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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