Workshop offers insight for priests into traditional form of the Mass

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PROVIDENCE — Louis Tofari’s classroom has a few odd details.
For one thing, it’s actually the narthex of Providence’s Holy Name of Jesus Parish.
For another, he addresses each of his five pupils as “Father” — except when he’s speaking to them in Latin.
Tofari is a liturgical consultant with Romanitas Press, and the headliner of the New England Priest’s Workshop — a recent, two-day conference designed to provide priests and seminarians with all of the skills needed to perform the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (also known as the Latin Mass).
Father Michael Kennedy, of St. Katherine Drexel Parish in Burlington, New Jersey, traveled all the way to Providence after a friend told him of the workshop, and hopes that the training will help him expand the availability of the Mass in his diocese.
According to Tofari, learning to properly perform the Extraordinary Form requires more than just brushing up on your Latin.
“You can’t expect to learn it overnight,” he says. “It’s a matter of building formative habits over an extended period of time. Every movement is regulated, every gesture has to be exact.”
Some of these gestures are so minute that members of the congregation might not even notice them — the precise position of the fingers when lifting the Host during Consecration, for instance.
“You’re supposed to join your fingers exactly like this,” Tofari says, as he articulates two digits on either hand. “And it might look picky, but the point is to prevent any fragments of the Consecrated Host from falling.”
Tofari says that the liturgy consists of hundreds of similar actions, each of which is significant for its own reason.
“That’s the other major part of this conference — explaining how the liturgy developed so that priests can celebrate the Mass with a full understanding.”
Tofari has been steadily perfecting his own understanding of the liturgy since first founding Romanitas Press in 2009.
In the decade since, he has developed strong (and meticulously informed) opinions on everything from selecting altar linens to the proper way to swing a thurible, the censer in which incense is burned during High Mass.
In addition to providing instructional sessions and consultations, Romanitas also publishes an array of texts and other training materials pertaining to the Latin Mass — many of them authored by Tofari himself.
Although Romanitas is based in Kansas City, Missouri, Tofari’s work as a liturgical consultant has taken him to parishes and communities throughout the country — including the neighboring Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts.
In fact, it was during consulting work at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Hyannis that the seeds for the Priests Workshop were sown.
“Joe Gallante was really the organizing force behind this,” Tofari says.
Gallante is a parishoner at St. Francis Xavier and a member of the Latin Mass Apostolate of Cape Cod, the organization that sponsored the Priest’s Workshop. He and Tofari met at a “liturgical bootcamp” which the parish hosted when they decided to introduce a weekly celebration of the Extraordinary Form.
“Louis gave us the training and background that we needed to be able to offer a High Mass every Sunday,” Gallante says.
“We probably have between 50 and 100 people that attend every single weekend, and we’re the only church in the area that has it regularly. Of course, if we could increase the number of local priests with the training to say the Latin Mass, then we could widen access to it even further.”
The availability of the Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form in our own diocese has been increasing, with St. Mary’s Church on Broadway becoming the most recent Providence parish to offer it. For those questioning why we might need more Masses in what is sometimes referred to as a “dead language,” Tofari offers a bit of Old Testament wisdom.
“Remember that God instructs the Israelites to build the Temple in a certain way,” he says. “That same sense of giving our best to God, of using the best materials in making the chalice and the linens and the altarware, is at the heart of the traditional liturgy.”
Slowly but steadily, that tradition seems to be making a comeback.