FEATURE
A Positive Future Christopher Akehurst on the Tridentine Mass in Australia
© St John Henry Newman Parish, Melbourne
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© St John Henry Newman Parish, Melbourne
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f the intention of Traditionis Custodes was to make the Tridentine Mass all but inaccessible to ordinary Catholics, it has so far not succeeded in Australia. Of the sixty-five Masses regularly celebrated before the motu proprio, most have continued, and congregations are undiminished – or, if anything, larger. A few Masses were discontinued, one at least because the priest went overseas and several because of bishops applying the letter of the new law with regard to the use of parish churches, but there has been nothing like the purge of Old Masses seen in, especially, a few American dioceses. Nevertheless, Tridentine Masses in Australia continue to be celebrated in parish churches, and two in cathedrals, Melbourne’s great St Patrick’s, the largest cathedral in Australia, and the similarly vast St Mary’s Basilica in Sydney, both Gothic Revival masterpieces. The Archdiocese of Melbourne, being neither liberal nor conservative in complexion, is a good place to test the health of the Old Mass in Australia. Melbourne has a nominal Catholic population of just over a million, of whom, the Archbishop estimates,
Solemn Mass at St Aloysius’, Caulfield, in the Archdiocese of Melbourne
between 900 and 1,000 attend the Tridentine Masses celebrated weekly in eight places in the archdiocese. Personal observation suggests that this might be an underestimate of at least a hundred. The principal centre for the usus antiquior in Melbourne, St Aloysius’ in Caulfield, a soaring Gothic Revival church once almost empty in
a parish where the demographic tide had reduced the Catholic population to a fraction of its former size, is thriving again. It is under the patronage of St John Henry Newman and is a personal parish, of the kind that Traditionis Custodes stipulates no more are to be established – and indeed you can see why, given that such places are anything but congenial to those who oppose the survival and diffusion of the Old Mass. With its attendance and activities under its energetic pastor, Fr Glenn Tattersall, St Aloysius’ has the vitality and air of a Catholic parish of the 1950s; it has a sense of devotion and purpose that puts the somewhat flaccid spirituality of many of the ‘Vatican II’ parishes in the archdiocese in the shade. Outside Melbourne, the Tridentine Mass is attended by sizeable congregations in three places in the state of Victoria. Many of these people travel long distances to get there. In one, a hundred people regularly turn up to Mass in a tiny country town. In another, the Bishop, not known as a traditionalist, has made a country church available to a Latin Mass community, which has taken
SPRING 2024
