My first Mass - Oh No! I've become a Trad!

Neil Addison writes about becoming a Local Representative for the Latin Mass Society

‘So, you’re one of these Trads?’ said someone when he heard that I had become a Local Representative of the LMS in Liverpool and Wirral. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m, well, er, ah!’

Personally, I blame Bishop Mark Davis of Shrewsbury. He decided to open the Dome of Home as a specialist Church for the celebration of the Traditional liturgy and he invited The Institute of Christ the King to run it. That is when the rot set in.

I am old enough to remember the Traditional Mass, but it changed when I was a child, and for 40 years I didn’t attend a Latin Mass and was perfectly happy with the English Mass. Well maybe not ‘perfectly’. I’ve always found the sign of peace an irreverent distraction at a sacred moment and I never really understood why we stopped kneeling for Communion and instead started lining up like a queue in a chip shop, but these niggles aside I wasn’t looking to change.

I had heard about the LMS as being a group of fairly ‘harmless nutters’ but I’d never actually had anything to do with them. Then, on 24 March 2012, out of sheer curiosity, my wife and I decided to go to see the reopening of this church on the Wirral with its queer idea of doing everything in Latin. To be honest is was just nice to hear of a church opening rather than closing.

It would be wonderful, but inaccurate, to say that attending that Mass was a ‘Road to Damascus, wow this is what I’ve been looking for, moment’ but the reality was that we simply decided it was sort of nice and we could maybe go back occasionally just to see how this experiment was working.

What we hadn’t banked on was that the Latin Mass is subtly seductive; you think a little won’t affect you and suddenly you’re going regularly. In many respects the Latin Mass is easier than the English Mass, where I can sometimes feel I am being lectured the entire time. With the Traditional Mass, I simply have the chance to be present at a sacred event and time to pray. Attending the May Day procession, when we took the statue of Mary round the local streets, was certainly a very important moment in making us want to be involved.

We found that the congregation in the Dome were a pretty nice group and, contrary to the stereotype, a large number of them were young, post Vatican II and with children; there are also a large proportion who are converts. The Institute is a young Order which is successful in attracting Vocations, and that gave me a positive feeling. This Latin Mass church wasn’t a museum of the past, it was a living Church looking to the future. The fact that the Dome has an excellent choir singing in Gregorian Chant also helped; no ‘Lord of the Dance’ rubbish.

As regards the LMS, I met the Chairman, Joseph Shaw, when we were both on the Committee of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. When he heard I had been to the Dome he said, ‘Well why aren’t you a member of the LMS?’ which, put like that, was a rather difficult question to answer. Before long I found myself a member of this organisation of ‘harmless nutters’ and the rest, as they say, is history. I was appointed an LMS representative in March this year for Liverpool and also for the Wirral. I live in Liverpool Archdiocese but Wirral is nearer to me than St Marys in Warrington, though I do go to Warrington when I can.

I was appointed just as all Churches went into lockdown and the job of LMS representative changed drastically. Normally, the local LMS Rep ensures members and supporters are told about Traditional Masses being held, helps to organise training sessions for Priests and Servers and visits the various churches, but with lockdown, Latin Masses, along with every other type of service, have had to be live-streamed and my job has been to keep everyone informed of where they can find a live-streamed Mass. I’ve watched the live-streamed Mass from the Dome every day. It was certainly a very new experience for me attending Mass daily and all the fault of Joseph Shaw, Bishop Mark and the Coronavirus.

So, am I ‘a Trad’? No, I’m ‘a Catholic’. I still respect the English Mass and will happily attend it when necessary, but I prefer the Traditional Rite and I am convinced it represents not just the past of the Church; it is definitely an important part of its future.