Early on Sunday morning, I wake up, leave the house, drive south down Hoddle Street, over the river, up Punt Road, left at Balaclava Road, past the kosher bakeries, until I arrive at St. Aloysius, an unremarkable red brick church that takes up almost an entire suburban block directly opposite Caulfield Park—the scene of many of my youthful sins, where I was once held up at knifepoint after a drunken Chanukah party by the wayward son of an Orthodox rabbi.
There is a palpably buoyant spirit in the church courtyard. It is Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in the season of Lent, a day of celebration, when priests wear rose-coloured vestments and the altar is decorated with pink flowers to inspire a sense of joy in the season of penance. The faithful are waving and smiling at one another, hurrying up the stairs to snag a pew as close to the action as possible.
"Hey, Francesco," a fit guy on a chromatic blue road bike, with a GoPro adhered to the front handlebar, calls out to another man. "Guess how long it took me to ride here?"
Francesco shrugs.
"One hour and six minutes. All the way from Heidelberg."
We have all made the pilgrimage to witness a Traditional Latin Mass, a liturgical form that is incanted, as the name suggests, in the Latin language. Some claim that the Latin Mass, also known as the Tridentine Mass or the Extraordinary Form, is the closest thing we have now to the original rituals enacted at the first Eucharist, when Christ offered his flesh and blood in the form of bread and wine to his disciples gathered at the last supper. Yet, though timeworn and venerable, the Roman Rite is no longer officially approved of by the Pope in Rome. The canonical Mass is the Novus Ordo, an updated version promulgated by the Vatican in 1969. It is performed not in Latin, but in the vernacular language of a particular parish. And there is only one parish in Melbourne that celebrates exclusively in the traditional form: the Newman Parish at St Aloysius Catholic Church.
This is why the faithful flock here every Sunday, from every corner of the Melbourne metropolitan region, and sometimes beyond. I hang back for a minute to observe the crowd. One might imagine it would be comprised mostly of older folk, those who remember a time before the Novus Ordo. But no. The parishioners are distinctly youthful. Not in an Evangelical Justin Bieber Swag Church kind of way. More in a Cruel Intentions kind of way. Conservative glamour. A certain transgressive chic. My gaze falls on one young man with a perfectly manicured mustache, wearing tapered olive green pants, a pristine white shirt, and what appear, from this distance, to be black Bottega Veneta boots. He makes his way up the stairs, crosses himself, and then kisses the ornate crucifix that hangs from the chain on his neck—from which also dangles a single pink pearl.
From among the crowd, I see a bearded man wearing a black suit and a red tie walking towards me.
"You Oscar?" he asks, with a smile. I nod.
"Follow me," he says. We walk to the rectory at the very edge of the church grounds. "Father Tattersall told me to collect you."
The man takes his phone from his suit pocket, and, peering over the top of his reading glasses, begins to slowly punch out a text message with his index finger.
"I'm messaging him now," he says. "Not very fast with these things. Struggled to catch up with the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. Oh good, here he comes anyway.”
I look up and see an extremely large, bald man in black vestments lumbering towards us.
"You made it," Father Tattersall says warmly, guiding me inside the rectory, where various parishioners are practicing hymns. We walk down a corridor through to a cozy, dark room where we sit opposite each other in leather arm chairs. His weight-lifter's frame fills his chair's generous contours. He has a moon-shaped face, rosy cheeks, and restless, inquisitive eyes.
"There will be much you won't understand, not least the language," he says about the Mass he will be leading this morning. "But I often find that people appreciate the Traditional Latin Mass first via its undeniable beauty. It has the feeling of a Greek drama. It offers profound catharsis."
His eyes dart quickly out the window across to the park, where several shirtless men appear to be doing some sort of calisthenics.
"Of course, it also contains the other two transcendentals, Truth and Goodness, because, you see, the Mass is eternal and timeless, rooted in being, not contingent upon the limitations of place and time."
*
Back in the contingent realms of time and space, my journey to the Latin Mass began towards the end of 2020. I was living in Brooklyn, and there were murmurings (on the streets and on Discord) of a Traditional Catholic revival in the environs of downtown Manhattan. By then, I had already encountered the Trad Caths of Twitter. Since around 2017, they had been posting about how ancient Christian theology could resolve modernity’s spiritual impoverishment better than liberal-capitalist individualism. They brought a kind of accelerationist, hyper-troll sensibility to their theology, often advocating for the most extreme and esoteric manifestations of the religion—"Christ was literally of a virgin born," "we literally believe in the hierarchies of the angels," and so on.
But if previously the Trad Caths were confined to obscure corners of online discourse, in 2020 it seemed that they were materialising from the estuarine sludge of the East River—the word made flesh (and wearing Balenciaga). It was a weird time. One of the weirdest. Portable morgues in March. Uprisings in Spring. A stolen election in Fall. As many have since noted, something shifted on this fulcrum. One month, being “the granddaughters of the witches you couldn't burn” was revolutionary. But then the next month, it was cringe and sacrilege. Suddenly, to be cool one had to abandon ideas of social progress and instead turn to God and tradition. Catholicism became a cipher through which to signal this new, transgressive sensibility. Dasha Nekrasova said she was “Catholic, like Andy Warhol.” Shia LeBeouf proclaimed that the Latin Mass saved him. Zoomers were running around lower Manhattan—that New Jerusalem—smoking menthols and tweeting about being in a state of grace.
I wasn’t convinced. To me, the whole Trad Cath thing seemed to be regressive self-appropriation, the last refuge of the alt white kid. These people were posers, irredeemable LARPers who would be onto the next thing before the next summer. By then it would be cool to be reading Richard Dawkins again. I was going to buy the dip on atheism.
After all, this wasn't the first time that city-dwelling dilettantes turned to Christ once they got bored of everything else. The hipsters of fin de siècle England and France got into it for a bit. Oscar Wilde lampooned it with his ultimate dilettante, Dorian Grey, who experiments with "the Roman ritual.” For a few weeks he goes to Church and enjoys its "primitive simplicity," its drama, the incense, which "the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, toss into the air like great gilt flowers." But then Dorian gets bored, and he moves onto something new with "that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament."
Then, in 2021, I moved back to Melbourne and found that the spirit had made its way here, too, manifested in the same demographic of inner-city Dorian Gray-types (of which it must be said I consider myself a member). They were listening to the same podcasts, reading the same Substacks, wearing the same Catholic-inspired e-thot brands—just at Canning Strip instead of Dimes Square. It seemed to confirm my suspicion about the trend-like nature of this revival. It was just one of many fashions to arise in New York and then move out to the more provincial cosmopolitan purgatories.
But then, as I settled back into life here, I started meeting curious and alluring individuals who quietly challenged my cynicism. A young woman told me she was writing an entire doctoral thesis on the concept of "the wound," the piercing in Jesus’ ribs, as a site of pleasure. “It really is like a vulva,” she explained. A friend told me that private prayer to Jesus helped him in his grief. And then a bunch of young Jews I know started studying Talmud in the evenings at Melbourne’s oldest synagogue. Not Catholic, but still Trad.
With some distance from New York and the peak discourse, I saw that there was something deeper going on—something that my ironic distance, or Jewish ambivalence, had stopped me from seeing. What began as an ironic joke, or a trend, or an experiment, or yet another “experience” had, potentially, transmuted into something genuine. The hipster had wandered down the divine path and now couldn’t get off. As the prominent online Catholic, Wretched Worm, (who is, it must be noted, originally from Melbourne but has since made the pilgrimage to downtown Manhattan) once tweeted: “Simply, don’t play games with God.”
So, in the months leading up to Easter this year, I decided to go searching for those who had been turned onto Jesus via the Holy Algorithm, and see where the path had taken them. I spoke to Bishops and aspiring theologians. I read the Gospel of Matthew. I sat for many consecutive Sundays at the pews of various Churches around the inner north (all of which mentioned that they now have gluten-free hosts). And amidst all this there was one name that kept coming up: St Aloysius. If I wanted to see the revival in its purest form, the place where LARP turns flesh, I had to go there. I had to witness the Latin Mass.
*
The long history of the Latin Mass began, in fact, as a reaction to one of the most momentous vibe shifts of all time: the Reformation. Before Martin Luther, the Roman patriarchate was willing to abide liturgical diversity across European Christendom. Now, with Protestants running around, any and all religious deviation was seen as an existential threat. As such, the Fathers at the Council of Trent, an almost two decade long meeting held in the sixteenth century, compiled a single and unified version of the Mass, which was authorised by Pope Pius V in 1570. It was to remain unchanged until the End of Time—anathema upon anyone who rejected it!
This simple and austere rite, deemed by one priest as “the most beautiful thing this side of heaven,” was basically unchanged up until 1962, when Pope John XXII opened the Vatican II—a council charged with the unenviable task of "aggiornamento,” bringing the Church up to date with the secularising laity of the twentieth century. A key issue at hand was liturgy. The Traditional Latin Mass was seen by the progressive wing of the Vatican as investing too much power in the priest, who presided over the passive congregation in a mostly dead language that no one understood. The rite was amended by a special committee of 42 bishops, and then signed off on by Pope Paul VI in 1969. The changes were not inconsequential: prayers were to be said not in Latin but the vernacular language of the parish. The congregants were required to verbally partake in more prayers. And, significantly, the priest had to face out to the pews instead of the altar—turning his back on Christ to face the people.
For most of the many millions who attended Mass around the globe, all this was totally fine. But for a vocal minority, particularly for members of the West's Catholic elites, the Novus Ordo was an unpardonable desecration. A coalition of eminent Catholic writers, artists, and philosophers, including Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, and Iris Murdoch, wrote a letter to Paul VI comparing the Novus Ordo to a desecrated Cathedral. When William F. Buckley attended the Novus Ordo Mass for the first time, somewhere in Connecticut, he was overcome by “passions of resentment and odium”, the same outrage "one would feel on entering the Cathedral of Chartres and finding that the windows had been replaced with pop-art figures of Christ sitting-in against the slumlords of Milwaukee." Some high ranking members of the priesthood also dissented. Cardinal Ratzginer, who would later become Pope Benedict, said that the Novus Ordo was "a banal on-the-spot product." French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre simply refused to perform the New Mass. "It is born of liberalism and modernism," he said. "It derives from heresy and ends in heresy."
It was in the wake of this liturgical tumult that Glen Tattersall first attended the Latin Mass. It was 1985 and he was studying a combined Arts Law degree at the University of Sydney. He had been brought up praying at the Novus Ordo, but when a friend invited him to St. Michael’s College Chapel to witness the ancient Extraordinary Form, his curiosity was piqued.
"Honestly I was irritated by it at first," he says to me in the cozy room at the St Aloysius rectory. "I was used to the artificial and rationalistic approach of the new Mass."
There was a certain gravitas to the ritual, though, that pulled him back again and again. In time, Tattersall found himself not just enthralled by its beauty, but convinced that this was the right way. At the age of 31, he left his legal job and entered a seminary in the United States for the explicit purpose of becoming a priest in the context of the Traditional Latin Mass.
After ordination, Tattersall was given the role of chaplain to a small but fervent Latin Mass community in Melbourne. At first he was a kind of freelance priest, traveling to various churches around the city to conduct the rite. Then, he negotiated permission to hold a regular Latin Mass at St Aloysius in North Caulfield, which was granted by the Archbishop of Melbourne. Attendance was initially limited to some elderly parishioners with an emotional attachment to the old liturgy, and a handful of die-hards. “They felt that they were being treated by the church as second class citizens.” Tattersall says.
More regulars started to trickle in during the mid-2000s, given Pope Benedict’s more lenient stance towards the traditional factions in the Church. But the major influx, or what Tattersall calls "the cascade," really began some time after 2015, when, to his surprise, younger millennials, many of whom came from entirely secular backgrounds, or what Tattersall calls "pagan upbringings," began reaching out.
"It was clearly those born after the entrenchment of the internet," he says to me, shuffling his weight in the chair, pulling his vestment up slightly.
"And they became interested in the Latin Mass online first?" I ask.
Tattersall nods. He explains that many of them felt disenfranchised by what they saw as “run-away progressivism and unforgiving wokeism.” The Latin Mass remained steadfast and unchanging, a beacon of Truth in a dark and dissembling modernity.
"The thing they tell me again and again, is that when they attend their first Latin Mass, it's like they've been red-pilled,” Tattersall says. “I hear that very often and I'm very amused by it."
"So you get the reference?" I ask.
"Oh, absolutely," he says. "When I was in seminary the original Matrix came out, and it was quite popular. I think it works as a metaphor, too. The Latin Mass can indeed wake you up to the truth. And besides, I'm even dressed a bit like Morpheus, aren't I?"
"I guess you are," I say.
"Ok," he says, looking at his phone and then heaving himself up off the chair. "It's time to go."
*
The church is by now almost full. There must be a couple of hundred people sitting in the nave, and everyone is silent except for the babies. There are lots of them. Their squawks rise heaven-ward and reverberate off the white ceiling. I take a seat around a third of the way back, next to a young woman wearing a calf length skirt, hiking boots, and a lacey veil embroidered with pink daffodils. Around half of the women in attendance are similarly veiled.
The altar boys walk in, holding long candles and a cross. A cherubic-looking 20-something-year-old with a luscious shock of orange hair swings the incense. Trailing behind come three men in scarlet robes. Father Tattersall stands in the middle, half a head taller than the other two. His eyes are locked straight ahead in reverence at Jesus on the cross. They take their places on the chancel. Then, Tattersall begins to intone the Latin prayer in a steady moan.
"Lætáre, Ierúsalem, et convéntum fácite, omnes qui diligitis eam," he booms. "Rejoice O Jerusalem, and all those who love her."
For the next hour or so, Tattersall and the others busily shuffle around up front. It’s hard to see, but it looks like they're picking things up and putting them down again, putting on their hats and then taking them off, doing stuff with leather-bound books, chanting. It is all very finicky, precise, esoteric-seeming.
It is a bit boring, too, but there is something comfortingly familiar in this boredom. Having attended an Orthodox synagogue throughout my childhood, I am used to men performing inscrutable rituals in a language I mostly don't understand. When I was growing up, there was endless community discourse about how “out of touch” these traditional services were—how irrelevant, how misogynistic, how dead, how in need of an update. There were always these novel, small, progressive synagogues starting up to meet the demand. One where women could read from the Torah. Another that focused on communal singing. Still another where God’s name was stricken from the liturgy. Some of these experiments proved popular and long-lasting, particularly among us younger Jews who felt alienated by a tradition out of step with our Tumblr-adjacent identities, universal allyship, and newly awakened radical care politics.
But recently, some of those same young Jews have been returning to the big Orthodox synagogues of their youth, where men and women have to be separate, where prayers are directed to a spiteful God who will happily smite His Enemies. It is not that they have reconciled their wayward lives with the tradition. More that they miss the traditional sensibility, and the way that it makes them feel. Maybe the aesthetic draw is quite enough. As Wilde once said, “it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” Did Dorian Gray understand this secret all along?
I glance at the veiled woman sitting next to me, who seems to be lost in the mysterious action, the archaic grandeur, the fun outfits. Everyone remains silent in rapt attention, standing and then sitting, and then standing, and then sometimes kneeling, watching the Mass unfold with such intensity that I feel not so much at a religious service, but some avant-garde theater production, maybe one of those Samuel Beckett plays where hooded men wordlessly move around on the stage for a couple of hours.
Tattersall's booming voice snaps me out of this reverie. He is standing at a high podium, wearing a little white hat, ready to give his sermon, the only part of the service in English. He begins by explaining that we are praying for Pope Francis in a particular way today, as it is the tenth anniversary of the solemn commencement of his ministry as Pope. There are some extra prayers in the Mass for him, which, Tattersall adds, is crucial as it will be more difficult for him to save his soul, as the Vicar of Christ, than any other Christian. A murmur passes through the congregation.
It seems to me to be a veiled jab at the Church’s highest authority. (Tattersall later denies this in an email exchange, claiming that it was “not intended as an anti-Francis statement”). But I noticed, too, on entering St Aloysius, that the printed Church Bulletin featured an essay by George Weigel, an American conservative who reports on the “sad mood” in the Vatican, how “papal autocracy has created a miasma of fear, parrhesia.”
A few months ago, it might have struck me as odd to see Melbourne’s custodians of the traditional liturgy distributing bulletins taking shots at Rome. But for anyone with even a passing interest in intra-Church politics, the reason is obvious. In July 2021, Pope Francis issued the Traditionis Custodes, a ruling that decreed those who wanted to celebrate the Latin Mass could only do so in parishes that had already been given a special dispensation. In an accompanying letter to bishops worldwide, Francis justified his position on the basis that the Latin liturgy was being "exploited to widen gaps, reinforce divergences, and encourage disagreements to injure the Church..."
Many Latin Mass communities quietly ignored the ruling, but it was then reaffirmed in December that year, when a senior archbishop banned use of the old Latin liturgies for confirmations, the ordination of priests and, in most cases, for weddings, baptisms, funerals, and anointing the sick. At this point, Tattersall weighed in, calling the ruling “a totally unprovoked and unmerited attack on faithful Catholics, who like Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem are told ‘There is no place for you here. Get lost!’"
Back at the sermon at St Aloysius, Tattersall spends a couple of minutes talking about how a man on a motorbike recently broke into the church when he and some parishioners were enjoying a "pizza supper," and began banging on the front door, screaming "you're evil, you're evil." The police arrived and the man was taken to hospital for an assessment.
"He was free within the hour," Tattersall says. "And so I beg you to be careful. Stay vigilant."
It seems an odd way to start a sermon that is nominally about “Christian Joy,” but not all that surprising. Tattersall is, after all, a bit of a culture warrior. He has given high-profile interviews where he has blamed clerical pedophilia not on the Church’s obfuscating hierarchies but on homosexual priests and liberals. He publicly accused the head of Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which was set up to bring justice to those abused within the Church, of using the issue to push a progressive agenda.
As I listen to Tattersall sermonise, I wonder to what extent he cultivates this sense of being embattled Christians besieged on all sides by “wokeism”, whether the energy I feel in St Aloysius, that buzz I noticed on arriving, is not so much Christian Joy, but the addictive energy of righteous indignation and perceived victimhood. Less catharsis, more resentment.
The sermon is only short, and soon enough the Mass resumes. It is time for the Eucharist. Being a Jew and unbaptised, I am not allowed to partake. But it is nice just to sit back and watch the performance. Tattersall holds the circular wafer up to Jesus on the Cross with both hands. The chalices fill with His blood. The pews empty one by one as the faithful walk up to kneel at Father’s feet to receive communion. One of the altar boys has to relight his candle. A bell rings. Tattersall intones some beautiful, ancient prayer. It is a relief that it’s not in English anymore, to not really know what is being said.
*
On my way out, I shake hands with Father Tattersall, who is perspiring with effort.
"What did you think?" he asks, with a big smile.
"Yes," I respond, also smiling.
He tells me to stand to the side and directs several young parishioners my way, so I can ask them questions about their enthusiasm for the Roman rite. We stand awkwardly in a horse shoe as I ask one by one, "so what brings you here?"
“It is just so reverent,” one guy explains.
“It is the light of God,” says a young woman.
The well-dressed man with the pearl necklace wanders up.
“It is a miracle,” he says, softly. “I was running through the regular renegade stuff and I was called here and now I have everything.”
They all seem very authentic, but the authenticity remains kind of perplexing to me. It was a pleasant and interesting service, but I’m not “red-pilled.” I didn’t see modernity melt away before my eyes, replaced with the eternal Truth of Christ. Part of me wishes I did, though, at least for a moment. Of course, I want to know what it is like to be filled with God’s presence. I want to see a miracle. Is this how conversion begins? With desire? Maybe faith does not arrive as an internal motion but via something more mimetic, a kind of unintended copying of those who seem to have what we all want: the answer. Is this why Christianity, a religion that hinges on faith, is so contagious—and so perfectly suited to the affordances of life online?
I thank the young Latin Mass-ers for their time and go to leave. On my way out I see a familiar face—an extremely handsome guy I think I remember from high school. Old world Hollywood good looks. I remember he was always rifling through the various masculine identities available to the millennial man. Football Jock. Rock Band Front Man. Philosophy Bro. Now a Trad Cath? This would be somewhat scandalous, because, well, he is also a Jew.
I take out my phone and search his name. I quickly find him on Twitter. His bio reads: “Convert from Oy vey to O Felix Culpa!” It is Leigh. His last post is a retweet of Glenn Greenwald praising Tucker Carlson. The one before that begins: “LEFTISM is the politics of DUPLICITOUS PRIDE.” And so on. Later that evening I DM Leigh and ask if he might be willing to chat with me about his journey to Catholicism. He responds just over two weeks later. He tells me he doesn't "much like speaking on the telephones" but he is "available during the day in the environs of South Yarra."
We meet the next day at a cafe directly opposite the Botanical Gardens. Leigh is wearing a brown leather bomber jacket, collar up—he squints dramatically, and looks just like Robert Redford.
“For some it is just a game,” he tells me, swirling a teaspoon anxiously in his long black. “But I’m not like them. For me Catholicism is the truth. The only truth.”
“How did you arrive at this truth?” I ask.
“How long do you have?”
I shrug, and he launches into a baroque and unwieldy monologue, which lasts over an hour. He talks volubly, passionately, at times mystifyingly, gesticulating with his hands, I think, in a distinctly Jewish way. I try to take notes but he speaks so quickly, sometimes breaking into French, other times ancient Greek. I scribble down whatever quotes I can.
“Satre was a Maoist.” “The Anglo-Saxon concept of freedom is superior.” “I was living a life of sin in Paris.” “My background is in law.” “Kafka.” “My thesis was about the conscience.” “I’m not a Jew anymore, I’m a Hebrew.” “Nietzsche was no doubt a clever man, but here’s where he went wrong.” “Do you know about the logos of Heraclitus?” “I was womaniser, sure, but she worked for the CIA.” “Jesus is God manifested in the flesh.”
There is a lot of painful searching in this story, and I can see how Latin Mass could be a salve. It is community, beauty, tradition, and most importantly, something to do. But isn’t this the appeal of basically all religion today, and a lot of political activism, and, like, yoga?
“Could it have been Buddhism instead?” I ask.
“Oh no, no, no, no,” Leigh says. Catholicism is the Truth, his belief is genuine, and this is his very last stop. The end of searching. This is absolutely not just one of the many trends, or manias, that occupy the life of the modern homo sapien—that help a person survive it all.
I’m suddenly reminded of a joke my grandmother used to tell. I interrupt Leigh for the first time.
“Leigh,” I say. “Can I tell you a joke?”
“Ah yes, humour, the catharsis of the Jews,” he says. “Go ahead.”
“So there’s a Jew living in a village in Poland,” I begin. “Every year, in the lead up to Easter, there is a pogrom in this particular village. One year, the Jew has had enough, so he goes to the local priest and tells him he wants to convert.”
“Ok, my son,” the priest says. “Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was virgin born, died on the cross, and on the third day rose again?”
“Absolutely,” the Jew says.
“Very good,” the priest says. “Just one more thing. Will you abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent?”
The Jew pauses and says, “Ok fine.”
The priest retrieves a flask of holy water, sprinkles it over the Jew’s head and says: “You’re a Christian, you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian.”
A few days later, the pogrom rolls through, and the Jew is spared. That Friday, the priest pays him a visit and finds the Jew eating a big Kosher steak.
“What are you doing?” the priest exclaims. “You’re supposed to be a Christian.”
“Father, I am!” the Jew retorts. “I believe in Jesus and I have never felt better.”
“Then why are you eating that?” the priests shouts.
“What, this?” the Jew asks, taking a bite from the steak. “You see father, I went to my butcher, I bought this steak, I came home, I seasoned it, cooked it to perfection. And then, just before tucking in, I sprinkled it with some water and then chanted: ‘you’re a fish, you’re a fish you’re fish.’”