Sweet are the uses of adversity

Joseph Shaw explains why the half-hearted attempt to get rid of us isn’t working

In this spring edition of Mass of Ages, as usual I would like to draw attention to the many events to come, especially in the summer, associated with the Society and the Latin Mass. While a few are still ‘to be confirmed’, it is not too soon to note in your diaries the St Catherine’s Trust Summer School for children (4-10 August), the Society’s Residential Latin Course (12-17 August), the Walsingham Pilgrimage (22-25 August), the Chideock Martyrs Pilgrimage (14 September), the annual Mass at Snave in Kent (14 September), the Oxford Pilgrimage (19 October), and the Bedford Mass of Reparation for Abortion (9 November). This MassofAges may be too late for the Guild of St Clare’s spring Sewing Retreat (16-18 February), but you can always book the autumn one (8-10 November), and come along to the Guild’s many regular one-day events in London and around the country, often paired with server training organised by the Society of St Tarcisius. (For all these events, see the Year Planner and the website.)

Of particular note is the Society’s Annual General Meeting and High Mass. We are not being allowed to have our annual Masses, for the AGM or the Annual Requiem, in Westminster Cathedral, as we have since 1972. This mustn’t get us down; it is an opportunity to try something new. Accordingly, the AGM this year will take place in the Birmingham Oratory on Saturday 29th June, the feast of SS Peter & Paul (in the Novus Ordo the feast will be moved to Sunday this year). We will combine the AGM with a pilgrimage in honour of St John Henry Newman, whose shrine is in that magnificent church. We are very grateful to the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory for their hospitality.

Some doors have been closed to us, but we have a lot to be grateful for, and so many things are going on that we have serious need of more volunteers to help us. If you live in London and have time on your hands, please consider volunteering in the Office. Around the country, we have spaces to fill in our network of Local Representatives. For this year’s Walsingham Pilgrimage we need, in particular, people who can drive vans and other vehicles, assemble large tents, clean, and help with food preparation. So large is the volunteer team becoming, in fact, that we would like it to have its own chaplain: if there is a priest who would like to associate himself spiritually with a 56-mile walking pilgrimage while travelling by car, please get in touch. We need chaplains and marshals for the walking pilgrims too, of course, and the more the merrier.

'Dear Mother used to say "Only over my dead body".

From Cracks in the Clouds by Hubert van Zeller, erstwhile Brother Choleric, 1976.

Last year’s pilgrimage had just over 200 people signed up, well over double what we had in the era before Traditionis custodes.

The movement for the Traditional Mass, not for the first time, is being tested in the furnace of persecution. It is not a severe persecution, but in a world increasingly both ignorant about and unfriendly towards the Faith, it is painful to find our own community, our own spiritual home, turning us out.

Where there should be some refuge and refreshment, we find, if not hostility, then a kind of embarrassment about us.

The half-hearted attempt to get rid of us isn’t working, however. By all sorts of measures the movement, and the Latin Mass Society as well, is stronger than ever. Just as we are no longer able to publish the Mass listings as part of this magazine— members receive them as hard copy and can also access them on the website—so we are unable to report many items of good news, from this country and abroad, that we are hearing, lest they attract unwanted attention. Progress is being made by the Traditional Priestly Institutes; there is good news from Traditional religious communities; there are positive developments in parishes.

The current situation of official semisuppression is unworkable, ludicrous, and counter-productive. It is also, inevitably, temporary. When it ends, we are going to be busier than ever. Will you be ready?

This issue’s cartoon reflects a very different era. Today the older generation is not holding back the tide of liberalism, but the tide of restoration.