What is it like to try to document over two decades of Divine Providence? I'm asking because I genuinely don't know. But I'm about to try right now, on this page.
I was classically homeschooled through twelfth grade, which included eight years of Latin study and reading the Great Books beginning in third grade. Gregorian chant and classical music were the soundtrack of everyday life and the walls, books, and even the films we watched were filled with beautiful visuals. My childhood was accompanied by Palestrina and Bach, illustrated by Rembrandt and Monet, and narrated by voices like Grahame, Burnett, Lewis, and Alcott. The good, true, and beautiful weren't just part of our lives; Catholicism wasn't just something we did on weekends and feast days. It was in every element of what we did. My father calls it "breathing Catholic air."
In the early 2000s, opportunities to experience the Latin Mass were rarer than they are now. The closest parish with a Latin Mass - pastored by my godfather - was more than 2 hours' drive each way.
And so the next best thing was my parents' experience with the Latin Mass. They were both born in the 1950s and spent at least a portion of their childhoods attending the Latin Mass.
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They spoke fondly of the Latin Mass but never compared it to anything else. There was never an attitude of anger or spitefulness in the way they talked about the differences; they knew that comparison was not needed and wanted us to know and love the Latin Mass for what it is, instead of what it is not. They also had no desire for us to take a resentful attitude to the Mass that we did have available, even if many aspects of it were less than ideal.
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They talked about how the Extraordinary Form and all that it entails belonged to us. I remember my mother telling me many times, "All of the Church's Tradition is yours. The Latin, the chant, the customs, the Mass. It is your heritage, and it belongs to you because you are a baptized Catholic. We want you to know about everything you have as a Catholic, even the things you may not see in church right now."
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My father spent his most formative years in the Traditional Rite. When it came time for my Confirmation preparation, he took great delight in telling me all about the ceremonies, especially the "slap on the cheek" from the Bishop, showing that the Confirmand is now an adult Christian and must endure suffering. (When he told me that I would likely be receiving a handshake instead, I rolled my eyes and wailed, "How will I ever be a man if I don't even get a slap in the face?")
The only things missing were good catechists out of the home and the Latin Mass itself, but there is no gap God won't fill.
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He filled the catechist gap with a nun from Guadeloupe, a tiny island in the Caribbean.
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Her name was Sr. Teresa (+RIP). I was six when we first met. She was a cloistered discalced Carmelite, away from her monastery and staying with her sister for a time to receive medical care. Neither she or her sister could drive, so we were tasked with taking Sr. Teresa to daily Mass.
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Between her habit, which looked exactly like St. Therese's - wimple and all - and her age, I was sure she'd been best friends with my patroness. "Trini, I am old," she told me in her thick French accent. "But I am not that old!" I never really believed her; she was so old - small and hunched over, barely taller than I was, and more wrinkly than both of my grandmothers - spoke the same language and wore the same habit as St. Therese, and even had the same name. There was simply no way they weren't best friends in the convent before St. Therese died. I'm sure now she'd tell me that she and St. Therese were indeed best friends, just not in the way a six-year-old mind would have imagined.
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Sr. Teresa made vestments. There was no room to do it at her sister's house, so she regularly came to our house after Mass and sewed in the guest room for the better part of a day. My mother tried to keep my sister and me out of her hair. She was moderately successful.
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I've been avid question asker my entire life and poor Sr. Teresa was the first non-family member to field the barrage of inquiries that I deemed unsatisfactorily answered in the parish-mandated First Communion CCD classes. Occasionally I snuck into the room where Sr. Teresa sewed and watch quietly...or ask her questions until my mother came to shoo me away and let Sr. Teresa work in peace. She never watered anything down, simplifying things as much as were truly needed for a second-grader, but never more than that. She also took some initiative and offered little bits of information here and there or corrections on basic elements of Catholic practice before I had the chance to ask.
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One morning before Mass, she caught me genuflecting on my left knee. Once I entered the pew, she pulled me to her side and whispered in her gravelly voice, "You must never genuflect to the tabernacle on the left knee. Always on the right! Do you know why?" I shook my head. "We genuflect to greet Jesus in the tabernacle. We are saying hello to Him and telling Him we love Him. It is an act of worship! And the right side is reserved for worship. So always, always the right knee. Never," patting my knee for emphasis, "never, ever the left."
I finally made my First Communion on the 120th anniversary of St. Therese's own First Communion. Sr. Teresa went back to her community shortly after, and we maintained written correspondence every couple of months. I sent long letters with lots of questions; she sent back postcards with one answer or, if I was very lucky, two. She passed away in 2008. Please pray for the repose of her soul.
God chose to fill the Latin Mass gap not with the Latin Mass itself, but with a burning desire for the Latin Mass that went almost entirely unfulfilled for nearly 20 years. He gave me a deep love of the true, good, and beautiful that was nurtured by the culture established in our house, and the more I heard about this mysterious Latin Mass I had was never able to experience, the more I wanted to see it for myself.
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I have one memory of the family vacation we took when I was in third grade: an image of a small chapel and a priest, flanked by two kneeling servers, standing at the foot of the altar at the very beginning of Mass. Two candles on the altar created bright spots in the otherwise dark stone church. It my first Latin Mass, and the only thing I remember about that trip.
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I loved that the whole thing was in Latin and was so excited when I recognized the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. I especially liked that the bells rang at the Sanctus. I noticed that my father seemed to know the whole thing, even what gestures to make, but I was quite lost most of the time. Still, that Mass made more sense to me than any other Mass I'd been to; it communicated something to me that no words could have.
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When I was in fifth grade, my family began attending a parish an hour's drive away that had greater reverence in the Mass. It was pastored by Fr. R. Brown, a gruff, no-nonsense, fast-talking New Yorker who wore a cassock and biretta, the latter of which fascinated nine-year-old me. He tuned the massive pipe organ himself, oversaw the annual carnival on a golf cart he drove at terrifying speeds, and had no patience for any of the altar servers' shenanigans during homilies.
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He regularly offered Sunday Mass ad orientem and the Ordinary was almost always in Latin, which went a long way in satiating my hunger for the Latin Mass. There was a weekly Latin Mass on Mondays at noon, but due to the distance and my family's schedule, my father and I were only able to go a handful of times.
When we did, always commented on how quickly Fr. Brown could offer the Latin Mass. "Trin," he told me, "back in my day, it was almost like a competition between the priest and the servers to see who could say their parts of the prayers faster. But I've never seen a priest say a Latin Mass in under half an hour!" After each Latin Mass, we went to a hole-in-the-wall place down the road for Chicago-style hot dogs before making the long drive home, talking about theology and liturgy and music the whole way. My formation throughout high school happened on those drives and in my father's "man cave," often starting with a question about something I read online that quickly became an hours-long discussion.
I attended my first High Mass during my first month of college when a friend visited and invited me to come to Mass with her at Old St. Patrick Oratory. That was my first exposure to the Institute of Christ the King, and it fell on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Tthe Propers for that day almost seem to prophesy the role the Oratory would play in my life nearly a decade later: "Better is one day in Thy courts above thousands...my soul longeth...for the courts of the Lord... Seek ye first the Kingdom of God..."
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The Oratory stayed on my mind, but I didn't return to it until 2020. I had no car in college and once I graduated I spent the next few years serving as organist at parishes in the diocese and was otherwise committed on Sunday mornings.
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In 2020, the world shut down. Even when things began to open up again, church music was slow to return, which left me without any musical obligations on Sundays. I proposed to my friend Megan that we take a trip to the Oratory on a whim, and the rest is history.
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During this time, I began experiencing - or maybe finally put a name to - what I can describe only as severe clinical depression. Because I never had a formal diagnosis, I will not say that I was depressed, but I checked all, and I do mean all, of the boxes.
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There are four dates I can point to as proof that I am still here only by the love and mercy of God, in spite of myself and my thoughts. The fourth and final date is 11 January 2023, which was the date offered to me for an Epiphany house blessing. I had grown up doing the blessing with my family every year, processing around the house and chalking the doorways. It wasn't a foreign practice.
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So when a priest named Canon Stein showed up at my door wearing a big grin topped with a blue biretta tuft, I didn't think much of it. We had corresponded via email while coordinating the blessing and only formally met in person that day. He spent maybe ten minutes at my place, vesting, doing the blessing, packing up his things, and leaving with the same grin he had worn when he arrived.
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That was all it took to flip my life upside down. The change was so immediate and radical that it took me over a week to realize it had happened at all. The next six months brought with them a torrent of grace and a whirlwind of wondering what on earth had happened, why it had happened to me, if it had really happened at all.
What had happened? Complete and total healing in an instant. Why did it happen? It took me over a year to make peace with this, but it happened as part of God's Will for me and wasn't for me to question beyond that. Had it really happened at all? Deo gratias, it did.
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Over the next year, pieces fell into place. Doors closed to allow others to open, some more painfully than others. The task of helping me pick up the pieces of my blessedly shattered life fell to Canon Stein.
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