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Chairman's Blog

    21/01/2022 - 11:35

    Iota Unum 2022 Season

    The talks are in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street. Doors open at 6:30pm for the talk at 7pm.
    Refreshments provided. £5 on the door.
    Prof Tom Pink

    Please come to the Golden Square entrance directly to the basement: 24 Golden Square, W1F 9JR, near Piccadilly Tube Station (click for a map)

    Friday January 28th, Prof. Thomas Pink: ‘Papal Monarchy’

    Thomas Pink is a Professor in Philosophy at King's College London and a Patron of the Latin Mass Society. He has a particular interest in the history of theology in the early modern and modern periods, on religious liberty and the role of the Papacy.

    Theo Howard

    Friday February 25th, Theo Howard: ‘The Dominicans and the English Parliament’

    Theo Howard is a contributing editor of the traditionalist web journal OnePeterFive. His writing has also appeared in Crisis, the Catholic Herald and The European Conservative.

    Friday March 25th, Pierpaolo Finaldi ‘On the vocation of the Catholic author’

    Pierpaolo Finaldi
    Pierpaolo Finaldi is the CEO and Publisher of The Catholic Truth Society, Master of the Catholic Writers' Guild, a regular guest on EWTN global Catholic TV, a Catholic Herald top 100 trailblazer Catholic, a husband and father of seven.

    Friday April 29th, David Hunt ‘The perennial sin of Usury’

    David Hunt

    David Hunt studied at the International Theological Institute in Austria to study philosophy and theology, and recently completed an MA in Philosophy at the University of Buckingham with a thesis titled ‘Usury Redux: A defence of the scholastic position on usury’. David lives in Kent with his wife and five children.

    Friday May 27th, Dr Jeremy Pilch ‘St John Henry Newman and Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces’

    Jeremy Pilch

    Following undergraduate studies at Oriel College, Oxford, and an MA at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL), Dr Jeremy Pilch was awarded a scholarship for a doctorate at the University of Bristol, researching on the doctrine of deification in the Russian tradition, focusing especially on the thought of Vladimir Solov’ev. At St Mary’s University, Dr Pilch is the Programme Director for the BA In Theology, Religion, and Ethics. He regularly teaches across a range of topics, including modules on Systematic Theology, Mariology, Mystical Theology, Theological Anthropology, Christian Ethics, Ecclesiology, and Eastern Christianity.
    Tim Stanley
    Friday June 17th, Dr Timothy Stanley ‘Whatever Happened to Tradition?”
    Dr Stanley is a well-known historian and journalist, and author of the recent Whatever Happened to Tradition?

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    20/01/2022 - 12:05

    The attack on Latin: Tito Casini
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    The celebrant blesses the deacon before the latter proclaims the Gospel at High Mass.
    LMS Annual Mass for our Annual General Meeting in Westminster Cathedral, 2021
    My latest on 1Peter5

    I have been reading the Traditionalist classic, Tito Cassini’s The Torn Tunic, first published (in Italian, La Tunica Stracciata) in 1967, reprinted by Angelico Press. It is an impassioned, indeed ferocious, statement of the case for liturgical traditionalism, written and published before the Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated. Casini, like most Catholics of the time, has only the vaguest idea what further changes were being cooked up. What he was objecting to was the things which had already been done, notably by the 1964 Instruction Inter Oecumenici, and the liturgical abuses which had been springing up. Casini’s focus, like that of the Latin Mass Societies and Una Voce groups which were founded as early as 1964, was the use of the Latin language.

    Read the whole thing there.

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    17/01/2022 - 09:43

    Iota Unum talks: Prof Tom Pink on Papal Monarchy, Friday 28th Jan

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    We are delighted to announce a new series of Iota Unum talks. The following have been confirmed. Great speakers, great topics, plenty of wine, an intimate setting and lots of time for discussion: if you in reach of London, don't miss out!

    January Friday 28th: Thomas Pink: ‘Papal Monarchy’

    February Friday 25th: Theo Howard: ‘The Dominicans and the English Parliament’

    March Friday 25th: Pierpaolo Finaldi ‘On the vocation of the Catholic author’

    April Friday 29th: David Hunt‘The perennial sin of Usury’

    May Friday 27th: Dr Jeremy Pilch ‘St John Henry Newman and Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces’

    June Fri 17th: Dr Timothy Stanley ‘Whatever Happened to Tradition?”

    Doors open 6:30pm; talk at 7pm

    Basement of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street: enter via

    24 Golden Square, London W1F 9JR (click for a map)

    Refreshments provided; £5 on the door.

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    11/01/2022 - 09:47

    The Direction of Worship, for Catholic Answers
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    LMS Pilgrimage to Chideock. Photo by John Aron.
    My latest on Catholic Answers.
    It begins:

    The subject of which direction the priest should stand while celebrating Mass has generated a great deal of attention since about the middle of the twentieth century. The celebration of Mass “facing the people” (versus populum) was officially encouraged after Vatican II, but the historic practice, of “facing East” (ad orientem), is still permitted in the reformed Mass and normative for the traditional Latin Mass.

    Even before the Second Vatican Council, some important historic churches, notably St. Peter’s in Rome, had altars at which celebration facing the people was possible. In St. Peter’s (and also in the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem), this was because the high altar was over an important holy place, which needed to be accessible from the nave of the church, via steps. The solution to the design problem was to allow the priest to celebrate facing east, toward the rising sun, from the apse side of the altar. This general arrangement was imitated (or anticipated) in some other ancient churches.

    10/01/2022 - 10:00

    The idealised past and anti-Tradition: the Brown Windsor Myth
    King Alfred the Great lets the cakes burn.

    A key feature of tradition is the notion of a past as in some sense normative: the past as a guide to action in present, because that past should in some sense be restored. Tim Stanley talks about this in his Whatever Happened to Tradition? 


    As Stanley says, this is not nostalgia in the simple, and often pejorative sense. Critics of appeals to the past often say: but look that past you like was also characterised by Bad Things! Stanley responds by pointing out the obvious: if we agree they are bad, then obviously they are not among the aspects of the past we want to restore. We want to 'restore', if that is the right word, an idealised past. In fact, the creation and development of a shared sense of an ideal past is essential to a society's sense of what it should be like now and in the future. Idealising the past is a way of imagining the future. It is a way of developing a political programme.

    Care is needed, of course. If the past you want to revive was dependent on slavery, for example (say, the past of classical paganism), you may say you don't want to revive slavery, and you may be sincere, but you'll have to explain how a culture built on cheap labour can be revived without the cheap labour. This is a genuine question, and there may be an answer to it, but it is a question which needs to be asked, and to ask these questions we need a discipline of history which is not just the curation of national myths. But we do also need the national myths.
    Those who set out to debunk our national or indeed ecclesial myths, often on the basis of a very partial historical analysis, often do so because they, like those attached to the myths, are not primarily concerned with the past as the subject of scientific study, but with the past as a guide to the present. The people who try to debunk the idea that Britons were stoical in the face of the Blitz, for example, are not motivated by a love of truth. They are motivated by a hatred of the value of stoicism, as embedded in British self-understanding. 
    Those who want to cut us off from the past as a source of inspiration want, in fact, to create a lot of myths themselves. This can be done in deadly earnest, and it can be done in a jocular way. It is in the latter category, apparently, that the culinary counter-ideal, the anti-hero of the kitchen, Brown Windsor Soup, comes from. After extensive research, the people at the website Foods of England have concluded that it never, or almost never, existed. It was above all a product of satirists, popularised in the 1950s by the Goon Show.
    More seriously, the Protestants who wanted to detach the English from their Catholic roots invented black legends about the Catholic past, some of which became so embedded in national consciousness that they have have taken historians generations to to unpick. Something similar has happened with the debate about the Church: was everything Bad in the Bad Old Days? Some people in the Church are determined to say so, and to hell with the facts. 
    What we need to do is to imagine how the Church could be, practically, using the past as a guide, with an awareness of the problems. What was good should be restored. What was bad, guarded against. What we fondly imagine to have been the Good Old Days is not a delusion: it is an imaginative attempt to see how things could be in the future.
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    08/01/2022 - 15:07

    Online Latin Courses: discounts for Clergy & Seminarians


    The new year will see a new set of online Latin Courses from Matthew Spencer. The Latin Mass Society is happy to sponsor clergy (priests and deacons) and seminarians (or those preparing for the diaconate) to tune of 80% of the course fees.


    Yes, we are serious about promoting Latin! It is not only the key to the celebration of the ancient Latin Mass: this language is, within the Latin Church, an abundant well-spring of Christian civilisation and a very rich treasure-trove of devotion (Paul VI).

    We have even arranged a way for your grasp of Latin to be certified by a senior academic Latinist at a British university: if you need to show anyone you have it.

    Details here.

    More from Matthew Spencer.

    Do you wish you had better Latin — to follow the liturgy, or immerse yourself in the theology and history of the Church?Since 2020, small groups have been meeting over Zoom to help individuals do just, with the support of an accomplished ancient linguist.

    Now, after "Traditionis Custodes", the Latin of the Roman Canon has become a particular renewed focus for many people. Therefore a special 3-month route, led by Matthew Spencer (MA MSt Oxon) to better linguistic understanding of this ancient text, which unites the vetus and novus ordo, concluded just before Christmas.

    A repeat of the course (further details here) will begin in the last week of February 2022 for a limited number of people.

    'The Latin Mass Society,' as Matthew writes, 'is generously supporting my initiative by offering 80% bursaries to any Catholic priest, monk, nun, religious sister or permanent deacon or seminarian (or other Catholic religious) who has established ties to England or Wales.'

    The standard course fee is £600 — reduced to £120 for LMS Bursary holders — and allows you to meet with no more than four others, together with the instructor, for two 1-hour sessions weekly over 12 weeks. (A short break of a few days will ideally occur every four weeks, schedules permitting.)

    We meet on the days most convenient for the group. As a special New Year offer, those who do not qualify for the bursary may take the three 4-week individual modules at a reduced price of £500 for all 3 modules — if they sign up or express an initial interest by 2022. [deadline??]

    Alternatively one module may be taken for £200, based on prior experience of Latin (please write directly to matthewjaspencer@yahoo.com to discuss your options).

    An independently moderated examination (conducted "viva voce") is now available for those who need or would like conformation of their level of Latin for pastoral or liturgical purposes.

    About the three-month course a Dominican sister writes: '. I have found that by the way you blend actual reading from texts, group exercises and grammar lessons, I have been able to slowly assimilate everything as we have progressed. This has worked well for me.'

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    29/12/2021 - 14:09

    Letter of the week: from The Tablet
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    The absolution before Communion: High Mass of Requiem at St Benet's Hall 
    (Fr Edward van den Burgh)
    This is something worthy of a slightly wider audience, I think: from The Tablet's Christmas double issue (18th December). 
    The same issue has an article by the radio journalist Madeleine Bunting, who is creating a programme for Radio 3 on ritual. Coincidentally she refers to the a very interesting book by Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, which I am currently reading.
    The Protestant and Enlightenment theory about ritual has caused a terrible devastation of Western culture, to whit (as Bunting quotes the Catholic anthropologist Mary Douglas) "ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity." This theory, though still guiding many institutions and people, has now pretty well run out of intellectual steam. The interesting people are now rejecting it as old hat, and looking at what ritual did for the societies which had or still have it, and why those which lack it are missing out on something of great importance. 

    This is not the moment, obviously, for the final dissolution of the Church's ancient liturgical tradition. This effort is coming from people whose ideas are at least half a century out of date. (Mary Douglas was writing in the 1960s.)
    -----------------------
    Even as a supporter of the liturgical reform, I would have to admit that the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy is left-brained. Article 34 is a classic example: “The rites should be … short, clear, and unencumbered by useless repetitions.” 
    The academic study of ritual was only starting in the 1960s. It has taken over 50 years for leading thinkers like Iain McGilchrist (“The singing of things”, 4 December) to suggest how and why we have largely lost something near-indefinable from the pre-Vatican II liturgy – when it was celebrated well at a High Mass or Missa cantata. In his chapter on “The Sense of the Sacred”, he talks of “a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable”. 
    Ritual, like all art, is used when its object cannot be defined in words – or in rubrics, or in Vatican documents. Liturgy is an instrument of worship by those who take part in it – a means, not the end itself. Worship is indefinable because its object, God, is ineffable – literally “beyond speech” – thus its exercise is right-brained, rather than left-brained. That is why art, especially music, can assist worship so effectively when it illumines the ritual being performed. One cannot understand the worship signified by ritual, but one can discern it, intuit it, even be grasped by its mover, the Holy Spirit. 
    JOHN AINSLIE 
    LONDON N20
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    27/12/2021 - 10:00

    Responsa ad dubia: good news on private Masses
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    A private Mass in a side-chapel, at Prior Park, England, at our Priest Training Conference in 2016

    As noted in the Latin Mass Society's canonical notes, there are a couple of points in the Congregation for Divine Worship's Responsa ad dubia on which there is good news. In both cases they are indicated by silence. 
    First, the Responsa are silent about the celebration of the Traditional rites during the Easter Triduum, which the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, Cardinal De Donatis, tried to prohibit in Rome. It was, indeed, an extraordinary thing for him to do, without a sliver of justification in the text of Traditionis Custodes, and it provoked a great deal of comment. The CDW obviously knew about the issue, and chose not to comment on it. Given the detail of the limitations on celebrations of the ancient Mass which it does include, this is a clear indication that they do not want to extend this arbitrary prohibition to whole world, which is to say that they do not think it is a reasonable interpretation of Traditionis Custodes.

    Secondly, the Responsa are silent about the private celebration of the Traditional Mass. For reasons which elude me many bishops, including the bishops of England and Wales, have tried to insist that their permission is needed for a priest to celebrate even a private Traditional Mass. (An example is Archbishop McMahon's decree for his diocese, Liverpool.)

    There seems absolutely no basis in the text of TC to support this requirement, and the LMS Guidance on TC said so (before, I should add, the bishops started to issue their decrees and ad clerums on the subject). This guidance was then sent to Archbishop Roche, the Prefect of the CDW, by Cardinal Nichols of Westminster, as noted in a letter which subsequently became public. Archbishop Roche's reply indicates that he read them: he describes them as a 'lose interpretation' (he must mean 'loose', but no matter). You can see their exchange of letters here.
    Which is to say, there can be no doubt that the Congregation was aware of the issue, and aware that there were different views about it. The Congregation has nevertheless chosen not to comment on the issue, or to correct the LMS' 'lose interpretation' in this regard. Again, in the context of the, sometimes problematic, extra restrictions being placed on celebrations in the Responsa, it seems that they have decided to let this one go.
    Is it reasonable to take permission for something from the Congregation's mere silence about it? Yes of course it is. One does not start with the assumption that things are forbidden, and then seek permissions. Is the Church some kind of concentration camp? No: things are permitted until they are forbidden. It is because they were not forbidden in TC, that we have been assuming that they were not forbidden up to now. The continued silence of the CDW confirms that there has been no attempt to forbid them.
    This is in fact a principle of Canon law, set out in Canon 18:

    Laws which establish a penalty, restrict the free exercise of rights, or contain an exception from the law are subject to strict [i.e. narrow] interpretation.
    The universal permission for priests of the Latin Rite to celebrate the Old Mass 'privately' is of considerable significance. It means that it will be possible and practical for priests who have not yet been given permission to celebrate it in public to learn the Mass and to practice celebrating it in private, as in fact usually happens when a priest wants to start celebrating it. Can members of the faithful attend such celebrations? Not only can they, but it is highly recommended.

    Pope Benedict in Sacramentum Caritatis (2007) 80 wrote: 'I join the Synod Fathers in recommending "the daily celebration of Mass, even when the faithful are not present." '

    This needs to be read with Canon 906: "Except for a just and reasonable cause, a priest is not to celebrate the eucharistic sacrifice without the participation of at least some member of the faithful."
    Thus, Masses which are literally sine populo, without any faithful, are better than not celebrating Mass at all: the value of the Mass and the priest's personal spiritual benefit is sufficient justification for celebrating alone. Nevertheless, Masses which are 'private' in the normal sense, of not being advertised and perhaps not being regularly scheduled, should if possible have at least a server; anyone who wishes to attend can of course do so: it is good to go to Mass, not bad! And if they are present, they may receive Holy Communion (see Canons 912 and 918).
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    24/12/2021 - 18:00

    A happy Christmas to all my readers!
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    23/12/2021 - 16:52

    Canonists cast doubt on the force of the Responsa ad dubia
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    LMS Pilgrimage to Chideock; High Mass was celebrated in the presence of 
     Bishop Mark O'Tool of Plymouth, England. Photo by John Aron.


    My latest in the Catholic Herald. I'm grateful to them for publishing this so swiftly.

    It is worth emphasising that the problem I discuss, essentially that the requirements on bishops in the Responsa infringe bishops' rights under Canon law, is not just some fever-dream of Traditional Catholics: it is being said by canonists all over the place. I am fortunate in having access to canonical advice from qualified people, which helped us in preparing our Canonical Notes on the Responsa, but you can see this online now, notably here, here, and here. Confronted with this difficulty by the journalist Edward Pentin, the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Archbishop Roche, did not say anything which is likely to change anyone's mind. At this point we have to take the matter seriously.

    My Catholic Herald article begins:

    On Saturday 18th December a document was published by the Congregation for Divine Worship tightening up restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass: Responsa ad dubia. This is a clarification of Pope Francis’ Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes, answering questions (‘dubia’) sent to the Congregation by bishops.

    Since then canonists all over the Catholic world have been examining the document, which appears to tighten the screws on the availability of the Traditional Mass considerably compared with Traditionis Custodes itself. By a stroke of the pen it prohibits marriages, baptisms, burials, and even blessings, using the older books, outside a tiny number of ‘personal parishes’. Similarly, it prevents priests from saying more than one Old Rite Mass on a Sunday, and allows them to say it on a weekday only if they have no Novus Ordo Masses to celebrate.

    The ban on parishes noting the times of Traditional Masses on their bulletins has caused widespread ridicule. However, it suggests a level of attention to detail, and a desire to make the Traditionist phenomenon disappear from view, which is more than a little alarming. There is no reference to this, or to the other points just mentioned, in Traditionis Custodes, which now appears quite mild by comparison.

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