Frowning on women who wear trousers to church and being declared "morally illicit" by the heads of the Catholic Church have done little to stem the enthusiasm of members of a deeply conservative Catholic society.

FOR the first tine in 30 years, the Latin Mass was celebrated in Middlesbrough on Sunday. Veni, vidi, didn't quite know what to make of it all. It was conducted by the Society of St Pius X, who hold the "modernistic" Mass to be an abomination, believe all religions but Catholicism to be false, despise ecumenism, frown upon women who wear trousers to church and suspect Masonic plots beneath every square and compass.

In grander moments they talk of the reconstruction of Christian civilisation and wonder what the Holy Inquisition would have made, mercifully, of their opponents.

"Of course we are paranoid," a Society member once told the Sunday Times. "If we weren't paranoid we'd need our heads examined. People ARE against us."

The Society was formed after the Vatican reforms of the mid-1960s by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, excommunicated in 1988 for consecrating bishops without Papal authority.

Though Rome has suspended its priests and declared Mass attendance "morally illicit", the Society now has over 400 priests and 600 churches or Mass centres worldwide. Expansion, they claim pertinently, has been particularly strong in Poland.

Is the Pope a Welshman?

Just about all that the Society of St Pius X has in common with the average Catholic church, indeed, is that both run 100 clubs.

Today's headline should probably be Rites and Wrongs, possibly with the question mark which - another false belief - is said in journalistic cells to render all calumnies inactionable.

Almost 40 attended the 6pm Mass at the St Mary's Centre in Corporation Road, a generally secular building used by groups as varied as Cruse and the Credit Union. Next door, the Purple Onion was preparing for its "Sunday funk session". The two would not easily be confused.

They are not rebels, they insist. Rather they would see themselves as a resistance movement, uncompromising and uncompromised, though there are belt and braces Catholics in Sunday's congregation who've been to "official" Mass in the morning.

When a St Pius X priest talks of tradition, however, it is Tradition with a capital T.

Though the symbol of their counter-revolution is the "Tridentine" Latin Mass - replaced, says a Society history, by "an inept, banal translation into a kind of mid-Atlantic English" - they represent a stand for deeply conservative Catholicism in all its long-enshrined allegiances.

As that floury old Allanson fellow might have said, it is religion with nowt tekken out.

"Nothing is done in a spirit of rebellion, rather of fidelity," says Dr Carol Byrne, from Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough.

"All we are doing is trying to build up what others are tearing down. We feel let down by the Church, deprived of our spiritual heritage. All we ask is for the Church to give us back the traditional Catechism and Mass, so that we can live our Catholic faith to the full."

Previously they had met monthly in a Redcar community centre, now deemed too small. Among the indications that it is not a "modern" Catholic service is that there is almost complete silence beforehand.

When there is a whisper, overheard, it is not of measles (or metatarsels) but of Mass intention.

Fr Matthew Clifton, the young celebrant, is one of three Preston-based priests who represent the Society in the North of England and Scotland. Alan Webber, the server, is a BBC Radio York journalist based in Harrogate.

Othere have come from Hartlepool, Bedale and Darlington. By tailor and tonsure, one chap appears to be an Orthodox Jew.

Whilst the "official" church is fast declining, says Dr Byrne, the Society - high Society - grows steadily.

"The logical outcome of undermining the true nature of the Mass was to destroy the supernatural ethos of the sacred mysteries and make the church appear irrelevant in the modern world.

"Reverence to God was being gradually eroded. Many people began to wonder why, in the new secularised atmosphere, they needed to go to church at all to be offered the kind of banalities they could find in their everyday worldly lives."

Though there are no kneelers, almost everyone kneels on the floor, testament to devotion or dexterity or both. The Mass, as of old, is celebrated with the priest's back turned to the faithful.

Whatever his body language, Fr Clifton's Latin is quickfire and incomprehensible, giving new meaning to the term "sacred mysteries".

The scripture is read in English, though printed bi-lingually. The homily, a suitably Marian exposition, lasts 14 minutes.

There are bells but no smells. For one thing it is a Low Mass, for another the incense these days is left largely to the high Anglicans.

The Society also holds a weekly Mass at the Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle. Soon, says Fr Clifton afterwards, they hope to complete the sale of the redundant St Cuthbert's church in Bensham, Gateshead - reckoned one of John Dobson's finest.

When last we heard, the Church of England was considering flogging it for a carpet warehouse.

He is not interested in numbers, he says, only in bringing people of all ages to Christ, nor does he regard the Society as acting illegally or outside the Church.

Their motto could be semper fidelis - or words, of course, to that effect.

* The St Mary's Centre in Corporation Road, Middlesbrough, will continue as the Latin quarter on the second Sunday of every month at 6pm. Tridentine Mass is also celebrated each Sunday at 6pm in the Royal Station Hotel, Newcastle, and occasionally in Sacriston, Co Durham.