Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

15/04/2017 - 11:37

New Book: St John Fisher on the Priesthood

St John Fisher was the learned and heroic Bishop of Rochester, was the only one of all the Bishops of England and Wales refused to consent to Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy of 1534, the Act supporting to separate the kingdom from the jurisdiction of the Holy See. He was executed on 22nd June 1535.

He had earlier written a book against Luther defending the Catholic theology of the priesthood: ironically, in support of Henry VIII's own work against Luther, to which Luther had made a characteristically intemperate response.

Fisher's work deserves wider recognition, and I am pleased to see this new edition and printing available. It can be bought from Amazon here.

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14/04/2017 - 17:45

Maundy Thursday in St Mary Moorfields, London

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Each year the Latin Mass Society organises Easter Triduum services in London. For the last few years this has included all three Tenebrae services as well as the Mass of Maundy Thursday, the Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil. These are taking place in St Mary Moorfields in Eldon Street in the City of London.
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I was part of the liturgical schola for the first two Tenebrae services, and was able to attend the Mass of Maundy Thursday: and for the first time ever I found myself conscripted into the group having their feet washed.
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The church was packed for Maundy Thursday, with many standing at the back. I advise readers intending to go to the Easter Vigil to come early: if they want a seat. (Although you then have to leave the church for the blessing of the Easter fire.)
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Here are some photos from yesterday (Thursday). The Celebrant was Fr Michael Cullinan, who was assisted by Fr John Hemer (as Deacon) and Mgr Jamieson (Sub-deacon).

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All the services were accompanied by Cantus Magnus directed by Matthew Schellhorn, which performed Gesueldo's stunning responsaries for Tenebrae and Tallis' Mass for Four Voices at Mass: for the full list of pieces sung see their website here.

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Above: the Blessed Sacrament is taken to the Altar of Repose. Below: Tenebrae.

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10/04/2017 - 10:00

The Mandatum: let's not be hard on Pope Francis

I see from my stats a small spike of interest in this post: someone must have linked to it somewhere. So I thought I'd repost it. I'll repost a follow-up post on the same subject tomorrow. They both first appeared in January 2016.

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It is tempting to see the decree allowing women's feet to be washed on Maundy Thursday as an indication of an acceleration of liturgical decay underway with Pope Francis, following his breaking of the rule up to now. However, what has happened is no different from what happened under his predecessors.

Bl Pope Paul VI gave in to the pressure of endemic abuse when he allowed the reception of Communion in the hand. But there are other examples too from his troubled reign. One of the most peculiar documents of the Papal Magisterium is his Sacrificium laudis, an Apostolic Letter directed to religious superiors, begging, cajoling, and ordering them to preserve Latin in the Office. You won't find this document in the Acta Apostolicis Sedis, and only in Italian on the Vatican website. The speed of its transformation into waste-paper gives new meaning to the phrase 'dead on arrival'. (You'll find an English translation on the LMS website.)


Pope St John Paul II gave way, again because of the pressure of abuses, on Altar girls. It was he, also, who permitted another set of countries to take up Communion in the hand. It was on his watch, again, that the restrictions on Communion under Both Kinds fell by the wayside - this was forbidden on Sundays, in theory, and for 'large congregations', but the American bishops defied him, and he gave in. It was under him that major investigations of American seminaries and women religious were turned into whitewash, liturgical abuses were established on an industrial scale at the World Youth Days, and being blessed by witch doctors, kissing the Koran, and putting Buddha on altars became de rigeur. Religious sisters not wearing their habits sat right in front of him at a Papal Mass of beatification in Australia in 1995. That day, liturgical discipline was dead.

Pope Benedict XVI allowed Communion in the hand in Poland, where Pope John Paul II never had. Did Pope JP know something his successor did not? It was Pope Benedict who chose to continue JPII's Youth Day Masses, and Assisi ecumenical gatherings, at a moment when it would have been perfectly possible to let both series stop, and merely tried to make them less awful. But he did not continue JPII's series of Instructions lambasting liturgical abuses: he must have realised it was pointless. It was under Pope Benedict that the investigation of the American women's religious lost its conservative mojo: yes, he was the one who appointed João, Cardinal Braz de Aviz as Prefect of the Congregation for Religious, in 2011, with entirely predictable results.

There is, however, an important difference between the actions of these three Popes and Pope Francis. As far as one can tell, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Pope Benedict believed that poor liturgical discipline was a bad thing. Paul VI lamented Communion in the hand and the loss of Latin. John Paul II apparently dislike Altar girls, and condemned abuses vigorously before permitting them. Pope Benedict surely had no sympathy with the ghastly things which were happening in American convents. There is no reason to think that Pope Francis is similarly conflicted when he allows the washing of women's feet on Maundy Thursday.

And another thing: to be crass about it, the Mandatum is not all that important. It happens once a year, and it is optional. It is not an integral part of the Maundy Thursday service - despite its name. Allowing Altar girls and EMHCs and syncetistic pagan rites during Mass are far more serious issues.

Let's not get on a high horse about Pope Francis at this juncture. This is just another step, and not a particularly large one, in the development of the Ordinary Form away from Tradition, and it is not happening because of the personality of the Pope. It is happening because the Novus Ordo Missae of 1970 was unstable. It included a series of compromises which were never going to last. Given the direction of pressure, these compromises were always going to unravel the same way.

This is the real lesson to be learnt. Attempting to shore up the tottering edifice of the Novus Ordo with ferocious-sounding rules has failed. JPII and Pope Benedict didn't manage it, and obviously - obviously - Pope Francis, though not a liturgical 'meddler', is not going to succeed in a project in which he has no interest. If it is collapsing, it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

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08/04/2017 - 13:36

Scotland's 'Two Shrine' Pilgrimage 2017

I noted the success of the first 'Two Shrines Pilgrimage' a while ago; her is the booking info for the next one.

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Two Shrines Pilgrimage: 5th - 7th August 2017

St Andrews

We are pleased to announce the dates of the second annual Two Shrines Pilgrimage, a three day walk from Edinburgh to St Andrews with the particular intention of the reconversion of Scotland. The pilgrimage will incorporate the Extraordinary Form of the Holy Mass and traditional devotions.

If you are interested in walking all or part of the route, please register your interest by e-mailing the2shrines@gmail.com as soon as possible.

The itinerary will be as follows:
Saturday 5 August - St Mary's RC Cathedral, Edinburgh, to St Margaret's Memorial Church, Dunfermline;
Sunday 6 August - St Margaret's Church to Falkland Palace;
Monday 7 August - Falkland Palace to St Andrew's Cathedral, St Andrews.

Members of the public are welcome to follow the pilgrimage and to attend its liturgies and other events, which will be advertised in due course. If you wish to be kept updated by e-mail please contact us using the address above.

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07/04/2017 - 13:05

Debate about teaching music (and Latin)

James MacMillan, Patron of the Latin Mass Society, has signed a joint letter on musical education in response to an article by Charlotte Gill wrote in the Guardian. Gill wrote:

For a creative subject, music has always been taught in a far too academic way, meaning that theoretical knowledge is the main route to advancement. While there are routes into musical careers for the untrained, and many pop, rap and grime artists have never studied music formally, there are also dozens of choirs and amateur collectives that put a huge focus on musical notation.

This is a cryptic, tricky language – rather like Latin – that can only be read by a small number of people, most of whom have benefited from private education. Children who do not have the resources, or ability, to comprehend it, are written off. Even when they are capable performers.

Gill is winding a good few issues up together here. We might agree with her criticism of the 'Grade' system of learning instruments, followed by many children, that it can make learning an instrument something of a grind. But a more important issue she has left out is the poor quality (or motivation) of many music (instrument) teachers. This is not be unrelated to their poor pay, and their poor treatment by many schools, where they have to eke out an existence on the fringes of the timetable and the school community, often working for several schools at once, resented by the teachers of other subjects for taking children out of their classes. It's a pretty bad system, all things considered. (Would anyone tolerate this for sports? For art? For Maths?)

When she points out that people who can't or simply haven't mastered musical notation have many opportunities to make music in contexts where this lack isn't a problem, it is hard to know what she is actually complaining about. The choirs who do need it, or at least find it vastly convenient, and the classical music world in general, are perfectly rational and within their rights to demand it.

The comparison with Latin is telling. Being able to read musical notation, or Latin, opens up to you a whole world of Western culture. Gill is right to deplore one result of the most recent educational reorganisation (the 'English Baccalaureate' focusing attention on core academic subjects), which is the narrowing of the opportunity to enter this world to children whose parents can afford private music tuition. We might say something similar about Latin's disappearance from state schools (though it is now coming back).

But Gill then makes the wholly illogical, Guardianisty inference that, despite having just said that the reason for the decline in musical literacy is a shift of resources, somehow the mere fact that it has become the preserve of an elite means that it is intellectually beyond the children of the less wealthy. As if this were not crazy enough, her next assertion is that, apparently for this reason, reading music shouldn't be taught as much as it is now. She seems to be angry with the elite who preserve this skill, though it certainly isn't its fault that music budgets have been cut, and out of anger with this elite she does not want ordinary children to join it.

It is important to understand Gill's position, because it is widely held in the progressive educational establishment. There is a sneaking idea that poor people are stupid, and a less hidden idea that highly skilled and cultured people are wicked. The first means that it would be impossible to give people from materially deprived backgrounds real intellectual skills or an appreciation of culture. The second means that it would not be desirable to do so. Grasp this mindset, and you grasp a lot of what has gone wrong with education since 1960.

Nothing more destructive, educationally, could be imagined. Applied to music, this attitude excludes children not only from a closer engagement with their culture, but the chance of making music a career, or a better one. John Lennon, one of the 20th century's most commercially successful musicians, lamented the poor musical education he had had, which made it harder for him to express his musical ideas as he wished to. At least there was no one at that time actively stopping him from learning about music, as Gill would apparently want to do today. Memo to the Guardian: ignorance is not liberating.

James MacMillan et al. (the letter has more than 600 signatories), has pointed out the patronising and oppressive absurdity of Gill's sequence of thoughts: let's not call it an argument.

Gill will at any rate be pleased to hear that the many Chant choirs singing at the Traditional Mass tend not to expect people to be able to read music: chant notation isn't the same as modern music anyway. With familiarity, the square notes can serve as an excellent aide-memoir to singers not able to sight-sing. But the educational point she is making is chilling: that the correct response to declining standards should be to drive them still lower, to exclude more and more people from the West's cultural patrimony.

Of course musical notation can be taught more widely, as could Latin: it is a matter of educational priorities. Unfortunately, before we can have a useful debate about timetable hours, we'd need to have at our disposal enough enthusiastic and skilled teachers to use those hours. Not only do we not have enough today, but on present trends we will have even fewer tomorrow.

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06/04/2017 - 11:27

Why home school your children? Matt Walsh

I criticised a post of Matt Walsh's the other day, on the subject of getting men to 'man up', so it is only fair I note this post of his on home schooling which is excellent.

Read it here

Here are just a couple of his points. He's writing about the USA. How much better is the UK?

Third, yes, my kids will eventually be exposed to all kinds of strange and terrible things. As much as I’d like to keep them shielded from the evils of the world forever, I know that I can do no such thing. The question is not whether our kids will be exposed to this or that depravity, but when and how and in what context? Are you prepared to trust the school’s judgment on when Junior is ready to learn about concepts like “transgenderism”? Do you trust their judgment on how he learns about it, and what he’s told about it? If you do, I suppose you aren’t even reading this post right now because you’ve been in a vegetative state for the past 30 years.

Fourth, when a kid is sent to public school, he’s expected to navigate and survive and thrive in a hostile, confusing, amoral environment, basically untethered from his parents, 6–8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, for 12 years. Is a child ready for that challenge by the time he’s 5 years old? Is he ready at 8? At 10? No. Our job as parents is to “train them up in the way they should go,” equip them with the armor of God, fortify them in the truth, and then release them into the world. That process has not been completed in conjunction with them first learning how to tie their shoes. I mean, for goodness’ sake, most adults can’t even manage to withstand the hostilities and pressures of our fallen world for that amount of time. And we expect little kids to do it? That’s not fair to them. It’s too much to ask. Way too much. They aren’t equipped, they aren’t ready, they aren’t strong enough, and they will get eaten alive.

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03/04/2017 - 14:31

Family Retreat: Photo essay

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The St Catherine's Trust Family Retreat took place last weekend, in the Oratory School. It was our ninth Family Retreat, and a wonderful event as always.

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One of the highlights was Stations of the Cross outside, which concluded with Benediction in the 'old' chapel.

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We had Vespers on the Saturday and Compline each evening.

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On Sunday the younger children had an Easter Egg hunt.

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Alongside the Retreat Fr Guy Nichols and Chris Hodkinson led a Chant Training weekend for the Gregorian Chant Network.

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Two of the participants were able to have a go conducting the schola in the final Mass of the weekend.

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30/03/2017 - 10:00

Catholic University of Leuvain: Abortion 'a fundamental right'

Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.

In response to a junior philosophy lecturer distributing a document to students making the argument for calling abortion 'murder', a spokewoman for the 'Catholic University of Louvain' (or Leuvan) in Belgium has made it clear that this is 'contrary to the values' of the institution.

Tania van Hemelryck, the special adviser to the university president on gender politics, spoke to Belgian television on behalf of the university, saying: “The authorities want to find out the exact status of the text and how it was used during this course, bearing in mind that in any case UCL defends the fundamental right to abortion, and particularly women’s right to choose.”...

The official statement published by UCL on its website says much the same thing:

“Whatever the outcome of the inquiry, the right to abortion is enshrined in Belgian law and the note that was brought to the attention of UCL is at odds with the values upheld by the university. Conveying standpoints that contradict these values in the framework of a teaching course is unacceptable.”

Louvain has not been a very 'Catholic' Catholic University for a long time, but these statements take matters to a new level. Please consider signing a petition to support the lecturer at the centre of the row, Stéphane Mercier.

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29/03/2017 - 10:00

Albertus Magnus Summer Programme in Norcia

In light of the earthquake this seems particularly deserving of support this year: the annual Summer Programme of the Albertus Magnus Centre, associated with the monks of the Norcia community. It is a 12-day programme of study on Aquinas, this year on his sacramental theology.

"Divine Power in a Hidden Way:
Thomas' Commentary on the Sentences IV"
July 2nd - July 14th in Norcia, Italy

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28/03/2017 - 10:00

Sex education, sexual exploitation

Not long ago I posted on this blog about how sex education which focuses on consent and ignores all other aspects of sexual morality opens children up to abuse. Here is some concrete evidence, via the excellent Family Education Trust. This focuses on the corrosive nature of the sex ed ideology not only on the children, but on those charged with their care.


A serious case review published by the Bristol Safeguarding Children Board last year notes ‘an underlying confusion for practitioners in distinguishing between underage but consensual sexual activity between peers and child sexual abuse and sexual exploitation’. But that confusion does not exist in a vacuum. It is rather ‘rooted in the complex and contradictory cultural, legal and moral norms around sexuality, and in particular teenage sexual experimentation’. Put simply, a major part of the problem lies in the moral confusion that has resulted from an abandonment of moral absolutes.

The same theme features in the 2015 serious case review into child sexual exploitation in Oxfordshire. Having made the observation that there were times when ‘confidentiality was put before protection’, the report suggests that for at least some professionals this related to ‘a reluctance to take a moral stance on right and wrong, and seeing being non-judgmental as the overriding principle’. The Oxfordshire report further states that: ‘[T]here was…an acceptance of a degree of underage sexual activity that reflects a wider societal reluctance to consider something “wrong”,’ and argues that ‘action to prevent harm’ should always take precedence over ‘action to be non-judgmental’.

In a most telling comment, the report notes that ‘the reluctance in many places, both political and professional, to have any firm statements about something being “wrong”’ is among the factors that create ‘an environment where it is easier for vulnerable young people/children to be exploited. It also makes it harder for professionals to have the confidence and bravery to be more proactive on prevention and intervention.’

In the light of these observations from the serious case reviews, we should be wary of any approach to sex and relationships education that is reluctant to declare anything ‘wrong’. Children, young people and professionals alike all need a clear moral compass in order to safely negotiate the confused and confusing landscape that lies before them

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