69: I can understand better now the attitude of the martyrs and the saints of past centuries

Episode 69 At the age of thirty, Joseph attended for the first time the Traditional Mass, the Latin Mass. He explains how the experience changed his life and 'filled a gap' that he hadn't realised was there. For Joseph, now Chair of the Latin Mass Society, this liturgy is the 'engine' of a Catholic worldview.

Find out more

Latin Mass Society

Sacrosanctum Concilium

Let's Sing with the Pope

A new episode, a different conversation, every Wednesday!
Email me: theresa@KindsofCatholic.co.uk
Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and X/Twitter Give me a follow @KindsofCatholic
Find the transcript: https://kindsofcatholic.buzzsprout.com

The podcast is kindly supported by the Passionists of St Patrick's Province, Ireland & Britain and by CAFOD.

Music: Greenleaves from Audionautix.com

Transcript

 You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of ways we're living our faith today. Pope Francis used the image of a caravan for our travelling together on a sometimes chaotic journey. And Pope Leo, quoting St Augustine, reminds us, Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed and maybe challenged now and then.  I am too in these conversations. And if you're enjoying them, it helps if you rate and review on the platform where you're listening.  Thank you.

Thanks for joining today listeners. I've got an interesting guest today, Joseph, and we're going to have a really interesting conversation. We're going to talk a little bit about the Latin Mass actually, so let's see where the conversation takes us. Welcome, Joseph.  

Thank you very much.  

And just to give people some context, you are part of the Latin Mass Society. You've got a proper role at the Latin Mass Society, as Chair. 

Yes, yes, that's right. 

OK, so I'll put a link to the Latin Mass Society into the episode notes so people can follow up after this conversation if they want to, and anything else that comes up that might be useful.  Can we talk about you as a person first Joseph, as a person of faith and can we think about, or would you mind talking about, when  in your life your faith first became important to you? Is it from way back in childhood or is it something that happened later?  

I am a cradle Catholic and my parents were quite serious Catholics  and I actually don't remember a time when I didn't take the faith seriously. We went to Mass together and it seemed important to me. My engagement with the faith of course varied over the years. I was at Ampleforth as a secondary school, monastic school, the liturgy of monks around in those days of the 1980s. It was very much a monastic school. One thing that did change for me importantly was discovering the Traditional Mass. That wasn't until I was 30. I'd heard about it, but I'd never really seen it properly to go to regularly. That had a huge effect. 

For those who don't know about the Second Vatican Council, I'm just adding a quick explainer here. This was a huge Council which took place in the 1960s in the Church. The Council document Sacrosanctum Concilium outlined the direction of changes to the liturgy. So the Order of Mass, the way in which we celebrate Mass, was then changed from the late 1960s. Often Mass would now be said in the local language rather than in Latin. And one aim of that was to encourage active participation of the faithful in the celebration of Mass. We're not going to cover all the details just now, but there is a link to Sacrosanctum Concilium in the episode notes if you want to follow up. So today Joseph is talking about the Traditional Mass, which is the Mass of the Church before the Second Vatican Council. And the Novus Ordo, the new order, is the rite or form of the Mass, which was promulgated by Pope Paul VI following the Council. And that's the Mass that most people will be used to participating in, in parishes across England and Wales. So you were school at Ampleforth, but the liturgy there was not particularly Latin then. Would that be right? The Mass would be, I think, Novus Ordo is what we call the Mass that many parishioners would be used to.

Yes, that's right.  I think they would say, and I would have said at the time, it was conservative. It was sort of reverent Novus Ordo. They did have some Latin though. I used to go to the Litany of the Hours sometimes, Vespers,  sometimes that was in Latin. So it gave me a sort of taste of that kind of thing. This liturgical change, I was very dimly aware of it as a young adult. It happened just at the time when I was born and nobody really talked about it. So the references to it occasionally, it was like something had happened.

There'd been a new beginning. Changes, yeah. Changes that weren't really shared with you because you were just very small when they happened. 

Well, I wasn't born. So I was born in 1971. I remember when I first started thinking about the liturgy, becoming, I don't know, a bit more involved when I was at prep school. I was at a non-Catholic prep school. So the Catholics would get into a minibus and go out to Mass. There were sort of some experiments. On one occasion, the priest invited in a music group that played music which was more contemporary, more like pop music. And we got terribly overexcited and the priest was furious. Really not ideal circumstances at all. The priest thought it was terrible. I don't blame him for that. It didn't work. In hindsight, you know, that was the first half of the eighties. And this Mass was just 10 years old, 15 years old. It was still, people were trying things out and not quite sure how things were going to work and what effect it had on the people and whether people were going to carry on practising. And all those, all those questions were still very much unresolved.

Yeah, let me just jump in there because that's really interesting.  I was born just a few years before you, not many. I hadn't really thought before until you're saying that about how new the Mass was even in the early eighties for people still trying different things. Thinking about when I was at secondary school, and myself and I went to a Catholic secondary school, maybe the priests that came to say Mass were  not as familiar with that Mass as they were with the older Mass from before the Second Vatican Council, when I think about it now.

It wouldn't have been the Mass that they themselves had grown up with. 

You mentioned that when you were about 30 then, you found a Traditional Mass. And how did that happen? 

When I was at school and I first got a bank account, I got very excited about this bank account and I joined all sorts of organisations. I got this cheque book, I sent off these cheques and I joined the Royal Society for Protection of Birds. And one of the things I joined was the Latin Mass Society. I must have seen an advert somewhere. So I got these magazines, which were all rather sad. I kind of got the impression that there was this, you know, these people who felt very aggrieved. It was a very difficult time for the Latin Mass Society in those years, but I could never go to the Traditional Mass. I had this idea that that would be interesting and I was quite reactionary as a young adult. But it just wasn't available and I went to Oxford as an undergraduate and as far as I knew that it wasn't available. And then finally I got engaged to be married. I discovered that the Mass was being advertised in Oxford for the first time and little did I know that it had been celebrated there all through that period on the condition that it wasn't advertised. It was celebrated in these kind of funny locations with the permission of the archbishop. So finally I went to this thing and it was in - I went straight past the venue and I had to go back the following week because it was in the West Oxford Community Centre, which was a brick building. There are rooms in it, which you can hire by the hour. In one of these rooms, the Traditional Mass was being celebrated. It was just a kind of shoebox room. It was low, there was no singing or anything. I was there with my fiancée, now my wife. It changed my life. That Mass changed my life. I came out and I said, This is it. And I didn't know that I'd been looking for something.  Um, I just thought this might be interesting, but it filled a kind of gap in my understanding of the Church, of history, of Catholic spirituality. There was something which had just not been there, the sort of missing jigsaw piece.  And I thought, This is it. Cause you know, I'd been reading older Catholic authors and a little bit of knowledge of  theology and church discussions. And there was this sort of thing, the tradition, the past, which people talked about, of course, but there was something very powerful, very distinctive about Catholicism when people talk about it right up to the fifties. Some people are alarmed by it. Some people think it's awful. And some people are attracted to it. And you have all these amazing conversion stories and stuff. What's at the heart of that is this something very self-confident, something quite mysterious, something which you have to kind of take on and kind of deal with. And that's the liturgy. The liturgy is the centre of that. The centre of Catholic spirituality and therefore of the Catholic attitude to life. 

That's really interesting because when I've spoken to other guests who either like or prefer the Latin Mass, they talk about the beauty of it, a feeling of transcendence. Often, not always. There's been other things that  - a recent guest, listeners might remember, actually found it helpful that the priest wasn't making eye contact with her during Mass. There's a range of things, but I'm interested that this Mass that you're describing didn't have the singing, wasn't in a really beautiful building, and yet it still spoke to you in a very deep way. That is very interesting there. I suppose part of that is that you had some understanding of this tradition from past times that you could feel that connection with, maybe. But I wonder, was there something about the Latin itself or the fact that the priest has his back to you, you feel more involved, less involved, more swept up? I don't know. What is it that spoke to you, do you think? 

Well, I did feel all those things that your other guests have said, but people react according to what they bring to it. And I'm an intellectual. I was there as a young academic teaching analytic philosophy, not theology. I knew a little bit of theology, but my main thing was philosophy. But it meant that I was encountering the debates within the church and articles in the Catholic press and discussions I had with my Catholic friends in an intellectual way. And I didn't know that there was something that I wasn't getting, but with hindsight, that's the case, which I discovered with this. That's how I encountered it because of my own personal circumstance, the nature of my search, which is intellectual. I think it is very emotionally engaging as well, spiritually engaging. In a way, that's what I mean. That the fact that it engages you in this particular way. And yes, the priest not looking at you and all that stuff. Being in Latin, I didn't know Latin. I still don't have good enough Latin to understand it as it's spoken. You'd have to have pretty good Latin for that. And very few people do have, throughout history. Most people haven't had that. I mean, even when it was first done, because half of it was silent and it was in this kind of funny Latin that is not spoken in the street, even in ancient Rome. It wasn't intended to be completely comprehensible. It wasn't intended to be that kind of engagement. It's supposed to be a somewhat mysterious spiritual experience. Of course, the Novus Ordo is trying to do something quite different. And that was my experience throughout my life up until that point. It was an attempt to reveal the mystery. And this is an attempt, I think, to be the mystery. You can see it and what you can see is mysterious. And that doesn't mean you don’t understand it because of course, if you're catechised, you know what's going on. You know the priest is offering. In fact, you can, of course, can read all the prayers if you want to with a translation. But nevertheless, you engage with it as with a mysterious thing rather than have someone say to you, Oh, this is what they're doing now. And this is what he's saying now. There's an open question of whether these two approaches, you know, which one is better or I almost think that's not a terribly useful conversation because some things, you know, one appeals to some people and the other. What's tricky though, is that they are so different. I think in a way, I don't agree with people who think that the Novus Ordo reform went too far. Or at least I don't really like getting involved in that discussion because I can see they had a project to make it comprehensible and you can't do that with half measures. Obviously that has a value. I do have some sympathy with the argument that was made when this thing was being contested, was contested of course with some bitterness by some people about, you know, the word immanent and transcendent. But that's not the project of the Traditional Mass at all. And I think you can go in there without a missal, without any Latin, and even without much catechesis or liturgical formation and  find it an expression of something which is spiritually profound. And you may find it difficult to articulate that, a reflection of the fact that it is profound. It goes beyond words. Not to say that people shouldn't be catechised, of course they should. It's not absolutely essential to have that, to have this kind of engagement. The irony is that I was an intellectual, I am an intellectual. I want to understand things and I want to see lots of words. And yet I could see this was a sort of engine of a kind of a Catholic worldview, a Catholic attitude, a Catholic culture, a Catholic kind of response to persecution, the way that Catholics dealt with life. Over many, many centuries, all the stuff I've been reading about, I mean, not intensely, but I'd seen references to it because see, there was something. Gosh, these Protestants have said the Catholics are kind of mysterious and obscurantist. What are they going on about? Because the Catholic Church really wasn't like that in the 80s and 90s.

I'm really glad we've had this conversation, Joseph. That's really made me think. One of the things that was going through my mind was I remember my grandmother saying to me, she preferred the Latin Mass. Well, in the sense that she said, at school, they used to say, and she was born in 1900, they used to say that the wonderful thing about the Catholic Church is that you could go to Mass anywhere in the world and it would be the same. We've kind of lost that. On the one hand, I've often thought, well, at least you can understand what's being said. That has been what we've understood to be better. But you've explained very well there one of the pitfalls of that in a way. Alongside that, I've noticed that, for example, when Pope Leo was installed, when he uses Latin, like singing the Our Father in Latin, for example. Everybody from all over the world in St Peter's Square can sing that together because here's a common language of the church, except for me, because I don't know the Latin. I found this wonderful YouTube channel. I may put the link in the notes, called Let's Sing with the Pope, where a priest there in the Vatican teaches you some of those Latin things so you can sing along with Pope Leo. So I just mentioned that in a very trivial way against your more intellectual approach to this conversation. But I do think there is something very unifying and very grounding about everybody being able to experience this, whatever your own language is. That's what I have seen as valuable about the Latin, but that is different from what you're saying. So it's very interesting to hear that. 

It's a very common argument. It was made in official documents as well, the unifying nature of Latin, but I would slightly push back on that because actually it wasn't all the same. I mean, even without leaving this country, you'd find the Norbertines with a slightly different Mass, the Dominicans with a slightly different Mass, Carmelites with a slightly different Mass. The Canon was the same, the readings were the same, but it was very significantly different. I would say though that the spirit, it's very similar. One of the things that people meant in the older documents about the unifying nature of Latin is actually they were talking about Latin as a form of communication. And that was obviously for the educational elite of the church. But nevertheless, that was very important. They got together at Vatican II and they could converse in Latin. And now when the bishops get together internationally, they are put into language groups. That's obviously very unsatisfactory. They don't have a common language. I can't see what the solution is. They have to go home and learn Latin, but there's no incentive to do that without the, I think the Latin liturgy was a sort of incentive to get good Latin. And that's what John XXIII was very emphatic about in 1962 in his document, Veterum Sapientia, the importance of learning Latin and using it for studies. He hardly mentions the liturgy actually. The church does need a common language. 

There's one thing that was sticking in my mind there when you were talking about the importance of catechesis alongside the liturgy where a person can come and just experience a Latin Mass and feel the kind of spiritual experience without necessarily understanding too much of what's happening. I'm just thinking about part of how I continue growing in my relationship with God or continue really knowing more about Jesus and the gospel and how that relates to my life today. Some of that is through what I hear at Mass, through hearing the gospel read, reflecting on the sermon, maybe the bidding prayers and relating things from the readings to what's going on in the world. How do those things work for people who are experiencing the Mass in Latin then? 

The lections, the gospel and the epistle, they tend to be repeated in English.  Of course, many people have hand missals. There's a one-year cycle of readings for Sundays. 

Oh only one year? Only one year. It's not the same cycle of readings then? 

No, no, it's very different. 

Oh, I didn't know that. 

Not only is it a one-year cycle, but the great majority of them are either, the gospels are either miracle stories or parables. So actually, you get familiar with them very quickly. You get it presented to you again and again. Of course, the preacher might preach about them. The thing I'd emphasise though is the Traditional Mass is not intended to be didactic.  It's not an opportunity to familiarise ourselves with the Bible or theology. It's an act of worship, which is to say it's prayer. Your experience of Mass is like an experience of prayer, collective prayer, the prayer of the church. So it's a perfect prayer. Your task is to engage with that as perfectly as possible. To offer yourself with the sacrifice which is being offered on the altar. So whatever helps you do that will help you have  the better experience from this and to take away more in terms of grace. When I was at school, we were prepared for Confirmation and they didn't really believe in telling us any doctrine. And we were doing religious studies, so perhaps that wasn't so necessary. We were encouraged to meditate, know, sit in a darkened room and...I don't think that's a really stupid thing. Actually I think there is some value in that, but it strikes me that that's basically what the Traditional Mass is doing. It's creating the conditions for wordless prayer. You don't have to sit in the dark room with a candle and incense because it's all there.  And the familiar ritual helps you relax spiritually into this experience, which will enable you to engage in something in a profound way. It's a, it's a form of contemplative prayer when it's working well. It can be a form not just for the intellectual not just for the kind of theologian but for the ordinary Catholic who's experiencing it in this way and not engaging in the individual words. Not engaging in - the theme of the Mass is the, you know, the Last Supper or the feeding of the five thousand But just in this spiritual way. It can be supernatural prayer, the prayer of the Holy Spirit within us.  That can happen in any liturgy, but the Traditional Mass  is set up to facilitate that in a particular way.  And in the Novus Ordo, it's very clear that there's a didactic component which is given greater prominence. If you sit with a missal at the Traditional Mass, there's lots of things to learn, lots of lovely prayers, lots of beautiful readings with many insights for you. And of course, the parish priest who's preaching will want to use those things. But the ordinary person going in, that's not front and centre for their personal experience. What's front and centre is this being drawn into this mysterious contemplative engagement with God. You come out of that and of course the action of grace on the soul, the effects of prayer are very difficult to articulate. But I think I can understand better now the attitude of the martyrs and the saints of past centuries, particularly the ones who are not theologians. The ordinary people who rose up to defend the church in the 16th century. The French peasants who objected to the revolution. I think I can understand that better because they had this thing which meant so much to them. It's not about knowing theological propositions.  It's not even about having a knowledge of the Bible, although I think they would have had it preached to them over and over again. So I think they weren't ignorant actually of the of the basic stuff. Nevertheless, that's not the primary thing. The primary thing is that they had an opportunity to enter into a relationship with God, which is completely, it's just impossible to articulate. 

I think you've explained that really, really well, Joseph. That's given me a lot to think about and I'm sure listeners too. So that makes the next thing that I was going to ask you different in this case, because I often ask people about whether there are particular prayers or practices or what are the particular prayers or practices that nourish their faith. I'm kind of thinking for you being at Mass is the way you're describing it is different from how I might go into Mass on a Sunday. I mean, it is prayer for me. Of course it is. It's a time of prayer. But I am also learning, listening to the Word of God and feeling that I'm learning something as well. I feel that didactic element that you're talking about. So it's interesting that for you, that Mass is more about a time of deep prayer in a much more focused way. So I wonder whether outside of that now, are there other things that nourish your faith? What are the prayers and practices outside of Mass then for you that support your faith from day to day?

 Yes, I’m just thinking about this for the first time in these terms, but maybe outside the liturgy, to some extent, we do things which reflect our liturgical experience, and to some extent, we do things which are filling up other aspects of our spiritual needs. So I know that there's a big movement at the moment for Exposition, Adoration. People who go to Traditional Mass, of course, they like Benediction as much as the next Catholic, but I don't think it's quite such a felt, urgent need because there's more of an element of Adoration in the Traditional Mass. And I think with the Novus Ordo, some people react to the way that it works by saying, Okay, let's go off and have half an hour meditation in front of the Blessed Sacrament as a kind of separate, paraliturgical thing. I think outside Mass, we have our family prayers, which are important, of course, in a family. Partly because I teach my children at home, I've become really appreciative of scripture, reading scripture as part of teaching them for the most part. Maybe that's filling up a gap that might otherwise have been more satisfied with… not that it’s necessarily intended to satisfy all those things because it's good to read scripture at home. And catechism, I do catechism with my children. This is a very common thing among Catholics who go to the Traditional Mass. They take catechism very seriously and they sit for hours with their children with a penny catechism or whatever. And maybe that's precisely because the Mass is less didactic that you actually want to have the didactic element. You bring in a different way, especially living in, as we do in a society where you’re asked questions, you're challenged in your faith and you've got to have something to say. And instinctive faith is lovely, but you're going to run into problems when you're at university or a workplace or whatever. But the other thing which means a lot to me is the walking pilgrimage that I do once a year and other pilgrimages. So the idea of a holy place, a holy time, holy people, and that's something which has kind of gone in and out of fashion over the last half century. It's definitely back in fashion now. I love going on pilgrimage and the Latin Mass Society have lots of places, all sorts of places. But our biggest event of the year is a walking pilgrimage from Ely to Walsingham, which is 56 miles. And we just did that at the time of speaking, we did that last weekend. 

How do you cover 56 miles? How long does that take? 

Three days. So it's 20 miles, 20 miles and you know, the rest. People always want to take it even further. I started walking from Cambridge the day before, which is another 18 miles. That's not enough either. So some people walk all the way from South London  and they end up walking something like 180 miles and it's taking them an entire  eight days, Sunday to Sunday. They're pretty tired at the end.  And that's something which I can only admire and not imitate. And that's interesting as well, because I think that a walking pilgrimage, again, it lends itself to meditative prayer and the walking itself becomes a... and even if you're chatting, you're walking for a purpose. The intention of the walk is there all the time. But of course, we pray, we sing. We actually sing the Rosary, which is quite fun in different languages, Latin, English, and also in French, because so many people have been on the Chartres walk, which is even bigger, even more rigorous.  That's, maybe that's an extension of the spirituality of the Traditional Masses. Of course we have the Mass as we go along. 

The pilgrimage is interesting because in the previous episode listeners will have heard about the National Jubilee Pilgrimage. It's interesting that across different expressions of our faith, pilgrimage still is something that everybody can find something really valuable in. People often talk about some time for quiet meditation, some time out in the natural world, and also conversations with people which can be about faith because you're together walking and also praying together out in God's fresh air, the spiritual value of that. So that's really interesting that Latin Mass society also has I was going to say, a tradition of that, a practice of that, a way of participating in pilgrimage together? 

Yes. Our own walking pilgrimage in England started in 2009, I think. But the one in France, the Chartres which I mentioned, that's been going since the 80s. And that's massive. They now have 20,000 people. It's extraordinary. And to be part of that, and I haven't done it since it was much smaller actually, but even so it was thousands and thousands of people to be part of such a huge event, that adds a special quality to it. 

Yes. And I wonder if part of that for you, I don't know whether people that prefer the Latin Mass actually feel very small within the church in some ways, and actually being part of a big group of people who are like-minded actually feels particularly special for you. 

That's an interesting point. Yes, I think that may well be. Yeah, we are, we are very small. It's a very much a minority thing. I think sometimes people forget that with all the debate, people pay much more attention to us than we deserve in terms of numbers. And equally on our side, I think people can go into a little bit of a bubble. It is nice to have a kind of gathering of the tribe from a sociological point of view. And I think actually sociological considerations are not irrelevant at all to maintaining one's faith and passing on to the next generation. course. 

Speaking of maintaining faith and passing it on, I wonder whether we might just, towards the end of the conversation, think about Pope Leo and what your hopes are for Pope Leo. I know Pope Francis, for the Latin Mass Society, your experience was mixed, I don't want to put words in your mouth - but what are your hopes for Pope Leo's papacy, for where you are in the Church? 

I don't have any special insight into him. It's important for us to give him the space to make up his mind. What I'd like him to do, what I hope he will do, is to find a way to bring peace to this liturgical question. I think that Pope Benedict was on the right path with his approach to this. And I realise that it didn't seem very peaceful to some people because they were frightened by an increase of interest in the Traditional Mass and they thought it had all sorts of implications which were worrying to them. For many, that situation which Pope Benedict allowed the Traditional Mass to be celebrated much more widely, it meant that a lot of people stopped being miserable on the sidelines, stopped pestering their bishops about it, stopped feeling rejected by the institution.  And unfortunately, we've gone back to a situation in which people do feel rejected. They do feel miserable. They say, A form of the Mass that was celebrated by the church for many centuries, can't be anything wrong with it in itself because otherwise that wouldn't be the case.  And yet, I've been made to feel a bit of a pariah. In fact, Pope Benedict himself, he wrote before he was pope, he said that the people who like the Traditional Mass encountered no charity and were treated like lepers, which is very strong language.  Certainly isn't true of everyone that we encountered in those days.  There is truth in that and it doesn't reflect well on the institutional church that a body of people who were motivated by piety, devotional concerns should be treated like that. Throughout the history of the church, not just since Vatican II, people who've, they wanted to do slightly odd things with the liturgy - they've often been accommodated.  Even though people in Rome may not have had a great deal of sympathy with their desires. Nevertheless, you don't drive people into schism because they want to receive under both kinds. In the 16th century, there was a group of people like that and they were given an indult and they could receive under both kinds. And it wasn't a norm. It was just peculiar people in this peculiar place because they've been influenced by the Hussites and it went on for a few generations and then they phased it out. But I think it's very interesting that they allowed that. Even though they had all kinds of arguments where it wasn't necessary and there was a kind danger of profanation. Just let them do it. And similarly, you know, Eastern-rite people who wanted to be in communion with the Pope, Let them do it. It's okay. It's not ideal. Maybe, you know, in your 17th century attitude, you might well think everyone should just have the Roman rite, you know, and be happy about it. But even then when there's this idea that Roman rite was superior to all other liturgies, even then, there are a few million people in Ukraine who want to be in communion with the Pope - Yes, make the concession. Of course you do. So in that context, it just doesn't make any sense to persecute these… Okay, maybe they're lunatics. Maybe they're really stupid people. All the same, just make the concession. It's going to be okay. I realise that people don't see it that way. Not everyone sees it that way, but I think it was working. There were tensions under Pope Benedict about the liturgy, but I think the tensions are getting less. Things were going in a good direction. People were calming down. People were reconciling themselves to the fact that the institutional church is not against them, it's not their enemy. It was just gradually calming down and now we've been set back. This kind of on-off thing, I don't know, it's going to take longer. I do feel confident that he will. Maybe not in exactly the same way as Pope Benedict. He can do it in his own way, but to find a way for this accommodation so that we can all be at peace. No one is going to stop people celebrating the Novus Ordo. This isn’t on the agenda, but just for this little group of people. That will be a reflection of all sorts of factors. 

That's really interesting to hear directly from you about what you think and what you hope for.  I have really enjoyed this conversation, Joseph. I feel like I've learned a great deal more about the Latin Mass or the Traditional Mass as I hear you calling it, than I really appreciated. It is a more nuanced understanding that I've come away with, which is really helpful. I mean, I already would agree with you that I hope, hopefully, we'll find a way to make peace in this area so that all Catholics can be one in our worship of God and our faith without it necessarily looking the same in the way we celebrate Mass. I'm with you on that and I just feel much more informed now about what life is like for people who like the Traditional Mass and why you do and what you get from that. So that's really helpful. I'm really grateful for you spending some time with us today and I think listeners will find much there to be of interest and information. Obviously listeners who already are people who prefer the Latin Mass, I hope they feel that we've done it justice in our conversation today. 

Thank you very much, Theresa. That's very kind of you.  

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time.  I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday.  Follow AllKindsOfCatholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X Twitter and Facebook accounts, @kindsofCatholic.  You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there.  You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.