Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

09/09/2021 - 13:14

Statement of the Religious Superiors (and Taylor Marshall)

Cross-posted on Rorate Caeli.
The Superiors General of the Fraternity of St Peter, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, the Institute of the Good Shepherd, and a number of other Superiors General of priestly institutes and religious communities attached to the Traditional Mass (including three communities of women), have issued a joint letter in response to Traditionis Custodes. Here it is, on the FSSP website. It is addressed to the Bishops of France, not, as some have assumed, to the Holy See.
As befits such a document, it is carefully worded. In principle, Traditionis Custodes creates an impossible situation for the signatories. They are founded on the charism of the Traditional liturgy, and the Letter accompanying Traditionis Custodes tells us that it is the intention of the document that in the longer term this liturgy should entirely disappear. Furthermore, the justification for this given in the Letter is that the clergy and faithful (who are not distinguished) are detached in some sense from the unity of the Church.
The argument which needs to be made to the Bishops of France at this point is thus a delicate one. Negatively, it should be obvious that to strike a defiant attitude, to threaten disobedience to Traditionis Custodes or the Bishops, or to suggest that they might go over to the Society of Pius X, would serve to confirm the purported justification of Traditionis Custodes. It would be directly counter-productive. 

On the other hand, to make a direct argument against Traditionis Custodes, to insist that it should be rescinded, is pointless, because the French Bishops do not have the power to do that. To make such an argument to the Holy See would be pointless in another way, because there is absolutely no chance that an important document such as this would be cancelled, or modified in a significant way, by the very Pope who promulgated it, so soon after its publication. 
Instead, the statement approaches the problem in two ways. First, it emphasises the key-hole of concession offered by Traditionis Custodes and the Letter, through which the Traditional Mass can continue to be celebrated: timeTraditionis Custodes gives the French Bishops (like all bishops) the right to permit the Traditional Mass now. It is now that it needs to be permitted if the spiritual life of the Traditional Institutes, and of Traditional laity, is to continue as before. No limit to this time is set by the documents. The first thing to secure, then, is that the Traditional Mass will continue.
The second approach is to draw attention to a very serious problem created by Traditionis Custodes. In confirming the establishment of the Institutes and communities represented by this statement, the Holy See has over the years since 1988 allowed and encouraged men and women to commit themselves by vows to lives of a particular character: as do all priests and religious. A fundamental aspect of this character for these particular religious associations is the Traditional liturgy. If this liturgy is to be abolished, the vows and commitments made to these associations would become impossible to fulfill.
The implications of this fact are not drawn out. It is for the French Bishops to ponder the problem as they apply Traditionis Custodes. They must implement the legislation with regard to the good of souls: as it is when they apply any aspect of the law of the Church. For those bishops inclined to be sympathetic, this consideration will be a powerful one.
To summarise, what this statement does is to try to create a space in which the French Bishops may, without disobedience, make possible in practice the continuation of the life the of the Priestly Institutes and communities and of lay Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass. The Latin Mass Society did the same thing, in a some different way, when we issued our Canonical Guidance on Traditionis Custodes.

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Taylor Marshall, a man I usually ignore, has insulted the signatories of this statement, as lacking the "brave and bold" spirit which, he claims, animated the late Archbishop Lefebvre. He is, in a video far too tedious to link to, claiming that they are cowards.
This is a contemptible accusation, which reveals Marshall to be, as I expressed it on Twitter, an ignorant fool. I stand by that judgement, and I call on Marshall to apologise to these good men and women, who have a fearful responsibility both to their professed members, and also, in most cases, to the lay faithful for whom they have pastoral care.
Marshall appears to imagine that the Superiors General should react to their complex situation with the subtly of some Hollywood action-hero: an attitude, in fact, completely at odds with the historical reality of Archbishop Lefebvre himself. What, Marshall seems to be asking, would Rambo do? What would be the reaction of some knuckle-headed character played by Mel Gibson? Well, if he wants to base his understanding of ecclesial politics on Braveheart, he should remember the advice given by the Duke of Argyle (in the 1995 film) to the young William Wallace: "First learn to use this" (pointing to his head), "and then I will teach you to use this" (lifting his sword).
It is an interesting fact about social media that some people who witnessed Marshall's insult of the Superiors General, and my own criticism of Marshall for making this insult, concluded that I was the one to be blamed for dividing Traditional Catholics. This is an attitude completely detached from reality. The restoration of the Church is carried out through the sacraments offered by Traditional priests, and through the lives of prayer and sacrifice represented by the Traditional Institutes and communities, not by monetised social-media clicks. We need to show solidarity, in this moment of crisis, with the Superiors General, not with the man who likes to remind his viewers "I'm just a dad with a webcam".
To the Superiors General, I say: genuine Traditional Catholics have your back. If this separates me from Taylor Marshall and his more deranged fans, so much the better.
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07/09/2021 - 13:17

Monday Masses at Maiden Lane: professionally-led singing returns

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The Latin Mass Society has a very long association with the historic London church of Corpus Christi Maiden Lane, located in Covent Garden, and we organise a Traditional Sung Mass there every Monday at 6:30pm. This practice was disrupted by the epidemic, but maintained as far as possible with two singers and no servers.
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We are now back, and last night we had the first Mass with the newly formed Southwell Consort. This is led by Dominic Bevan and consists mainly of men and women with musical training who have chosen not to pursue music as a career. It is an opportunity for them to sing some lovely sacred music in the liturgical setting for which it was composed. Last evening they had a whopping 17 singers. They sang Missa O Quam Gloriosum, Victoria; Ave Maria a 8, Victoria; Panis Angelicus, Rebelo, and I must say (hearing this from the sanctuary where I was serving) it was extremely impressive.

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Next week, the Houghton Schola will return: also to be led regularly by Dominic Bevan, this is an all-male group singing Gregorian Chant, for singers of all levels of experience.

The two groups will alternate thereafter. Enquiries for both groups should go to southwell@lms.org.uk

Another new thing about these Masses is that the first of each month is being offered for the intentions of the Catholic Police Guild, at their request.
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The next Monday evening Mass will be a High Mass, a Votive of the Blessed Sacrament, part of the series of Masses in London linked to the Eucharistic Congress taking place in Hungary. In honour of the occasion the Houghton Schola will be joined by some polyphonists.

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03/09/2021 - 13:32

LMS Walsingham Pilgrimage: more photos

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These are by the photographer and videographer Peter Jones, who runs the One Of Nine YouTube channel.

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02/09/2021 - 10:00

LMS Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham, Part 2

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The little girl in red managed the entire walk, 56 miles over three days.

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Our fantastic non-walking volunteers, on Saturday evening in Great Massingham.

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Some of the tents at Great Massingham.

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Dinner at Great Massingham Village Hall.

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That evening we enrolled four members of the LMS' servers' guild, the Society of St Tarcisius.

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Walking on Sunday morning, accompanied by the processional statue.

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The final Mass of the Pilgrimage, in the Catholic Shrine in Houghton St Giles. The medieval shrine at Walsingham was of course destroyed by Henry VIII; the restored Catholic shrine today is based around a medieval 'slipper chapel', a wayside pilgrims' chapel, the last on the route and the marker of the Holy Mile to the shrine proper. The larger church there, the 'Reconciliation Chapel' pictured above, is always a challenge to photograph, but this year we filled it, with a congregation of about 350. This included many people who joined us by car and coach, and also people who just happened to be at the shrine, including many Syro-Malabar Catholics and Travelers.

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So after Mass we form up again, with many more people than before, and walk the Holy Mile singing the Rosary and the Te Deum.

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We arrive at what is left of Walsingham Priory, which once housed the Holy House. This represented the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth, and was established at the command of Our Lady herself on the eve of the Norman Conquest.

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There we venerated the processional statue we had brought with us and received the special blessing of returning pilgrims from the Roman Ritual.

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The following morning, those of us who have stayed the night locally squeeze into the Slipper Chapel for a Sung Mass.

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01/09/2021 - 16:42

LMS Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham: Photos, Part 1

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In thanksgiving for the easing of the Covid regulations, allowing us to have this event, I decided to do two new things, personally. One was to do a pre-pilgrimage, walking from Cambridge to Ely: extending the pilgrimage backwards. The other was to do the walk in a kilt. So there I am, above, looking a bit the worse for wear outside the Catholic Shrine on the final day: photo courtesy of Peter Jones. (The rest in this post are mine.)

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It was by far the biggest walking pilgrimage we have done. There were about 100 people walking and 21 non-walking volunteers: cooks and drivers. For the first time, we had four chapters, which walk, sing, and pray, as a group, with gaps between chapters to let cars overtake more easily on roads: the same system as is used on the Chartres pilgrimage.

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A Votive Mass for Pilgrims (Dominican Rite) was very kindly celebrated for us in the Cambridge Blackfriars by Fr Gregory Pearson OP. It was served by the Latin Mass Society's Local Representative, Gregor Dick.
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The pre-pilgrimage was just me with two others. Perhaps we can do it with more people next year, having established the feasibility of the route.

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It was almost all along the river, the Great Ouse, from Cambridge to Ely. It should have been 17 miles, but it ended up being rather longer, as we took a wrong turning up a tributary. One lives and learns.

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The pilgrims gather on Thursday evening and we have a meal together. Early on Friday we had a High Mass (votive for pilgrims) in St Ethelreda's, Ely's Catholic parish church. We had two priests with us: Fr Henry Whisenant, a priest of the diocese of East Anglia who has a chaplaincy for the Traditional Mass at Withermarsh Green, and Fr Serafino Lanzetta, Superior of the Family of Mary Immaculate and St Francis, based in Portsmouth Diocese. Fr Serafino brought two of his confreres with him. We also had the Rev Mr Gwilym Evans FSSP, who was this year ordained Deacon; he was subdeacon at the High Masses while the priests took turns to celebrate.

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Fr Whisenant gave us the Blessing of Pilgrims from the Roman Ritual before we set off.

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The first leg continued up the Great Ouse from Ely out of  Cambridgeshire: shortly after entering Norfolk we come off the river. It is difficult to give a sense of the numbers; especially when we were in single file, the column went on a long time! We were accompanied by pilgrims of all ages: some of the stoutest walkers were very young indeed.

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On Friday evening Fr Lanzetta enrolled 16 candidates into the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

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On Saturday morning we had Mass in the private chapel of Oxburgh Hall. We filled this chapel; we also have a Low Mass before the High Mass for the volunteers.
To be continued.

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25/08/2021 - 15:49

Contradictions among those defending Traditionis Custodes

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Final blessing at the High Mass in Westminster Cathedral;
Mass for the Latin Mass Society's AGM

My latest on 1Peter5: on some conflict among those who defend Traditionis Custodes.

It begins:
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Pope Francis has offered two reasons for wishing to bring celebrations of the Traditional Mass to an end: attitudes of some of the faithful which have become associated with this form of the Mass, and the idea that the unity of the Church requires a unity of liturgical rite. Accordingly, some of his defenders have focused on one of these points, and some on the other. Both are having difficulty explaining and justifying Pope Francis’ action.

Targeting the Innocent to Punish the Guilty?

I recently fisked an article by Michael Sean Winters which laid the blame for Traditionis Custodes (TC) on the people who like it, singling out the journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty. There is much wrong with Winters’ argument, but suppose he was right about Dougherty being a dangerous schismatic, what would be the significance of this? To be crass about it, who cares what some journalist thinks? If he were the head of an organization, clerical or lay, with serious popular support, which was closely associated with the TLM, that might indicate a wider problem, but as it is, it proves nothing at all.

As if realizing that he needed to widen his evidence base, towards the end of his article Winters brings in Martin Mosebach, accusing him of rejecting Vatican II without being able to quote him doing so, and the views of George Weigel, apparently unaware that Weigel has a long and distinguished history of gratuitouslyinsulting Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass. As a representative of the movement, he doesn’t really fit the bill. Nevertheless, that’s the best Winters can come up with.

Another problem with this approach is identified by Terrence Sweeney on the Where Peter Is blog, and in fact is acknowledged even by Winters himself: in Sweeny’s words, “Even if many are acting schismatically, this does not justify a restriction that affects those who attend the Tridentine rite but remain faithful.”

Read it all there.

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24/08/2021 - 10:00

Is Traditionis Custodes calling for more Latin?

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High Mass in Westminster Cathedral for the Latin Mass Society.
Photo by John Aron

 Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.

A number of American writers claim that Traditionis Custodes should spur priests to make their celebration of Mass more reflective of the liturgical tradition. Others commentators, including a number of bishops implementing it, apparently think the opposite.

Those in favor of the first interpretation can cite a couple of passages from the Letter to Bishops which accompanied Traditionis Custodes. Pope Francis quotes Pope Benedict complaining about liturgical abuses—“unbearable distortions”; later he remarks:

Whoever wishes to celebrate with devotion according to earlier forms of the liturgy can find in the reformed Roman Missal according to Vatican Council II all the elements of the Roman Rite, in particular the Roman Canon which constitutes one of its more distinctive elements.

The Roman Canon being Eucharistic Prayer I in the reformed Missal.

The two most influential American blogs defending Traditionis Custodes, Pray Tell and Where Peter Is, have accordingly taken this line. Fr Anthony Ruff of the Pray Tell blog writes:

The goal is that the entire Roman rite celebrates the liturgy of Vatican II in all the spiritual profundity and sacrality which remains to be discovered in the 1970 Missal, so that there is less reason for people to seek out the 1962 alternative.

Terrence Sweeney on Where Peter Is calls for more celebrations of the Novus Ordo in Latin and with “proper liturgical garments, fully celebrated liturgies, processions, and yes smells and bells,” a celebration that is “richly traditional”.

By contrast, the bishops who have been most prominent in implementing Traditionis Custodes are not encouraging their priests to make their celebrations of Mass any closer in spirit to Traditional Mass: quite the contrary. The Bishops Conference of Costa Rica, for example, in what seems like an inversion of Pope Francis’ words about continuity quoted above, warn against “any element coming from the ancient form”. One bishops has actually suspendeda priest for celebrating the Novus Ordo in Latin.

One American diocese, Rockford, Illinois, whose Vicar General Monsignor Eric Barr has written defending Traditionis Custodes, in 2017 bannedpriests from celebrating the Novus Ordo facing east, facing same direction as the congregation, in the traditional manner, despite this being permitted by the rules of the Novus Ordo.

The French bishops, whose reporton the spread of the Traditional Mass in their dioceses became public early this year, felt that “when elements are introduced into the OF they are more sources of tension than of enrichment.” What sort of “elements” did they have in mind?

Use of old vestments, and the use of black as a liturgical color. The adding of Signs of the cross. Veiling of statues in Passiontide. Blessing of the water at the Offertory. The sacring bell, communion plates.

In the Novus Ordo the bell is explicitly allowed as a “local custom” and black “where it is the practice” (General Instruction of the Roman Missal 150 and 346 respectively); the use of the Communion plate (paten) is actually required (Redemptionis Sacramentum 93).

The use of the more traditional options which exist in the Novus Ordo is sometimes called “the reform of the reform”. Fr Ruff and others like him think that this is more important than ever, because it show the continuity between the reformed Mass and the earlier liturgical tradition; liturgically progressive bishops, on the other hand, think that the reform was right to relegate these practices to the status of mere options, and thinks the actual use of these options is a retrograde step.

Pope Francis has, in fact, made his own position quite clear. He famously brokethe liturgical rules by washing the feet of a Muslim female on Maundy Thursday in 2013. Whatever one thinks of his action, it did not give an example of strict adherence to norms.

In 2015 he was reported as follows, after a long meeting with the priests of Rome:

The Pope noted that there are priests and bishops who speak of a “reform of the reform.” Some of them are “saints” and speak “in good faith.” But this “is mistaken”, the Holy Father said.

In 2016 he reacted negativelyto Cardinal Robert Sarah’s encouragement of the celebration of Mass facing east. Earlier this year priests were bannedfrom celebrating individual Masses in St Peter’s in Rome, and forced to concelebrate in Italian instead.

Taking all this into account, there is no justification for reading Traditionis Custodes as a call for making celebrations of the Novus Ordo more traditional. On the other hand, the Traditional Latin Mass is still allowed wherever a local bishop gives permission. Indeed, the only way for a priest to celebrate an individual Mass, or a Mass in Latin, at St Peters’ side altars, is now in a limited number of slots allocated to the Traditional Mass. Pope Francis and his allies among the bishops seem to prefer a situation in which the Traditional Mass is the only alternative to progressive-style Novus Ordo celebrations. This polarization of liturgical options has precisely the effect feared by Fr Ruff: it gives people greater reason to seek out the Traditional Mass. Pope Francis’ liturgical policies may in the end do more to promote attendance at the Traditional Mass than to discourage it.

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21/08/2021 - 17:33

Latin: not as dead as you think, on Catholic Answers

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Fr Henry Whisenant insensese the Altar in Westminster Cathedral:
Annual Mass for the Latin Mass Society
I am delighted to have been asked to write a short article for Catholic Answers, a website which has been addressing questions about the Catholic Faith since its foundation by Karl Keating in 1979. It is about the use of Latin in the liturgy, and it begins:

From an early date, the Church in the West has used Latin—not only for administration, study, and communication, but for prayer. This was natural for regions where Latin was the majority language, but as the centuries passed, the Western Church persisted with a Latin liturgy in evangelizing peoples on and beyond the edges of the Roman Empire not conversant with it, such as the North African speakers of Punic and the speakers of Celtic and Germanic languages in western and central Europe. By contrast, the Eastern Churches sometimes made use of the languages of their new converts, even when these had to be specially developed in their written forms for this to be possible, as with Ethiopia’s Ge’ez and Russia’s Church Slavonic.

There is thus a close association between the Western Church and the Latin language. Even today, when the liturgy can be celebrated in a huge range of languages, this relationship has left its mark, and Latin remains an option for both public and private prayer—not only in celebrations of the pre-Vatican II liturgy, but also for the reformed Mass.

Why has the Church been so attached to Latin? The answer is that liturgical Latin is not just a convenient language, but a sacred language. 

Read the whole thing there.
Improve your Latin with an online course! Liturgical Latin is the target of Matthew Spencer's latest course, and the Latin Mass Society is giving an 80% discount to clergy and seminarians who wish to take it up.

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20/08/2021 - 17:41

The LMS' London chant schola, the Houghton Schola, will return to singing in September

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Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, London

Cross-posted from the Gregorian Chant Network blog.

It has been a long winter for Gregorian Chant, but we can finally announce that the Houghton Schola, the Latin Mass Society's all-male training schola for London, will resume rehearsing and singing in September.

They will be singing at Corpus Christi Maiden Lane, two Monday evening Masses a week, and as a rule they will have one rehearsal a month to prepare both Masses, in the office of the LMS itself, which is in Macklin Street, Holborn.

To register your interest in singing, please email southwell@lms.org.uk 

The Director, Dominic Bevan, is also leading a new, mixed, polyphonic consort, the Southwell Consort, which you can also enquire about through this address.

The Houghton Schola trains chant singers who may or may not have previous experience. The Southwell Consort provides an opportunity to sing in a liturgical setting for people with musical training but who have not become professional musicians. 

The first rehearsal of the Houghton Schola will be on Friday 10th September.

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20/08/2021 - 14:22

Iota Unum Podcast on the former Communist bloc

Today we release a discussion about the Church and the Traditional Mass in the former Communist countries of central and eastern Europe, with contributions from Russia, Poland, and Romania.
See it here on Podbean; you can find it on other platforms as well if you search for the Latin Mass Society.
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