The Faith has been riven

Joseph Shaw on the mission of the LMS and this magazine

Welcome to the 200th issue of Mass of Ages ! Long-term readers will remember the LMS Newsletter which preceded it, as I do myself, which served the Society from its foundation until twenty-five years ago. We owe a debt of gratitude to our former General Manager and Editor, John Medlin, for establishing a periodical with the aspiration to showcase the work of the Society to members and non-members alike, and also to Mike Lord, a later General Manager, for master-minding its transition to full colour.

Some people might imagine that the Latin Mass Society’s supporters would have a narrow range of interests, but in fact we are interested in pretty well everything: the liturgy, of course, but art, music, philosophy, literature, history, and more. It is the breadth, rather than the narrowness, of our readers’ interests which, presents a problem—a good problem, for a change—of which to focus on in the magazine.

In the same way, we are sometimes accused of having a simplistic and short-term view of the crisis of the Church: that it was entirely caused by the liturgical changes following the Second Vatican Council. On the contrary, in my experience it is liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics who are most inclined to trace the problems of today to the Council. Both groups admit that there were problems before then, but both appear to think those problems would have been solved by the Council, if only it had been implemented correctly. One might call this thesis ‘the magic bullet which misfired’.

Many Catholics today find the history of the Church, before 1960, and the lives of the saints, difficult, because they are all about a Church which they don’t recognise, or like. The Church of the past was populated by people who actually believed in heaven, hell, and purgatory, sin and grace, in indulgences, sacramentals, crusades, and the temporal power of the Pope. History and its lessons can be neglected by those who find the whole thing distasteful, just as can, for the same reason, the liturgy, music, and art of the past.

It is left to Traditional Catholics to see the importance of the heresies of Jansenism, Josephism, Modernism, and Americanism, the errors they propagated, the limitations of those who opposed them, and the scars the resulting battles left on the Church. Considering these phenomena of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, along with Protestantism lying behind them, we can see what they have in common, and in what ways their errors evolved over time. The contempt for popular piety, the fear and loathing of the mysterious, the shrinking away from the supernatural, the embarrassed shuffle out of the public square: these things, so familiar today, have deep roots. They are what John Henry Newman referred to when he said he had devoted his life to the opposition of liberalism in religion. They were opposed with equal vigour by all the intellectuals, saints, and holy Popes of those centuries. We can learn much from their analyses of the problem, their methods, their successes, and their failures, as well as from their liturgical and artistic responses to these challenges.

Those Catholics today who, if pressed, might easily conclude that the Americanists were basically correct, and that Pius X’s opposition to Modernism was thoroughly misguided, don’t just suffer from a myopic view of history. It is impossible for them to understand what is going on today except in an absurdly superficial way: as being about power, personalities, or some kind of tribalism. Why is the Church in crisis? Why has the number of worshipping Catholics collapsed in the West? Why are priest numbers about to fall off a cliff? Why are we witnessing the opposition of bishop against bishop, Cardinal against Cardinal, and even Pope against Pope, in a way we have not since the Arian crisis fifteen centuries ago?

The answer is complex, but it comes down to this: the Faith has been riven, from top to bottom, from the highest in the Curia to the old ladies sweeping church floors. The unity of belief among practising Catholics has gone.

The ancient Mass we value—not just the Sacrament of the Eucharist, but the venerable texts and ceremonies—is not just a nice thing. It is the ultimate expression of this Faith: the unchangeable teaching of the Church. The aesthetic aspects of the liturgy, the poetry, the music, the vestments and architecture, in which we take such consolation, are not merely decorative. They are artistic meditations on the Faith, elaborations and expressions and applications of it. For those opposed to the Faith, all of this must be destroyed. For those who wish to uphold the Faith, all of this must be, in the words of Vatican II, preserved and fostered in every way (‘summa cura servetur et foveatur’). That is the mission of the Latin Mass Society, and of this magazine.

Here’s to another 200 editions!

Some time after the Second Vatican Council they went over from the Book of Hours to the Book of Minutes.

From Dom Hubert van Zeller OSB (aka Br Choleric) Cracks in the Clouds 1976