A small Summorum pontificum miracle occurred at the parish of St. James the Moor Slayer in Trumansburg, NY this morning. Fr. John Tokaz, O.F.M. Cap. offered the octave day Mass of Christmas according to the missal of Blessed John XXIII. Contrary to my expectation, Fr. John was far from alone: a more or less full house was in attendance.

This was not what used to be called an “indult” Mass - there were very few of those in the Diocese of Rochester and we traditionalists at Cornell had long ago despaired of having one in our neighborhood. Instead, we drove two hours to Scranton or an hour, as we’ve done lately, up to Syracuse. As Fr. John said to me today, this Mass was waiting on the universal permission granted by Summorum pontificum.

As of today, there are not fixed plans for a regular Tridentine Mass at St. James. Fr. John did say, however, that he would take the matter before the parish council and that he hoped to have a Tridentine at St. James on a monthly basis. Hopefully this plan will go through. It would be a tremendous service to many students at Cornell University if we were to have such a Mass on all holy days. I only wish that we still had among us the vocalists that we once did - Fr. John also asked about whether the Cornell contingent could produce a schola for the Mass.

Amazing, really, that we should be in the position of worrying about whether we could beautify the Mass by the addition of singers! This is the sticks, after all, and in the Diocese of Rochester no less! Still, St. James’ hasn’t been an entire stranger to the usus antiquior in recent years. Father said during his homily that he couldn’t think when the last Tridentine at St. James would have occurred. This Society, however, assisted at the celebration of no less than 3 such Masses in recent years - albeit these Masses were “private” (and with the former pastor’s permission, of course). Which just goes to show that today’s public low Mass was an answer to the prayers of many years.

As I said, I was surprised by the number of people in attendance. If I had thought about the matter more carefully, though, it only stands to reason that there would have been a reasonable turnout, because it’s a Holy Day of Obligation, and some folks would have been there even if it had been billed as Novus Ordo in Swahili.

Still, it was hard to get a feel for this crowd. They did surprisingly well - or better than I would have thought - with the low Mass rubrics. That is, they followed the lead of the servers, which pretty much takes care of things in the low Mass. I could tell, though, that they didn’t quite know what to do when we came to the genuflections during the Credo and the Last Gospel. Another thing about the congregation today: a fair number of hats and mantillas. This was quite curious - who were these people?

After the Mass, I spoke with one of the servers, a doctor and a regular parishioner, as it turns out. He hadn’t served this Mass in some 40 years, but acted as though it had come back to him without too much difficulty. Speaking to a lady as they were walking out of the church, another man remarked with a snap of his fingers, “45 years goes by just like that, doesn’t it?” So there were a fair number of people present who seemed to come at the thing with a very open mind, remembered the Mass from their youth, and didn’t seem too exercised one way or another about the great liturgical questions of the past decades. Yet another lady, younger, who struck me by her tone as likely to be a friend of the extraordinary form, said to Fr. John: “You know, word will spread and there will be more people here next time.”

I hope so. As a low Mass with two servers, it was very well done. This was clearly not the first time that Fr. John had offered the old rite. He told me after Mass that he had helped with the indult in Portland, Maine when he lived in that area.

In short, a beautiful day. When I find out about future Masses at St. James, I’ll post the information on this blog.