Thus the greater New York metropolitan area is currently permitted only a handful of weekly celebrations of the Tridentine Mass. Unfortunately, finding a parish for our own nuptial Mass was a painful process. A priest at one such parish in Manhattan told us that the rector and his parish council were not interested in having more old Masses celebrated there. A parochial vicar in Long Island nearly chortled at the suggestion that any additional Tridentine Masses would be allowed in the diocese that he serves. The secretary of Edward Cardinal Egan, the Archbishop of New York, responded to our impassioned plea by offering us the ugliest church in the borough.
Finally, however, we were welcomed into a church in Manhattan by a pastor who, happily, cares little for the antitraditional biases of his ecclesiastical colleagues. And so on July 22 we were wed at the Church of Our Saviour, with all the rich trappings of a traditional Catholic Nuptial Mass–from the ethereal strains of Latin chant down to the lace trimmed hems of the priests’ vestments.