Letters to the Editor

Readers have their say

In praise of wine

I just wanted to write to say how much I am enjoying your new wine column.

Lovely though it is to have a magazine devoted to news and features all about the Traditional Mass, it is also rather nice - especially if you are a wine buff like me! – to have an occasional article not immediately or obviously connected to the magazine’s main focus.

I also rather liked the way Mr Morello gives us a little autobiography, especially in his summer account of claret, and the way he emphasises that good wine, rather like good books, can be a consolation in difficult times; and who can doubt that recent times have been very difficult indeed, and especially for the life of the church.

John Kelly, London

Northern record

Alberto Carosa’s article on ‘the first outpost of traditionalism’ in northern Sweden (summer Mass of Ages) was truly inspiring.

During the lockdown, excluded as we were from the joy of attending Mass properly, it was such a treat to read that even in Lapland the Traditional Mass is making inroads, however small. I’m sure he is right too when he says this must be the world’s most northern outpost of Traditionalism.

I also wanted to praise Clare Bowskill for her article in the same magazine on live-streamed Masses. I’m sure she is right and that streamed Masses will have given many Catholics their first taste of the Old Rite; I am continually surprised at the number of Catholics I meet who are hardly aware that the Traditional Mass is still celebrated at all. They go through the motions of attending Mass – I mean the Novus Ordo - and unless they are old enough, like me, to remember when the Traditional Mass was the only Mass, they have no idea what they are missing.

Live-streaming may, if we are lucky, actually increase interest in and attendance at, the Old Rite Masses. Thus, will some good perhaps come from the great evil of this terrible virus.

Angela Bates, Liverpool

Catholic stonemason

Paul Waddington’s excellent article on the Cathedral Church of St John the Baptist in Norwich, (Summer Mass of Ages ) reminded me – as I spent the lockdown weeks rereading favourite old books – how much we owe the Victorian builders who gave us so many of the beautiful churches in which today we are lucky enough to be able to attend Mass.

One of my distant ancestors was a stonemason who worked on the Cathedral Church in Norwich and family lore has it that he was so devout that he refused to be paid overtime for his work and was often to be found working long after most of the other stonemasons had gone home.

The Cathedral Church of St John the Baptist in Norwich

He worked at many other churches during the great Church building and re-building boom of the late nineteenth century and I often wonder today as I visit churches round the country if I am looking at some of his work.

Of course, I will never know for sure, but I know he will have put his all into his work, for he came from a long line of devout Irish Catholics who would lose anything rather than their Catholic faith.

Anne Wilson, Via email

Letters should be addressed to: The Editor, Mass of Ages, 11-13 Macklin Street, London WC2B 5NH email editor@lms.org.uk Letters may be edited for reasons of space