A More Measured View of Low Mass

Not every day can be Sunday, just as not every liturgy can be a solemn one, that grand Platonic High Mass from which all liturgies derive. I sprinted down to San Gregorio ai Muratori this evening after an exhausting day of touring-lecturing. I was there for a Latin Mass in honor of the feast of the Seven Dolors, not quite knowing whether to expect chant or hymns in honor of the holy day or a heartfelt but severe and rushed mass as I had witnessed yesterday in Trastevere. It was, as I discovered, another Low Mass, but it proved to be one of the most memorable spiritual experiences I've ever had. San Gregorio is a tiny church tucked into the lowest story of a humble Roman palazzo-turned-apartment at the end of a twisting cobbled street cluttered with parked bicycles. Only a miniscule bell-cote over the restrained, soot-shrouded classical portal marks the chapel's purpose. Within, the grime of ages masks its walls, filled with funerary monuments, two side altars, and the devout clutter of an indulgenced cross and a baroque confessional, but the innumerable Renaissance reliefs are still touched with gilding and glitter in the semidarkness. A dim oil painting of St. Gregory in supplication to the Virgin looms above the principal altar's six heavy brass candlesticks. It is a church filled with the delicate decay of its own forgotten history waiting to be discovered.

There were only a handful of us there, kneeling in those warped, baroque pews, and I would be grateful for the experience of this sacred intimacy. The priest, vested in white, entered to the clatter of the sacristy bell, his hands reverently holding the unconsecrated host beneath the heavy white chalice veil. The cassocked acolyte gracefully received the priest's biretta as he entered into the sanctuary beyond the marble altar-rail. The ancient Latin prayers were recited slowly and limpidly in his gentle baritone, in a solemn tone tinged with mournful introspection. They were accompanied by the effortless gestures of genuflecting and crossing, and the attendant's gracious oscula, the long-lost liturgical kiss of Trent, on the cleric's hand, on the biretta and on the cruets, as sacred objects passed between the two of them. Though I knew the ritual gestures were complex, it looked as beautifully simple and unconsciously natural as the first time Abel offered his sacrifices to God or when a child knees to pray at his bedside. This was the "noble simplicity" liturgists have failed to find for the last fifty years, despite the differing abuses heaped on the old rite by modernists and hurried, harried Hilaire Belloc 20-minute-Mass priests alike. Even the silent Canon, which sometimes seems to me like a veil drawn pointlessly over the transparent beauty of Christ's words, seemed transcendent, as half-glimpsed gestures told the whole story of the unspotted Sacrifice.

If we can't have Palestrina and incense at all our liturgies, we can still have these small beauties to comfort us.

I left with a wistful smile on my face, watching the sky in the east mellow behind bulbous, half-Austrian belfries, fantastic chimneypots and the wiry scarecrows of television antennas, which are graceful even in Rome. I strolled leisurely down the streets near the Ponte Sant' Angelo, watching the sunlight die on the dappled, dilapidated stucco as antique dealers in Via dei Coronari shuttered their storefronts. Behind the glass, I glimpsed dozens of navigational instruments in glittering brass, miniature obelisks covered in hierogylphs, huge marble pagan heads on pedestals, armillary spheres, scientific lenses.

I was so serene from the Mass, in fact, I nearly walked into a parked motorino while rubbernecking at some wooden liturgical candlesticks in the window of one shop. I'm quite hopeless, really.