'Missa Latina,' yes: I liked it. So excommunicate me.

A modest proposal, if you please, to return somehow, somewhat to the old liturgy. I make it after worshiping five Sundays in a row at my neighborhood Tridentine-Latin Mass church (doesn't every neighborhood have one?) in search of a newspaper story. The church, Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic, is run by the excommunicated priests of the Society of Saint Pius X, heirs to the late rebel archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, who never met a novus ordo he liked.

These are traditionalist Catholics who reject Vatican II as the work of freemasons and Protestants and running-dog liberals. For them the Mass says it all. If it isn't Tridentine (dating from the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent 450 years ago), it's not a Mass.

That's not my position, but I like their Mass. It has Latin and Gregorian music and incense and long periods when we pewsitters have nothing to do but let the music and smell of incense and overall ambiance of set-piece reverence wash over us. At the kiss of peace, we do not turn to shake hands with our neighbors-the virtual highlight of the Masses I usually attend. Instead, we concentrate on God above. We meditate and leave the hand-shaking for Rotary, Kiwanis, and the K.C.'s.

It's a serious bunch at this church. Don't look for a lot of greeting and meeting, though young parents can be seen after Mass comparing notes. It isn't against the rules to greet your neighbor. It just isn't something you have to do as part of the liturgy. Instead, you just show up and more or less nestle into things, which isn't bad after a week of bumping into people fight and left in your search for wealth and immortality.

This Mass is in Latin, which is Greek to most of us, I know. But that makes it a quintessential ritual language, special language for church, language that says church is not an extension of the five-day week, but something different, something out of the way.

Do not look for discussion of fights, women's or otherwise. Women wear lace head-covetings here, and there are no altar girls, though women sing in the choir above and behind us, where the organist, an insurance salesman and part-time jazz musician, belts out Kyries as choir leader as well. This is important. The high Mass is sit-and-watch time for worshipers, but it's listening time too. Gregorian Kyrie, Gloria, and the rest come hurtling down from above. They fill the air while you the worshiper have time to think and be moved.

The whole thing is anathema to the modern churchgoer, as novus ordo Masses are anathema to these folks at Our Lady Immaculate. I count myself a modern churchgoer, but my baptism did not entirely take as a member of the new church, it seems. For one thing, I relish the passivity of this worship experience. No song leader is up there waving and weaving to get and help me to be a good Catholic by singing up a storm. No celebrant is looking me in the eye, sometimes like a veritable talk-show host, eliciting (extorting?) my response to his "The Lord be (or is) with you." No neighbor in the pew is looking for my hand at the Lord's Prayer. None turns to me at the handshake of peace. I'm alone with God, and I love it. There. I said it. It wasn't easy.

Look, a good modem-church Mass is a joy forever, or at least for a few Sunday-afternoon hours. Holding hands at the Lord's Prayer is O.K., shaking on it before Communion is fine. Walking down the aisle rubbernecking to see who's around is fine, taking the whole-wheat host that cracks when I bite it, that's fine too. Watching people return from Communion is a meditation on solidarity, friendship, brotherhood, sisterhood. True, I can get something a lot like it at a meeting of my local political party or parent-teacher organization, but never with quite the Christian twist.

Let the record show I am not knocking horizontal worship. It's just that man is not fed alone by the bread of human intercourse, even in a divine setting. Humankind is fed also by the more or less monastic, the meditative, the being solitary in the company of others that characterized the now discredited, indeed mostly forbidden, Latin Mass.

There you are after running around all week, ready for something different. It's natural. You love God, you might even like God. But God is different from you and me. Extremely different. You would like to make contact. You would like to walk away changed, if only a little. You want a mood for some quiet communion. Among the Lady Immaculate worshipers are refugees from noise and frou-frou, balloons in the sanctuary and all that. They want something more reverential. For them worship is no cabaret, no more than life. They want meat on them bones, and sometimes almost raw meat at that.

They get it at Lady Immaculate. Sermons are devotional and aggressively pre-Vatican II, drawing on the heavily codified theology of that day. The regular priest, the Reverend Peter Scott, national superior of the society's thirty-five priests in the U.S., takes passing shots at rock music and television (is that so bad?) but concentrates on devotional themes: how Holy Communion infuses charity, for instance, thus cleansing the soul even of mortal sins which one has inadvertently not confessed.

Wow! Even the forgetful sinner is saved, thanks to this codifying of divine mercy itself.

It makes you squirm a bit, but Scott is no martinet. Writing my news story, I found him open and cooperative, unlike some Christians. Not to pick the favored whipping boy and girl, but anti-abortion activists do sometimes put others off with their tight-lipped intensity. Ditto rock-fibbed liberals pressing their causes.

But that's not what comes through in this Tridentine congregation, unless you ask around, as I did. Yes, there are some hard-nosed folks there, yearning for readier reference to hell and damnation. But the hardest of these, urging me for the umpteenth time to give them a favorable report, smiled when she spoke of Judgment Day when I would receive my just desserts. But that's not my point, which is that pre-Vatican II devotion seems not incompatible with 1990s' soul-feeding. Especially do I feel that something ought to be done about Sunday worship, to restore some of what worked before reform.

If God writes straight with crooked lines--the favorite aphorism of the well-meaning klutz--then maybe those stubborn Lefebvrists are telling us something we ought to listen to. The lesson is there one way or another: restore formality, stateliness, reverence to the Mass, or ratchet up your current formality levels, etc. It's for a whole parish to work on, not just the priest. As a church we took quite a flyer twenty-some years ago when we put our worship in the hands of some liturgical experts and told them to do it up new.

Now we have something that may have veered too sharply from. What ? Tradition ? Dare I say it ? Traditionalists are a crotchety lot, rebellious and cocksure. Does that mean they are all wrong? Say it isn't so. JIM BOWMAN

Jim Bowman, former religion editor for the Chicago Daily News, is now a free-lance journalist.