I got this question from a reader in Alaska:
Father Z,
I’ve been reading your blog in the effort to find this myself and it sounds like the Portland, OR area might work out for me (?) I still pray for the return of the traditional Mass up here, but don’t think it will happen soon.
I have enough frequent flier miles to go to Portland about once a month for Mass and sometimes, Alaska Air has last minute discount fares for the weekends. I don’t, however, know exactly where to start looking – I’m not rich enough to go wandering around the state of Oregon at random.
Suggestions?
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I used to live in Portland and I think the best place to attend mass is a church run by a bunch of awesome Dominicans, Holy Rosary in NE Portland. When I lived in Portland two years ago they had an 11am Sunday Novus Ordo that was mostly in Latin, had chant, and other traditional trappings (the way they celebrated the NO is the best I have ever seen). They also would celebrate a Traditional Dominican liturgy once a month on a Saturday, as well as on some Sundays for certain feast days. They would also invite in FSSP priests to celebrate the TLM on occasion.
Fr. Anthony Patalano is a great priest who is very attached to traditional liturgics. http://www.holyrosarypdx.org/
I haven’t heard anything about celebrations of the Extraordinary Form in the area yet, but Holy Rosary in Portland offers the Ordinary Form in Latin with chanted propers every Sunday in addition to a once-monthly offering of the ancient Dominican Rite Mass. The choir and schola are the best in that corner of the northwest.
If you’re on the road in the USA and don’t know where to find the Mass, I always suggest http://masstimes.org as a starting place. Search for a city, then click the “Languages” link and select “Latin”. Sometimes there’s a seperate link for “Tridentine”, so check for that too. It’s my experience that “Latin” is almost always “Tridentine”, since there are VERY few regular Latin Novus Ordo Masses in the USA, but you might have to check it each way to find the Mass you’re looking for.
http://masstimes.org/dotnet/ShowChurches.aspx?type=CITYSTATERADIUS&q=&country=United+States+of+America&city=Portland&countrycode=US&statecode=OR&filter=LATIN
I go to school elsewhere, but still consider Portland ‘home.’ There’s not a lot on the internet, so you will probably have to call parishes. (http://www.archdpdx.org/parishes/portland.htm) However, I know that St. Birgitta and Immaculate Heart have masses in Latin. Some NO Latin masses have been changed to TLM since last September. St. Birgitta’s offers a weekly TLM on Sundays at 8am. I think that St. Patrick has also added a monthly TLM on the third Sunday of the month at 9am.
Best of luck to you.
There is an Extraordinary Form Mass offered at St. Birgitta’s in far NW Portland on St. Helens Road (U.S. 30). It is on Sunday at 8:00 AM. It is a small church, dating probably from the 1940s. This is the former “indult” parish (there was only one in the entire Archdiocese of Portland).
It has been a while since I have been able to assist at this Mass, so I do not know if Fr. Browne, who was the pastor until 2005, is still offering it. There is a new pastor, and Fr. Browne was training him in the TLM (happily, he was generously willing to offer it once trained).
In addition to the EF mass at St. Birgitta\’s already mentioned, St. Stephen\’s has a Latin Novus Order every Saturday at 7:30, complete with polyphany choir. The 11:00 a.m. mentioned earlier at Holy Rosary is not itself a latin mass, but is very similar to the mass on EWTN with its use of Latin and chant. St. Thomas Aquinas in Camas, 15 miles ouside of Portland, also has a mass like this at 11:30 a.m. Finally, various other parishes havve once-a-month celebrations, etc, that I am less familiar with.
The monthly Dominican Rite Mass at Holy Rosary is held on the Firtst Saturday of the Month. They also do most of the Holy Triduum in Latin (as I recall).
In case you’re wondering, the Dominican Rite Mass offered at Holy Rosary in Portland is in some respects — at least, in most respects sought by those who look for the TLM — rather similar to the TLM. It is a pre-conciliar liturgy, and one could even argue it is an OLDER form of the Mass than the Missal of Pope St. Pius V. The Dominican liturgy has been very conservative through the centuries, and much of what happens in the Dominican Rite is drawn from the mid-13th century exemplar of the Dominican liturgy still preserved at Santa Sabina (the Dominican curia in Rome). So in a sense, you could claim that the Dominican Rite is even more traditional than the TLM . . . .
For more on the Dominican Rite, check out http://dominican-liturgy.blogspot.com/
The monthly Dominican Rite Mass at Holy Rosary is held on the Firtst Saturday of the Month. They also do most of the Holy Triduum in Latin (as I recall). If you are commin down all the way from Alask you may want to plan it around the first weekend. Then, you could atend Sat morning mass in the Dominican Rite at Holy Rosary and Sunday Mass at St. Birgitta’s.
The SSPX flies priests up to Alaska every month. Even if you do not approve of the SSPX’s stance with Rome, you could attend their Mass in Anchorage.
ANCHORAGE
St. Therese, Patron of Alaska Mission
907-349-2042
11610 Old Seward Highway
4th Sunday 8:30am & 10:00am
at Holy Rosary in Portland (since no one mentioned it):
On Corpus Christi, Sunday, May 25, Mass will begin at 10:30 AM
Fr. Anthony will celebrate the Dominican Rite Missa Cantata,
followed by a solemn procession with the Holy Eucharist.
Cantores in Ecclesia will sing the polyponic Proper from
William Byrd’s Gradualia of 1605.
If living in Alaska, why fly all the way down to Portland when there is Latin Mass in Seattle, WA?
http://www.unavoceww.com/mass.html
This (below) was posted by Fr. Z from his email, on this site, a few weeks ago. I believe Waldport is about a 4-5 hour drive from Portland, but if you will be traveling to the Oregon coast, might be worthwhile.
Your readers out west might like to know that since last December a Low Mass in the Extraordinary Form has been offered monthly by Father Gerard G. Steckler, SJ, pastor of St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Waldport, Oregon, in the Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon.
Their next Tridentine Low Mass will be Monday, May 26 at 8:00 am (Memorial Day). St. Anthony’s is at 685 Broadway in a tiny town on the central coast of Oregon located at the crossroads of highways 101 and 34. (Due to summer, the next Mass after May will be in August.)
Visitors should not expect an FSSP-style extravaganza such as seen on EWTN. This is a small parish with fewer than 100 families, although the Extraordinary Form Mass has a consistent attendance of about 30 people. It’s a simple Low Mass with no music and one server. However, it is done beautifully and correctly. Father Steckler was ordained over 50 years ago and, although he’s a Jesuit, has forgotten neither his rubrics nor his Latin.