Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

25/02/2017 - 12:55

The Narrative of Victimhood: Transsexuality

This is from a few months ago on my Philosophy blog. Recent flurries of activity on social media prompt me to offer it to a wider audience.

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I've just noted on my other blog that living as a transsexual has been categorised by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as incompatible with the Faith. This is about the argument in favour of tolerating or promoting this lifestyle.

The transsexual phenomenon is not entirely new, but it is taking on a new form and become a cause celebre with astonishing speed. From a common-sense point of view it seems sheer lunacy: people can now simply claim to be the sex opposite to that indicated by their biology, and have this assertion officially recognised, with or without any medical diagnosis or intervention (not that either would make any real difference).

Continue reading.

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24/02/2017 - 10:00

New book on the Faith and the New Age

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View from the choir loft: Milton Manor, Latin Mass Society annual Mass

Roger Buck's Cor Jesu Sacratissimum: From Secularism and the New Age to Christendom Renewed is a brilliant and touching full-length treatment of the New Age and his escape from that to to the Faith.
It is available here: Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com

I've discussed Roger Buck's earlier book, The Gentle Traditionalist, here

I've written about the book over on Rorate Caeli. Below I reproduce part of an article I wrote for the Christmas edition of the Catholic Universe newspaper.
The New Age movement is just the most fully-worked out manifestation of something vaguer and far more pervasive. For many of those without a formal religion, it seems more natural to seek solace in a country walk, in contemplating the stars, or in talking to animals, than in the words of scientific atheists. Again, some see the experiences offered by drugs as attempts to gain knowledge of one’s inner self, rather than simply the chasing of sensual pleasure. Such people are not attracted to things which are easy to understand, but to things which offer the promise of transformation, transformation by getting through to something, something which modernity, materialism, and science, have clouded over or lost. Furthermore, what they want is not something abstract and wordy, but something tangible and felt. For people like this, the mysterious nature of Catholicism can be an advantage, not a disadvantage, as can its ‘incarnational’ character: its use of created things, like the sacraments, incense, sacred music, blessed objects, and so on.
The principle teachers of this vague, nostalgic, longing are often not New Age gurus but pop musicians. The group Pink Floyd sang:
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse, 
out of the corner of my eye. 
I turned to look, but it was gone, 
I cannot put my finger on it now. 
The child is grown, the dream is gone. 
I have become comfortably numb.
Many of the people who are influenced by these ideas are strongly inoculated against the Christian message by misconceptions and prejudices, and sometimes by bad experiences. We should be concerned, all the same, to allow the Christian mystery to exert its full power upon them, for unlike tree-hugging and psychoactive drugs, Christ really does have the power to transform and to save.
It is no coincidence that Christmas is the Church’s most successful evangelising event, with the lapsed and the curious crowding into our churches for Midnight Mass. They want to experience the powerful and potentially transformative mystery of the Christmas message, which many of them glimpsed as children in the darkness, in the traditional songs, the liturgy, and the crib. Perhaps the most effective way of neutralising the force of the Church’s message at this moment is sentimentality, which makes what is truly stupendous in the message look banal: the baby in the crib competing with the lambs as to who can look the sweetest.  (What if the lambs win?) But the biggest challenge is not to make the most of the evangelising opportunity presented by Christmas, important though that it, but to extend this opportunity, in some way, to the rest of the year.
How can make clear to the New Age generation that the Faith is not dry and boring, that it is not all about words and abstract ideas, but that it is an intriguing saving mystery which they can see and touch? The weekly liturgy of the Church is indeed a celebration of the mystery of the Atonement, not neglecting the Incarnation and the rest of the Faith. In the reform of the Mass after the Second Vatican Council, however, the mysterious nature of what is going on has become less clear. As Pope Francis expressed it in 2013, referring to the ancient liturgy of the Eastern Churches:
‘We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They keep [it], they praise God, they adore God, they sing, time doesn’t count.’

This ‘sense of adoration’, or as Pope Benedict put it, the ‘sacrality’ of the liturgy, is clearly communicated in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, the Traditional Latin Mass. What this conveys is not that the liturgy is something you can’t understand, but that it is something, at least in part, which surpasses understanding, and somehow remains far from abstract, but conveyed by sacred music, incense, and ritual. Pope St John Paul II said that New Age people are rejecting ‘rationalistic religiosity’: when they see this in the Church they aren’t interested. The Traditional Mass is something which can, at least sometimes, interest them.
To be clear, the saving mystery is still there in the Ordinary Form; what differs between the forms is, to put it simply, the way the mystery is presented. It has long been argued that the use of Latin, silence, and complex ritual in the Mass made it more difficult for worshippers to understand what was going on. At one level that is clearly true: for native English-speakers, Latin is definitely harder to understand than English. At another level, the question is more complex. The Mass is not just a collection of theological propositions, which can be made easier to understand by putting them into simpler language. The Mass as a whole conveys something to the worshipper which goes beyond mere words. As Pope St John Paul II explained, about the use of Latin: ‘through its dignified character [it] elicited a profound sense of the Eucharistic Mystery.’ It communicates something precisely by notbeing the language of everyday speech, but by being ancient, beautiful, and at times silent.
To see the evangelising potential of the Traditional Mass we need to be alert to what the liturgy is expressing non-verballyas well as what it is expressing verbally. Non-verbal communication is key to conveying a sense that something special is happening: something sacred, something to do with God, for example with genuflections, signs of the cross, special clothes, and a special language. This can seem intriguing to people who are seeking, in their lives, something mysterious and transformative. As Pope Paul VI noted, ‘modern man is sated with words’.
Since the Traditional Latin Mass is now a legitimate ‘Extraordinary’ Form of the Church’s liturgy, we should look to see how it can be a resource for evangelisation. What it is particularly good at is demonstrating to Catholics, and to others, that what the Church possesses, in the Mass, is something of unfathomable grandeur. The priest and the server prepare for it by a public expression of sorrow for their sins; men doff their caps and women cover their heads; we kneel; and at the moment of its coming the only adequate language is God’s own language: silence.
Are people influenced by the New Age really going to be attracted by this sort of thing? They acknowledge the spiritual realm, but this is usually seems perfectly compatible with a self-centred and comfortable life. The Extraordinary Form focuses attention on the Other; the New Age focuses attention on Oneself. Despite this the ancient Mass had the power to attract the most sensual egomaniac of English fiction, Oscar Wilde’s creation Dorian Gray, who used to wander into Catholic churches to see Mass being said:
The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize.
Dorian Gray was fascinated by what he saw, and in real life many of Wilde’s ‘decadent’ friends, and eventually Wilde himself, converted to Catholicism, which could give them what their sensuality could not give them. The explanation is that in their sensuality they were not seeking just pleasure,they were seeking meaning, and furthermore they were seeking spiritual realities manifested in created things. This is what they found in the Mass and in the Church.
The New Age Pantheist says that the physical world is God. The mystery of Christmas tells us that because of the Incarnation, God can be contained in a physical reality. The Church’s ancient liturgical tradition spreads that idea out to the whole of life, because it makes clear that the sacraments and holy images and holy water and all sorts of physical things can do more than simply remind us of God: they can convey an objective blessing and the objective action and presence of God in the world. The world is not a flat, rationalistic, machine: it is enchanted. It is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, ‘charged with the grandeur of God’: a grandeur which can be glimpsed in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

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23/02/2017 - 10:00

A smaller, weaker, impurer Church

Reposted from December 2015, since that Ratzinger passage is once more doing the rounds on Facebook.

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An international pilgrimage: the traditional pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres.

From time to time people like to quote something Joseph Ratzinger wrote in 1969. Here's the key passage (source):

The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.


She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members….

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . . But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.



I always like to oppose signs of false optimism, so I'll say something about this.

In relation to Cardinal Ratzinger/ Pope Benedict, this passage has to be read in light of his intellectual development. In 1969 he didn't have the same views as he did when he became a cardinal in 1993 or Pope in 2005. He might or might not have later actually disagreed with this passage, but his writings certainly took on a very different tone and emphasis. To put it crudely, he was a bit of a liberal in 1969. It is to his credit that he had the flexibility of mind and intellectual honesty to continue developing his thinking, in light of new research and the unfolding of events, as the decades passed.

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An association of Chant choirs: the Gregorian Chant Network.

The reference to the 'Church of the political cult' is an example of liberal thinking and language. It is a disparaging reference to the role of the Church in society and politics, particularly in Catholic countries, in the old days. The loss of 'privileges' and 'edifices' noted in the passage was not, it should be noted, something which liberals saw with regret. They consciously and actively repudiated the Church's privileged place in society, which she had had in 19th century Spain, Second Empire France, and the like. They thought that political privileges and elaborate institutions made the Church worldly (in need of 'spiritualisation'), made her look arrogant in relation to other religions, and needed to be set aside for the sake of more effective evangelisation.

In light of this, at the time widely held, view, the passage makes a very different kind of sense to that sometimes, I think, attributed to it by conservative Pope Benedict fans. To a large extent it is not about the disaster of post-Conciliar collapse - which wasn't so visible in 1969 - as about the liberal hope for purification and growth following the sloughing off of the privileges and institutions which were cramping the work of the Holy Spirit. Of course, the two things are closely related. When Pope Paul VI talked about the 'autodemolition' of the Church, he was talking about the way that liberals were deliberately and joyfully smashing the place up, convinced that this would lead to a new springtime. The liberal attitude has not gone away entirely. Even now, bishops planning for the institutional disappearance of the Church in their dioceses give their discussion documents jaunty and optimistic titles like 'Leaving Safe Habours'. Only if we leave all those fusty old things like schools, hospitals, and parish churches, behind, can we really get going with our evagelisation. Hanging on to the old institutions is playing it too safe. If smashing up half of them didn't have a positive effect, then we should try smashing up the remaining half.

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A pro-life witness: outside the John Radcliffe Hospital, in Oxford.

Pope Paul VI wasn't so sure this was a good idea, as the reference to 'autodemolition' in his famous, but somewhat mysterious, 1965 sermon indicated. What we have seen since then is the very effective destruction of the Church's institutions and place in society, but absolutely no sign of 'purification' or a 'great power' flowing out: quite the contrary. One reason is that secularised, formerly Catholic institutions don't always leave the Church's institutional orbit. For example, the completely secularised 'Marriage Care' counselling service of the UK, whose philosophy is radically opposed to the teaching of the Church, still gets a privileged place in the Church, in advising bishops, on parish noticeboards, in terms of references in Catholic newspapers, and in Catholic directories. The same is true of the Catholic school system. Such secularised institutions bring completely worldly thinking into the heart of the Church.

There lies at the centre of the liberal project a confusion about the Church's engagement with the world. In the old, confessional Catholic state, and to an extent in non-Catholic countries like the UK where there were well-developed Catholic institutions, the Church used to engage very closely with the world, but on her own terms. There were Catholic schools, hospitals, prison-visiting charities, and all sorts of professional associations, all with a genuine Catholic ethos. A slackening of that ethos would lead either to intervention and reform or repudiation. That was the way that a (relatively) pure Church made herself known to a perhaps hostile world. This manifestation made it possible for non-Catholics to recognise the Church's unique character, and what she had to offer, in even quite brief encounters with Catholic institutions. Non-Catholics who had experienced a Catholic hospital, or who had wandered into a Catholic church during Mass, came away with something to reflect about. When Malcolm Muggeridge decided to send his son to a preconciliar Downside School, the headmaster warned him that the boy was very likely to ask to be received into the Church: most non-Catholic pupils did, he said. And so it came to pass.

The liberal conception of engagement, by contrast, is exemplified by the fictional Pope Kirill in the film, The Shoes of the Fisherman (a 1968 film of a 1963 book), going off to mediate between Russia and China in a business suit, explaining that if you look like the people you are talking to, they are more likely to listen. The idea is that by making concessions (supposedly only concessions on outward, disciplinary, non-doctrinal matters) the Church can 'gain a hearing' with the world. The result has been, however, that there is nothing for the world to hear. Catholic schools, hospitals, and even liturgies have become next to useless as means of conveying anything about the truth of the Catholic religion, the Church's insight into human nature, or the supernatural virtues which the Church makes possible, to non-Catholics, or even to Catholics, because they have deliberately made themselves worldly.

And so it is that liberals criticise the old institutions of the confessional state for sitting down with secular leaders to negotiate privileges, like the opportunity for religious to catechise Catholic children at French state schools during the school day, state support for Catholic hospitals or leper colonies, or having crucifixes in courtrooms, because this kind of thing led to the Church becoming 'worldly', and even to the Church making concessions such as allowing state influence over the appointment of bishops. Instead, they propose that the Church sit down with secular leaders to evangelise them, having first made the evangelists themselves as worldly as possible. As a matter of fact, the Church continues to spend a huge amount of time and energy negotiating over Catholic education and the like - the column inches in the Catholic press on the subject of free transport for children at Catholic schools must surely exceed those on all matters of bioethics combined - though with a weaker bargaining position than before. Meanwhile, the appointment of a bishop unacceptable to the secular power is about as likely as snow in Hell. How this is supposed to represent progress, I am unable to explain.

What Joseph Ratzinger was certainly right about in 1969 was that the new situation would absorb much energy in introspection, and would lead to a crisis which would take many years to resolve. Where he was wrong is in the idea that the Church can evangelise without institutions, 'edifices', relying instead on individuals. Catholicism is an incarnate religion, and the Church is herself a human, as well as a divine, institution. Wherever Catholics set up shop they create institutions: first the family and the parish and diocese, and then schools and associations of all kinds. It is through human contact that the Gospel is spread, and institutions can manifest the Church, humanly, more effectively, convincingly, and consistently, than isolated individuals. We are inviting non-Catholics to join an institution, after all, and not simply become a personal friend. If the Church is to recover her evangelical zeal, she must rebuild her institutions, just as she did after the French Revolution and the English Reformation.

As you build new Catholic institutions, the key thing is not to let the liberals get their hands on them: they will instinctively destroy them. They can't help it. It is their nature.

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A Summer School: St Catherine's Trust

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22/02/2017 - 10:00

Easter Cards from the Latin Mass Society

This year, for the first time, the Latin Mass Society is selling Easter Cards. Make this part of your preparations for the the greatest feast of the Church's year!

Buy them here.

Pack of 6 cards for £3.99; make sure you are logged in to the website for your member's discount.

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20/02/2017 - 10:00

Juventutem Mass in London 24th Feb

7:30pm Friday 24 Feb: Mass will be celebrated by Fr Armand de Malleray FSSP.

Music by Cantus Magnus directed by Matthew Schellhorn:
Messa da Capella a quattro voci Monteverdi
Sicut cervus Palestrina
Sitivit anima mea Palestrina

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17/02/2017 - 14:48

A pre-history of the Guild of St Clare


It seems the Guild of St Clare has a pre-history: there existed, up to about the time of Vatican II, a 'St Clare's Guild' for sewing in Catholic parishes in the United States. I'd be interested to hear more about this Guild from those who have any information.

From an email:

On a regular basis, the Guild would meet to sew what I recall were "pads for cancer patients". There may have been other projects that they worked on, but I recall that one. As to the spirituality of the group, I have no clue, nor whether it was promoted by my parish (Nativity of Our Lord) or the Archdiocese of St Paul Minnesota.

What I recall was a large number of women gathering at the house on an occasional basis and hand sewing. My Mother would refer to it as the St. Clare Guild, and she participated in it probably until 1960 or so. That was a time, of course, when many women did not work outside the house but would involve themselves in charitable work.

There was quite a bit of adult catechesis at the time as well. My Mother also belonged to a parish sponsored "women's discussion club". There were many such discussion clubs set up by my parish on a neighborhood basis. Members were asked to read chapters of books written by Catholic authors (it was the time of Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen) and gather to discuss what they had read.

In addition to the women's discussion club, there were discussion clubs for couples and both of my parents participated in the one for our neighborhood.

Comment: Any group of skilled ladies doing vestment repairs would have suffered the same fate as groups of skilled singers: under the new dispensation they were no longer needed, or only for things which would not have motivated them to hang around. The new spirituality did for any groups based on spiritual matters. 

It is not clear whether this St Clare's Guild did much liturgical sewing, however, and there were other factors at work: the 1970s saw the decline of every kind of voluntary and leisure group. Robert Putnam, in his well-known study Bowling Alone, blames commuting, TV, increased female participation in the labour market, and a mysterious 'generational change'. I've discussed this on this blog here.
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16/02/2017 - 10:00

St Catherine's Trust Family Retreat: 31st March to 2nd April

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The Family Retreat is back in the Oratory School near Reading this year, for Passion Sunday weenkend (the weekend before Palm Sunday), led by Fr Serafino Lanzetta of the Gosport friars. Details and booking here.

The Family Retreat, run by the St Catherine's Trust, is designed to make it possible for the parents of small children to attend a retreat without leaving their children behind. We arrange activities for the children during the spiritual conferences. Everyone is welcome, however: you don't have to bring children with you!

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The Oratory School is a lovely setting for the Retreat, with two chapels and extensive and beautiful grounds. Last year we used Ratcliffe College near Leicester, as the Oratory School wasn't available.

The Retreat runs alongside the GCN Chant Training Weekend so the chant singers accompany our liturgies: Mass, Benediction, Vespers, and so on.

For some years now we have been using different Retreat givers each year; last year we had two priests of the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, from Papa Stronsay.

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The Latin Mass Society provides bursaries which HALVE the cost to families who would not otherwise be able to come.

It is a great event, do join us!

Details and booking here.

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15/02/2017 - 10:00

Guild of St Clare Sewing Retreat: report

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I've pinched some of the photos; the Guild has a short report on their blog.


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"Our first ever sewing retreat finished yesterday, and I for one enjoyed myself enormously. With snow falling outside over the panoramic views of Oxfordshire countryside, an infinite supply of tea and biscuits and good company, what could be more agreeable than a weekend of sewing punctuated by traditional liturgy?"



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See their blog to read more.

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14/02/2017 - 16:23

Mass in Milton Manor: photos

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Fr Philip Harris celebrated a Missa Cantata in the lovely private chapel at Milton Manor House for the Latin Mass Society yesterday. The Schola Abelis accompanied Mass for the Apparition of the Immaculate Conception with chant.

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11/02/2017 - 10:00

The Church's calendar and popular culture

Reposted from 2014.

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Yesterday was St Valentine's Day. That is what a thousand shop windows, restaurant menus, and service station card racks proclaimed. St Valentine was a martyr of the 3rd Century, over whose tomb a basilica was built when he Church's time of persecution was over. I attended Mass in his honour, and in the name of the Church the celebrant implored God's mercy in light of St Valentine's merits.

Collect:
Grant, we beseech Thee, O almighty God, that we, who celebrate the heavenly birthday [ie, death] of blessed Valentine, Thy Martyr, may by intercession be delivered from all the evils that threaten us. Through our Lord...

Secret:
We beseech Thee, O Lord, graciously receive the gifts we offer Thee: and may they, in view of the merits of Thy blessed Martyr Valentine, be of help to us towards our salvation. Through our Lord...

Postcommunion:
O Lord, may this heavenly Mystery be to us the renewal of of soul and body, that by the intercession of the blessed Valentine, Thy Martyr, we may feel the influence of this Sacrifice. Through our Lord...

This, of course, was Mass in the Extraordinary Form. In the Ordinary Form we don't find mentions of Sacrifice scattered through the proper prayers. Or the merits of the saints. Or their intercession. Nor is it made as clear as this that the gifts we offer God in Mass are not the unconsecrated bread and wine, but the Body and Blood of Christ by which are saved. And then again, in the Ordinary Form St Valentine is not celebrated on his historic feast day, the day of his death all those centuries ago.

It is hard to find anyone (at least, on Twitter) willing to defend the decision to take away the liturgical celebration of the saint who has, however unwillingly, given his name to the secular phenomenon of Valentine's Day. But by chance I read something which suggests that it may not be just a coincidence, that in their clear-out of the saints of ancient Rome from the calendar (where they used to be heavily represented: this is, after all, the Roman Rite we are talking about), the reformers turfed out someone with the cultural significance of St Valentine.

It was Bugnini, talking about Ash Wednesday. It is inconvenient to have it on a Wednesday, he thought; much better on a Sunday. This is impossible, however: you can't have a penitential liturgy on a Sunday. So he had to leave it on Wednesday after all. (A close shave for another ancient tradition!) But he wanted to allow the imposition of Ashes to take place any day between Ash Wednesday and the following Monday. Having it on the Wednesday, you see (The Reform of the Liturgy, p307, n7)

In England, admittedly, the celebration of the day before
Ash Wednesday is a little more restrained.

'had the drawback of keeping the association with Mardi Gras.'

Come again? The association with Mardi Gras is a drawback? The fact that calendar and the practice of penance has become so deeply embedded in popular culture that it is impossible to avoid it, in many cultures: this is a bad thing?

A third example occurs to me: Halloween, the Eve of All Hallows (All Saints). When All Saints falls on a Saturday or a Monday, the bishops of England and Wales, in their wisdom, move it to Sunday. This means that, except in the Extraordinary Form, Halloween is not followed by All Saints. Either it is separated from it by a day, or it falls on the same day. This horrible clash happened in 2010. But perhaps the bishops, when this decision was made (many years ago), didn't actually want to make the connection with Halloween.

What is going on here? It is true that in each case, the secular celebrations have taken a problematic turn. In the case of Mari Gras, this has been the case for many centuries. They have become unCatholic, to say the least. The response of Bugnini and those who think like him seems to be that we should retreat into a bunker, at this point, stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that they are not happening, or at least have nothing to do with us. The Church, they seem to think, should disown them. This kind of response is regularly made by puritanical types in relation to the secular celebration of Christmas: we should eschew Christmas trees and Father Christmas and presents and having fun, and pretend this has nothing to do with the Birth of the Saviour.

The spirit of the New Evangelisation, however, takes the opposite view. These are opportunities to evangelise. We Catholic invented all these things, or (in the case of the Christmas tree and Father Christmas), have long made them our own. Even the worst aspects, the occult references in some places in Halloween, for example, are a sort of shadow of the Catholic teaching, and can give us the opportunity to talk about it. We don't need to approve of fornication on St Valentine's Day, or getting drunk on Mardi Gras, but rather than ignoring these things, we should engage with them. That is what Pope Francis was doing by giving special blessings to engaged couples on the ... feast of SS Cyril and Methodius, yesterday. (Funnily enough, the Vatican News Service called it the Feast of St Valentine. Those trads must be infiltrating...)

The liturgical reform is usually characterised as optimistic, open to 'secular values', and in some ways it is. I think, however, that deep down there was a lot of timidity, of fear, a feeling that the Church has lost control of popular culture and needs to return to the catacombs, where the chosen few can 'participate', and outsiders can be made to feel as though they have stumbled into an intimate gathering of chums. This attitude doesn't get us anywhere. We have to go out there and make use of whatever vestiges of Christianity we can find. Even those embedded in cultural artefacts with origins in anti-Catholic polemic can be useful, like cult of the anti-hero Guy Fawkes.

Soon, after all, there will be precious little in the way of Catholic institutions to shelter us.

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