I was born in the 1950s, and was not raised a Roman Catholic. However, my mother (who left the church in the 1940s) had a lot of family members, very unassimilated Italian Catholics who were incredibly upset at “the changes” (as they called them). I used to overhear, as a child, their discussions around Nonna’s dinnertable…I remember my uncle especially, saying (with sarcasm), “Oh yeah! The Church that ‘never changes’!”
All of then left the Church in 1970, after the novus ordo was introduced (and it wasn’t even that bad back then, from what I later learned!) I learned about the pre-Vatican II church from them, and their memories spurred me to investigate the RC church as a teenager.
The end result was I became a Roman Catholic in 1978, through a regular, novus ordo parish…but left shortly thereafter because I’d hoped to find at least some semblance of “the old ways”. But I was eternally thankful to the old priest who catechised me for a year (they didn’t have classes back then; he met with me, one on one, weekly). He showed me the modernist catechism the parish often used, and Father had said, "This is the catechism they want me to use with you…but this is the one we’re going to use instead (and he reached into a drawer of his desk and took out an old Baltimore Catechism!) He hated the changes too, in the church, but he told me he stayed out of obedience.
Anyway, a neighbor, to whom I shared my dilemma of wanting the TLM, told me of a group of Traditional Catholics who held a Tridentine Latin Mass in a suburban motel called the Ramada Inn. I took 3 buses to get there, fell in love with Traditional Catholicism, and kept going.
Then, the priest died, and they moved the Mass location much further away, near where another priest lived. I couldn’t go anymore, so I then found a SSPX Mass to go to, also held in a motel.
Eventually, they bought a church building and stopped having Masses in the motel. Because their new bldg was even further from me, I stopped going (I have never learned to drive due to a health issue I have and have to rely on buses for travel.)
I remembered the Tridentine priest telling us that if we ever can’t find the TLM, we could go to the Byzantine Catholic Liturgy, since they did not change the words of consecration over the wine, as the NO did. So I found a local Byzantine Catholic parish, went there for many years, and loved it!
But then we had to move to another state, and there wasn’t one nearby, so again, I was churchless.
I didn’t mean to get into ALL of that, just wanted to give my background of how I found Traditional Catholicism, including the TLM. I will say that times now are MUCH MUCH different and better than those horror days of the 1970s! You folks now are so fortunate that you can just go to a local parish in many cases, and have a TLM. But those first Traditional Catholics, they pioneered the way for all of you to have it so much easier now. If not for them being holdouts as they were, things would not have progressed to the point where they are today.
