Assumption Mass here

Went to the early Low Mass at the territorial parish, Novus Ordo of course. Great news: our cathedral hosted an evening Tridentine High Mass, Mater Ecclesiae's Assumption thing. But I stuck close to home. Highway and city driving after eight hours at work would have been too much: all that stress finding a parking space downtown as every other local official-church traditionalist is jockeying for the same spots (an occasion of sin!). I love our Mass as you know. But still.

So I walked to Mass first thing, in my town, before work. Just like people did 50 years ago.

The late-Victorian church hasn't been wreckovated, thank God (it still has its reredos with the tabernacle front and center, and its disused altar rail, and the sedilia are off to the epistle side, not in that awful "courtroom" configuration on the predella), but the churchmanship is still American Catholic low, as explained by the great Thomas Day: deep cultural roots in Low Mass junked up with hymns, mixed with an anti-tradition of 40 years' standing. Old ladies doing things in the sanctuary, one in an alb, another lighting the altar candles with one of those electric grill lighters. A squad of "Eucharistic ministers." A good-natured priest with zero liturgical sense. Obviously I don't want a steady diet of that.

That said:

Every. Word. In. The. Text. Is. True.

Pope Benedict the Great fixed the real problems. It IS a Mass. So when the ladies in the EM squad proceeded down the nave to the back of the church, I bowed my head as if it were a Corpus Christi procession.

A congregation of about 30, older folks.

I said the Gloria and the Creed from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer/Anglican Missal from memory.

Assumpta est Maria in caelum.