crossed my mind, too.

“ Has the proposal been cooked up to drive tradition-minded Catholics into conflict, so that the German bishops can look OK when they implement the heretical proposals of their fake "synod"?”

I have a hunch the German “synod” is going to continue to go nowhere. Pope Francis really put his head on the line the other month in denouncing blessing same-sex unions, and with last week’s canon law revision that, among other things, explicitly threatens automatic excommunication and laicization for bishops that attempt to ordain women to any degree of Holy Orders (including deacon). That’s an awful lot of political capital to burn if he’s just planning to roll it all back at by the end of the month. In reading Cardinal Marx’s resignation letter, I got a real sense of desperation and frustration that the “synod” isn’t going anywhere vis a vis the Vatican, and he’s probably much more privy to upcoming reforms than almost anyone else. I could be wrong but that’s the sense I get.

latinmassdir.org can give you some parishes to check as a starting point, if you make, say, a 50-mile search based on the location you're interested in. There are apparently TLMs in Raleigh, Dunn, Rocky Mount, and Greensboro.

I know the nearest tlm parish to us has bullet holes in the facade. While it was a historic parish, it had been wreckovated to some degree and has required restoration and reinstallation of reredos and an altar rail. Conversely, I also know of many situations where they were NOT given a beautiful old historic parish and are forced to worship in very drab buildings on makeshift altars at very awkward times, while the beautiful historic parishes in close proximity are threatened with closure because they only have 30 attendees… so I don’t think the old trope of “give’m the crappy old church downtown” necessarily holds true. I’m also aware of multiple cases where diocese have refused to allow the use of certain churches by the SSPX, for instance, and prefer to close them or even sell them to Protestant groups over letting them be restored and used as intended by the SSPX, who are in turn forced to purchase Protestant chapels and make them work. It’s a quite queer situation, if you ask me.

So changing the Liturgical style is not statistically significant... But over what time frame?

Over a longer time frame Liturgical style would become significant, but this all becomes difficult to track as you rarely control the other variables. We can never be sure which variable caused the change. Also no two churches or two populations are comparable.

So we change the style, we will loose some people and gain others. We will have a delay as people need to change their timetable if they change churches, so the gain will take longer. Once this has settled like minded people mingle and we will see the rise in couples getting married, and then the rise in Baptisms etc.

Over the 25 or so years of our community we have gone from say 50 to around 70-100 in the first 5 years then sat at 100-120 for 10 years then a gradual increase over 5 years to 150, and now we have the Covid bounce to 220. Also we are still under some Covid restrictions so can't advertise!

Tom, were your 220 part of the (bias, reportedly) mere "Hundreds" that marched on London, the other day?
The propaganda machine continues, to try to keep those not in-the-know in the dark. It's sad.
But I saw some nuns in the video footage, which was neat.

It doesn't necessarily mean that. It means TLM attendance would be spread out more thinly over more locations and Mass times, and the legacy TLM parishes would see a drop in numbers.

This is what I meant by "cornering a niche market." I also think that the comments about constraints on TLMs (bad location, bad time, political barriers) miss the point here. If the TLM faced absolutely no constraints at all, maybe 5% of weekly Massgoers would choose it rather than 2%.

Which is why comments that presume that switching from the Novus Ordo to the TLM are a sure plan to grow the Church aren't realistic. And, it's careful to gaurd against this logic, because it's really easy to get fooled by anecdotal evidence. If you open the first TLM in 100 miles, your parish is going to experience growth, because now 2% of all regular Massgoeers in your area have a strong incentive to attend your parish. If one more parish opens, they'll probably see similar growth, because you haven't hit market saturation yet. And now, you've created a narrative that "people flock to tradition" and now if a bunch more poeple copy you, they're likely to experience disillusionmnet once TLM supply exceeds demand.

This has been discussed here:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/have-we-reached-peak-latin-mass/

To avoid the pitfalls of anecdoatal evidence, it's important to draw conclusions from high quality data. The data in this report pretty strongly suggests that liturgical preferences have little or no effect on Church attendance when variables are properly controlled for. If people disagree with the conclusions of this report, I'd like to see equally high quality data refuting it's claims.

My own observation is that locally, many Novus Ordo parishes are growing and are
prospering. They are not anywhere near death and new parishes are being built. Some TLM folks are like the blind people describing an elephant. They only "see" or are aware of their own piece of the beast and not the whole animal.

I actually like the TLM and this is not my view. However, I am old enough to remember that the majority of Catholics in the U.S. were more than glad to see the TLM gone. Most of the folks in NO parishes don't want it back. It appeals to a niche audience.

Most of the folks in NO parishes don't want it back.

I think most N.O. catholics are too ignorant of it to even have an informed opinion about it. I suspect it is much like any other acquired taste: you don't know you'll like it until you've had it a few times, and most people haven't tried it and don't have any impetus to, particularly since the TLM has been falsely sold to people as antiquarianism. People are turned off from the idea due to false assumptions and ignorance. I've heard many people remark after their first TLM that "[they] had no idea Mass could be like this... could be this beautiful! I really felt like I could pray. etc. etc."

"Niche market". Hmm.

When Thomas More was being pressured to cooperate with Henry VIII, someone said to him that all the great minds in England (except his) were on the side of the king, and he should consider abandoning his obdurate position, which (it was insinuated) he held for reasons of pride rather than truth, which (again, insinuated) was with the numbers. He replied that, if he chose as his sample not the great thinkers and great men of 1535 England, but the whole of Christian thought for 15 centuries, the truth could clearly be seen to stand with him, not with that one cohort in England.

In our time, perhaps the TLM is in a niche, but this is not true when we see a wider picture.

Mark,

I'm inclined to quote Pope Benedict on the subject of how any institution discredits itself, to the effect that when what has been held to be true is suddenly held to be false (and vice versa) a disorientation takes place.

About liturgical diversity, on the other hand, the predominance of the Roman Rite didn't prevent the existence of other rites, even within the Roman orbit. I'm not sure why the Sarum Rite was allowed to die on the vine, and someone will chime in here to fill in those details. Dominican Rite continued for years afterwards. In the Middle Ages, of course, liturgical diversity was permitted precisely because each rite conveyed the same faith.

There's a good book, if you don't know of it already, which compares the Latin of the collects of the Roman Rite pre and post 1969. I can't think of the name.

As to wholesale apostasy..... look around you!

I'm inclined to quote Pope Benedict on the subject of how any institution discredits itself, to the effect that when what has been held to be true is suddenly held to be false (and vice versa) a disorientation takes place.

This quote abounds on the internet, and while I haven't read the full context of the quote, what it seems to be saying is in my opinion specious. Sacrosanctum Concilium (a document that the CMMA exists to promote the authentic interpretation of) called for a liturgical committe to revise the Roman rite due to deficencies that are clearly stated in Sancrosanctum Concilium.

The problem with the TLM, according to Sacrosanctum Concilium, is not that is it has suddently become no longer true, but that it was not nearly as effective as it could be in promoting "fully conscious, and active participation" in the liturgy.

Hence, the intention of Sacrosanctum Concilium is not to label the old Mass as false and replace it, the intention is to upgrade the Mass and replace it with a new and improved version developed form what came before.

So, you can argue that the committe didn't do what Vatican II told them to do and that the Novus Ordo isn't the revised liturgy called for by the Council, but that's a seperate topic.

The claim that replacing one missal with another involved labeling the old missal as suddenly false when it used to be true is so obviously a ridiculous claim that I have a hard time beleiving that anyone actually thinks this.

Well, Queen Mary I also effectively nationalized the Sarum Use when she caused a national missal to be adopted at the expense of other local English uses that previously co-existed with it in some ways.

The editio typica of the new Mass is in Latin, not in English. Authorized vernacular translations of the Latin typical edition are numerous.

Anyone who compares the texts of the new Mass with the preconciliar Mass will notice considerable overlap and an identical ritual structure. The canard about it being a completely different rite, or a revolution, or that it isn't an organic development out of the Church's historical liturgy should be put down.

I am old enough to remember that the majority of Catholics in the U.S. were more than glad to see the TLM gone.

Citation for that? I'm old enough to remember that no Catholic in the U.S. got a choice in the matter.

I'm old enough to remember that no Catholic in the U.S. got a choice in the matter.

Same as what happened after Trent. The normal course of action is that when a new ordo of the missal is published all prior editions are abrogated. I know that there's some legalistic argument about how the paperwork wasn't filed properly to abrogate the 1962 missal but I think that really misses the point, the intention of issuing a new missal is that people use the new one and stop using the old one.

The parts that are most significantly discontinuous from the 1962 Missal are clearly called for in Sancrosancum Concilium, such as returning many of the responses to the congregation and allowing for use of the vernacular.

Gee. You forgot about chopping the Offertory by about 2/3rds and the expressly-stated 'limited' use of the vulgar.

Same as what happened after Trent.

Oh. So ramma-jamma in 1969 is just fine b/c ramma-jamma in 1510 (whatever.) I see!