Degrees Of Latin Mass?

Let me be clear: I've been to a Latin mass. But this was back when nobody had a choice in the matter, about 1957 or 1958, when my mother took my sister and me to a wedding in Elizabeth, NJ. Apparently this was a friend of some sort, or possibly a distant relative (our family was solidly Protestant), and I'm not entirely sure why she did it at all. My memory of it is that she acted as though she were doing something furtive. I have a vague memory of a darkened nave with a bright gold reredos in the smoky distance with some sort of fussing and mumbling going on up front. We were definitely in the last pew. We probably came in late.

I went on the web to see if I could find any photos of Catholic churches in Elizabeth, NJ, and I think this one, St Genevieve's, best reconstructs my memory:

However, the altar and reredos were lit, and I was seeing it through a screen of adult bodies. At one point, bells started ringing, and my mother became more agitated than usual and hustled us out. This all raises more questions for me, but I'll leave most of them aside.

It does occur to me that my mother was raised Methodist, which would make me eligible for membership in the ordinariate, and that I did attend that Latin mass makes me an Anglo-Catholic, notwithstanding my 30 years as an Episcopalian, which are now thus canonically nugatory as far as Houston is concerned.

Indeed, I think if I were to obtain a correspondence school certificate of some sort, I would qualify for ordination by Bp Lopes as a Catholic priest -- especially if I could get Fr Bartus to put in a good word. That, I suspect, would be key. ("What about Fr Perkins?" you may ask. "He knows what you think of him." I answer that the man would forget who I was in his anxiety to gain a new priest.)

But back to Latin. My regular correspondent raises an intriguing set of questions about the Ordinary Form Latin mass at Our Lady of the Atonement:

Do, or perhaps it’s already “did” the congregation say the responses? Many of the differences between the Extraordinary Form and the Ordinary Form which this blogger notes —-position of the altar, male and female servers, etc—-would presumably not apply to celebrations at Our Lady of the Atonement. But I assume the OF is always done as what used to be called a “Dialogue Mass” (see below). Of course serious traddies also have issues with changes in the prayers themselves, which are there regardless of what language the OF is celebrated in.

The Wikipedia article my correspondent links says,

In 1922, the Holy See gave approval to the practice whereby "at least in religious houses and institutions for youth, all people assisting at the Mass make the responses at the same time with the acolytes", a practice that it declared praiseworthy in view of the evident desire expressed in papal documents "to instil into the souls of the faithful a truly Christian and collective spirit, and prepare them for active participation." The practice was already established without authorisation in Belgium and in Germany before the First World War. Further approval was granted in 1935 and 1958.

. . . The Dialogue Mass never became prevalent in English-speaking countries and current celebrations of Tridentine Mass in these countries are in practice rarely structured as a Dialogue Mass.

So the question becomes whether the OF Latin mass is ever much more than a freelanced, mongrelized dilution of the Tridentine mass no matter what, and whether it could have much appeal to serious traddies. But this in turn raises the question of whom it actually appeals to -- some non-trivial number of people felt disappointment at minimum when Houston discontinued the OF Latin mass at OLA. and the visitor from Greenville, TX, with the OF Latin mass at his home parish no longer available, nevertheless felt the Tridentine versions at FSSP or SSPX parishes come with cliquish baggage.