On Sunday, with my latest broadside on matters Catholics filed
and published, I drove with my family up into northwestern
Connecticut — just for the drive, no particular destination in mind. We
ended up stopping for mass at a shrine near Litchfield, built in
imitation and honor of Lourdes, that I’d visited occasionally many years
earlier with my parents. The place was mostly unchanged: A big expanse
of land, gray and somewhat forbidding on a cloudy day with the trees
half-gone toward winter; a grotto where they have outdoor masses in
warmer weather; a long stations of the cross ascending a wooded hill to a
lifesize Calvary; and various gift shops and outbuildings scattered
around the grounds. One of the outbuildings doubles as a chapel, and
that’s where the All Saints Day mass was held: In a crowded, close,
carpeted space, with a mostly-gray haired congregation (we were some of
the youngest people there) dressed in suburban- Catholic casual and
packed into too-small chairs on three sides of the altar.
It was the kind of
setting that would annoy a liturgical conservative and give a real
traditionalist the hives, and while there was no guitar (that I noticed)
the style of worship fit the space: The music mostly came from the
Saint Louis Jesuits, (“Be Not Afraid,”
etc.) the crucifix was dark and abstract and there was no other
iconography to speak of, and the priest was a great ad-libber and
elaborator, working his own reflections in here and there throughout the
mass.
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