Unwanted Priest: The Autobiography Of A Latin Mass Exile by Bryan Houghton

Paperback: Father Bryan Houghton’s life was fraught with momentous transitions. 

As a Protestant child educated in a Catholic school, he gradually awakened to the truth of the Faith and eventually converted. He responded to the call to priesthood, which he understood in its traditional sense as an office of offering sacrifice, reconciling sinners, feeding the spiritually hungry, and preaching divinely revealed truths. 

When the Second Vatican Council hit, and even more the successive waves of liturgical reform in the 1960s, Father Houghton was brought to a crisis of conscience: how was all this lust for change compatible with the rock-solid Faith to which he had given his life? Why must the Church’s noble, ample, orthodox rites of worship be hacked to pieces? 

A man who placed great store by the maxim lex orandi, lex credendi, Houghton watched the dismantling of liturgical tradition with growing dismay, and when the substance of the Mass was changed beyond recognition and he could not bring himself to say a rite that belied his faith, he resigned his curacy and drove to southern France, where he bought a house in which to live, pray, offer the Tridentine Mass - and, fortunately for us, compile his memoirs. 

The never-published English manuscript of the resulting book, unique in its blend of entertaining stories and precise critiques, was long thought to be lost, with only its authorized French translation still in print; but the recent discovery of the original manuscript allows us access to this masterpiece decades later, when the situation in the Church is eerily like the one that faced its author in his time. 

A stable priest contented with tradition in the midst of mandated modernizations, Father Houghton offers us in his autobiography, Unwanted Priest (Prêtre rejeté, 2022), a moving and insightful account of why a priest would choose rather to be “unwanted” than to betray his innermost convictions. 

Fr Houghton’s touching account of his personal journey in the Faith is accompanied by a spiritual insight of enormous value into the crisis of the modern Church. I recommend this book to everyone. - Joseph Shaw, President, International Una Voce Federation, and Chairman, Latin Mass Society of England & Wales

About the author: Bryan Houghton (1911–1992), of Anglican background, was received into the Catholic Church in Paris in 1934 and ordained a priest on 30 March 1940. Throughout the 1960s, he found himself increasingly at odds with the self-styled “reformers” who, in the name of Vatican II, were wreaking havoc in the Church. On the day the Novus Ordo Missae went into effect - 30 November 1969, the first Sunday of Advent - he resigned from his pastorship at Bury St Edmunds, refusing to celebrate with the new missal. 

Drawing on his inheritance, he purchased a property with a chapel in the region of Viviers in the south of France and, with his bishop’s consent, continued to offer the Tridentine Mass for a small congregation until his death on 19 November 1992. He wrote two novels, Mitre and Crook and Judith’s Marriage, a collection of essays, Unwanted Priest, and a children’s book, Saint Edmund, King and Martyr.