Chairman’s Message – Joseph Shaw on coping with the pandemic

A concern for truth

Joseph Shaw on coping with the pandemic

As one lockdown follows another, it has become impossible to say when our regular events will recommence. We hope to move the date of the Priest’s Training Conference, originally planned for the spring of 2020, for a third time, into this summer. If it does turn out to be possible to have residential events by then, we will also have the St Catherine’s Trust Summer School (1-7 August), the Residential Latin Course (16-21 August), and the Walsingham Pilgrimage (26-29 August). If we can’t have these events, then we won’t, and they will have to skip a second year.

The Latin Mass Society has been adapting to make the most of the onlinefocused possibilities which remain to us. At the time of writing, we have released six ‘Iota Unum’ Podcasts, and have begun recording a second season: search for ‘Latin Mass Society’ on podcast providers such as Spotify. The Society has been sponsoring the participation of seminarians and clergy in online Latin courses led by Matthew Spencer, which are ongoing (there are details in this issue’s Classified Advertisements). New videos are also planned. The Society’s shop, which has always been online, had a good Christmas and continues to operate reasonably normally.

We have also done our best to have music in the Masses which are taking place, for the benefit not only of the congregation but of people watching the live-stream. In doing so we have had to follow the twists and turns of the regulations.

Our Director of Music in London, Matthew Schellhorn, has done his best to maintain continuity with the London training schola, the Houghton Schola, with online training and online sung Compline.

The Guild of St Clare, our affiliated group of needleworkers which makes and repairs vestments, has been hit hard by the cancellation of last autumn’s Sewing Retreat; this spring’s retreat will clearly go the same way, though booking is open for the autumn Sewing Retreat (see Classified Advertisements). What they have done is to complete a major project which is noted in this edition of Mass of Ages: a set of faldstool covers for Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane (see pages 10-11). The Guild is also inviting applicants for its sponsorship of the Royal School of Needlework Certificate Course (details onpage 43).

Overall, I’m not sure whether we will all emerge from this prolonged hibernation desperate to get back to our normal activities, or depressed, worn down, and lethargic. In either case we must make the effort, when the time comes, to spring back as vigorously as possible, for our own sakes as well as for the sake of the good works we hope to do. We are making plans for this, despite not knowing when restrictions will be lifted, or how. Otherwise, we are thrown back on the question of how to use the time until then as productively as possible.

I have felt extremely fortunate in living my ‘lockdown’ in the bosom of a large family in a comfortable home, but there’s no getting away from what we are losing in terms of human contact. There are ways to mitigate this. I have taken part in two of Matthew Spencer’s Latin courses, and I have started offering some online philosophy seminars myself to all comers, on the early Platonic dialogues, with a view to staying sane as much as anything. Sometimes it is useful to get away from the application of principles to the latest crisis or scandal, and go back to the basics of those principles themselves.

At the very bottom of these principles is a concern for the truth, exemplified with such persistence and wit by Socrates. Only a culture which cares about truth will be open to the message of the Man who is Truth, and it seems increasingly as though our own society has lost interest in truth, preferring the language of feelings.

As we mark the melancholy anniversary of the start of the Coronavirus epidemic, don’t forget to pray, to do penance, to read, to talk—and to talk not only about viruses and conspiracies. We must be prepared, when this is over, to give an account to God of the use we have made of that precious gift: of time.