The first time I stumbled into a Traditional Latin Mass years ago, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. A well-meaning traditionalist friend took me there in Italy, convinced that I would simply be blown away by the beauty and the timelessness of it all. There are stories of people stumbling into their first Latin Mass and instantly ‘getting it’, being drawn in.
Well, reader, I was not. My instinctive reaction after exiting the church was that this was the weirdest thing I had ever seen, and that I was most definitely never going to attend another one. Several things put me off strongly, first and foremost the veils on the heads of the women, then the endless genuflections of the priest, who did not look at us even once, and also his stiff, old-fashioned vestments. It was all so formal and seemed to confirm what a friend in church circles had told me about those strange traditionalists: ‘They are simply in love with a black and white photograph of the Church, and cannot cope with the modern world.’
