Chairman's Blog

Since its inception, the Latin Mass Society has published lists of traditional Masses in England and Wales; for many years these have been available to all on its website. If you go to the relevant page now you will be asked to log in as a member. The reason for this is explained in the 'Chairman's Message' of the currant Mass of Ages, the magazine of the Latin Mass Society, which arrived with members over the weekend.

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Chairman’s Message

Joseph Shaw

Mass of Ages
began as the Latin Mass Society’s Newsletter; we started selling a few
copies in about 2005 and we made it free in 2009. It’s availability to
non-members, indeed to anyone in the world online, allows us to explain
ourselves to a wider audience. It also means that in these pages we are not
simply talking among friends.

With this issue, we are instituting a new approach to
the information available to readers. Readers picking up Mass of Ages for
free at the back of church will no longer find, bound into their copies, a list
of Masses celebrated according to the 1962 Missal around England and Wales. Nor
will this list henceforth appear on the publicly accessible part of our
website. Members of the Latin Mass Society who receive their copies in the
post, on the other hand, will find them included.

To casual readers, this part of the magazine was the
bit in the middle they skipped over. For our members, I know, it can be a
lifeline, especially when travelling. Others again, looking at the list,
didn’t like what they saw, and didn’t think others should be able to see it. This
reality has a distorting effect on the listings: there have always been a few perfectly
licit and regular celebrations that could not be advertised. Sometimes this has
been a condition imposed by bishops.

The seriousness of the problem has depended on official
attitudes to the Traditional Mass. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, permissions
for it were seen by some as pastoral concessions to something that really ought
to hurry up and die out, a long and growing list of Masses celebrated with
permission was seen as an indication of the failure of the official policy, and
even a spur to greater repressive efforts. Furthermore, listing these Masses,
and therefore making them known to a wider group of people, could be seen as ‘promoting’
them, in defiance of the official policy. When people resorted to travelling
long distances for the Traditional Mass, their personal sacrifices were
regarded by some as a bad thing: not a sign of love for the liturgy, but contrary
to the spirit of the permission, supposedly given only for some vaguely defined
local group of people.

Of course, what the official attitude—the will of the
bishop, or of the pope of the day—really was, was not always easy to discern.
Bishops naturally varied in their views, among themselves and over time. Again,
I remember being told firmly that that Pope John Paul II ‘doesn’t like it’, but
the historical record of his words and actions paints a rather more complex
picture.

Readers know that those days, with all their confusion
and spiritual suffering, are back. Once again we are being told that promoting
the Traditional Mass is somehow problematic, and once again advertising Masses
has the potential to cause difficulties for celebrants, and even for their bishops.

We have made the decision, therefore, to make the Mass
listings available only to our members, who are also be kept up to date through
electronic means. I encourage those readers who value and make use of our Mass
listings to join the Society, if you share our aims. The membership fee is
equivalent to approximately 1p a day through the year, even if you do not
qualify for a concessionary rate. We have not raised it in line with inflation
in the last few years, and I’d say it was very good value. You can pay for it
in monthly instalments if you wish, and you get a discount if you pay by Direct
Debit. You also get a discount in our shop and when booking our major events.

Membership of the Latin Mass Society, however, should
not be seen primarily in terms of what you can get out of the Society. We are
not a commercial venture offering a parcel of goods for fixed sum. We are a
group of Catholics determined to preserve the Church’s liturgical patrimony,
and to use every resource, of our prayers, knowledge, skills, time, and
energy—and money as well—to do so. As an LMS activist, Bernard Wall, wrote in
explanation of the 1971 Petition to save the ancient Mass, signed by Agatha
Christie and so many others: the signatories ‘felt that a liberal and plural
approach to church ceremonies was in harmony with our age where all are allowed
to do and think what suits them best, and that a totalitarian prohibition of
the old Mass involved an out-of-date approach.’

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