There are certain parishes in the archdiocese where knowing that’s where someone goes to Mass regularly tells you a whole lot about them. Saint Sabina, Old Saint Pat’s and Saint John Cantius are three which spring immediately to mind.
The last one on this list is the hyper-traditionalist parish. When I attended Mass at Holy Cross Monastery, I found myself wondering if I’d accidentally slipped into some schismatic church and kept googling the particular branch of Benedictines to make sure that they weren’t schismatic (and also because the monastery didn’t make the list of parishes in the archdiocese since, strictly speaking, it’s not a parish although it does offer a regular Sunday Mass). If Saint John Cantius weren’t on the list, I would assume I’d walked into a Society of Saint Pius X church. The parish was run by the Resurrectionists until 1998 when the pastor of the parish founded a new religious order, the Canons Regular of Saint John Cantius dedicated towards celebrating the Tridentine Mass. The 8a Mass was “Low Mass: 1962 Missal (Latin)” and while I have attended a Latin Mass before (including one at an SSPX church when I was researching my first novel), this was particularly disconcerting because not one word of the Mass was audible in the pews. Presumably there were scripture readings, but they were as inaudible as the rest. It does make the ringing of the altar bells more significant though since it provides a sense of where in the service we were.
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