Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

25/10/2018 - 10:00

Peter Kwasniewski's book launch in Oxford: Friday, after 6pm High Mass in SS Gregory & Augustine

All the details are below. We'll have copies of Peter's most recent three books.

On Saturday he will be at the LMS Pilgrimage to Aylesford. See here for more details.

More on Peter's latest book here.


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24/10/2018 - 10:00

The Pope and the Papacy

My latest on LifeSiteNews begins thus:

 The canonization of Pope Paul VI raises the question of how the Papacy is viewed. The elevation to the Altars of the Church of Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, and Pope John Paul II, seems a surprising legacy of the Second Vatican Council. The Pope’s triple crown has been locked up in a museum; his Noble Guard has been disbanded; the harmless fun of ostrich-feather fans at Papal Masses has ceased; and the Gestatoria has been retired. But something has come in instead: a process of canonization which increasingly seems to be the norm and not the exception for a deceased Pontiff. 
Many theological conservatives hoped that the canonization of Pope John Paul II would canonize, so to speak, his writings as Pope. It would surely be harder, they said, to ignore his fearless condemnation of abortion, contraception, and divorce, once his heroic sanctity was officially recognized. However, this has not come to pass. Pope Francis, who canonized him, seems to have made the keynote of his pontificate the minimization of John Paul II’s teaching in Familaris Consortio(1981) 84 that divorced Catholics in illicit second unions must not receive Holy Communion. It would be foolish to expect the canonization of Pope Paul VI to offer any extra protection or prestige for his condemnation of contraception in Humanae Vitae (1968), or indeed to the doctrinal orthodoxy defended with such vehemence in his Credo of the People of God (1968) and Mysterium Fidei (1965). The teaching of the Church, which Pope Paul reasserted in Evangelium Nuntiandi(1974) 5, that the preaching of the Gospel to unbelievers is of vital importance for their salvation, has long been unsayable. 

Read it all there.

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23/10/2018 - 12:42

On relics and their uses

My latest on LifeSiteNews starts thus:

Over at the New Liturgical Movement, Gregory DiPippo passes on for English-speakers Italian-language reports of a scientific analysis of the relics (a full skeleton) of St Ambrose of Milan.
St Ambrose (337-397) was one of the great figures of his day, who baptized St Augustine of Hippo, and with St Augustine is one of the four Latin Doctors often depicted in art (the others being St Jerome and St Gregory the Great).
Not only are the bones the right age for St Ambrose, but they display the poorly-healed broken collarbone which, as his letters attest, troubled St Ambrose for many years. They are, so far as science can speak on the subject, authentic. 
Contrary to the wise-acres who for centuries have been casting doubt on the genuineness of the relics venerated by Catholics, this kind of scientific vindication keeps happening. The Holy Chalice of Valencia, according to tradition used at the Last Supper, was created (from agate) using techniques unique to the time of Our Lord’s life and earlier. The Holy Thorn of Andria, said to be from the Crown of Thorns and to bleed when Good Friday falls on 25th March, did so again under the cold gaze of scientific instruments in 2016. If these are the products of medieval forgers, those chaps certainly knew a thing or two.

Read it all there.

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22/10/2018 - 18:11

Making Oxford's Streets sacred again

The Latin Mass Society held its annual Pilgrimage to Oxford last Saturday.

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In the 19th century a surprisingly broad cross-section of Anglicans incorporated into their thinking the notion of sacred space, leading to a new conception of what churches should be like: a conception which harked back to many old churches' Catholic past. This conception of sacred space had a natural parallel in the idea of processions. This was also the historical moment when Catholic church-building and processions began to be largely untrammelled by legal restrictions, so Catholics, less surprisingly, were doing the same things at the same time. For about a century England saw an amazing number of these, and then they suddenly almost died out in the 1970s.

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The idea of sacred space implies that one place can be a better one than another for prayer not just because it is convenient and quiet but because it is holy. When our churches are consecrated there are lots of prayers and ceremonies which call down God's blessing on the building with this idea in mind. But consecration by a bishop is not the only factor: it will also particularly please God to answer our prayers if the place where we are praying is associated with the lives and sufferings of his saints. It is natural therefore to build churches at the sites of martyrdoms (the origin of St Peters and of many ancient Roman churches) and to bring relics of the saints into them. We can also go out to such sites, such as do not, yet, have churches built over them.

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The site of the Catholic martyrdoms of 1589 was the Town Gallows, now occupied (approximately) by 100 Holywell Street. Four brave men, two priests and two laymen, made the ultimate witness to the Catholic Faith there, and we can witness to the Faith we share with them by going there in procession. When there the cleric with us says the Collect from the Mass of the Martyrs of England and Wales, and we sing the Church's hymn of thanksgiving, the Te Deum.

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This year the sun shone and numbers were higher than they have been for quite a few years, with 70 in church and a very creditable 35 people processing through Oxford's tourists and shoppers.

Many thanks to the Prior and Community of Blackfriars for hosting us, and to Fr Lawrence Lew OP for celebrating the Mass, and to Mrs Shaw for providing lunch for pilgrims in Blackfriars' Aula.

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Read more about the martyrs and this event here.

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19/10/2018 - 11:30

Oxford Pilgrimage 20th October 2018

This is tomorrow!

Join us for the Latin Mass Society's annual pilgrimage in honour of Oxford's Catholic martyrs, particularly those of 1589 whose site of martyrdom, where 100 Holywell Street now stands, we will be visiting.

Schedule
11am Dominican Rite High Mass
Followed by refreshments in the Aula in Blackfriars
2pm Procession from Carfax to Holywell Street, and back to Blackfriars
4pm Benediction
Music
With the Newman Consort directed by Alex Lloyd
Missa Quem dicunt homines Antonius Divitis 1475-1530
Laetamini in Domino Jacob Regnart 1540-1599
Dominican Chant with the Schola Abelis of Oxford directed by Dominic Bevan
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A recent High Mass in Blackfriars in the Dominican Rite

These pilgrimages are an occasion when we take the Faith out into the streets of Oxford. Last year we went to the site of the 1610 martyrdom of Bl George Nichols, a priest, in the Oxford Castle complex. This year we'll be going to where the town gallows used to stand, outside the portion of the city walls which are still preserved in New College gardens. The junction of Holywell Street, Manor Road, and Longwall Street was called 'Hangman's Corner' within living memory, and four beatified martyrs made their heavenly nativity there in 1589.

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The procession last year, with a processional statue of Our Lady of Walsingham

In 2008, the pilgrimage included the blessing of a newly installed plaque marking the site of these martyrdoms, by Bishop Kenny, an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Birmingham.

Blessing of plaque

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15/10/2018 - 20:04

Newman Colloquium: a new project in Oxford

Once a month the Newman Colloquium will be presenting a 'conversation' before an audience on a matter of Catholic interest. I am delighted to be part of this project and will be the interlocutor for some of our guest speakers. The first is the excellent Michael Wee of the Anscombe Centre, and we will be talking about 'Humanae Vitae at 50'.

It will take place in the newly refurbished parish hall at SS Gregory & Augustine's, on Saturday 27th October, from 3:45pm.

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14/10/2018 - 10:00

Bishop Genn's fear of Traditionalists

Published on LifeSiteNews. The article begins:

Despite the fact that his diocese is desperately short of vocations, Bishop Genn of Münster recently declared: “I can decidedly say I don’t care for pre-conciliar types of clerics, and also I will not consecrate them.”

This is not an uncommon attitude, and it is not limited to Germany. I have heard stories from the English seminary, St. Cuthbert’s College at Ushaw, now closed for lack of custom, that superiors were so concerned to root out conservatively-minded candidates for the priesthood that they would watch how they held their hands during Mass. If they folded them prayerfully, this went on the record as a mark against them. Seminarians would meet to say the Rosary in each others’ rooms, in secret, for fear this subversive activity would get them into trouble, and hide theology books by Joseph Ratzinger.

This attitude seems to go beyond a simple matter of theological disagreement. Signs of conservatism are regarded as akin to signs of leprosy, and indeed, it is not uncommon to hear theological conservatism or traditionalism compared to mental illness. It should be said that this attitude is much less bad, at least in the English-speaking world, than it was a generation ago, but it has not gone away, and it is striking that a German bishop should embrace it so openly.

While I lack any special information about Bishop Genn, I think I can shed light on the phenomenon as a whole. The language commonly used about young conservatives and traditionalists – “rigid,” “conformists,” “authoritarian,” “clericalist” – are related to trends in psychiatry which were influential in the decades after the Second World War. Here is a typical description of the “authoritarian personality” published in 1970 (Peter Kelvin, The Bases of Social Behaviour):

Read it all there.
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13/10/2018 - 10:00

Welcome Princess Alexandra of Hanover to the Roman Catholic Church

Published on LifeSiteNews: the article begins:

Every now and then a closer or more distant blood relation of Britain’s Queen becomes a Catholic, and in doing so is removed from the "line of succession." This is one of the last legal remnants of a system of anti-Catholic discrimination which once saw Catholics banned from living in London and becoming army officers, long after the bloody persecution ended. It means that however unlikely it might have been in any case, swimming the Tiber washes off the theoretical possibility that you could become King or Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Recently, it was the turn of Princess Alexandra of Hanover, who at 19 has adopted the Catholic religion of her mother.

Princess Alexandra is rather more closely related to the houses of Hanover and of Monaco than to Britain’s House of Windsor, and she probably gave this aspect of her conversion little thought. Somewhat closer to the British throne was Lord Nicholas Windsor, who was received into the Church in 2001; he gave an interview to LifeSiteNews in 2011.

Catholics are excluded from the line of succession by the Act of Settlement of 1701; Britain’s monarch is, after all, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Catholics are the Act’s targets, because it was passed in the aftermath of the English Revolution of 1688 (called by its supporters the “Glorious” Revolution), which saw the overthrow of the Catholic King James II. The greater friendliness of his brother and predecessor King Charles II to Catholicism and to the leading Catholic power of the time, France, led to the anti-Catholic moral panic of the fraudulent Titus Oates plot. When the Catholic James II had a son, and so looked set to establish a Catholic monarchy for the foreseeable future, a group of powerful Protestant nobles staged a coup.
Read it all on LifeSiteNews

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12/10/2018 - 15:40

The cultural front-line in Oxford

I have a piece on the Catholic Herald website. It begins:

Recently I spent many hours on the front line of the new evangelisation. In a formerly Christian country, Britain, where the cultural achievements of the Church are still remembered and appreciated, at least by some, I was working on the via pulchritudinis: the “way of beauty”.

As Pope St John Paul II expressed it in 2003 (Ecclesia in Europa 60):

“Nor should we overlook the positive contribution made by the wise use of the cultural treasures of the Church. … artistic beauty, … a sort of echo of the Spirit of God, is a symbol pointing to the mystery, an invitation to seek out the face of God made visible in Jesus of Nazareth.”

Where was I? At Oxford University’s Freshers’ Fair, as I am every year, recruiting singers for a Gregorian Chant schola named after an Oxford student who died for the Faith, Blessed Thomas Abel.

Read the whole thing there.

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10/10/2018 - 10:00

Ouellet replies to Viganó

October 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Those observing the developing controversy which has followed Archbishop Viganó’s extraordinary denunciation of Pope Francis had their patience rewarded by an official response from a leading Cardinal, the Canadian Marc Ouellet. As Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops since 2010, he is uniquely qualified to confirm or deny what is perhaps the central factual claim of Viganó’s testimony. This is that in 2009 or 2010 (I quote from Viganó’s testimony):
Pope Benedict had imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis: the Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.
(McCarrick had retired at the usual age from the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. in 2007. On June 20, 2018, he was stripped of the title of Cardinal in light of allegations that he had sexually abused a minor. He retains the rank of Archbishop.)
This claim is explosive because following the election of Pope Francis, McCarrick was, as one journalist approvingly expressed, “back in the mix and busier than ever,” having been “more or less put out to pasture” by Pope Benedict.
Archbishop Viganó made a special point in his testimony of pointing to Cardinal Ouellet, among others, as able to corroborate his claims. In a second public letter, he addressed Cardinal Ouellet directly:
Your Eminence, before I left for Washington, you were the one who told me of Pope Benedict’s sanctions on McCarrick. You have at your complete disposal key documents incriminating McCarrick and many in the curia for their cover-ups. Your Eminence, I urge you to bear witness to the truth.

Read more on LifeSiteNews

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