Is the Latin Mass for Freaks?

Writing in Tablet, Maggie Phillips explores how the internet has “remade” the traditional Latin Mass. It’s a story meant to warn people off. The Latin Mass is surrounded by male internet freaks and insane politics, and it doesn’t deserve the attention it’s getting because it’s practiced by so few Catholics. Or so Phillips tries to tell us.

For those who don’t know, the traditional Latin Mass (TLM) is just the form of the liturgy celebrated in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church up until the time the Novus Ordo Missae — the New Order of the Mass — was introduced in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Ever since that council, some Catholics and non-Catholics have lamented the disappearance of the traditional liturgy, and a movement to make it more available or bring it back has been percolating for decades, until it burst into the mainstream under Pope Benedict XVI. The founder of this magazine was devoted to the old liturgy. The English literary hero Evelyn Waugh was also a partisan for it. So was Pat Buchanan. (Phillips is correct to see an association between the TLM and political conservatives.)

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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Writing in Tablet, Maggie Phillips explores how the internet has “remade” the traditional Latin Mass. It’s a story meant to warn people off. The Latin Mass is surrounded by male internet freaks and insane politics, and it doesn’t deserve the attention it’s getting because it’s practiced by so few Catholics. Or so Phillips tries to tell us.

For those who don’t know, the traditional Latin Mass (TLM) is just the form of the liturgy celebrated in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church up until the time the Novus Ordo Missae — the New Order of the Mass — was introduced in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Ever since that council, some Catholics and non-Catholics have lamented the disappearance of the traditional liturgy, and a movement to make it more available or bring it back has been percolating for decades, until it burst into the mainstream under Pope Benedict XVI. The founder of this magazine was devoted to the old liturgy. The English literary hero Evelyn Waugh was also a partisan for it. So was Pat Buchanan. (Phillips is correct to see an association between the TLM and political conservatives.)