Chairman's Blog
16/10/2022 - 14:26
LMS Pilgrimage to Oxford, Sat 22nd October
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
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
This morning the Latin Mass Society's organised Missa cantata for the late Queen took place. The celebrant was Fr Michael Cullinan.
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.
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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22/09/2022 - 14:30
The Royal Prerogatives and the law: 1Peter 5 by James Bogle
The well-known Catholic barrister James Bogle (also a former President of the FIUV) has written about what the Queen could and could not have done about bad laws being passed, on 1Peter 5. It is well worth a read; the principle is clear enough but the technical details are helpful.
Mr Bogle explains that saying 'The Queen should have refused to sign the Abortion Act' (or any other Act of Parliament) is no different from saying that a Catholic judge should have ignored it, that a Catholic clerk working in the Houses of Parliament should have falsified the official record of the Act, or even that a Catholic soldier guarding Parliament at the time it was being voted on should have stormed in and threatened everyone with his gun. It would have been illegal, as well as totally futile and destructive of the constitution, and of course morally wrong.
In a constitutionally-governed state bad laws must be prevented, or failing that, overturned, by constitutional means. Anything else is a revolution which overturns the state itself. And yes we do want to live in a constitutional state, and not in a state of legal anarchy and permanent civil war.
Elsewhere, Mr Bogle has summarised the question of whether it is possible to hold a Requiem Mass for The Queen, as the LMS has done and will do again. This is worth quoting:
Dear all, canon law makes it quite clear that the baptised of any denomination may be given a public requiem and that the final decision lies with the local Ordinary. Here is what canons 1183 & 1184 say:
"Can. 1183 §3. In the prudent judgment of the local ordinary, ecclesiastical funerals can be granted to baptized persons who are enrolled in a non-Catholic Church or ecclesial community unless their intention is evidently to the contrary and provided that their own minister is not available.
Can. 1184 §1. Unless they gave some signs of repentance before death, the following must be deprived of ecclesiastical funerals:
1/ notorious apostates, heretics, and schismatics;
2/ those who chose the cremation of their bodies for reasons contrary to Christian faith;
3/ other manifest sinners who cannot be granted ecclesiastical funerals without public scandal of the faithful.
§2. If any doubt occurs, the local ordinary is to be consulted, and his judgment must be followed."
The Queen was not an apostate, heretic or schismatic (one must first be a Catholic to meet those categories) nor was she a manifest sinner.
In addition, the local Ordinary has given permission.
IT IS THEREFORE ALLOWED.
THAT IS THE END OF THE MATTER.
Now, for goodness sake, find something more sensible to argue about.
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17/09/2022 - 10:00
Indifferentism and Praying for the Queen and the King
I know some traditional Catholics have misgivings about praying for the late Queen and for King Charles.
Under the old Code of Canon Law, Requiem Masses could be said for non-Catholic Christians but these could not be publicly advertised as such. At least, this was the way Canon 2262 was enforced, though the canon referred to people who were excommunicated. Non-Catholic Christians are not usually personally guilty of the sin of separating themselves from the Church.
Again, non-Catholic monarchs would not normally have the Prayers for the Sovereign said for them at the end of Mass.
Today, the first rule does not apply. On the second, permission for this was given for England and Wales, dating back to 1789.
The rules on exactly what level of communicatio in sacris (sharing in sacred things with non-Catholics) gives rise to an unacceptable risk of religious indifferentism (the attitude that all religions are equally valid) have varied over time: it is a matter not of doctrine but of discipline.
There was certainly sense in the old rules: they emphasised the wall around the Church, and this wall, this solidarity, was part of why made the Catholic community cohesive, and therefore attractive to stay in or to join. The massive rates of lapsation, and the collapse of conversions, since the 1960s, are directly connected with the breakdown of the attitudes which the old rules articulated and reinforced. We cannot, however, improve the situation by pretending that the old rules are still in force. Building up the sense of community, the sense of difference between inside and out, and the sense of urgency about the conversion of non-Catholics, is essential to the renewal of the Church, but it can't be done by gestures which lack the context which makes them make sense either to Catholics or to those outside.
There are many things we can do instead to promote Catholic solidarity, and we in the Latin Mass Society are doing them. I hope you, dear reader, are doing them too: a concern with the Catholic content of children's education, and public witnesses of the Faith in pilgrimages and processions, are obvious examples.
Refusing to pray for Queen Elizabeth and King Charles today would look not just rude, but a failure to do what we can to give them our spiritual support, and to do so publicly. The importance of this for English Catholics in particular has been very acutely recognised by our predecessors in the Faith going back centuries, and we do well to place ourselves in the tradition they established.
Not only did they have Prayers for the Sovereign after the principal Mass on Sunday, but preceding the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 the Bishops of England and Wales ordered a triduum of Masses to be said for her. I have been sent a scan of a booklet for the final one of these Masses. It was a Votive Mass of St Augustine of Canterbury, followed by the Te Deum and the Prayer for the Sovereign. The booklet was clearly distributed all over the country, as it includes the variations on the orations used for St Augustine in certain dioceses. Special permission of course would also have been needed for a Mass in the evening, back in 1953; general permission for evening Masses didn't come until 1957.
Catholic dioceses, parishes, and organisations should all consider how best to support King Charles in prayer, particularly at the time of the Coronation. The Latin Mass Society, naturally, will be organising a Traditional Mass for this intention, as soon as the date is announced. On Monday a Requiem will be said for Queen Elizabeth in Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, in London; on the 'month's mind' of Her Majesty's death, Saturday 8th October, we will have an even more splendid Requiem Mass for her in St Mary Moorfields: full details to be announced.
This is the Preface of the booklet from 1953, by Cardinal Bernard Griffin, who died in 1956.
IN her broadcast message to her people last Christmas Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II asked us all to pray for her at the time of her Coronation. None of us can fully appreciate the immensity of the burdens which Her Majesty assumed on her accession to the throne but we c all lighten those burdens, not just by our loyalty and devotion, but most of all by our prayers that Almighty God may guide her in her appointed tasks.
In response to the Queen's request for our prayers, the Hierarchy of England and Wales has directed that the three days prior to the Coronation be observed by Catholics as a Triduum of Prayer that God may bless Her Majesty and her realms. Throughout these three days our people will pray earnestly for this great intention. Moreover, it is the Bishops' wish that the entire Catholic community in England and Wales be united in prayer for the Sovereign on the Eve of the Coronation itself. In every public Catholic church throughout the country Mass will be celebrated at 8 p.m. on the evening of 1st June, and this souvenir booklet provides the Order of Ceremonies which will be followed. The Mass will be the culmination of our Triduum. It will be the supreme moment at which the Catholics of England and Wales will be asking God's blessing upon our Queen. In the words of the prayer which we shall recite with such fervour that evening: God save Elizabeth our Queen, now by Thy mercy reigning over us. Adorn her yet more with every virtue. Remove all evil from her path.
+ BERNARD CARDINAL GRIFFIN
Archbishop of Westminster
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| Cardinal Bernard Griffin, centre |
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17/09/2022 - 10:00
Protestant Traditionalists: Letters in The Tablet
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| LMS Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham this year |
The Tablet no longer publishes my letters, which is an interesting development: they used to publish them pretty regularly. However, these two are interesting. They are the only letters published this week on this subject.
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Many of us will be pleased that Cardinal Arthur Roche, head of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, has come out critical of those who refuse to accept liturgical reforms as promulgated by Vatican II (“Roche asks whether traditionalists are still Catholic”, 3 September). However, I would question the way in which he demonises these dissenters as “Protestants”.
That same Vatican Council decided that after all Protestants are good people. And the analogy falls flat when you take account that Protestants concluded some centuries before Catholics that the vernacular was indeed the better language to celebrate the liturgy.
CHRIS LARKMAN LONDON SW20
I was sorry to hear Cardinal Roche’s judgement on Tridentine Mass-goers, as reported in The Tablet.
The Vatican Council was not legislation to impose on the faithful. It was more a path of renewal taken by all the bishops of the time, celebrants of the old Mass to a man. They re-engaged with Scripture, were opened up to the riches of Catholic tradition, were sensitive to the needs of the day and were led by the Holy Spirit.
Shouldn’t Rome be making sure that that path remains open to all, and not labelling our brothers and sisters in the faith as Protestants?
JIM SPENCER GILLINGHAM, KENT
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