Good Shepherd, Rosemont

Photos.

Been acquainted with these fine folk for more than a quarter century. Their tradition is the American biretta belt (which actually was far away in the Midwest), which “St. Tikhon” Western Rite Orthodoxy is taken from: 19th-century Roman Catholic style but both Gothic/Anglophilic (WASP) and, unlike their English version, old (in this case 1928) Book of Common Prayer-based (Mass: Anglican or American Missal, which are the BCP fitted into the Tridentine Mass). In later years they’ve done more of a high-church Rite I. If you want monthly Evensong and Benediction they’re your place. Unlike anything around them because Pennsylvania was originally Quaker so the Episcopal churches in other Main Line towns are low-church, usually now liberal of course. (The “cathedral” of the local Protestants seems to be Bryn Mawr Presbyterian.)

So that said, the court’s right. Freedom of religion and property rights (self-government without interference and thou shalt not steal) are Libertarianism 101, or to defend the Catholic Church in America you defend all religions’ rights. (So neither the haters nor the martyrs/last-standers are right.) I’m really sorry. Charming buildings.

Of course I hope Bishop Moyer and the really Catholic-minded from there join Fr. Ousley in the ordinariate locally when it starts.

In the meantime or alternatively there’s Our Lady of Lourdes down the Pike. It’s great! (25 years ago there was literally nothing like it in the archdiocese and you would have been chewed out if you asked for it. Hooray for Pope Benedict.) The first Mass every Sunday morning is Tridentine Low.

We are surrounded with so much of what I grew up with as a [religiously] privileged Anglo-Catholic, that I hardly know that I am “across the Tiber.”

At the eastward Novus Ordo Sung Mass every Sunday, partly in Latin, you even sing many of the same hymns.

Of course most of the archdiocese isn’t like that but now, like England in the ’80s (the Brompton Oratory), these places are there.