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  3. Chairman's Blog

Chairman's Blog

    09/11/2022 - 19:36

    Oxford Pilgrimage 2022: photos
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    I've been so busy these last few weeks I failed to post photos of this lovely event here in Oxford.
    Huge thanks to the clergy and singers who made it possible! Fr David Rocks OP was celebrant, Fr Gregory Pearson OP (from Cambridge) deacon, Br Bede Mullens subdeacon; Fr David also officiated at Benediction. The procession was led by Fr Felipe Cinelli. It was accompanied by the Schola Abelis and the Newman Consort. 

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    08/11/2022 - 19:36

    Pilgrimage to Rome
    Cross-posted from the FIUV blog.
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    Cardinal Zuppi processes into the Pantheon for Vespers

    The Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage 'ad Petri Sedem' (to the seat of Peter) took place as usual this year, and with the personal permission of Pope Francies, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, Archbishop of Bologna and President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, officiated at the traditional Vespers in the Pantheon which began the Pilgrimage, and Monsignor Marco Agostini, one of the Pope’s Masters of Ceremonies, celebrated High Mass in the Chapel of the Throne in St Peter’s.

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    Fr Claude Barthe, Chaplain of the Pilgrimage, about to lead the procession to St Peter's.
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    Mgr Agostini (right), about to celebrate Mass in the Chapel of the Throne.

    Mass in St Peter’s was said to have been attended by 1,000 people, including 200 clergy in choir. That is to say, we filled the Chapel of the Throne to capacity: on the Epistle side the chairs stretched back continuously to the baldachino; on the gospel side space had to be left for the procession. Similarly, in contrast to past years, we are now largely filling the Pantheon for Vespers (620 people seated, rising to 1,000 if you include the people passing through the place during the service), and a large crowd had to wait in the road during Adoration at Santi Celso e Giuliano, which was completely full.

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    The Pilgrimage concluded with High Mass on Sunday at Sanctissima Trinita, the church of the Fraternity of St Peter, which was fuller than I have ever seen it.
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    The Federation was represented by the President, Treasurer, and several Councillors who attended these events.
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    Mgr Patrick Descourtiaux celebrating Mass in Sta Trinita

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    17/10/2022 - 14:16

    Iota Unum talks in London this autumn

    The Iota Unum talks which take place in the basement at Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street, are resuming for a brief autumn season.

    This Saturday we will hear the Rome-based journalist Edward Pentin, and in November, Edmund Adamus, who has worked over many years for Westminster Archdiocese, Portsmouth Diocese, and now the Order of Malta, in the areas of pastoral formation and Catholic education.
    Friday 21st October, Edward Pentin: the Vatican and the Traditional Mass

    Friday 25th November, Edmund Adamus: The New Evanglisation -- what does it really mean?
    Doors open at 6:30 for the talk at 7pm.
    Refreshments are served; £5 is payable on the door.
    The talks take place in the basement of the presbytery: please enter it from the Golden Square side.

    24 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JR

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    16/10/2022 - 14:26

    LMS Pilgrimage to Oxford, Sat 22nd October

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    Latin Mass Society

    Oxford Pilgrimage

    Saturday 22nd October 2022

     

    In honour of the Catholic Martyrs of Oxford,

    visiting the site of the martyrdom of

    Bl George Napier, 1610

     

     11am Solemn Mass in the Dominican Rite, 

    in Blackfriars, St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LY,

    2pm Procession to the site of the martyrdom in Oxford Castle, from Carfax

    3pm Benediction in Blackfriars

     

     Mass will be accompanied by Dominican Chant form the Schola Abelis, with

    polyphony from the Newman Consort

    under the direction of Alex Lloyd:

    ​Taverner, Kyrie Le Roy

    Tallis, Mass for Four Voices (Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus)

    Offertory: Tye, Laudate nomen domini

    Communion: Byrd, Ave verum


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    Photos from the last time we went to the site of Bl George Napier Martyrdom, 2019. After a break for Covid, we processed to the other site of martyrdom in 2021.

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    08/10/2022 - 17:33

    Requiem for Queen Elizabeth: some photos

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    This morning the Latin Mass Society's organised Missa cantata for the late Queen took place. The celebrant was Fr Michael Cullinan.
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    The singing was superb; for the occasion the Southwell Consort (the LMS's London-based polyphonic consort in London) were directed by Gareth Wilson. They sang Victoria's Missa defunctorum. And yes, we had sackbuts and cornets too.

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    For those interested in the rules about the celebration of public Masses for deceased non-Catholic Christians, see here and here.
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    04/10/2022 - 13:52

    Requiem for Queen Elizabeth this Saturday in London

    A Traditional Latin Requiem Mass will be held in London this Saturday in memory of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to mark a month since the death of the monarch.

    The Sung Mass organized by the Latin Mass Society will be held at 11am at St Mary Moorfields church in the City of London. It will feature music by Tomas Luis da Victoria sung by the Southwell Consort directed by Gareth Wilson with the unusual accompaniment of Sackbutts and Cornetts.

    Church location: 4-5 Eldon St, London EC2M 7LS; click for a map.

    Nearest tube stations Moorgate and Liverpool Street.

     

     

    Joseph Shaw, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales said

     “Under the law of the Church, we can offer for the repose of the soul of the late Queen, as a baptized Christian, not only private prayers but also public Requiem Masses. Although many have already been said for her, we are following the longstanding custom of celebrating one exactly a month after her death, and we will do so with the greatest possible solemnity.”

    All are welcome to attend. For further information email: info@lms.org.uk

     

    Notes for Editors

    The Latin Mass Society (England and Wales), founded in 1965, is an association of Catholic faithful dedicated to the traditional Latin liturgy of the Catholic Church, the teachings and practices integral to it, the musical tradition which serves it, and the Latin language in which it is celebrated.

    Website : www.lms.org.uk

    Please note we have moved:-

    9 Mallow Street LONDON EC1Y 8RQ

    Registered Charity Number: 248388

    Contact: Clare Bowskill, Publicist: clare@lms.org.uk

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    02/10/2022 - 12:00

    Farewell to St Benet's Hall
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    A Traditional Requiem Mass offered in St Benet's Chapel
    The demise of St Benet's Hall, a 'Permanent Private Hall' of Oxford University and my academic affiliation, as a Fellow, since 2004, has now taken place: officially, on 30th September.
    I wrote about it in The Critic here, and more recently Dan Hitchens has written about it in The Spectator here.
    Hitchens' angle is rather different from my own: I was concerned with the internal culture of the institution, which had I attended as a student in the 1990s. Hitchens is interested in the role of the University in its closure, which was, indeed, decisive. As I mentioned at the end of my article, without mentioning any names, the University refused to allow the Hall to accept a £40m donation which would have amply solved the problem of financial instability which has been presented as the cause of the decision to close it. We never had any official explanation as to why the donation was turned down, but Hitchen's article, which mentions lots of names, is clearly correct: key figures in the University didn't like the idea of a Catholic institution within the University.

    What I wanted to emphasise in my own piece was that the Hall's failure was due to the combination of internal and external factors. This doesn't make for such a clear narrative of University nefariousness but that's reality for you.
    Certainly the University's decision should be called out; it was disgraceful. It is important to note also that the anti-Catholic animus behind the decision had in no way been mollified by the appeasement  offered to wokery over the years by the Hall leadership. Indeed, in the final stages, it actually made things worse, because it created the impression that people like the hugely distinguished academic lawyer Prof Robert George, who was involved in the negotiations, was suspect simply because he is a faithful Catholic.
    We can't expect people in the University administration, who know nothing and care less about the Catholic intellectual tradition, to take us seriously, if we don't take ourselves seriously.

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    01/10/2022 - 10:00

    Children, Rigidity and the Synod
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    Mass at the St Catherine's Trust Summer School in 2022
    Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.
    There is an interesting article in the Una Voce Scotland Newsletter, from April 2022, by a young mother who took part in the Synod on Synodality discussions in her parish. The article in anonymous. She describes how she explained to the meeting she attended that her own experiences of the Novus Ordo 'children's liturgy' and catechesis had been underwhelming, and that most of her contemporaries had lapsed. She, however, had discovered the Traditional Mass, and her small son was so taken by the bells and smells that he was copying the bell and the thurible in his play.
    He takes a rattle in his hands and pretends that he’s ringing the Sanctus bells (kneeling down and saying “ring, ring”) and swings his hands in front of him in the act of censing (“chk, chk!”). Where I was hardly aware of – and even distracted from – what was taking place in front of me during (Novus Ordo] Children’s Mass, my infant son is inspired by the traditional liturgy, his imagination fueled with enough images, sounds, smells and actions to take him through the week. 
    My conversation partners, formerly quite talkative, received this account with a stony silence and shifting brows – some rose, some furrowed. The pause was broken by Shona, who wanted to add another problem to our list: “You know, we had a priest in our parish who caused a few people to leave. He wouldn’t accept any change, you see, and didn’t connect well with the people, especially not with the children. He was very set in his ways.” And that was that.

    I have been researching bishops' conferences submissions to the Synod insofar as they refer to the Traditional Mass. Many don't, but in Scotland and in England and Wales the bishops, to be fair to them, acknowledge the issue with a degree of openness, if not explicit sympathy. Nevertheless I think that Shona's response is very telling, and that she could stand for many, not just laity and not just in Scotland. And for that matter the experiences of the author of the article are also typical of a lot of people who attend the Traditional Mass today.
    I myself remember the toe-curling liturgies which were intended to engage me and my contemporaries as teenagers. I suppose they would mostly have lapsed anyway, but these Masses did nothing to help. This has been going on for half a century, plenty of time, I would have thought, for the lesson to be learned, but it seems some people are completely closed to reality. When you mention to them that, by contrast, the Traditional Mass works really well for children, they can't deal with it at all. It is too far removed from their cherished assumptions for them to be able to process the information.
    The fact is that it was never an empirical question for them; whether or not they would articulate it this way to themselves, it is fundamentally a theological question. The evocation of transcendent holiness in the Traditional Mass, which makes such a strong impression even on small children, and motivates young men and women to consider vocations and take marriage seriously, is for them wrong theologically. It if works pastorally, this is an embarrassing fact which needs to be denied until it goes away: perhaps it will go away, if the Traditional Mass is banned.
    On the other hand, the emphasis on a largely fake parish community is right theologically, so if it is not working pastorally it just needs to be tried harder. 
    I say 'largely fake' because although a congregation is a worshiping community in a theological sense, if worship as a supernatural reality is pushed into the background and a natural conception of community is emphasised, there is very little if any natural community to work with. Members of a congregation are overwhelmingly not people who work together or spend leisure time together in the week. Modern Catholic parishes simply don't operate like 18th century village churches.
    Shona's way of dealing with all this is to reach for the stereotypical 'bad rigid priest' who puts people off coming to church because he is 'very set in his ways'. Talk of the Traditional Mass naturally brings to mind the problem of people being 'very set in their ways' because the old Mass, as she conceives of it, is something from the past that its supporters are morbidly attached to: they can't let it go.
    The stereotype is ludicrous because today Traditionalists who are young adults, parents with children, or young priests, are not clinging to something in their own past: we are seeking out and reviving something that was taken away from parishes before we were even born. We are the ones open to new experiences and to empirical facts. Shona and her like are accusing us of what she is herself guilty of: a rigidity about pastoral strategy and liturgy. She won't accept change. She's very set in her ways.
    Shona doesn't represent everyone, but there is an important segment of opinion which thinks like her. It is so utterly closed-minded that practically anything is preferable to living in peace with celebrations of the Traditional Mass. Even the mildest efforts to restore sacrality to the Novus Ordo, like the 2011 ICEL version of the Mass or clampdowns on liturgical abuses, are greeted with horror, and even apostacy.
    How these views are going to be 'synthesised' with those of everyone else in the Church in the Synod remains to be seen.
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    The conclusion of the LMS Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham 2022

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    30/09/2022 - 13:03

    Home Education meeting in Reading Saturday 1st October

    From 10:30, 338 Wokingham Road, Reading RG6 7DA

    Organised by the very active Catholic home-schoolers of Reading, who attend St William of York served by the Fraternity of St Peter.

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    29/09/2022 - 17:51

    A Muslim convert encounters the Traditional Mass

    This piece on Rorate Caeli is worth reading. It is from the journal of the Fraternity of St Vincent Ferrer, Sedes Sapientia, which is now available in English translation for the first time.

    The author is Derya Little.
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    When I attended my first traditional Latin Mass years later [after her conversion, first to Protestantism and then to Catholicism] in an old English church with dark walnut pews, that reverence I had experienced during my very first Mass reached a new height where the reason for those tedious [Old Testament] details about worship became clear. This was a God before whom I could kneel; a God who held our existence in his hands, yet chose to humble Himself to become one of us and suffer humiliation and death in love to save us from our own sinfulness.


    As the priest and the faithful faced the Lord together, Mass was no longer oriented towards the priest, but to God. It did not matter who the priest was as long as he said the black and did the red. His personality was inconsequential. The prescribed rubrics and prayers made sure that the priest would not be the center of the worship, but stood in persona Christi with and for the people as the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was offered, surpassing the limits of time and space.

    Yes, the priest was not the focus, but neither was the laity. With whispered prayers, the faithful stood, knelt and uttered their own prayers. The silence and solemnity directed our attention to the cross away from ourselves and each other, uniting us in a unique way as we all directed our gaze towards heaven. Of course, these impressions were all before I studied liturgy and the meaning of the rubrics and prayers. Even for a newcomer, the traditional Mass presented a kind of worship that reoriented our bodies, minds and souls to the perfect order where the Lord received the worship He was due as the loving Father. Finally, not only could I bow my head, but I could also kneel in worship and unite my prayers with the entire church. The limelight did not fall on the priest, the server or on the congregation, but to where it belonged: the crucified Word of God who loved the world unto death.
    Read the whole thing there.
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