Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

09/02/2021 - 16:01

The French Bishops and the Traditional Mass

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LMS Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, Bedford, 2019

My latest on LifeSite.

As LifeSiteNews has reported, a document emanating from the French Bishops’ Conference has found its way into the public domain on the subject of the Traditional Mass or Extraordinary Form (EF). It describes itself as a summary of the responses made by individual bishops on the application of Summorum Pontificum, the 2007 Apostolic Letter of Pope Benedict XVI which made it easier for priests to celebrate, and for people to request, the Mass in the form it had at the eve of the Second Vatican Council, in Latin.

The document has angered many French traditionalists for its hostile tone. Una Voce France, for example, fails to find in it “the slightest trace of empathy, cordiality, or ‘heart’.”

One should not too quickly assume that this tone is representative of the French bishops: the document is clearly the work of a middle-ranking functionary of the Conference staff, and not a very well-educated one at that, in light of its numerous errors of syntax and spelling. Nevertheless, it has some relationship with individual bishops’ reports, which are often quoted, and two themes in particular stand out.

Read it all there.

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07/02/2021 - 10:00

Holy Communion from the Tabernacle: Letter in The Tablet

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SS Gregory & Augustine's, Oxford


It is sad to see The Tablet's Letters Editor reverting the habit of cutting out the key sentences of my letters. Here is my letter in full - with the expurgated sentences in red. In this weekend's edition.


This particular issue is a favourite of the kind of progressive liturgist who likes to sprinkle his attacks on the Tradition with plausible-sounding quotations and references. Don't be fooled. The distribution of Hosts from the Tabernacle is a practice perfectly in line with the Tradition of the Church for very important theological reasons, and is licit in both Forms of Mass, whatever the faddish 'recommendations' of the General Instruction may say.


----------------------

Sir,

Canon Atthill (Letters, 30th January) quotes Pope Pius XII quoting Benedict XIV encouraging priests to give, in Holy Communion, hosts consecrated at the Mass being celebrated. In context, however (Mediator Dei 118, 121), the passage reads slightly differently. Pius XII is speaking of those who request to receive the hosts consecrated at the same Mass as a special act of devotion, and notes that ‘not infrequently’ this is not convenient. He clearly envisages the reception of Hosts consecrated at the same Mass as the exception, not the rule.

The practical considerations at issue have not gone away since 1947. The number of communicants is not always easy to establish in advance, and the hosts which are reserved need to be regularly consumed and refreshed.

But there is also a theological consideration. The ritual of commingling recalls the ancient practice of dropping into the consecrated chalice a portion of a host consecrated at a previous Mass, to express ‘the continuous unity of the Eucharistic sacrifice’ (as Josef Jungmann put it). The use of reserved hosts today has the same significance. As Pius XII remarked, when insisting that tabernacles be joined to the altar: ‘it is the same Lord who is present on the altar and in the tabernacle’ (Assisi allocution, 1956).

 

Yours faithfully,

 

Joseph Shaw 

Chairman, the Latin Mass Society

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06/02/2021 - 16:01

China steps up persection

My latest on LifeSiteNews.

With almost every day that passes, there are new revelations about human rights abuses by the Communist-run People’s Republic of China. Those of a sensitive disposition are not advised to listen to this BBC report on the systematic rape of Uighur girls. It is just the latest news from a particular region of China, where the majority population is distinct ethnically, culturally and religiously from the Han Chinese who dominate China.

The Uighurs, who are Muslim, have received no detectable public defense from the Islamic world, which seems more concerned with doing deals with the Chinese government. They are not alone. Governments and especially universities around the world have been silenced by China’s policy of buying influence. A committee of the U.K.’s House of Commons recently declared, after taking evidence on the problem:

There is clear evidence that autocracies are seeking to shape the research agenda or curricula of UK universities, as well as limit the activities of researchers on university campuses. Not enough is being done to protect academic freedom from financial, political and diplomatic pressure.

Read the whole thing there.

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04/02/2021 - 18:49

More Socratic seminars!

Socrates is in green up on the left, in profile.

In early January I offered to lead some online seminars on early Socratic dialogues, as a small personal response to the lockdown, and (almost to my surprise) this has actually happened. We have now done three of the four proposed seminars, with seven students spread across two groups. It has been fun and I am planning the next set.

It is a remarkable fact of my experience - and I know other academics have found the same - that however many times one looks at a great text, discussing it with students seems to bring out new aspects of it. Different people notice different things, and these texts keep surprising us.
It's not that I think Plato (or Socrates) is right about everything in these dialogues. Indeed, in some ways he is stubbornly wrong-headed, in my view. What I value about them is that they are carefully crafted arguments addressing important ideas without too many preconceptions. I mean this in the sense that they are at the beginning of a tradition, rather than at the end of one (though these things are a matter of degree): in relation to Plato's own thinking, and in relation to great Greek-Roman-Latin-European philosophical tradition.
It is inevitably more difficult to understand later products of a tradition without understanding the earlier stages. Nothing comes without a background, but the background here is more managable than that of some other texts I could mention. For these, I've been putting together a single page of information about the cultural and historical background to each dialogue, and not asking students to do any other reading apart from the text itself.
I'd love to hear from anyone who'd like to join us to discuss the next four in my projected list. These will be the Apology, Crito, Charmides, and Hippias Minor.
More details, including prices, here.

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02/02/2021 - 13:35

The Virus and the Exams

I feel extremely lucky that I was already home-educating my children before the Coronavirus struck. My children's education has not escaped entirely unscathed--their sporting opportunities have been eviscerated--but they have fared as well as anyone and better than most. Teaching and learning have simply carried on, if necessary online. One thing we can't control, however, is the setting of public examinations. 

Now we are told that the Government has cancelled this summer’s public examinations in schools, and is consulting on what to do instead. An articleon a blog on the government website explains:

The cancellation of examinations this summer is not because the pandemic makes them impossible to sit … but rather because the unequal impact of the pandemic makes it impossible for them to be fair.

This is for the simple fact that disadvantaged students have had less digital access and schooling, resulting in higher learning loss than their more advantaged peers. They will not be on a level playing field.

As such, qualifications for 2021 can never be an objective measure of performance in the way we are used to, no matter how much we might wish it.

This is a thoroughly disingenuous argument. Certainly the closure of schools has made an “unequal impact”, and this is a catastrophe which will have terrible and long-term consequences.

But it does not follow that exams this summer would not be “an objective measure of performance in the way we are used to.” We are used to disadvantaged children performing poorly in exams, because for whatever reason they have learned less than other children and are less competent in getting their knowledge down on paper. If there were exams this summer, we would see that again, with knobs on, and would learn precisely how much educational damage had been done, and to whom.

This is information the UK Government has decided should not be made available, to universities or employers, to teachers, or to children and their families.

The real argument against having examinations this summer, which emerges eventually from this article, is that while exams usually serve indirectly as a measure of potential, showing who is suited to further studies or jobs, this time they will fail to detect the potential in those children who have suffered most from the closure of schools.

This argument is easier to sympathize with. It is certainly unfair, and a tragic waste, when children’s educational prospects are blighted by factors beyond their control. However, there remains a problem. While universities and employers certainly want to know about potential, there is simply no way of telling what people will do in the future except by reference to what they have done in the past. Candidates for demanding degree courses who have excelled at demanding courses of study at school have demonstrated, insofar as it is possible to demonstrate, that they are equal to the challenge. A certificate of potential based solely on wishful thinking about what young people could do if they put their minds to it will obviously have no credibility.

Such certificates may be where we are heading, and they have the further advantages, for educational progressives, of enabling schools and examiners to make up for all the disadvantages which children have endured. It could be a woke paradise, indeed, with people ranked, not according to achievement, but according to their place in the hierarchy of victimhood.

At the same time it would render unnecessary any actual teaching.Progressive teachers who hate giving children information, or training them in any testable skills, would no doubt welcome this possibility.

This approach also tends to see education as a competition where every winner creates a loser, without regard for the overall level of attainment. In this spirit the Portuguese government recently forbadeprivate schools from offering online lessons, to prevent their pupils from getting too far ahead of children in state schools. This suggests that society as a whole does not benefit from people being educated. In that case, why bother with schools at all?

Oh I was forgetting: schools would still have a rolein undermining parent’s values and as child-care for mothers forced to work outside the home.

But a good education does benefit children. The knowledge, skills, and study-habits formed over years of demanding study makes them better able to tackle further studies or jobs. In other words, a child’s potential is not fixed at birth. Good education increases a child’s potential, and poor education limits it. It doesn’t matter what your genes are, if you have no relevant knowledge or skills you would not cope with a degree course in astrophysics, and letting you do it because of your “potential” would simply waste your time as well as everyone else’s.

Again, education is not a zero-sum undertaking. There may be a fixed number of university places, in a given year, but there aren't a fixed number of job opportunities: a better educated population is more economically productive. Again, education is not just about making money. Children are benefitted by education because it gives them an intellectual formation: it makes them educated adults, able to understand, articulate, and engage with ideas.

What is needed in this crisis is not for teachers to give up on education more than ever, but to make up for lost time. The Institute of Fiscal Studies estimatesthat children at school this year will end up £40,000 worse-off over their lifetimes as a result of the disruption to their education. They propose a raft of initiatives to address the problem by teaching them: in summer schools, for example. Giving them certificates of the exam results they mighthave achieved in other circumstances won’t help: catching up on learning might.

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31/01/2021 - 13:22

The government wants to recruit children to spy on their parents

My latest on LifeSite.

The U.K.’s Conservative Party government was elected in 2019 on a wave of revulsion at the patronizing progressivism of the political elite, which was doing its best to frustrate the implementation of the result of the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union (EU), and condemned patriotic voters as “low information” and racist.

This government has now finally implemented our departure from the EU, “Brexit”, but in many parts of the establishment the old elite are clearly still very much in charge. The government’s attitude to the family, the natural, basic unit of society, is starkly revealed by a proposed law they wish to ram through Parliament, despite it being once already defeated by the House of Lords. The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill, due to be considered in the House of Lords in February, allows for the recruitment of children of 16 and 17 years old to spy on their parents, and at the same time allow them to break the law in doing so. The Daily Telegraph reports:

Covert child agents can break the law if it means they will be able to glean information that could prevent or detect crime, protect public health, safety, or national security or help collect taxes, says the guidance, quietly laid by the government this month.

But it’s ok, we are told, because this will only be done if any one of twenty different state agencies, who are given this power, takes the view that it is justified by “exceptional circumstances.”

Read it all there.

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30/01/2021 - 13:21

Younger, conservative priests attacked again: by Fr James Martin

Me on LifeSite. Fr James Martin, who retweeted the article I discuss, is even more annoyed now than he was before. However, since I quoted his tweet in full I can hardly be accused of misquoting him.

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Fr. James Martin, SJ, has condemned younger, more conservative priests, linking to a National Catholic Reporter article that uses a parish’s experience as a jumping-off point to criticize a whole generation who are strongly motivated to oppose abortion, who are “active” and want to “evangelize,” who like Latin and incense, and — horror! — who read LifeSiteNews. 

Fr. Martin commented as he re-tweets the article: “Essential reading: These are not isolated incidents and part of a growing trend in the church, leaving parishioners feeling angry and isolated. Essentially the rejection of much of Vatican II by younger priests, this phenomenon has flown under the radar.”

"I cannot tell you how many people have told me of experiences like this: parish councils disbanded, women removed from positions of leadership, parishioners being told they're "bad Catholics," after recently ordained priests decided to remake the parish in their image."

Read the whole thing there.
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28/01/2021 - 17:37

The trade in babies must stop

My latest on LifeSite

The public were recently treated to a recordingof a discussion by the family of Chinese actress, Zheng Shuang, about what to do about two babies which she had arranged to be born by American surrogate mothers. The babies arrived, awkwardly, after she had split up from her boyfriend, the babies’ biological father. The recording was released in the context of a bitter dispute between them and the father.

It’s not clear why Zheng, who is 29 and donated the eggs, wanted to employ other women’s wombs for these pregnancies. Perhaps she has some health reason, or perhaps it was to avoid disrupting her career. After the couple’s split, Zheng and her family have appeared to regard the infants as nothing but an embarrassing inconvenience. Interestingly, surrogacy is illegal in China, and the affair has not gone down well in the Chinese press. Zheng has also been dropped as the Chinese advertising face of the luxury clothing brand, Prada. 

There are of course plenty of minor celebrities, and ordinary people too, whose romantic failures have left small children high and dry. Still, however foolish the earlier behaviour may have been, the maternal bond is generally still strong, and grandparents too tend to feel they have something at stake and frequently step in to help pick up the pieces. Those who pay for surrogates to bear children for them, like the Zheng family, by contrast often seem to feel no connection with the children when things go wrong.

Read the whole thing there.
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27/01/2021 - 15:21

Find me on Gab: @LMSChairman

Following the suppression of huge numbers of pro-life and Catholic accounts by Twitter, I have created a Gab account. Right now that seems the only alternative - if that makes me an evil person that's too bad.

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27/01/2021 - 15:18

'Transjacking' women's sports

My latest on LifeSite

I thought I spotted some signs of common-sense returning to the world of sport a few weeks ago, but the President of the United States can, up to a point, create the political weather, and Joe Biden’s lead on allowing transexuals to compete as whatever sex they choose now makes my optimism seem premature. On the plus side, I have now learned a new word to describe this phenomenon: “transjacking.”

I found it this in this article on the subject which helpfully gives a long list of American sports events where athletes who had the good fortune to be born with male bodies outcompeted athletes who did not. The advantages that men have over women in almost every sporting endeavour are very significant, and enduring. They include, notably, longer limbs and larger lung capacity. The response of many sporting bodies, to insist that male-born athletes who wish to compete in women’s events lower their testosterone levels for a certain number of months, is wholly inadequate. To have the necessary effect, the hormones would have had to have been different over the course of several years, from about the age of 12. Low levels of testosterone isn’t going to shorten runners’ legs at the age of 20. 
Read the whole thing there.
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