Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

10/08/2022 - 12:00

The Morning After Pill: abortion or contraception?

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Annual Mass of reparation for abortion at England's
Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe organised by the Latin Mass Society.
The next one will be on 12 noon, Saturday 12th November;
St Joseph's, Bedford MK40 1HU


My latest on Catholic Answers wades into some of the complexities about the 'Morning After Pill', aka 'Emergency Contraception'.

It begins:

Recently, a spokesman for the bishops of Louisiana suggested that the use of so-called “emergency contraception” is compatible with Catholic teaching in cases of rape. The news article reporting this connected it with the explicit exception made for “emergency contraception” in the restriction of abortion by new Louisiana abortion laws, made possible by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. There are, however, a tangle of issues here that I will try to separate.

The Catholic Church teaches that human life is worthy of protection from the moment of conception—the moment when the genetic material of an ovum and of a sperm are united to form a new human (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2270 and following). The Church, further, demands that this life be protected by law (2273).

Read the whole thing there.

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09/08/2022 - 11:00

SCT Summer School: Classes and activities

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The St Catherine's Trust Summer School has always been concerned not only to give the children a pleasant time, but with education: to convey something to them, not just a bit of catechism but a range of lessons on Catholic history, art, philosophy, Latin and Greek, and so on. There is a limit to what we can do in a week, but we want to give the children at least a taste of a range of things connected with our beautiful Faith.
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To this end we have five 40-minute lessons most days, as well as Sung Mass, Rosary, Compline, and activities. Most of one day was dedicated to a trip to Oxford, where we had Mass in the Oratory and a tour of some sites of particular Catholic interest.
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The week includes a quiz on what the children have learned, and we had football and tennis in the afternoons.

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Every year the children perform a staged reading of part of Dorothy Sayers' radio plays on the life of Christ.

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Rehearsing some polyphony for the final Mass of the week.
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One afternoon activity was sewing; this year they made pocket shrines, which our chaplain, Fr Andrew Southwell, blessed (below).

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To join the mailing list email info@stcatherinestrust.org; to make a donation see here.

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08/08/2022 - 18:31

SCT Summer School photos: liturgy

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We have just concluded our annual Summer School, organised by the St Catherine's Trust: a small charity I set up for this purpose in 2004. It took place this year (for the first time) at the St Cassian's Retreat Centre, Kintbury. The Chaplain was Fr Andrew Southwell, a priest of Southwark Archdiocese. This was the first Summer School since 2019, due to Covid, and ran from 31st July to 6th August.
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On the Wednesday of the week, we had a day-trip to Oxford, with Mass at the Oratory--thanks to the hospitality of the Fathers.
These are photos of our liturgies: Mass in St Cassian's, in a temporary chapel (the permanent one was too small for us); in the Oxford Oratory; Compline, Benediction, Stations of the Cross outside, and veneration of a relic of St Pius X which has been given to the Latin Mass Society.

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07/08/2022 - 13:04

LMS AGM Mass: photos

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I didn't have time to post these photos until now, but here they are: from Saturday 30th July, in St Mary Moorfields. The celebrant was Canon Amaury Montjean ICKSP, the deacon Fr Michael Cullinan, and the subdeacon Fr John Scott.
My address to the Annual General Meeting, which followed this Mass, can be heard here.

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26/07/2022 - 17:48

Radio discussion with Fr Robert McTeigue SJ

You  can hear my latest chat with Fr McTeigue SJ on his Catholic Current radio show here.

It is always a pleasure to shoot the breeze with Fr McTeigue! This was my second visit to the show, and our theme was Pope Francis' Apostolic Letter Desiderio desideravi on liturgical formation.
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14/07/2022 - 10:00

New video on the LMS Walsingham Pilgrimage

Here is a 6 1/2 minute promotional video for the Latin Mass Society's Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham; it's a longer version of the one embedded in the LMS booking page.
For more information and to book a place on the pilgrimage, see here.

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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.
Description:
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).

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