Bob McClory *and all ye Call to Actionists past, present and future, be advised! Latin is coming! Latin is coming!
Yes, dear sisters and brothers, right here in Chicago River City, or just outside it, in beautiful Berwyn, where the church strangely named Odilo is taking the Holy Father in Rome up on his personal edict permitting old-style Latin mass wherever people want it.
Saint Odilo, that is, at 2244 East Avenue, a block north of Cermak, 6600 West as Chicago crows fly, on three consecutive Tuesdays, November 6, 13, and 20, at 7 p.m., “for the souls in Purgatory in the extraordinary form (Latin traditional).”
Nothing precipitous here. It will be four months since Pope Benedict announced that Tridentine (16th-century Council of Trent) masses are A-OK on priest and parish say-so, period.
Since 1988 it’s been OK on local bishop say-so, and that has included Chicago and Chicago’s archbishops, Bernardin and George. Indeed a whole parish, St. John Cantius, on the Near Northwest Side, has had its rebirth largely on the strength of its Latin liturgy, on the way acquiring a whole new community of priests and seminarians.
Neither is Latin mass new to the St. Odilo pastor since February, Rev. Anthony Brankin, who is an old hand at this, having celebrated Tridentine mass at St. Thomas More, at 81st and California, where he was pastor for 15 years until his term ran out and he was reassigned.
Father Brankin was quoted by The Observer in August as to how he would do Latin mass at his new place — “with organ and choir,” because “high mass is what generates interest.” Bring out the bells and incense.
More recently, he has said, “We have to do it right, which means getting the altar in position [turned back around], the music right and the priests trained.” It doesn’t hurt that Father B. is an artistic bloke. His sculpture commemorating the Irish famine sits in Gaelic Park, in Oak Forest, and he used his recent six-month sabbatical to complete another of the Holy Family, recently unveiled in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
He is “in highest hopes” his parish can make a success of the Latin mass. “We will be the first in our area,” which means near west and near south suburbs. “I want all out here to know about it.”
So he has advertised, in The Catholic New World, Pioneer Press papers including the Oak Leaves, which arrived in my mail this week, and Berwyn Life and other Life newspapers.
It will be a solemn high requiem mass, old style, which means black vestments and the “Dies Irae” (day of wrath), sung readings, incense, bells, and all the other hot buttons of pre-Vatican II worship.
The other two priests on the altar, one as deacon, the other as subdeacon in the standard roles of the solemn high mass, are Rev. Ryszard (Richard) Gron, of Wroclaw, Poland, director of formation at Bishop Abramowicz Seminary, 1447 West Superior, for Polish immigrants recruited to serve in the Chicago archdiocese, and Rev. Adam Galek, of Lublin, Poland, who is stationed at St. Odilo.
The preacher will be Rev. Richard Simon, pastor of St. Lambert, in Skokie, who as pastor of another parish in 1997 moved the tabernacle back to the main altar to help restore “a sense of the sacred” to his congregation and protesting in a letter that mass has become “simply a drama, a vehicle for whatever agenda is currently popular.” His “stemwinder” at St. Odilo, so designated by Father Brankin, will be on the Four Last Things — death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
Fine. But why pick on the highly competent Robert McClory and his Call to Action organization in the opening line? It’s in honor of his and their representing, nay, embodying the deep suspicion in which this Latin mass permission is held by liberal Catholics.
In Chi Trib last July, he roller-coastered his readers from towering condescension to crisis-mode anxiety, characterizing this permission as either a “harmless gesture of goodwill,” toward Catholics who “prefer a more quiet, passive worship style” or “a powerful sign of what is to come: a full-bodied campaign by the Vatican to bolster the monarchical, authoritarian claims of the church” — as if this was a permission that unleashed the dogs of war on progressivism.
So he will do for our whipping boy, a standard-bearer for those who will not show up at St. Odilo on these November Tuesdays, or if they do will come to scoff. A pity that. But coming to scoff, like Tennyson’s unbeliever, they might remain to pray. And more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, right?

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Jim Bowman is the religion editor for The Chicago Daily Observer.

*: Bob McClory refers to Robert McClory, a former priest who is a leader of “Call to Action,” a group of liberal Catholic reformers founded by the late Msgr. John Egan.