Shocker: Holy Family is special
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but Holy Family Parish actually is special, and as such deserves an enormously higher level of fitment and graphical presentation.
Specialness
-
If we pretend the SSPX does not exist (many do pretend as much), Holy Family hosts the only Latin high mass in Toronto. You’d have to drive to St. Ann’s in Hamilton to find another one.
Holy Family runs about a third of all the Latin low masses in the entire GTA, even if we admit the SSPX exists.
-
You are fairly unique in celebrating a so-called reverent Novus Ordo. (“Fairly” means “probably actually and literally.”)
-
You run your own seminary, which Americans, and certain other foreign nationals, laboriously secure government visas to attend. On YouTube, Norbertines talk about learning Latin mass at Holy Family in “Toronto, Canada.”
Ordinations are held inside your own nave.
But the real source of specialness is found in your parishioners. Holy Family is their church. They – we – deserve a beautifully detailed, high-function environment. So, for that matter, do all of you.
Proper environs for proper masses
Soi-disant traditional Catholics on the Internet are quick to insist that they’ll attend Tridentine masses behind a McDonald’s dumpster if they have to. Perhaps a bit de trop – but everyone seems to like the make-do attitude of celebrating a Latin low mass on the hood of a milspec Jeep.
We are not living in conditions of privation matching either of those scenarios. Nor do we need the level of gilding found at St. Michael’s. (Upstairs there, at least.)
In a House of God, environs should befit the Mass. Those are not Holy Family’s environs at present. A facility with practically no exterior signage, where the doors and washrooms don’t work, and where even the church bulletin has to be corrected by hand (to the extent it even gives full information about the upcoming week), intrinsically vitiates efforts at reverence.
But it’s all fixable. So let’s fix it.