A WEEKLY Mass in Latin is to be celebrated in Belfast from the first weekend of Lent.
St Thérèse of Lisieux Church, on Somerton Road in north Belfast, will be the venue each Sunday at 4pm.
The first weekly Tridentine Mass will be celebrated on March 5 and will operate in a trial period for six months.
Up until reforms introduced following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, all Catholic parishes worldwide celebrated Mass in Latin.
At present, Latin Mass is celebrated in two churches in Belfast; St Paul's on Falls Road and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, on two Sundays each month and also on a Tuesday evening once a month.
St Mary's Church in Newry is the only other church in the north which offers weekly Latin Mass, although parishes in Dungannon and Derry celebrate them.
Fr Martin Graham, administrator of St Peter's Cathedral in Belfast and one of four priests who will celebrate the Masses, told The Irish News: "There was always a Latin Mass in Belfast but it just fell away, with priests getting older and so on.
"People who had been attending those Masses approached Bishop Walsh (former Bishop of Down and Connor) around 2002/03 to see if it could be restored. It was celebrated on the first Saturday of the month as a trial, and we were gradually able to extend the provision."
Fr Graham said the Masses would feature traditional aspects such as the priest standing facing the altar except when addressing the congregation directly, while Holy Communion is received kneeling on the altar.
On its website, the Latin Mass group in Belfast said that it did not wish to lose out on the traditional practices of the Church, with which many of the early doctors of the Church and saints would have been familiar.
It said: "These forms were the basis of their spirituality and informed their theology. If modern Catholics are unfamiliar with these forms, or worse still reject them, they will find the writings and the spirit of these men and women alien, and will become disconnected from their own traditions."
Many people within the Catholic Church were unhappy at the replacing of the Latin Mass, and in a Papal decree in 2007, Pope Benedict addressed the issue, stating: "There is no contradiction between the two editions of the Roman Missal. In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture.
"What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful."
