Chairman's Blog
Guild of St Clare: Sewing Retreat photos
Last weekend was the Autumn Retreat of the Guild of St Clare. These are 'sewing retreats': with daily Mass and other devotions, and spiritual conferences from the retreat-giver each day, the participants mend vestments. This retreat took place in Douai Abbey.
The number of man-hours which goes into some of these vestments is immense. In addition to two annual Sewing Retreats (Friday to Sunday), the Guild has a 'Vestment Mending Day' in London every two months, and occasionally one in Oxford. With all these opportunities to make progress on various sets of vestments, mostly belonging to the Latin Mass Society, worn places are patched, linings replaced, embroidery repaired, braid stitched back down, and missing items are replaced. The Latin Mass Society has been given a great many sets missing a maniple, stole, chalice veil, or burse, or (usually) some combination of these.
The Guild accepts help from people of all levels of skill: there are always tasks to match what you can do. These occasions are also opportunities to learn new things, and the Guild also arranges training sessions with professionals and is sponsoring two students through the Royal School of Needlework Certificate Course. Both of these took part in the Retreat.
After the repeated cancellations of the Covid epidemic it was good to be back in a face-to-face event. The next sewing retreat, which is already almost fully booked, will be 4th-6th February, in a new venue: Park Place Pastoral Centre in Hampshire: full details and booking on the LMS website. The one after that will take place 4th-6th November in the same place: booking is now open.
LMS Bedford Pilgrimage in Reparation for Abortion
Mass setting: Tomas Luis de Victoria - Missa Trahe Me Post Te
Offertory motet: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Ave Maria a 5
Communion motet: Juan Gutierrez de Padilla - Stabat Mater
Letter in the Tablet: the value of the Old Mass
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| View from the choir loft at St Mary Moorfields, for the LMS' Easter Triduum 2018 |
I'm late with this, but I think it is worthy of a wider audience: part of a Letter in the Tablet from the 23rd October issue. All credit to them for publishing it.
Mr Wells' transformative liturgical experience sounds to me like on of the Masses organised in St Patrick's Soho Square and then in St Mary Moorfield's by Juventutem London before the lockdown, which were sponsored by the Latin Mass Society. (These continue, at the moment, in St Mary Magdalen, Wandsworth, in a slightly different format: 7pm on Fridays.) The organisers, including the then musical director Matthew Schellhorn of Cantus Magnus, should be reminded that their efforts were not without fruit.
On graduation I returned to my home parish where, for me, the post-conciliar vernacular Mass that had worked so well in the university chaplaincy seemed arid in a parish setting; perhaps the church building was too big for the new informality. Anyway, one evening I went to a Tridentine High Mass in central London, and what a difference: Gregorian chant drifting down from the gallery, the sacred ministers involved in the ritual of the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the gentle formalised approach of the whole service.
And that is what I crave when I go to Mass. I have no wish to split the Church or to denounce the present Pope. But I would like to worship God in the way that best leads me to him. Is that too much to ask?
IAN WELLS
NOTTINGHAM
Do your Christmas shopping and support the Latin Mass Society
The Latin Mass Society's online shop has continued to expand, and our offerings for Christmas are extensive: six Christmas cards based on classics of the Church's artistic patrimony (Botticelli, as in the image on the left, Giotto, etc.), Advent calendars, Nativity sets, seasonal devotional books: a selection you might have seen in a large and well-stocked off-line Catholic bookshop before nearly all of them closed down. Plus our regular stock which contains an excellent selection of books, including ever-changing stock of second hand ones, and devotional items. Do check it out!
Just visit the easyfundraising site and all will be explained. The donations vary in size; some are fixed sums, some are percentages. It's not much but it adds up. If thousands of UK Catholics consistently did their shopping this way in favour of the Latin Mass Society or Aid to the Church in Need, it would raise a very real sum of money.
The Winter Mass of Ages has arrived!
Mass of Ages
In this issue:
Response to Cardinal Cupich
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| LMS Pilgrimage to Bedford (in reparation for abortion), to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe |
Cardinal Cupich has published a defence of Traditionis Custodes in the Jesuit magazine America. (An earlier article, on Pray Tell, finds a response from Matthew Hazell on Rorate Caeli here.) In this article he argues... well it is actually quite unclear what he is arguing.
Is he suggesting the TC was a response to the failure of the SSPX to submit to the Holy See after Summorum Pontificum? In which case why are their privileges to give absolution and witness marriages in the old Rite not the target of the Holy See's restrictions, instead of the corresponding rights now denied to priests in good standing in the diocese of Rome?
Is he suggesting, instead, that the problem has been that people have been "promoting" the "antecedent liturgies"? But isn't that exactly what Pope Benedict XVI called for when saying that "it behooves us to ...to give them their proper place"?
Or is he arguing something quite different: that the very existence of an alternative form of the liturgy is a wound in the unity of the Church? In which case his complaint is less against the SSPX, or the Faithful who attend the Usus Antiquior under the bishops, but with Pope Benedict himself.
I have published a response in Catholic World Report. (America declined to let me respond.)
Cardinal Cupich begins the story with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, in “the early 1970s”. It is worth noting that by the time the SSPX became headline news, with its canonical suppression in 1975 and unauthorised ordinations in 1976, lay groups had been campaigning for the ancient Mass for more than a decade, and had achieved a symbolic, if limited, concession in Pope Paul VI’s Indult for England and Wales which was signed in November 1971, exactly fifty years ago. It was, similarly, the desire of the Faithful, not of SSPX clergy, which was recognised by Pope John Paul II’s world-wide indult of 1984, which does not mention the SSPX, and these Faithful who are again noted as a motivation for Pope Benedict’s Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum.
This is worth emphasizing because, although they share an attachment to the former Missal, the International Una Voce Federation (founded in 1965) and its member associations around the world, and the SSPX, are clearly distinct phenomena, and have suffered quite different fates in recent years. In 2016 Pope Francis gave priests of the SSPX special faculties to hear confessions, and in 2017 he made provision for them to officiate at marriage services. They still enjoy these privileges today. Priests serving the faithful within the structures of the Church, on the other hand, have just been forbidden to do either thing using the older books used by the SSPX in the very diocese of Rome. If Traditionis Custodes is motivated by disappointed hopes for “healing and unity” with the SSPX, it seems to have sadly mistaken its target.
Iota Unum series continues: Dominic Sullivan, 19th November
The Iota Unum talks in London have triumphantly returned, and we are continue the series this Friday in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street. Doors open at 6:30 for the talk at 7pm; refreshments provided; £5 on the door.
Please come into the parish room via the stairs from Golden Square, rather than through the church. So the address is that the of the Presbytery: 24 Golden Square, London W1F 9JR
This month Dominic Sullivan, Head of Classics at the London Oratory School, is giving a talk entitled 'Spanish Intergrism and the Lesser Evil'.
Remembering the Agatha Christie Petition
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| High Mass in the Chapel of the Throne, St Peters, for the Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage 2021. The celebrant was Mgr Patrick Descourtieux. Photo by Edward Pentin |
My latest in the Voice of the Family bulletin. Here I address the objection that the beauty of the liturgy and the music and so on are irrelevant to the real value of the liturgy.
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Almost exactly fifty years ago, 5th November 1971, the reformer of the Catholic liturgy, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, wrote to John Cardinal Heenan, informing him of the terms of an “indult”, permission, for the continued public celebration of the older Catholic liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, with the agreement of the local bishop. The reformed Mass had been in place for less than a year, and Catholics had been warned that the older Missal would become illicit at the end of the calendar year, except for private celebrations by older priests. Although the indult was applicable only to England and Wales, Bugnini was denied the complete victory of the reform he had wanted to see. In 1984 another indult for the Old Mass was signed, by Pope John Paul II, which extended permission for the Vetus Ordo to the whole world.
Paul VI believed that the reformed Mass was theologically accurate and rich, and he had high hopes that it would be pastorally effective. One argument which retained the power to move him was historical and cultural. Pope Paul had indeed indicated that he understood such arguments, speaking of the “expressive sacrality” of Latin and the “regret” which faithful Catholics might feel in the change. Heenan, who had attended the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs just days before his meeting with the Pope – forty men and women who had literally died for the Mass – was able to show Pope Paul a petition showing an astounding number of figures of the highest culture begging him to preserve something which, as the petition text expressed it, “belongs to universal culture”.
Vicar General of Rome attempts to ban the use of the 1962 Rituale Romanum
The motu proprio establishes that the “liturgical books promulgated by the Holy Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, are the sole expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite” (art. 1, Traditionis Custodes) and that therefore it is no longer possible to use the Roman Ritual and the other liturgical books of the “ancient rite” for the celebration of sacraments and sacramentals (e.g., the Ritual for the reconciliation of penitents according to the ancient form). The use of the other Ordines, therefore, is currently expressly forbidden and only the use of the Missale Romanum of 1962 remains permitted.
The liturgical books promulgated by Saint Paul VI and Saint John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, are the only expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.
Laws which establish a penalty, restrict the free exercise of rights, or contain an exception from the law are subject to strict interpretation.
It is therefore permitted to celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass following the typical edition of the Roman Missal, which was promulgated by Blessed John XXIII in 1962 and never abrogated, as an extraordinary form of the Church’s Liturgy. The conditions for the use of this Missal laid down by the previous documents Quattuor Abhinc Annos and Ecclesia Dei are now replaced as follows: ...
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Vladimir Ashkenazy accepts the De Saventhem Medal from the FIUV
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| Vladimir Ashkenazy in 2007, from Wikipedia Commons |
Cross-posted from the FIUV blog.
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| 'Dr Erich de Saventhem: Pro merito magno' |
My personal view of the matter is, that it is of great spiritual value and importance that the more ancient Latin Catholic Liturgy, with its associated cultural and musical traditions, be preserved for all those who are concerned with strengthening, or at least maintaining, our connection with the Divine; the ancient liturgies, be they Catholic or Orthodox (I am baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church) are, by default, bound to represent a much purer spiritual relationship with Christ in particular, and with the world in general, than do, to quote Dr. Erich Vermehren De Saventhem: " the flat, prosaic, philistine or delirious liturgies which will soon overgrow and finally smother even the recently revised rites..."
Being a musician, I am fully in agreement with the idea that the ancient/traditional Roman Catholic Mass will have inspired a plethora of invaluable artistic achievements over the ages: mystical works, poetry, philosophical treatises, musical works of genius, magnificent edifices, wonderful paintings, incredible sculptures, and even the construction of marvellous musical instruments like the organ and the piano!
There is a discussion of the significance of the petition and of the involvement of Agatha Christie on the Catholic National Register, and of cultural figures including Vladimir Ashkenazy on the 1P5 blog respectively.
More about the 1971 petition, its organiser Alfred Marnau, and other petitions for the same cause, can be seen here.