Chairman's Blog
13/07/2022 - 11:31
Part-time Job opportunity at the Latin Mass Society
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| The current LMS Office, when it opened in 2009. |
The Latin Mass Society is advertising for a part-time employee.
We have two full-time employees, plus this part-time role, two freelancers who work for us, and many volunteers, in the Office and around the country. I believe the Latin Mass Society is the only national 'Una Voce' group around the world to have permanent staff of any kind.
This role is administrative: answering the phone, maintaining data-bases, fulfilling orders to our online shop, and so on.
We will soon be in a new, larger, office, where our thriving shop can continue to expand. We last upgraded our office space in 2009, and were planning to do this again before Covid struck.
The deadline for applications is 26th August.
Job title: Office Assistant
Based in our central London office, the Office Assistant will be responsible for the administrative
work of the charity. The General Manager is their line manager.
KEY AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY
- Office administration - The Office Assistant acts as the principal secretary for the LMS office.
- This includes general correspondence, answering telephone calls, post and emails.
- Membership administration - The Office Assistant is responsible for the membership database (CiviCRM), membership renewals, data entry, data analysis, data export (print or email mail-merges).
- Mail-order - The Office Assistant is responsible for the administration of the LMS online shop (Drupal Commerce). This includes stock replenishment, stock management, product updates/additions and order fulfilment (picking, packing & mailing).
- Information administration - The Office Assistant is responsible for compiling information which pertains to the Charity, including research and document publication and distribution.
- Volunteer administration – The Office Assistant is responsible for overseeing office work undertaken by volunteers.
- Other tasks as determined by the General Manager.
More details from the LMS Website.
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07/07/2022 - 16:54
New podcasts: interview with Timothy Stanley
In this podcast with Tim Stanley I discuss his recent book Whatever Happened to Tradition?
You can find on various platforms; on Podbean it is here.
He also gave a talk in the Latin Mass Society's Iota Unum series in London; more about that series here.
Tim writes in the Telegraph and is on Twitter as @timothy_stanley
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06/07/2022 - 17:19
Learn Latin this Summer! Residential and Online options
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| Mass at Park Place during the Guild of St Clare Sewing Retreat in the spring. |
Not many of those reading this blog will be able to put their hands on their hearts and say that their Latin could not be improved. So why not do something about it?
Residential Latin Course, 8th - 13th August
The Latin Mass Society hasn't had a residential Latin course since before Covid, but this year we are back, better than ever: a better venue, and the option of beginners' New Testament Greek as well as beginners or intermediate Latin. The great Fr John Hunwicke will be with us to teach Latin.
The venue is Park Place Pastoral Centre in Hampshire (PO17 5HA), a quiet rural setting with en suite rooms and excellent food.
There are discounts for LMS members (yes, join us to get one, it's cheaper that way) and enormous discounts for clergy, seminarians, and religious.
All the details are here.
Online Courses, July–October
Can't make it to Hampshire in August? From later this month the next round of online courses organised by Matthew Spencer, now with an assistant, Peter Day-Milne, starting late this month.
The courses accommodate Latinists of all levels, and include options to explore a wide range of Latin registers: liturgical Latin, the Latin of the Fathers, Classical Latin, the Latin of modern Church documents, and so on.
The courses are essentially ongoing through the year, and can be done from anywhere in the world.
The LMS' sponsorship for clergy and seminarians applies to these as well. In fact we will pay 80% of the cost for clergy etc. based in or from England and Wales.
All the details are here.
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05/07/2022 - 20:19
What does Pope Francis mean in Desiderio desideravi?
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| The laying-on of hands at the recent priestly ordination in Bavaria for the Fraternity of St Peter. |
My latest on 1Peter5.
Desiderio desideravi: “with desire have I desired,” Our Lord said to His Disciples before the Last Supper, “to eat this Pasch with you.” The quaint Latin phrase is a literal translation of the Greek of the Gospels (Luke 22:15; Matthew 13:14), but it is no less quaint in Greek. It is in fact an expression at home in Hebrew, which does this kind of thing to express a superlative. No doubt this was an expression in use in Our Lord’s native Aramaic as well. The fidelity of a succession of translators has brought it to us today as something at once mysterious, poetic, intriguing, and rather beautiful. The effort necessary to understand it, its very elusiveness, has the effect of fixing it in our minds, and making it echo in our souls. To put it another way, the slight barrier to propositional understanding increases its transformative potential for us.
Every poet, every novelist, knows this. It is a mystery hidden, however, from modern Biblical translators, who come up with phrases like the one used in the English version of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter of this name: ‘I have earnestly desired.’ It is flat, utilitarian, and drab; defensible as a translation, to be sure, on modern principles, but about as memorable as a corporate mission statement.
Which is to be master, one may ask? The Church’s Tradition, which draws us in through mystery, or the flattened-out, dreary rationalism of liturgical Modernism? It is a problem with which Pope Francis struggles in this Letter. He sees the struggle in terms of avoiding two bad options, which present themselves as opposites.
I want the beauty of the Christian celebration and its necessary consequences for the life of the Church not to be spoiled by a superficial and foreshortened understanding of its value or, worse yet, by its being exploited in service of some ideological vision, no matter what the hue (16).
Read the whole thing there.
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01/07/2022 - 15:15
The Myth of Liberal Neutrality
My first article for The Critic magazine is online now. It begins:
Beleaguered liberal academics often appeal to the idea that universities should be neutral on substantive issues: they should teach the scientific or philosophical method, or the method of literary criticism, or whatever, but not enforce a single view of the correct answers. This kind of argument is also used in relation to schools, and in general to all the activities of the state. It is not just a bad argument, but a strategically disastrous one.
Classical liberals claim that what they want is simply a framework within which free enquiry can take place. The only limit to the debate which a classical liberal can accept is the defence of free enquiry itself. The only voices which are excluded are those which would silence other voices. But — they say — this is not a real limitation, a limit on what substantive results are allowable, because it is merely the limit imposed by rationality itself. Those who would silence other voices are rejecting rationality, in rejecting the value of the free debate which those voices would stimulate.
Read the whole thing there.
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30/06/2022 - 13:28
Iota Unum Podcasts: Prof Thomas Pink
Over the Summer we are launching a new season of Iota Unum Podcasts.
The first, published today, is a recording of Professor Thomas Pink's Iota Unum talk on The Papal Monarchy, which he delivered in January, at our regular location, the parish hall of Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street, in London.
You can hear it on Podbean here; it is also on Spotify: search for the Latin Mass Society.
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28/06/2022 - 16:29
Traditional Catholics in the Synod on Synodality
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| A newly ordained priest, of the Fraternity of St Peter, concluding his first, Traditional, Mass in Munich. Fr Gwilym Evans comes from Wales. |
Traditional Catholics' contributions to the Synod on Synodality have not been entirely ignored. The Synthesis document for England and Wales includes this paragraph:
(viii) Traditionalists 72. Although very few in number, a sense of grievance and marginalization is strongly expressed by those who worship using the Missal of 1962. Traditionalists complain of “sadness and anger” at the restrictions they believe were imposed by Pope Francis’s Traditionis Custodes, which restored to bishops the regulation of the provision of pre Second Vatican Council liturgies. 89 Adherents of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) complain of the “watering down” of liturgical devotion in eucharistic celebrations following the Council, and fear that the Church has capitulated to “modernistic” ideas. 90 In response to questions about marginalisation and exclusion, both TLM adherents and those committed to “maintaining traditional Catholic teaching against what they interpret as harmful modifications” feel “badly treated by the bishops and by Pope Francis“ and “saddened by a sense that their views are habitually denigrated and their voices left unheard and unanswered.”91
This appears under other categories: the Traveller Community, People of Colour, the Divorced and Remmaried, and so on.
The pattern is similar in diocesan Synthesis reports from England and Wales. I quote a few below. It is interesting how similar they are to each other, regardless of the very different policies of the dioceses towards the Old Mass, and therefore of the experience of the people making contributions. Portsmouth, which is quite well served with the Traditional Mass, is unusual in not mentioning it explicitly at all (see below).
It is disappointing that the issue of the liturgy is not linked in any positive way to the question of evangelisation. The reports record comments about how the new English translation is off-putting and the like, but Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass have much to say about how it has helped them in the Faith, in many cases bringing back to the practice of the Faith, or bringing them to the Faith itself. It is partly, perhaps, a result of the structure of these documents that such cross-referencing is not made. In any event, I do not think that Traditionalists' contributions were as uniformly negative in tone as these summaries suggest.
Nevertheless, it is something to note that the message that Traditional Catholics exist, and have been unjustly marginalised, has made it into the reports.
A sense of marginalisation and pain included those who value the traditional Latin Mass: ‘Seeing how fundamentally these Masses have affected our own journey in faith, and how profoundly they are drawing souls to the church, including many young families, we are concerned that a baseline policy going forward will be to make provision of the Latin Mass a serious and real priority in our Archdiocese and beyond; something which appears to be under threat at present, and a cause for alarm even in the secular world, making headline news. [Individual submission]. Birmingham Archdiocese
There were, from several reports, an appeal for a return to and encouragement of traditional Catholic pious practices. Some referred to traditional Corpus Christi processions as a means of witness. A few reports highlighted the desire to be inclusive of those who prefer the ‘Extraordinary Form’ (elsewhere: ‘Tridentine Rite’), though one report indicated that where the Extraordinary Form had been experienced as ‘imposed,’ ‘division and hurt’ had occurred. Many reports indicate a hunger among the people for wider prayer and spiritual formation opportunities, as the world, and Church, emerge from the pandemic. Cardiff Archdiocese
Another said that “Modern liturgy is tedious, dull, impoverished, casual and uninspiring.”. The loss of the opportunity to participate in the Tridentine Rite was expressed both by those who want it and those who feel sympathy for a group they believe has now been excluded. Clifton Diocese
An appreciation of the variety of styles of liturgy was expressed. Some responses called for more ‘lively and engaging’ liturgies, whilst others expressed the need for ‘reverence’ and ‘silence’. Liturgies expressing the diversity of the cultures making up our parish communities was seen as desirable by around 20%. Portsmouth Diocese
There are binary views about how we celebrate Mass and the Sacraments which present challenges to synodality. A minority perceive a decrease in “devotion characterised by reverence and awe” and would like greater access to the Latin Mass; they are deeply hurt and angered by Traditionis Custodes. Others feel the Mass is too traditional and ‘stuffy’ and lacks joy. Plymouth Diocese
There were several calls for the wider use of the 1962 Missal and availability of the Latin Mass, one request being typical of others: “I would be grateful if there was a Latin Mass near me. At present I have to drive a long way to attend one” (240). Another wrote: “It’s strange to hear all this talk about inclusivity. The Latin Mass is being reigned in, the liberals aren’t” Shrewsbury Diocese
Those who describe themselves as traditionalists who desire to worship in the Extraordinary Form feel marginalised by the Church hierarchy (as if not tolerated by Rome) and even some of the clergy in the diocese. Some feel that the Holy Father is moving to eliminate the traditional rite of Mass and this leaves them feeling profoundly alienated. Lancaster Diocese
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24/06/2022 - 14:03
Fr Gwilym Evans FSSP: First Mass, photos
Cross-posted between Rorate Caeli and LMS Chairman. Photos by me.
Fr Gwilym Evans FSSP celebrated his First Mass on Sunday 18th, the Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi. Although Corpus Christi is a public holiday in Bavaria, and a public procession had taken place on the day in Munich, on the Sunday another procession took place, organised by one of the parishes, the Peterskirche. After his Mass, Fr Evans and his congregation joined this procession.
His Mass took place in the small but extraordinary Baroque 'Asamkirche', which has relics (in a waxwork) of St John Nepomuk above the altar. It was a Low Mass.
In the procession, Fr Evans was vested in a cope and gave one of the three Benedictions which took place at the outside altars created for the occasion outside various churches. He also gave the general blessing at the conclusion of the event, in the Peterskirche.
The procession was extremely impressive, with hundreds of people taking part and a huge amount of preparation involved, not just in the procession itself but with these outside altars, which had the footpace laid out with flowers. The Peterskirche, where we ended up, is a truly magnificent church, with its Baroque furnishings intact (unlike the nearby cathedral, which has suffered over the centuries, not least from war damage).
Fr Evans will be celebrating 'First Masses' in various locations in England, and will also be on the Walsingham Pilgrimage, so for people in England there will be many opportunities to see him and receive his First Blessings.
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23/06/2022 - 14:03
FSSP Ordinations in Bavaria: photos
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| Photo by Monika Rheinschmitt |
Cross-posted between Rorate Caeli and LMS Chairman.
On Saturday 18th June, Archbishop Joseph Haas of Vaduz (Liechtenstein) ordained two members of the Fraternity of St Peter to the priesthood. They stand either side of the Archbishop in the above photograph: Daniel Bruckwilder, left, and Gwilym Evans, right. Fr Bruckwilder is from Germany; I and many others from the UK attended this event because Fr Evans is from Wales. He has attended many traditional events in England over the years, particularly the Latin Mass Society's walking pilgrimage to Walsingham: and will do so again this year.
Most of the photos in this post are by my Una Voce International (FIUV) colleague, Monika Rheinschmitt; a few are by me. Readers can click through to Flickr albums of more of her photographs of this event and mine. Tomorrow (Friday) I will post some photographs of Fr Evans' First Mass in Munich.
The ordinations took place some distance from the FSSP Seminary at Wigratzbad, Bavaria, in the Church of our Lady of the Assumption, Turkheim.
Archbishop Haas very kindly stepped in at short notice to do the ordinations, when Bishop Czesław Kozon of Copenhagan was unable to do so, having tested positive for Covid.
The Bishops' Conference of England and Wales was represented by Mgr Keith Newton, the Ordinary of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
09/06/2022 - 10:51
Latin and NT Greek intensive week with the LMS
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| Mass at Park Place at the Sewing Retreat |
Booking is open for our intensive study week of either liturgical Latin or New Testament Greek, 8th August - Saturday 13th August 2022.
The venue is Park Place Pastoral Centre, a Catholic retreat centre in Hampshire (Wickham, Fareham, Hampshire PO17 5HA).
- Find your own level with our experienced Latin tutors: Fr John Hunwicke and Ethan Freeman will be dividing students into beginners and the more advanced.
- Matthew Spencer will be teaching the New Testament Greek, as he has been doing online.
- A relaxed and Catholic atmosphere focusing on the liturgical and scriptural uses of the languages.
- A comfortable setting, with en suite single and twin rooms, and rather good food -- which we've experienced before in the Guild of St Clare Sewing Retreat.
- There are huge discounts for clergy and seminarians for the Latin.
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