TLM redux?

From OSV News:

[T]raditionalist Catholics in France are discerning a new idea: a personal ordinariate for Catholics devoted to the older Roman liturgical and sacramental forms that could give them pastoral stability and a bishop who could speak for them and be directly responsive to the Holy Father.

No longer outcasts?

(Note: it’s time to abandon this blog’s custom of writing in the third person; it’s simply too cumbersome for the longish tale below.)

I have long been a TLM enthusiast. As a convert from the Episcopal Church, I formerly attended a small, ultra-high Anglo-Catholic church in Manhattan, one that featured elaborate Catholic ritual, along with the incomparable 1962 Book of Common Prayer and 1940 Hymnal. One fateful Good Friday I was attending a service for that day,  which involved the removal of the Host from the Altar of Repose to the High Altar in the sanctuary. As the servers were precessing slowly with their precious burden, with incense billowing everywhere, the choir intoning appropriate chants, all was splendid indeed until out of nowhere a voice within told me, clearly: “Jesus is not here.” For some time I had indeed considered “swimming the Tiber,” but never seriously until that moment in my little A-C church. It was then I knew the time had come to go to Rome.

While not knowing a single Catholic priest in New York, I was aware of one, a well known author of many books and a familiar figure to many, Catholics and Protestants alike; so that was the priest I chose to contact. Not even knowing Father’s email address, let alone his phone number, I sent a letter “snail mail” to his then-parish, to his attention, and prayed. Having included my email address in the letter, the very next day I received one from that priest that simply read: “Come see me.” I did and shortly afterwards began seven months of rigorous catechization. The following Easter Eve, I was received into the Holy Catholic Church.

I should note this momentous occasion took place around the time the late Benedict XVI permitted the celebration of the Latin, or “Extraordinary Form” Mass again. It was not long afterward I learned of another small church in a different part of Manhattan that offered the Latin Mass, which I had only heard of,  every day of the week. I began attending Mass there and quickly came to love TLM. The church also had a small Schola Cantorum, which its director kindly invited me to join. It was there for around seven years I happily attended the Extraordinary Form Mass and participated in the chanting. Alas, this came to an end when I quit New York and moved to Taos.

It wasn’t long afterward that Pope Francis, in 2021, severely restricted the celebration of  TLM and though I was fortunate to find a church where it is still permitted to be celebrated, it is some distance away from home and Mass is celebrated at a highly inconvenient time,. I am thus only able to attend Mass there occasionally. Still, I am fortunate in having access at all to TLM. Most TLM enthusiasts have none.

Now there is a small hope things may change. The Latin Mass may become more accessible again with the good news from France related above. It is not the first time a group has sought to have the restrictions on TLM lifted, but the request this time is different in that the group’s approach is respectful, to the Pope, to contemporary Catholic worship and, in general, displaying a more positive attitude than certain groups in the past have been. To quote further from OSV News:

French Dominican Father Louis-Marie de Blignières first proposed the idea of the “traditional ordinariate” in September 2023, but continues to develop it today. Age 75, he is the founder and former prior of the Dominican-inspired Fraternity of St. Vincent Ferrer, whose priests celebrate the older form of Roman liturgy. His convent is located in the picturesque village of Chémeré-le-Roi, south of Normandy.

At this time all TLM lovers can do is pray the Holy Father will be sufficiently moved by this respectful group’s request and honor it. Oremus.