Embracing Impoverished Liturgy and Impoverished People - A Glasgow Catholic Worker's Reflection on the SSPX Excommunication by Ross Ahlfeld
Spoiler alert: this isn't really an article about the SSPX's recent excommunication and schism.
Not because it isn't important, but because I turned fifty a few months ago, and reaching half a century has done something unexpected to me. I've become more willing to accept the things I cannot control. I've become less interested in winning arguments, less invested in legalism and dogma, and much less concerned with convincing anyone else that I'm right.
Perhaps most surprisingly of all, I've changed my mind.
That is especially true when it comes to liturgy.
There was a time when I would have described the post-Vatican II liturgy as "impoverished." In those days I shared much of the SSPX's frustration. I lamented the gaudy polyester vestments, the cheap office carpet tiles, the bare concrete breeze blocks that lined the walls of so many churches, and those earnest but excruciating folk hymns from the 1970s. (I still struggle with Colours of Day.)
What I wanted was Latin. Lace. Smells and bells. Birettas. I wanted the whole glorious package.
I was that soldier.
To be fair, this wasn't an especially unusual position within parts of the Catholic Worker movement. For all our political radicalism and commitment to social justice, many Catholic Workers have often been remarkably conservative when it comes to liturgy.
That was certainly true of Dorothy Day.
Some admirers of Dorothy prefer to remember her as an activist while quietly overlooking just how traditionally Catholic she remained. Yet the two were never in conflict for her. She combined a deeply traditional devotional life with anarchist pacifism because the Eucharist was never separate from her social action - it was its source.
One famous story tells of a priest who borrowed a mug from the Catholic Worker soup kitchen to use as a chalice when celebrating Mass. Afterwards, Dorothy carefully washed the mug, kissed it, and buried it in the ground. Having held the Precious Blood, she believed it was no longer fit for serving coffee.
It's a beautiful story.
But there is another Dorothy Day story that has become even more important to me.
She once visited a community of desperately poor Mexican families who survived by scavenging on a rubbish dump. There, on top of the garbage heap itself, stood a tiny makeshift chapel - a windowless cement-block shelter furnished with rough benches made from scrap timber. It wasn't beautiful by any conventional standard.
Yet Dorothy saw something altogether different.
"We have been accused of taking a morbid delight in the gutter and worshipping ashcans," she wrote. "The fact of the matter is that God transforms it all, so that out of this junk heap comes beauty."
Those words have stayed with me.
Because somewhere along the way, they became true for me too.
Today, the Mass is simply the Mass. Whether the hymns are ancient chant or modern folk songs, whether the priest wears embroidered silk or plain polyester, whether the church is a Gothic cathedral or a concrete parish built in 1972- Christ still gives himself to us.
So what changed?
The answer is surprisingly simple.
I found myself praying in places where none of the old arguments seemed to matter anymore.
I found myself attending Mass in the Little Sisters of the Poor's care home, where many of the congregation can no longer kneel and elderly priests sometimes celebrate the Eucharist sitting down, occasionally needing someone else to help elevate the Host. It is among the most reverent liturgies I have ever attended precisely because nobody is pretending that perfection is possible.
I found myself welcomed into L'Arche communities for Morning Prayer, praying alongside people with intellectual disabilities whose uncomplicated joy often seemed to grasp the Gospel more instinctively than all my theological opinions ever had.
In recent years I've also been blessed to pray alongside Chinese Catholics in Maryhill and Filipino Catholics who have made Scotland their home.
I've shared meals with Congolese Catholics whose faith radiates a joy that is difficult to describe without sounding like I'm exaggerating.
Modern technology has allowed many of these friends to show me photographs of the churches they left behind - simple parish buildings that look remarkably like my own modest modern church. Nothing that would grace the cover of an architecture magazine. Nothing likely to impress liturgical aesthetes.
Yet they are holy places.
I also think of the stories told by the missionary priests of my own parish at St Ninian's in Gourock- Holy men like Fr Brian Fulton, who died in Vietnam in 2006, and Fr Neil Sharp, who died in Chile in 2024. Through them we glimpsed a Church that has always been far bigger than our own preferences.
Standing in solidarity with Christians from such humble circumstances slowly exposed something uncomfortable within me.
I realised that my criticisms of "impoverished liturgy" had often been inseparable from a certain cultural arrogance.
These brothers and sisters, worshipping with immense gratitude in churches far simpler than the ones I had dismissed, quietly converted me. They convinced me that the Second Vatican Council really was a response to the Holy Spirit, and that the future of Christianity will not be determined by Europe's nostalgia but by the joyful faith of the global Church.
None of this means that beauty no longer matters.
Quite the opposite.
The point is not to reject beauty but to discover where beauty truly begins.
Beauty is not something we import into the liturgy through expensive vestments or elaborate architecture. Beauty begins in Christ's self-giving, and from there it spills out into the ordinary places of everyday life.
Alexander Schmemann captures this beautifully in For the Life of the World. He argues that the Eucharist is never meant to remain inside the church building. It is meant to overflow into kitchens, workplaces, streets, dining tables, and neighbourhoods. The whole world becomes sacramental when received with gratitude.
The boundary between sacred and secular begins to dissolve.
Rather than escaping the ordinary world in search of holy places, we begin to discover that ordinary places have always been capable of becoming holy.
A soup line can become as much an encounter with Christ as a Communion line.
Not because they are identical, but because the same Christ who feeds us at the altar sends us out to meet him again among the poor.
So no, I cannot follow the SSPX's liturgical red lines.
Instead, I find myself saying yes.
Yes to the so-called "impoverished" liturgy of Vatican II.
Yes to shabby parish churches.
Yes to inexpensive vestments.
Yes to concrete walls if they shelter faithful people at prayer.
Yes to the universal Church—from Cameroon to East Timor, from Colombia to Gourock.
Because we belong to one another.
We belong to the same mystical Body of Christ.
And perhaps that is where I return to Dorothy Day.
France has always been central to the story of the SSPX, from its founder to its identity and growth. Yet Dorothy's words, written over fifty years ago, seem remarkably fitting today:
"A friend of mine once said that it was the style to be Catholic in France nowadays, but it was not the style to be one in America. It was the Irish of New England, the Italians, the Hungarians, the Lithuanians, the Poles—it was the great mass of the poor, the workers, who were the Catholics in this country, and this fact in itself drew me to the Church."
That remains true.
The Church has always belonged, first and foremost, to ordinary people.
To workers.
To migrants.
To the elderly.
To the disabled.
To the poor.
And perhaps that is why I no longer fear an impoverished liturgy.
Because I have discovered that Christ has always seemed remarkably at home among impoverished people.