Taxonomy of Trids

There are as many kinds of Trids as there are Tridentine Mass adherents. You can't go to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass for two years (and in three countries) without figuring that out. The composition of a Trid community can also fluctuate greatly from diocese to diocese and from country to country.

All that said, there are some discernable groups among Trids, mostly overlapping, and for the amusement of all, I will describe some of them here. After much thought, I have decided I had better confine myself to Britain, because the national differences are so great. Needless to say, I am describing only those in "approved groups" because I have never been to Mass in an SSPX church.

BRITAIN

University Students. Hoorah for the students, promise of our future. If male, they wear tweed or don surplices over who-knows-what. If female, they wear white lace mantillas, either a proper one, one jerry-rigged from a bridal veil found in a second-hand shop or one snipped from a bolt of lace in a fabric shop.

Male students can be divided into aesthetes and ascetics.

The aesthetes smoke and refrain from communion if they are still drunk from the night before. They delight in ornate ties of lush pattern. They glory in the beauty of the EF and feel rather let down by the liturgical habits of university chaplaincies.

The ascetics do not smoke or drink (much). They are less likely to wear tweed or think at all about clothes. They are intensely devotional. They delight in the orthodoxy of the EF and feel rather let down by the rank heresies of university chaplaincies.

There are not enough female university students to sub-divide. At Trid gatherings, male and female university students generally avoid each other's eye. Occasionally the male students attempt jests, and the female students stare at them balefully. The female students are usually frighteningly pretty, frighteningly intelligent, or both. It must be very hard to be a male student Trid these days.

Recusants, circa 1535. The original Recusants are Old English and sometimes even Old Scottish (and presumably Old Welsh) Catholics, which means that their families hung on during the Reformation and stayed Catholic in spite of dungeon, fire and sword. Often they did this by having too much power and money and cleverness to be messed with too severely and were only decimated instead of rubbed out. They also hung on by eventually marrying into rich Anglican families and making them Catholic. The original Recusants, therefore, tend to be rather posh, or at least delight in poshness, and to have gone to public schools, sometimes even Catholic ones.

Original Recusants know who is related to whom, vast amounts of history, the Almanac de Gotha, the Times obituaries and the back story to much of what you may have read in Hello.

Strong-minded to a man (or woman), the original Recusants had a look at the wonderful new Mass (calendar, relaxed fasting laws, etc.) brought to them by their Irish episcopal overlords and said, "It was not for such that my ancestor Saint Sir Geofforie de Merryweather-Tysdale went to his death on Tyburn Tree". Then they summoned the Recusant spirit of their ancestors and, recusing, flocked to the semi-underground Trid Mass house churches--or sat steaming in their parish churches--until indults were widely granted.

Original Recusant men wear tweed, woollen jumpers and marvellous ties. The women wear the insignia of this noble order or that and whatever they think looks smart. Oh, and black mantillas, of course.

Recusants, circa 1965. The new Recusants, even if ultimately Irish, were not impressed by the lovely new Mass (calendar, relaxed fasting laws, etc.) brought to them by their Irish episcopal overlords. They discovered their strict obedience, of which they had been so proud, was not actually to those bishops but to the Ancient Faith with which the bishops--of all people--seemed to be monkeying.

Hearts broke in half across this sceptered isle, and the new Recusants either stopped going to Mass altogether or flocked to the Latin Mass Society and/or the SSPX. When Archbishop LeFebvre did That Bad Thing, John Paul II allowed many more indult masses, so many ex-SSPX went to those, and some ex-SSPX priests formed the FSSP, which made JPII happy, and others formed the SSPV, which didn't.

The men wear whatever they think appropropriate, and the women sometimes wear mantillas and sometimes hats and sometimes nothing on their heads at all.

Incidentally, British Trid women of all kinds sometimes wear trousers to church. The fact that some American Catholic churches have signs reading "Women must not wear pants in church" makes British Trids, especially Anglo-Catholic Converts, roll about in hysterics.

Anglo-Catholic Converts. The Anglican Communion is the wet-nurse of the Roman Catholic Trid communities of Britain. Throw a rock during Credo III--in any direction--and you will hit an Anglo-Catholic Convert. At all hours of the day and night those of us already on the bank of the metaphorical Tiber metaphorically pull yet another Anglo-Catholic refugee out of the water and wrap him in blankets.

The Anglo-Catholics tell us strange, dark tales of promises made and broken, of hideous betrayals, of terrible man-women in Roman collars, of seminary orgies too unspeakably horrible for our Roman ears.

And then they sing for us. Ah! And how they sing! Such music! Such glorious music as we have rarely heard, in such liturgical English as we have never heard--beautiful, elegant, with perfectly rounded Os! They speak of one called Coverdale and of one called Byrd. They quote to us long euphonious passages from a Bible apparently borrowed from King James, and tears run down our faces.

"Truly these are not Anglicans, but angels," we sob and hand them gin-and-tonics.

In their culture, the boys are trained up from the age of eight to sing as do the heavenly choirs. When puberty wreaks its wrath, the boys are shuffled down the pew to find their way as tenors, baritones or basses. Class difference is bullied out of them, so that even the sons of communist shipbuilders pronounce their liturgical Os like 1930s Oxford dons. (What the girls are trained for, I do not know. Presumably they sulked and schemed and bided their time before staging the palace revolts up and down the country.)

By the time we pull them onto the bank, the Anglo-Catholic converts are faint with exhaustion. A bit further down the bank, they hear women singing "Eagles' Wings," and preferring to drown rather than sing "Eagles' Wings" for the rest of their lives, they struggle on towards us. They take over our choirs and boss us around. If single, they are easier to marry than original Recusants. Snaffle one, if you like.

They wear whatever they have managed to salvage from the wreckage, usually something woollen. If he has any money at all, the Anglo-Catholic Convert man eventually buys a tweed jacket--Britain's traddie toga of manhood.

Other Converts: In Scotland, many converts were once Church of Scotland. They stopped going to church when the Church of Scotland stopped going to church, but then they took an interest in religion and, to their families' vague disapproval, joined the winning team. The big bad weird old Church of Rome didn't seem so big, bad or weird anymore, in large part because of this Vatican II thing their new friends kept telling them about. However, when they get a bit bored or shocked at the boredom of those around them, they go shopping amongst various movements in the Church, like the Charismatics, and eventually come upon the Trids and our awesome solemn EF and our glorious Anglo-Catholic Convert choirs. If the Trids are nice to them, they stay, but if the Trids are in one of our awful, snobby snits, they flee.

Then there are the Flitters, the Journalists, the Musicians, the Aristos, the SP Bandwaggoners, the Poles, the European Royalty and the Families of Ten, but I haven't time to do justice to all of these wonderful Trids of Britain, so I will stop there.

Update (Wednesday): Welcome, readers of Once I Was a Clever Boy!