Source: The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/02/22/cherishing_an_older_catholicism/
On February 22, 2004 The Boston Globe reported, "The worshipers at the St. Benedict Center are not big consumers of popular culture. Many don't own televisions. The nearest multiplex is miles away. And R-rated movies are frowned upon.
But Mel Gibson has done what MTV could not. By producing a graphic motion picture depicting the last 12 hours of Jesus's life, Gibson has punctured the cultural isolation of this small community of believers, who worship in Latin, eschew birth control, cling to the rituals and beliefs of the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council, and claim Gibson and his father as theological allies...
In Richmond, a small town south of Keene, those traditions are immediately on display, ideas and rituals so powerful that people are willing to live at odds with their own church hierarchy to preserve them.
On Sunday mornings, 200 to 300 people gather in a hilltop chapel, a low-ceilinged basement with wooden pews. The families are huge, some with as many as 11 children, displaying, a community leader says, 'their noncontraceptive glory.'
Before the Mass, they recite the rosary aloud, in unison, a chorus of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, as one man walks, praying, along the Stations of the Cross. Women wear black veils. A group of celibate women in black habits with white wimples sing Gregorian chant.
The priest faces a high altar, not the assembly, as he celebrates the pre-Vatican II Tridentine Rite Mass."