My First Catholic Masses in England

Sunday, September 11, 2016  Brighton, England

My parents raised their children Roman Catholic in Canada, where that religion has more adherents than any other religion.  I married in the church in 1993, the first Catholic wedding in my family since our parents married in 1950.

Like most "cradle Catholics," I rarely go to mass.  In the past three days, however, I went twice in England, my first masses outside Canada; but the masses differed from each other, and from masses I recall in Canada.

St. Mary Magdalen Church, about a kilometre from where my sister and I stayed in Brighton,  is a brick church built in the 1800s.  It has masses in English, Polish, and Latin.

What was there in 1830, when England, after almost 300 years, reduced restrictions on Catholics and others who would not swear to faith in the Church of England?

Quakers I met at a Saturday open house at their church told me of restrictions their church faced from a few decades after their mid-1600s beginnings until the late-1820s "emancipation act" of parliament. 

Before emancipation, instead of ministry, many Quakers went into business.  Quakers started the Cadbury and Rowntree candy firms, and Barclay's Bank, for example.  Quakers also famously opposed slavery decades earlier than a mass movement rose against slavery.   Even before their own emancipation, Quakers emancipated others.

The Quaker women I met were happy to hear that United States folk music singer Joan Baez grew up Quaker.
 
After the English government rescinded laws requiring non-Church of England people to swear to the church in order to advance in certain areas of society, Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and other "dissenters" were allowed to attend and teach in universities, to sit in legislatures, and freely to practice their religions.

A Baptist church near where we stay had a cornerstone dated 1834, less than a decade after emancipation.  The Baptists got busy quickly, I thought when I saw that brick church.  They are among the "dissenters," people with religions neither Catholic nor Church of England, which we Canadians call Anglicans.  Two Anglican churches I was in here had crucifixes behind their altars the first time I saw that.  I suppose these are High Anglican, unlike the Low Anglican church, which has no crucifix, in my hometown of Williams Lake. 

The dissenting churches suffered in England, and elsewhere, and still do in parts of the world.  Dissent can prevent or reduce tyranny, so tyrants, whether religious or secular, don't like dissent.

Getting back to mass so to speak, I sensed a different spirit of dissent in each of the two masses I attended here in England.

The first was a  Traditional Latin mass, not to be confused with a Tridentine mass, the standard mass form before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s changed the content of the mass and approved it for use in languages other than Latin.  I was a child when this change came, and I do not remember the Tridentine Latin mass.

At age 20, when I lived in Ottawa to finish my Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature at Carleton University, I went to a Traditional Latin mass.  Almost 35 years later, last Friday night, I went to a Traditional Latin mass at St. Mary Magdalen Church here in Brighton.

Most of the 20 or so participants, some of them children, knew more of the words than I knew.  A girl of 10 or 12 sitting in front of me seemed fluent, including singing the Latin hymn that ended the mass, the first music in this mass.

The priest and his assistant faced the small altar to the right of the large altar.  They did not face the congregation, but this was a modern mass in Latin, not a Latin mass using words common before the Second Vatican Council.  That is, this was not a schismatic event, such as some theologians critical of the council began, to revert to the old forms.

This mass merely served people who wanted a modern mass in Latin.  This dissent strengthens the church and perhaps the faith, by expanding the range of people it welcomes.

Perhaps the church should expand its offerings more, but past a certain point, it would lose unity; this is a delicate balance, as it is in all areas of society where dissent exists.  Each person accepts a different level of disagreement from those around him or her.

Incidentally, the First Vatican Council, in the mid-1800s, was, like the second council a century later, an effort to make the church more relevant, without discarding what makes the church endure.  Unlike the Counter-Reformation of the 1600s, these councils, especially the second, were less efforts against Protestantism than efforts for Catholicism.

Catholic with a small c means inclusive.  John Milton, the 1600s English poet and republican, wrote for inclusion, and against Puritans and Anglicans and Dissenters and Catholics who saw their way as the only way to salvation.  He infuriated both the monarchists and the republicans, during that era that largely formed the Christian traditions that continue to this day, in varying degrees, in Europe, America, and the rest of the world.

The Friday Latin mass felt inspiring, and inclusive by virtue of its linguistic echo of centuries-old traditions followed by many; but the Sunday English mass felt inspiring and inclusive, too.  On Sunday, we said more of the mass in Latin than I ever said in an English mass:  the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Apostle's Creed, and the Our Father.  People also used the communion rail, something removed from churches in the late-1960s but returning in the past decade.

Most inspiring on Sunday was the singing; the priest and people sang the whole mass.  The last time I was at a mass that was all sung was in the mid-1980s in Edmonton, at St. Alphonsus Church, the one my dad attended during his early adulthood.  "When you sing, you pray twice," St. Augustine's words, were on the church bulletin.

The same priest said both the Friday and the Sunday masses; versatile priest.  He invited people for refreshments after the Sunday mass.  As people left, he stood at the door and shook each hand.

"Hello from Canada," I said, a greeting I use here to alert people to my Canadian accent.

"It's good to have you," he replied, with his English accent.

In a complex world, which was always complex in different ways in different eras, people seek help, answers, inspiration, meaning, and hope, from religion, nature, work, play, learning, love, and many other sources.

"We're all going the same place on different roads," Mom said more than once.  She converted to Roman Catholicism before she married Dad, who grew up Catholic; but she converted from choice, not compulsion, Mom and Dad both said.  Others her age in our hometown were in mixed marriages and wed in the church.

"What's your religion?'"  Dad used to quote himself from their courtship days.

"'I have none,' Mom replied."

"'Want mine?'"

"'OK.'"

This is less a theological debate than a proof of the devotion of two people to each other.

Like most Catholics, I rarely go to mass.  The church I go to mass in the most is in my spouse's community in the Cariboo Region of Western Canada.  That mass has almost no Latin, some singing, and a sermon that sometimes inspires and sometimes infuriates me.

I have been to other religious services, mostly for funerals:  Jehovah's Witness, United.  I have been to a Lutheran service and various fundamentalist and revivalist services.

The United States folk singer Woody Guthrie once mused that he did not know which religion was right, which wrong, and whether any of them was any good.  He concluded that love matters most, echoing the Ancient Roman poet Virgil:  amor vincit omnia, "love conquers all."