The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals: The Petitions to Save the Ancient Mass from 1966 to 2007

With contributions from Fr Gabriel-Díaz, Erik Tonning, Sebastian Morello, Philip Maxence, Leo Darroch, Matthew Schellhorn and Joseph Shaw.

What do Evelyn Waugh, Lanzo Del Vasto, Nancy Mitford, F.R. Leavis, Agatha Christie, Yehudi Menuhin, René Girard, Franco Zefferelli, Stephen Hough, and Prof Jonathan Riley-Smith have in common? Along with scores of others—artists, musicians, scholars, writers, actors, politicians, business people, and others—they signed public petitions to save the Catholic Church’s ancient Latin liturgy, between 1966 and 2007.

This is the story of how so many men and women of culture, some Catholic, many not, came to the defence of the world’s greatest monument to the human spirit—the immemorial Latin Mass—and of the music, art, and spiritual tradition which it comprises and inspires.

As the 1971 petition stated, “Educated people are in the vanguard where recognition of the value of tradition in concerned, and are the first to raise the alarm when it is threatened.…They wish to call to the attention of the Holy See, the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the Traditional Mass to survive.” Numerous petition signers were not Catholics, “which only makes their testimony more impressive,” as Martin Mosebach notes in the foreword. “For their participation in this great action proved how deeply the ritual of the Mass of the Roman Church had become rooted in the general consciousness.”