What’s all the fuss about the Latin Mass?
by Gavin Ashenden, Christian Today:
My first encounter with the Latin Mass was at an Anglican Benedictine monastery in West Malling in the late 1980s. I had gone there for a week’s retreat and had been given a room in the gatehouse. In the gatehouse were two rooms for guests. The building itself was part of the original Catholic monastery founded in the 11th century.
And that, I imagine was why the room opposite mine in this ancient building, was temporarily taken by a Roman Catholic Abbot making a retreat.
Dom Aelreed Sillem was the Abott of Quarr, a Cistercian monastery on the Isle of Wight. He had been elected abbot when I was 10 and was now pretty elderly and physically a bit frail. He was the epitome of a man who had spent his life praying and meant it. He had come to make his own retreat in a place that had belonged to his spiritual forebears. Since then it had been destroyed by the English authoritarian state under Henry VIII, borrowed by the wealthy bourgeoisie, and finally re-adopted in the early twentieth centuries by the high church of the Church of England.
I liked him on sight, and through his generosity we quickly became friends.
He reminded me he had to celebrate the Catholic Mass himself each day (separately from the Anglican nuns whose eucharist had been declared ineffective by Pope Leo 13th in 1870) and did so in the ancient chapel of this ancient gatehouse. He asked me if I would care to serve for him, that is help him at the altar with some of the practicalities, while he prayed the liturgy. I could not share in communion, but I could share in the prayer. I said I would be delighted. And so I joined him early the next morning. The liturgy he used was the Latin Mass, which had remained the same for 500 years, from 1570 (the Council of Trent.)
One never goes to worship looking for ‘an experience.’ But sometimes our perceptions are bounced into a heightened state of awareness by a mysterious combination of things. And this, my first Latin Mass, celebrated by an elderly monk, in the remnants of stones soaked in adoration over a thousand years old took me into what seemed like a translucent antechamber of heaven.
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