Hello, Word

For four years, Robin Cheung served as a daily altar server at St. Lawrence Martyr parish in Toronto, Ontario—the designated Diocesan Traditional Latin Mass parish for the Archdiocese of Toronto. In this capacity, he was honoured with the grace of serving beside Fr. Steven Szakaczki and Fr. Liam Gavigan, learning the rhythms and rubrics of the 1962 Usus Antiquior through daily practice at the altar.

Those years of reverent service planted a seed. The ancient liturgy—with its precision, its beauty, its unbroken connection to centuries of Catholic worship—demanded a digital companion worthy of its dignity. When Robin discovered Laszlo Kiss' extraordinary DivinumOfficium project (an MIT-licensed digital transcription of the complete traditional liturgical texts), he recognized an opportunity to build something that had never existed: a modern, offline-first, multi-platform application that could bring the complete Traditional Latin Mass to any device, anywhere in the world—without requiring an internet connection.

A REALTOR-Broker by profession and a Catholic by conviction—though he would resist the label “traditionalist.” Robin is, by temperament, a bridger of extremes: he is either the most modernist of traditionalists or the most traditional of modernists, and he has never found the contradiction worth resolving. For most of his life—through his Conversion and well into the years he spent serving at the Usus Antiquior altar—he identified equally as a DJ and raver. By the time he took his place beside the sanctuary rail at St. Lawrence Martyr, he had largely retired from the circuit and returned to his first instrument, classical piano; yet the duality persisted, quietly. He brings the same instinct to SanctissiMissa: not to choose between the ancient and the modern, but to make them speak to each other.

That instinct has roots in an unlikely origin. Robin is an adult convert and the only Catholic in his immediate family. On his birthday in the Jubilee Year Anno Domini 2000—having just begun his MBA at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University—he completed a hat trick of sacraments in a single celebration: Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation, at the parish directly across Main Street West from the university gates in Hamilton, Ontario. He entered the Church alone, without family precedent.

Robin brings both the rigour of a builder and the instinct of a bridge-maker to SanctissiMissa. The project’s architecture reflects its subject matter: like the stone churches that have sheltered the faithful for centuries, the app is built to endure—with a complete 27.4 MB bilingual corpus bundled inside every installation, immune to server outages, subscription lapses, or internet disruptions.

SanctissiMissa is not merely a technical exercise. It is an act of service to the Church—an offering of modern engineering skill in support of ancient, unchanging worship. The name itself echoes this mission: Sanctissima Missa, the Most Holy Mass.