St Mary's Church, Warrington

St Mary’s Church in Warrington boasts a remarkably tall tower which can be seen for miles around, and the internals are rather lofty, too. It is administered by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP), a highly conservative group of priests who reject the Roman Church’s reforms of worship at the Second Vatican Council, and retain the older practices of the Mass, as detailed in the 1962 Missal, which directs the Traditional Latin Rite, or Tridentine Mass.

We Protestants with our variations in worship styles and worldly methods sometimes look with envious eyes at the Catholics’ unity and contentment, but this is clearly unmerited. There are Roman Catholics who seriously lament their own church’s modernisation and long for the older ways. Yet the best and most acceptable worship to God is not found in Roman missals, Genevan psalters or Anglican prayerbooks, but the Bible, God’s word. Longing for the traditional Roman Mass is still a hankering after innovation and invention. Nothing but God’s word offers blueprint and authority. In this, both Romanists and Protestants fall.

I will worship toward thine holy Temple and praise thy Name, because of thy loving-kindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy Name above all things by thy word. Psalm 138:2, Geneva Bible

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