This Sunday, I\u2019m attending a Latin Mass. There, it\u2019s decided. I could hardly call myself a fl\u00e2neur <\/em>of Catholic culture otherwise. Never having taken a knee at the Porziuncola or the Holy Sepulchre, never having set so much as a single toe on the Camino \u2014 all these omissions, I think, are forgivable, given budgetary constraints. But never having heard a single Latin Mass when it\u2019s offered in my own diocese is just plain laziness. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve always been a bit of an experience junkie. My checkered life has led me into swingers\u2019 clubs, Mexican cantinas, Hong Kong tattoo parlors, Russian gangster hangouts, and subprime mortgage brokerages. In each case, I had to repress a natural revulsion \u2014 that was most of the fun. In each case, the awkwardness evaporated within a few minutes, along with the novelty. By contrast, deciding to go Tridentine, even as a one-off, has been a bear, a resolution arrived at only after many evenings of huffing and wall-punching and chain-smoking. Just writing about it makes me seize up \u2014 at the rate I\u2019m going, I\u2019ll probably suffer a psychotic collapse when the first drop of salty water hits me. <\/p>\n The ick factor comes from the association I\u2019d formed between the Tridentine Rite and anti-Semitism. Never mind the line in the Good Friday liturgy about praying for the Jews, or even the line in the old Good Friday liturgy about about praying for faithless Jews. You can be a supercessionist without being a hater. But then, minus Nostra Aetate<\/i> \u2014 introduced a few years before the Mass of Paul VI, and rejected by some traditionalists along with it \u2014 Jew-hatred gets automatically downgraded from a serious moral failing to an unpleasant quirk, like B.O. The Society of St. Pius X put up with decades of it from Bishop Williamson. Just recently, SSPX head Archbishop Fellay proved Williamson wasn\u2019t a total oddball by going completely Bobby Fischer in his own right.<\/a> In an address to followers at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Chapel, Fellay asked, \u201cWho, during [negotiations with the Vatican], was the most opposed that the Church would recognize the Society? The enemies of the Church. The Jews, the Masons, the Modernists.\u201d <\/p>\n Forget the bigotry, forget the self-serving intellectual shabbiness. That statement\u2019s most repellent quality is its ungraciousness \u2014 ungraciousness to Benedict and Cardinal Castrillon, whose reputations have already taken hits on SSPX\u2019s account; ungraciousness to all the decent trads who look up to Fellay and have pleaded his cause with skeptics; ungraciousness to more or less faithful Catholics like me who\u2019ve gritted our teeth and smothered our doubts and hoped and prayed that the Vatican knew what it was doing. Frenchy cut the cheese right in our faces.<\/p>\n He ought to be ashamed of himself. But he isn\u2019t, and he won\u2019t ever be. To his way of thinking, because he\u2019s got the Latin Mass, he\u2019s got the moral right of way. The Mass, then, is a perfect aegis for assholes.<\/p>\n But of course, that\u2019s not all it is. I used to know a woman who belonged to a sedevacantist sect. (To take her account at face value, her head bishop was a perfectly sane, pastoral, gentlemanly guy with no particular animus against Jews or anyone else.) During her early childhood, she and her family lived far away from any of the sect\u2019s few churches. They took their Latin Mass wherever they could get it \u2014 sometimes in a motel room rented for the occasion by an itinerant priest. Now that\u2019s an image to conjure with: two or three families bowing their heads and straining to tune out the crack-smokers in the next room while a fresh-faced kid in a fancy stole recites the confiteor<\/em>. It speaks to a catacombs level of commitment deserving of respect. If the draw was in the Latin, well\u2026that\u2019s a point in its favor.<\/p>\n The signs of the times seem to say that Latin, along with traddishness in general, is staging a creeping comeback. In April of 2010, Washington D.C.\u2019s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception featured a Pontifical Mass in the Extraordinary Form. A Paulus Institute press release called it \u201cgloriously reverent,\u201d and, indeed, it must have been a hit with somebody, because the following year Archbishop DiNoia of the Vatican\u2019s Conrgegation for Divine Worship celebrated a Solemn Pontifical High Mass in the very same place. Just last week, in an about-face no less stunning than Christopher Hitchens\u2019 endorsement for the Global War on Terror, Deacon Greg Kandra called for the re-introduction of Communion rails.<\/a> True, he made no specific reference to Latin, but he must know the camel and the tent too well to suppose that people can go on kneeling in the vernacular forever.<\/p>\n So, it would be nice, then \u2014 really comforting \u2014 to run with the image of the Best Western conventicle; to write off Fellay and his followers as a million isolated cases; to refute any connection between crankishness and a flair for the fruits of Trent. It\u2019d be nice, but it\u2019d be hard. Too often does one hear the words Novus Ordo<\/i> used as a weapon, a nifty synedoche for every species of moral degeneracy the speaker wishes to pin on his opponent. In the mouth of a pro, it can sound impressive. Fr. Clement Procopio, formerly a priest in the Diocese of Phoenix, demonstrates as much here, in the letter where he tells his bishop what\u2019s what:<\/a><\/p>\n What you should be saddened by, however, as all of us should be, is what has happened to the Catholic Church since Vatican II. That revolution is what brought about changes in doctrine, such as, false ecumenism of a Cosmic Christ that doesn\u2019t exist, universal salvation in which all are automatically saved, distorted notions of religious liberty that eliminated Christ as King of the Universe; changes in morals such as immoral sex education in the Catholic schools, the defense of homosexuality, a sin that cries to Heaven for vengeance, that has resulted in the glaring scandals in the priesthood and in the hierarchy; changes in the liturgy, like substituting the Mass of All Ages, instituted by Christ, with a Masonic Protestantized Novus Ordo Mass, that was concocted precisely with the intention of destroying the True Mass and the whole Catholic Church, by lending itself to all kinds of abuses, sacrileges and circuses at the altar, resulting in disastrous effects, such as the loss of many vocations, the loss of faith, the loss of discipline, etc. etc.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n