Hans Memling. Musician Angels. 1485. Koninkijk Museum, Antwerp.

High Mass at San Gregorio

I’m ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. I was thinking mostly about my skipped breakfast when I turned off Piazza Nicosia down towards the unassuming alleyway where the tiny church of San Gregorio ai Muratori stands. It’s Rome’s indult Latin mass parish, a church of what my friends and I jokingly call the Frat House, that growing new order known as the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.

It’s a grubby, lifeless little street on Sunday mornings, blinds drawn and shutters closed, a few parked cars and the open snackbar with its down-at-heels bamboo matting testifying to some sliver of neighborhood activity. Then there’s the bicycle parked in front of the church’s grimy, classical doorway, but it always seems to be there.

It was about 10:25 and the four rows of pews were full of congregants, solemn-looking young men in ties and blazers, a middle-aged tourist in a greasy ponytail, and then there was a bearded, impeccably dressed and coiffed gentleman seated one row back. A young man in a suit moved over to him, slipping an expensive tweed topcoat over his shoulders, flamboyantly mismatching his silk scarf and muted plaid blazer.

Something about the tilt of his head, moving back over the small group of kneeling churchgoers for a familiar face suggested a hint of the politician. Perhaps his assistant, small, compact, gel-haired, knotty-muscled and perfectly dressed, was a bodyguard. He stood by the door throughout the mass.

I finally found a seat next to a crop-headed German in wire glasses and a demure young lady with a Carmelite face, framed by a white head-shawl. She was carefully paging through her English-Latin St. Andrew’s Missal. I knelt. My eyes moved, perhaps carelessly, over the tiny oratory’s playful stone-grey cherubs and the tarnished gilt sunburst ringing the descending dove of the Holy Spirit. Elaborate renaissance stuccowork snaked over every surface of the sanctuary.

There was the faint Christmas smell of candle-wax, and I noticed the tiny steady flames of the six altar candlesticks glowing against the darkened and expansive image of Our Lady appearing to St. Gregory. And there was something of Advent in those delicate, isolated flames after coming in from the slight morning chill.

Two clerks in cassocks and surplices carefully set up the missal, turning the pages precisely to the proper of the day. There was a smile passed between then, perhaps a murmured joke, but they all genuflected as they moved back and forth across the footpace of the altar. I noticed the ornate silver frames of the mass cards, the printed irregular columns of the Canon’s text forming an elaborate baroque shape almost like a sarcophagus. I hadn’t noticed those before on previous visits.

Then I remembered it was the third Sunday of the month, 10:30, the parish’s monthly high mass. I heard stirrings through the half-open door of the sacristy, hints of practiced chant or murmured vesting prayers, the click of a censer just starting to smoke. I felt anticipation lick at my soul. I was still somewhat drowsy from waking up, but I soon found myself awake, alert, ready. Light winked on the bulbous brass profiles of the candlesticks.

The sacristy bell clattered, and I heard the small schola in the loft overhead begin the Gregorian melody of the introit. First came the thurifer, incense boat and censer in his upraised hands, eyes cast down solemnly, his broad medieval sleeves falling in precise folds. Then came the other clerks with glowing tapers, moving in a great circular motion from the sacristy around through the miniscule nave and then up into the sanctuary. Last came the subdeacon, deacon and priest, black birettas crowning their heads, white vestments gleaming with silk diapering and golden trim. Heavy maniples hung at their wrists, hands folded neatly at their chests. Another priest stood in the back, carefully watching, his hands hidden in the sleeves of his cassock. And so the mass began.

The mass setting was a polyphonic one, in the great tradition of Lassus and Palestrina, but uniquely suited in its simplicity for the tiny church. It was difficult to tell the composition of the schola, kneeling there beneath the loft, but by sound alone you could feel the character of the different choristers. The single deep Gregorian tone of the introit chant was exchanged for a gentle, spare Kyrie, high, ethereal sopranos and a deep, rich bass sometimes fading into the background with perfect deference, a raw tenor moving in between with graceful flourishes.

It was not museum-quality singing or chanting, lacking the cold precision of recordings for a real, unvarnished, delicate sound. Occasionally a hint of hoarseness crept into the chant of the deacon intoning the gospel or the melismatic flourishes of the tenor, but it was all the richer for its quirks.

In the sanctuary, the sotto voce prayers of the clerics, their repeated and gracefully natural bows, seemed to run in perfect time to the Gloria, to the Sanctus, to the chanted Creed and the rich interwoven melodic lines of the offertory motet. It didn’t seem synchronized or mechanical, but that both their ornate observance of the old Tridentine rubrics and the metrical perfection of the anonymous polyphony was a reflection of some greater cosmic harmony that kept perfect heavenly time without clock or metronome.

Those gestures seem almost as beautiful and sacred as the actual texts of the mass, motions with slow perfection so unfamiliar to the eyes of my post-post-Vatican II generation. There was the gracious dip of the biretta at the name of Jesus, the gentle spew of dovelike perfumed smoke back and forth from the bobbing thurible, the liturgical kiss of the assistant on priestly hand and censer-chain. There were the simultaneous bows of deacon, subdeacon and priest, or the complex motions of the murmured Confiteor as the two bowed assistants turned to the priest at the words et tibi, pater, as obvious and ritually intelligible as a spoken word. And to you, Father, I confess. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

It was solemn but it was easy, as natural as the turn of the seasons and the rising of the sun, the clerks and deacons falling into an order and hierarchy mirroring God’s tiered creation on both earth and heaven. There were other impromptu memories, too, like the glimpse of the thurifer slipping back into the sacristy to re-light the censer, the candle flame transforming it into a wood-paneled Georges de la Tour vignette.

The politician kept looking around with a peculiar smile. The young lady hardly ever glanced up from her missal.

At long last came the Pax, the sign of peace, the Tridentine sign of peace, seldom glimpsed in this day and age. It was perhaps the most beautiful gesture I have ever seen, a slow ceremonial embrace, the interlocking movement of hands on shoulders and hands on elbows, a discrete bow of the head, a withdrawal, a nod. Pax domini sit semper tecum. Et cum spiritu tuo. The priest exchanged it with the deacon, the deacon with the subdeacon, the subdeacon with the four clerks, human order and celestial hierarchy. Seraph to cherub, cherub to throne, throne to domination. For the heavenly liturgy of the Book of Revelation was incarnate here.

And then, just as the Agnus Dei began, I realized I didn’t feel so hungry anymore.