Mass of Ages Spring 2022

Mass of Ages The quarterly magazine of the Latin Mass Society

Issue 211 – Spring 2022 – FREE

World reactions to Responsa ad dubia Two performances of Modernist Christian art The Catholic Police Guild Requiem Mass Plus: news, views, Mass listings and nationwide reports

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Contents

CONTENTS

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Chairman’s Message Demand for the Traditional Mass will increase, says Joseph Shaw

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LMS Year Planner – Notable events

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Liturgical calendar

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Profoundly Christian Joseph Shaw on two performances of Modernist Christian art: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio

10 Little Maggie Alan Frost on the life of Blessed Margaret of Castello who was canonized last year 12 The Catholic Police Guild Requiem Mass 13 Roman report: Promoting liturgical peace Diane Montagna on listening to the bishops 14 Architecture St Mary’s, Chislehurst Paul Waddington looks at a church with a fascinating history

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16 Reports from around the country What’s happening where you are 26 Sad Closure Fr Christopher Basden remembers St John’s Seminary, Wonersh, and one of its great characters, Fr Freddy Broomfield

28 Family matters James Preece looks at Vatican II “Inventions” 29 World News Paul Waddington reports on reactions to Responsa ad dubia 30 Art and devotion Caroline Farey on a painting by Guido da Siena from the 1270s 32 Rebuilding the Faith Jeremy Boot on the Catholic Revival in England in the 19th Century

34 Mass listings 40 A fundamentally Catholic work Charles A. Coulombe on J.R.R Tolkien’s deep commitment to the Faith

42 Daughter of a king Mary O’Regan on the martyrdom of St Philomena 43 Wine On the shores of Lake Garda…

Sebastian Morello on Traditional Catholics, and the wines of Lugana

44 Press return Robert Asch on the St Austin Press, Britain’s premier traditional Catholic publishing house 46 Crossword 46 Classified advertisements Fr Gabriel Diaz celebrating Missa Cantata on the feast of St Cecelia in the Shrine Church of Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, London. © Joseph Shaw

The Latin Mass Society 11-13 Macklin Street, London WC2B 5NH Tel: 020 7404 7284 editor@lms.org.uk Mass of Ages No. 211 Due to the considerable volume of emails and letters received at Mass of Ages it is regrettably not always possible to reply to all correspondents.

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40 PATRONS: Sir Adrian Fitzgerald, Bt; Rt Hon. Lord Gill; Sir James Macmillan, CBE; Lord Moore of Etchingham; Prof. Thomas Pink.

COMMITTEE: Dr Joseph Shaw – Chairman; Kevin Jones – Secretary; David Forster – Treasurer; Roger Wemyss Brooks – Vice President; Paul Waddington – Vice President; Alisa Kunitz-Dick; Antonia Robinson; Nicholas Ross; Alastair Tocher; Neil Addison.

Registered UK Charity No. 248388

MASS OF AGES: Editor: Tom Quinn Design: GADS Ltd Printers: Cambrian DISCLAIMER: Please note that the views expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the Latin Mass Society or the Editorial Board. Great care is taken to credit photographs and seek permission before publishing, though this is not always possible. If you have a query regarding copyright, please contact the Editor. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission.

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CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE

A question of meaning Demand for the Traditional Mass will increase, says Joseph Shaw

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he Summer 2021 edition of Mass of Ages was dominated by Traditionis Custodes. The Holy See has now provided us with another document, the Congregation for Divine Worship’s Responsa ad Dubia, the ‘dubia’ being questions about the meaning of Traditionis Custodes.

The consequences of Traditionis Custodes have not been anything like as shattering as many first imagined they would be. Without minimising the further restrictions on the Traditional Mass the Responsa has stimulated in some countries, it seems destined to have still less effect. I don’t think it necessary to re-print the Latin Mass Society’s careful Canonical Guidance on the Responsa in Mass of Ages: it is available on the website. It suffices to say that where the Responsa go beyond Traditionis Custodes, they go beyond what the Congregation for Divine Worship has the authority to determine as a matter of law.

The Tablet reports on our Canonical Guidance, quoting two individuals to criticise it. Both admit, in effect, that the Responsa do not have legal force, but add that they show ‘where Rome stands’. So be it. But since we have just experienced a 180 degree change in ‘where Rome stands’ on the subject of the Traditional Mass, it seems fair enough for bishops and priests to give their first attention to what the Church’s law actually requires.

Things were very different in the 1960s. I have been reading a proofcopy of Fr Bryan Houghton’s excellent Unwanted Priest, autobiography, written in 1990 but only now to be published in English: it should come out in February. As Fr Houghton explains, Masses started being said in the vernacular long before permission was given in 1964, and after 1964 Mass in Latin immediately almost completely disappeared. Cardinal Heenan, in fact, insisted that parishes

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"I wonder if you can tell me the meaning of 'collegiality?' " From Cracks in the Curia by Br Choleric (Hubert van Zeller) 1972.

in the Archdiocese of Westminster put on one Latin Mass each Sunday, but this only lasted a few years. This was despite the fact that many priests opposed the changes. Nevertheless, there was a sense that this was the way things were going, the path of least resistance, or what one would not be criticised for doing, and the changes were accelerated and amplified by the people on the ground. The same thing happened with Communion in the Hand, and then Altar Girls: a mere permission, allowing something already being done illicitly, turned in practice into an almost universal rule.

We are living in a different era today. Rome’s invitation to bishops to stifle the Traditional Mass has not been taken up with a great deal of enthusiasm. A follow-up document which tries to make the invitation sound more forceful is not going to make much difference. There is very little pent-up desire to get rid of the ancient Mass. Pent-up demand will now start building up in the other direction. When the wind turns again, as it inevitably will, there will be a rush of priests and bishops responding to official encouragement, as there was in 2007 to Summorum Pontificum.

There are many precedents for reversals of official policy. Papal policy on the Franciscans’ understanding of poverty veered in different directions in 1279, 1312, and 1322. The decidedly untraditional Breviary of Quiñonez was imposed on the secular clergy in 1535, and supressed in 1568. Rituals honouring ancestors were permitted to Chinese Catholics in 1656, banned in 1704, and permitted again in 1939.

These controversies caused great harm—various Franciscans were burnt for heresy, and the Church in China was persecuted—but they do not impinge on the Church’s infallibility.

To live through such times, Catholics have to keep a firm grip on common sense, giving the law of the Church its due, while recognising its limitations.

It is thanks to Providence that the Church’s ancient liturgical tradition has never ceased to be celebrated, in public, with the permission of ecclesiastical authorities. From 1971 until 1984 such celebrations were unique to England and Wales; since 1984 they have been world-wide. As readers can see from our Mass listings, despite all difficulties the Traditional Mass remains widely available in this country. Let us resolve, in 2022, to make the best possible spiritual use of these Masses and associated events, and to pray for those priests and bishops who have made them possible.

Postscript I encourage readers to take part in the Synod on Synodality currently underway. Without placing exaggerated hopes on the outcome, at this critical moment in the Church’s history the voice of Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass needs to be heard. It may not be, but let us not make this a forgone conclusion by declining the invitation to speak. A guide to how to take part can be found on the LMS website.

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YEAR PLANNER

LMS Year Planner – Notable Events At the time of going to press the following events are planned.

Iota Unum Talk Friday 25 February. The next in our series of talks, which focus on topics connected with the everyday life of traditionally-minded Catholics, takes place in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London. The speaker will be Theo Howard on ‘The Dominicans and the English Parliament’. Doors open at 6:30pm for the talk at 7pm; entrance via Golden Square.

St Tarcisius Server Training Day and Guild of St Clare Vestment Mending Saturday 26 February. St Mary Moorfields, Eldon Street, London EC2M 7LS at 10.30am. Men and boys will be able to learn all roles for Low Mass and Sung Mass, and High Mass if there is demand. Booking is required, see our website for details.

Guild of St Clare One Day Course Saturday 19 March. The Guild of St Clare is collaborating with the Royal School of Needlework to provide a special one day course, making a quarter-scale Roman Chasuble at Hampton Court Palace. For more information please email Lucy on lucyashaw@gmail.com or book via our website.

Iota Unum Talk Friday 25 March, in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London. The speaker will be Pierpaolo Finaldi on 'The vocation of the Catholic author’. Doors open at 6:30pm for the talk at 7pm; entrance via Golden Square.

St Tarcisius Server Training Day and Guild of St Clare Vestment Mending Saturday 2 April. St Dominic's Priory, Southampton Road, London NW5 4LB at 10.30am. Men and boys will be able to learn all roles for Low Mass and Sung Mass, and High Mass if there is demand. Booking is required, see our website for details.

Iota Unum Talk Friday 29 April, in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London. The speaker will be David Hunt on ‘The perennial sin of Usury’. Doors open at 6:30pm for the talk at 7pm; entrance via Golden Square.

St Tarcisius Server Training Day and Guild of St Clare Vestment Mending Saturday 21 May. St Mary Moorfields, Eldon Street, London EC2M 7LS at 10.30am. Men and boys will be able to learn all roles for Low Mass and Sung Mass, and High Mass if there is demand. Booking is required, see our website for details.

Iota Unum Talk Friday 27 May, in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London. The speaker will be Dr Jeremy Pilch on ‘St John Henry Newman and Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces’. Doors open at 6:30pm for the talk at 7pm; entrance via Golden Square.

LOOKING AHEAD Residential Latin and Greek Course 2022 8 - 15 August.

Park Place, Wickham, Fareham PO17 5HA. Annual Walking Pilgrimage from Ely to Walsingham 25 – 28 August. Pilgrimage to West Grinstead Monday 29th August.

Details, and where appropriate booking facilities, of all events can be found on our website.

NEWS Write for us!

If you enjoy reading Mass of Ages and feel there is an article you would like to write for us do let us know.

In the first instance contact the Editor with an outline of your proposed article letting us know why you are the person to write it and with details of any photographs or illustrations you are able to supply.

Contact our Editor Tom Quinn at editor@lms.org.uk

FACTFILE Details of all our events can be found on our website, together with booking and payment facilities where applicable. Go to lms.org.uk

Please pray for the souls of all members who have died recently Requiescant in Pace

Br John Aspinwall James (Walter) Atkinson Bernard Davidson Ernest Eyes Gerard Felix Bryan Finnigan Winefride Johnson Joseph Santos (Priest) Every effort is made to ensure that this list is accurate and up-to-date. However, if you know of a recently deceased member whose name has not, so far, appeared on our prayer memorial, then please contact the LMS, see page 3 for contact details.

The LMS relies heavily on legacies to support its income. We are very grateful to the following who remembered the Society in their Will: John Kim

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LITURGICAL CALENDAR

Liturgical calendar FEBRUARY SUN 13 14 MON TUE 15 WED 16 THU 17 FRI 18 19 SAT SUN 20 MON 21 TUE 22 WED 23 THU 24 FRI 25 SAT 26 SUN 27 MON 28

SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY II CL V FERIA IV CL V FERIA IV CL V FERIA IV CL V FERIA IV CL V FERIA IV CL V CELEBRATION OF THE BVM IV CL W SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY II CL V FERIA IV CL V THE CHAIR OF ST PETER AP II CL W ST PETER DAMIAN B C D III CL W ST MATTHIAS AP II CL R FERIA IV CL V CELEBRATION OF THE BVM IV CL W QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY II CL V FERIA IV CL V

MARCH TUE 1 WED 2 THU 3 4 FRI SAT 5 SUN 6 MON 7 8 TUE WED 9 THU 10 FRI 11 SAT 12 SUN 13 MON 14 TUE 15 WED 16 THU 17 FRI 18 SAT 19

SUN 20 MON 21 TUE 22 WED 23 THU 24 FRI 25 SAT 26 SUN 27 MON 28 TUE 29 WED 30 THU 31

FERIA IV CL V IN WALES ST DAVID B C I CL W ASH WEDNESDAY I CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V 1ST SUNDAY IN LENT I CL V ST THOMAS AQUINAS C D III CL (PRIV.) W FERIA III CL V EMBER WEDNESDAY OF LENT II CL V FERIA III CL V EMBER FRIDAY OF LENT II CL V EMBER SATURDAY OF LENT II CL V 2ND SUNDAY IN LENT I CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V ST JOSEPH SPOUSE OF THE BVM C, PATRON OF THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH I CL W 3RD SUNDAY IN LENT I CL V ST BENEDICT AB III CL (PRIV.) W FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V ST GABRIEL ARCHANGEL III CL (PRIV.) W THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE BVM I CL W FERIA III CL V 4TH SUNDAY IN LENT I CL V/ROSE FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V

APRIL FRI SAT SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI

FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V PASSION SUNDAY I CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V FERIA III CL V PALM SUNDAY I CL R MONDAY OF HOLY WEEK I CL V TUESDAY OF HOLY WEEK I CL V WEDNESDAY OF HOLY WEEK I CL V MAUNDY THURSDAY I CL W GOOD FRIDAY I CL B/V

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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SAT SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

HOLY SATURDAY I CL V EASTER I CL W EASTER MONDAY I CL W EASTER TUESDAY I CL W EASTER WEDNESDAY I CL W EASTER THURSDAY I CL W EASTER FRIDAY I CL W EASTER SATURDAY (SABBATO IN ALBIS) I CL W LOW SUNDAY I CL W ST MARK EVANGELIST II CL R ST CLETUS & MARCELLINUS PP MM III CL R ST PETER CANISIUS C D III CL W ST PAUL OF THE CROSS C III CL W ST PETER M III CL R ST CATHERINE OF SIENNA V III CL (PRIV.) W

MAY 1 SUN

MON 2 TUE 3 WED 4 5 THU FRI 6 SAT 7 SUN 8 MON 9 TUE 10 WED 11 THU 12

13 FRI SAT 14

ST JOSEPH THE WORKER, SPOUSE OF THE BVM C I CL W ST ATHANASIUS B C D III CL (PRIV.) W FERIA IV CL W ST MONICA W III CL (PRIV.) W ST PIUS V P C III CL (PRIV.) W FERIA IV CL W ST STANISLAUS B M III CL R 3RD SUNDAY AFTER EASTER II CL W ST GREGORY NAZIANZEN B C D III CL (PRIV.) W ST ANTONINUS B C III CL W SS PHILIP & JAMES APP II CL R ACHILLEUS, DOMITILLA V, & PANCRAS MM III CL R ST ROBERT BELLARMINE B C D III CL W CELEBRATION OF THE BVM IV CL W

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FEATURE

Profoundly Christian Joseph Shaw on two performances of Modernist Christian art: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio

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n December I was privileged to see performed two great works of Christian culture, both earning standing ovations. One was the recital, by the veteran actor Ralph Fiennes (familiar to some as ‘M’ in the most recent James Bond films), of T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, the poem series, Four Quartets. The other was the UK premier of a new composition, Christmas Oratorio, by the Catholic composer Sir James MacMillan.

Four Quartets is the greatest achievement of the greatest modern poet of the English language. Eliot was a modernist poet, in the sense that most of his poetry does not rhyme and scan like that of Shakespeare or Coleridge.

He was of course perfectly able to do old-fashioned poetry, and in one of the great ironies of literature, eventually made his widow a rich woman with his whimsical children’s poems about cats, set to music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

But as he explains in Four Quartets, he felt he could not express himself adequately within the limitations of the old conventions. After a bombastic passage, he tells us: That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.

One way of understanding the problem, the impetus for art always to break out of old conventions and to develop new forms, is the need to maintain the effect on the audience of doing something a little unexpected.

Thus, Shakespeare made his own the quite new convention of the iambic pentameter. In the late plays he broke the rules to convey (for example) in an extraordinarily vivid way, the growing madness of the jealous King Leontes in A Winter’s Tale. To have the same

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Four Quartets is, indeed, a profoundly Christian poem. Eliot perceived the problem of modernity—as expressed in The Wasteland—and came to accept not just Christianity, but the traditionalism of High Anglicanism. Some of his modernist artist friends were appalled to read these lines, which refer to Jesus Christ:

T.S. Eliot in a photograph taken by his friend Lady Ottoline Morrell. The Christian message of Eliot’s Four Quartets is profound

effect, later writers would have to break the rule even more, but do this too much and the expectations created by the rules disappear: it would no longer sound mad. In this sense the old forms are ‘worn out’. Eliot comments: …every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.

Modernism in art can mean the antitraditionalism of avant-garde artists who want to shock us simply to get attention, or wish to subvert, ridicule, and destroy artistic forms which have been used in the past to express values they reject.

What Eliot does is, rather, to develop the poetic tradition, and his work is characterised both by economy of effort and the establishment of new forms and conventions. Modern poetry, not all of it bad, is deeply indebted to what Eliot was doing a hundred years ago. Eliot’s new paradigm has stood the test of time.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

It was pretty amazing to hear them spoken by one of our leading actors, the Catholic (I believe) Ralph Fiennes, in a small but fashionable London theatre.

Fiennes was brilliant and accompanied by all the subtle effects of lighting and stagecraft.

The poems are about time and memory and set (and written) in part during the London Blitz. Eliot makes an extraordinary analogy between the bombs which brought destruction to the city, and the Holy Ghost: The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed from fire by fire.

For all the brilliance of Fiennes’ performance, however, I detected a certain embarrassment about the Christian nature of the work. The programme did not deny it, but placed the focus elsewhere: for instance, on Eliot’s interest in Eastern mysticism, which he studied at university.

Again, there was something a little strange about the way Fiennes recited the two most explicitly Christian passages, of which I have quoted parts above. The first he spoke sitting, in front of an old-

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FEATURE

fashioned microphone, as if making a radio broadcast, with his voice oddly amplified. The second he spoke woodenly, standing to attention on the edge of the stage. I wondered if the suggestion was that these passages were meant for show, that they were not the authentic, core message of the work.

No such ambiguity was to be found with Sir James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio, commissioned and performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the South Bank. The Oratorio sets to music passages of Milton, the recusant Catholic poet St Robert Southwell, a Scottish lullaby, the Preface of St John’s Gospel, and Latin liturgical texts.

Like Eliot, MacMillan seeks to express a traditional Christian faith—he is, indeed, a Patron of the Latin Mass Society— through art which is ‘modernist’ in terms

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of its style. Like Eliot he understands and makes use of traditional forms, but also goes beyond them, and breathes new life into them, with modern forms and conventions: in Eliot’s words, ‘an easy commerce of the old and the new’.

I do not have the technical knowledge or vocabulary to express exactly what MacMillan does and how, but his mastery of modern techniques is undisputed.

These can be used to express a hatred for traditional music and for the values that music so often expressed, but musical forms are a language, and can be used to say other things as well. Nevertheless, there is a problem: modern composers, like modern architects, often seem to struggle with beauty, either because they associate it with sentimental art or ‘old hat’ styles, or because they reject the values which lie behind beauty: because they

© Hans van der Woerd

think that, ultimately, the world is ugly, and to deny this as an artist is to tell a lie.

This problem is made worse by the Church’s use of bad art. By this I do not mean popular or genuine folk art, but sentimental or incompetent art. Since art is the expression of values, sentimental religious and devotional art expresses a sentimental spirituality: an emotionally manipulative, and ultimately abusive, spirituality. Incompetent art, art which revels in incompetence and makes a virtue of it, expresses a religious attitude of contempt for spiritual things.

It is MacMillan’s achievement to show that music can be beautiful and at the same time have artistic integrity: it can be fine, intelligent, serious, profound. By operating at the sweet spot of artistic endeavour— without straying into the predictable on one side, or the incomprehensible on the other—MacMillan gives this message the greatest possible power for today’s critics and audiences. He makes the message of the art, the Christian message, luminous, attractive, and accessible to those who might otherwise think that it is artistically inauthentic and, by implication, morally and spiritually inauthentic and mendacious.

These great artistic achievements, of MacMillan and of T.S. Eliot, demonstrate that the Christian message is still inspiring the greatest artists and performers of our time, and can move our largely pagan contemporaries profoundly. As a cultural force, Christianity still has life in it.

Sir James MacMillan: his Christmas Oratorio expresses a traditional Christian faith through art which is modernist in terms of its style

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FEATURE

Little Maggie Alan Frost on the life of Blessed Margaret of Castello who was canonized last year

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ittle Maggie is an affectionate reference, because of her stature, to a girl born into an aristocratic family in central Italy more than seven hundred years ago. She led an inspirational life of sanctity that would lead to her being beatified as Blessed Margaret of Castello in 1607, and, finally, canonised as St Margaret on 24 April 2021.

Though unknown to most Catholics for centuries, in more recent times she has become increasingly seen as a champion of the disabled and unwanted.

Numerous churches have shrines to her, notably St Patrick’s in Columbus, Ohio and she is also identified as a patron by pro-life groups in the USA and elsewhere.

Though a ‘new’ Saint, Margaret of Castello was born back in 1287, in Metola in Italy. She was the daughter of prominent local figures: the castle owner and Captain of the army, Lord Parisio and

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his wife Lady Emilia. They were far from pleased, however, on discovering their newborn daughter was clearly seriously disabled. The blow to the prestige of the father was such that the baby was sent to be baptised secretly, and as she had not even been given a name, ‘Margaret’ was chosen, after the servant sent with the baby for the ceremony.

For the next six years Margaret lived in the vaults and recesses of the castle, attended to by servants, but hidden. Her one regular visitor was the castle priest, who instructed her. Having an excellent memory, she came to learn the Mass, prayers, the Psalms, pieces of scripture, teachings of the early Church Fathers and lives of the Saints. She had a precocious love of Christ and a deep sense of how He had been rejected by His own people. Though they rarely came to see her, she bore no grudges against her parents, even when

her father had her moved to an annex built next to an out-of-the way church, fearing she might be seen in the castle by visitors.

As she grew into a teenager, through the continual friendship and guidance of her padre, who described her mind as ‘luminous’, she came to understand that it was not her body that mattered so much as her soul. Spending each day mostly in learning, prayer, and contemplation, she endured more than twelve years in her confinement.

When she was in her late teens, the political situation forced her father to move his whole family to the town of Castello for safety. A monk of the town had recently died and subsequently miracles occurred associated with him.

Margaret’s parents thought that given their social standing, surely a miracle would also cure Margaret. But this did not happen, and while she was in the

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local church, her father led the rest of the family away, abandoning her.

Without any hint of bitterness, she accepted her fate and trusted to God. She was befriended by the local poor, helping them to survive by begging. Her remarkable cheerfulness and constant reference to God and the Scriptures in her conversations led people to think there was someone holy in their midst.

She joined a local convent, but was soon rejected by the nuns because she proved to be a model too strict for their ways. Undismayed, she took shelter in her favourite church, the Chiesa della Caritas, where she was found and taken in by comfortably off people, one of whom was a mantellata. All such women were allowed to wear the cloak of the Dominicans as a ‘tertiary’. Usually, such women were mature in age, but an exception was made in Margaret’s case and she was allowed to join them. Though small and suffering from curvature of the spine and needing to walk with a stick, Margaret was regularly to be seen helping the local poor, visiting the sick and prisoners, and giving wise counsel and spiritual teaching.

On occasions she exhibited miraculous acts, once seen levitating in a prison when absorbed in prayer for a blasphemous prisoner, who became a true believer.

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There are numerous documented and witnessed examples of acts she performed that could have occurred only through divine intervention, such as saving people in a burning house, and saving a young girl who was close to death.

A sixteen-year-old girl wanting to become a religious against her parents’ wishes, did so through Margaret’s intercession.

The girl wore the Dominican mantle to the end of her days, as did Little Maggie herself. Nearing the end of her short life, Maggie said to friends: “If only you knew what I carry in my heart.”

It was only after she died that the significance of this remark became apparent. Maggie died aged just thirtythree, in 1320, and a miracle was witnessed by the Dominican abbot who celebrated her funeral Mass. He had initially declared that Margaret must be buried in the cloister graveyard with the deceased members of the Order of Preachers, but the people clamoured for her to be buried in the church as a saint.

During the heated exchanges, a mother put her disabled child by the side of the uncovered body of Margaret to pray for a healing. The arm of the deceased was seen to move and touch the child who was instantly cured. Never having walked or spoken, the child was now able to move about unaided and praised aloud Margaret and God. The Prior acknowledged that the people were right.

It was not unusual at this time for the inner organs of those deemed especially holy to be extracted and preserved for veneration as relics when a presumed saint died. When Maggie’s heart was examined, astonishingly, three pebbles ‘leaped out,’ each bearing an image. One was a crowned effigy of Our Lady; another, the infant Jesus at His Nativity; the third a bald man with a staff beside a kneeling woman in the habit of a Dominican, taken to be St Joseph and Margaret herself.

Also on this pebble was a very white dove taken to be the Holy Spirit. These stones from Margaret’s heart have been kept by the Order of Preachers and are occasionally displayed. At last, the people understood what Margaret had meant by that reference to what she carried in her heart.

Images: Three depictions of St Margaret of Castello: ‘She led an inspirational life of sanctity’

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FEATURE

The Catholic Police Guild Requiem Mass

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he Catholic Police Guild in London held a Requiem Mass at Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, on 8 November last year, for fallen Catholic officers and members, their families and benefactors of the Guild.

Fr Gabriel Diaz Patri was the celebrant. The Mass was accompanied by a six-part Requiem by the Portuguese composer Duarte Lobo (1565-1646). The motet Versa Est in Luctum by Spanish composer Alonso Lobo 1555-1617) was sung at the Communion. The music was performed by the Southwell Consort.

The Catholic Police Guild was formed on the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1914 to help officers, initially in London but now nationally, to live the Catholic Faith wholly while policing. This is an increasingly difficult task, making the Guild’s apostolate more important than ever. Membership is open to all serving and retired officers and staff. Support for broader society, and especially fellow Catholics, is most appreciated.

If you would like to know more about the Guild, you can contact the London Chair, Alex Blatchford, alex.blatchford@ catholicpoliceguild.co.uk Mass for the Guild is offered every First Monday at Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane. More Masses and events in London will be notified to members through 2022.

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Photographs by Alex Blatchford

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ROMAN REPORT

Promoting liturgical peace Diane Montagna on listening to the bishops

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n a recent statement calling on Pope Francis to rescind the canonical provisions contained in Traditionis Custodes and the Responsa ad dubia, Bishop Athanasius Schneider held up the example of the second century bishop and Church Father, St Irenaeus of Lyons, whom Francis will soon proclaim a Doctor of the Church, with the special title Doctor unitatis.

The auxiliary bishop of St Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, urged the Pope to imitate St Irenaeus by promoting “liturgical peace” with the many thousands of Catholics who have been injured and marginalized through the promulgation of Traditionis Custodes.

How did St Irenaeus work for peace?

Eusebius of Caesarea tells us that he intervened to talk Pope Victor I out of schism with the bishops of Asia Minor over a controversy regarding the date of Easter. Contrary to Victor’s wishes, bishops and faithful there were observing Easter on the day of Passover instead of the Sunday afterwards. This led Victor to threaten them with excommunication.

The bishops of Asia Minor, who had observed this custom since the time of the Apostle St John, would not back down.

According to Eusebius of Caesarea, St Irenaeus “fittingly admonishe[d]” the Pope and warned him not to “cut off whole churches of God which observed the tradition of an ancient custom” ( Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book V, Chapter 24 on The Disagreement in Asia ).

St Irenaeus—in alliance with the bishops of Asia, led by Polycrates of Ephesus—worked for peace by remonstrating with a pope on a matter far more limited that the suppression of the entire ancient Roman Rite.

His example also demonstrates how contrary it is to the tradition of the Church for a pope to act so arbitrarily without religious respect for the mystery of the liturgy (cf. CCC 1125).

In recent months, I published a trilogy of articles containing the collection of quotations from bishops that was included in the report the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith prepared

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for Pope Francis based on the results of their consultation of the episcopate in 2020. Organized under various headings, the purpose of this collection was to give the Holy Father a well-rounded sampling of what the bishops had said about the implementation of Summorum Pontificum in their dioceses.

Pope Francis, in his accompanying letter to Traditionis Custodes, cited the CDF report as one of the chief motivating factors for issuing the Motu Proprio, telling the world’s bishops: “Responding to your requests” and “in defence of the unity of the Body of Christ I am constrained to revoke the faculty granted by my Predecessors.”

Yet what the collection of quotations reveals is that Pope Francis is doing the opposite of what the bishops requested. Let us consider specifically the quotations from the English Bishops that were contained in the CDF report (I have translated the quotations back into English from the Italian and redacted the individual names of each bishop): Negative assessments about the attitude of certain faithful “In a negative sense, [the EF] can foster a feeling of superiority among the faithful, but since this rite is more widely used, that feeling has diminished (A Bishop of England, response to question 3).

“There may be a tendency among some of the faithful to see this [the EF] as the only ‘true’ Mass, but I think this comes from the fact that these people have been seen as “odd,” or marginalized.

If you try to ‘regularize’ it as much as possible, then these people feel cared for and guided pastorally, and they can be very faithful and loyal” (A Bishop of England, response to question 3).

On the value of the EF for the peace and unity of the Church “The EF, under the prudent leadership of the Ordinary, has allowed more Catholics to be able to pray according to their desire, and has dispelled the conflicts of before. Its quiet presence should not be disturbed” (A Bishop of England, response to question 9).

Proposals and/or perspectives for the future “I think it is possible for the two uses, Ordinary and Extraordinary, to coexist.

This could be a strength within the Catholic Church. Although we hear a lot from the LMS [Latin Mass Society] and its crusade to change the face of the Church and set the clocks back, my impression in the Diocese is that the strident appeals for the EF have now faded, and that it will find its own (probably quite small) level, so to speak (... ) I would say that formation in the fullness of the tradition of liturgical forms, practices, and symbols is needed, and that these can be open to all in full freedom, and even encouraged, in such a way as to show that the EF is not something to be feared, and that the OF is not to be despised, because it is rooted in tradition” (A Bishop of England, response to question 9).

On the value of the Extraordinary Form for the peace and unity of the Church “Many of the people who attend are troubled pilgrims and quite suffering, and I think that the ‘normalization’ of their liturgical experience within the life of the Church strengthens the unity of the Church” (A Bishop of England, response to question 9).

On the historical value of the Extraordinary Form “As Pope Benedict said, we cannot abandon the rite of the Mass that has been used for centuries and say that it is no longer relevant” (A Bishop of England, response to question 9).

Given the Pope’s attempted suppression of the traditional Roman Rite (made on a deliberately false reading of a survey of bishops that he himself had requested) that is fomenting schism rather than fostering unity, we are facing a situation far more serious than that faced by St Irenaeus and the bishops of Asia Minor. This leaves us with the burning question: Where are the saintly shepherds of today speaking up in defense of their flock and of tradition?

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St Mary’s, Chislehurst Paul Waddington looks at a church with a fascinating history

C

hislehurst now forms part of the London Borough of Bromley, but in 1853, when the church of St Mary was built, it was a village in Kent.

Prior to the building of the church, the Catholic population of Chislehurst would have been small, although a number of Irish immigrants had found employment as quarrymen and farm labourers in the surrounding area.

In the year 1851, the newly formed Diocese of Southwark recognised the need to provide a Mass centre and was looking for a suitable location.

The solution was provided by one Captain Henry Bowden of the Scots Fusiliers, who lived in a large house (now a school) called The Coopers. Sunday Masses were offered at The Coopers, but it soon became apparent that a church was required. Captain Bowden again came to the rescue, donating a plot of land across the road from his home, and providing funds for the building of a church and presbytery. William Wardell was appointed as the architect, and building commenced in 1853. The church was opened by Bishop Grant in August 1854.

Wardell had been much influenced

by Augustus Welby Pugin, who was his mentor and personal friend. The design that he produced for Chislehurst was modest, and typical of fifteenth century parish churches found in the area. Built from rough Kentish ragstone with ashlar dressings, it had no side aisles, but included a chancel under a lower roof line.

The (liturgical) west gable is undecorated, except for two large two-light windows.

The main entrance is via a somewhat hidden porch attached to the north side, although there is a smaller porch on the opposing south side. This smaller porch also gives access to the sacristy and the presbytery. A modest belfry is mounted above the chancel arch. Had Pugin lived to see the church built, it would surely have met with his approval.

William Wilkinson Wardell deserves more recognition as an architect than he is generally afforded. Born in 1823, into an Anglican family, he became interested in the Oxford Movement as a young man.

He converted to Catholicism in 1843, at

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View of the church, mausoleum and presbytery

about the time when he was starting his architectural career. Over the next fifteen years, he was responsible for the design of several Catholic Churches in England, including, St Birinus in Dorchester, Our Lady Star of the Sea at Greenwich, Our Lady of Victories at Clapham and St Mary and St Michael in the East End of London.

In 1858, at the age of 35, Wardell, who had health problems, decided to remove himself and his growing family to Melbourne in Australia, where he gained the prestigious position of Government

William Wilkinson Wardell converted to Catholicism in 1843

Architect for the State of Victoria. Besides his work for the government, Wardell developed a private business, and in the space of 20 years, designed St Patrick’s Cathedral and 14 other churches in the Melbourne area. In 1878, he moved to Sydney to take on the design of St Mary’s Cathedral. The two cathedrals were massive works and neither was completed until long after his death in 1899.

The Emperor Napoleon III Life in the Chislehurst parish changed considerably in 1871 with the arrival from France of the exiled Emperor Napoleon III, with the Empress Eugenie and their son, the Crown Prince, Louis-Napoleon.

By the time of his exile, the Emperor was in poor health, and he died two years later.

His funeral was conducted at St Mary’s Church by Bishop Dannell, the second bishop of Southwark. Because there was little space in the church for a tomb, the sarcophagus was installed in the sacristy.

In 1874, the Empress commissioned Henry Clutton to build a mausoleum for her husband in the French Gothic style.

This was attached to the northeast corner of the church and constructed of ashlar stone. It was considerably more decorated than the church having hooded windows, and a conspicuous parapet of

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ARCHITECTURE

The interior of St Mary’s as designed by Wardell

open stonework around the base of the roof. Imperial eagles were mounted above each corner of the parapet, and finials were installed at the gable ends.

The mausoleum was topped with an iron cross above the centre of the ridge.

The Crown Prince was also laid to rest in St Mary’s Church, following his death fighting for the British in the Zulu War of 1879. Still mourning the death of her husband, and distressed by the death of her son, the Empress decided that a grander family mausoleum was required.

Due to insufficient land being available in Chislehurst, a new mausoleum was incorporated into the crypt of the Abbey Church of the monastery at Farnborough, which the Empress founded in 1881. The bodies of the Emperor and the Crown Prince were transferred there in 1888, allowing the mortuary to be repurposed as a chapel devoted to the Sacred Heart.

The church was improved in 1925 with the provision of a gallery at the western end, and the installation of a large organ.

These, together with new stations of the cross and a wrought iron screen separating the church from the Sacred Heart chapel, were gifts of the Tiark family.

In common with many Catholic churches, St Mary’s suffered from some poor quality reordering following the Second

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Vatican Council. The white marble altar was separated from its matching reredos and moved forward. To accommodate this, new wooden altar steps were constructed in the sanctuary. These look out of place and make the already small sanctuary congested. The altar rails were removed, although a small portion was retained in the Sacred Heart chapel.

Stained glass St Mary’s is fortunate to have a number of good quality stained glass windows, several of them by the Hardman Studio, but also four small panels depicting the Evangelists that were salvaged from Dunstable Priory.

The rose window behind the altar depicting the Queen of Heaven with Child and surrounded by angels is also impressive. A recess in the south wall, flanked by pillars capped with suitably imperious crowns contains the former tomb and memorial to the Crown Prince.

An effigy of the prince dressed in military uniform lies over the tomb, and there are plaques bearing appropriate inscriptions.

The chapel of the Sacred Heart is entered through a pair of round headed arches, separated by a double column with foliated capital. A mural in the spandrel depicts an imperial eagle above

an elaborate letter N. The chapel has a stone rib vaulted ceiling, lancet windows to the north and a rose window at the west end. The chapel floor is covered in tiles displaying imperial eagles and the crowned letter N. These surround a black marble slab, marking the original position of Napoleon’s sarcophagus.

There is a stone altar with canopy at the east end, and a modern statue of the Sacred Heart at the west end.

Nowadays, the octagonal stone baptismal font is housed in the chapel as is a wooden screen that serves as a confessional. The remaining section of the altar rail stands in front of an effigy of Christ emerging from the tomb and the Empress’s prie-dieu is also in the chapel.

Mention should also be made of the presbytery, which is built from materials and in a style that that matches the church. It seems that Wardell lavished as much attention on the presbytery as he did on the church. The presbytery, church, mausoleum and surrounding cemetery make a picturesque composition close to the centre of the old village of Chislehurst, and definitely justify their Grade II Listing.

The Parish Priest, Fr Lynch offers a Sung Tridentine Mass at St Mary’s Church every Sunday at 11am.

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DIOCESAN DIGEST Mass of Ages quarterly round-up Arundel & Brighton Huw Davies aandb@lms.org.uk 07954 253284 Members in the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton enter the new calendar year thankful that a healthy schedule of regular and festive Masses has so far weathered the challenges of government Covid restrictions and the implementation of Traditiones custodes.

November saw two Sung Masses at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation and St Francis at West Grinstead, on Remembrance Sunday and Advent Sunday, celebrated by Fr Jim Hurley and Fr Bruno Witchalls respectively. Despite the organ being out of action on both occasions, the choir provided musical accompaniment and there were welcome refreshments after Mass, courtesy of the Shrine administrators. The next Sung Masses here will be on the first Sunday of Lent, 6 March, and then Whit Sunday, 5 June. Please also mark in your diary the Bank Holiday Monday, 29 August, as the date for the annual Pilgrimage - more details will follow in the next edition of the magazine and on the Society’s social media.

At St Hugh of Lincoln in Knaphill the Dawn Mass on Christmas morning was celebrated in the Vetus Ordo, followed with joy later in the Octave by a Sung Nuptial Mass for the new Mr and Mrs Moran, who have been attending Masses in Knaphill since March of 2021. Beautiful music was provided by Cantus Magnus, and the parish and the couple are grateful for the serving assistance from St Bede’s in the Archdiocese of Southwark. There will be further occasional Sung Masses at Knaphill this year, starting on Candlemas. Meanwhile, the co-op of St Joseph for home-school families marked Advent with a service in church concluding with Benediction, and Epiphany with a Nativity play. We continue to pray for this wonderful initiative and its organisers.

Christmas Day Masses were also celebrated at St Pancras, Lewes and St Barnabas, East Molesey. Looking ahead to Easter and some of the great solemnities along the way, we look forward to more occasional Masses to commemorate these and thank our priests who fit them into their busy Mass schedules. As ever, please do keep an eye on the online listings or individual churches’ social media pages and websites for the latest information.

Birmingham & Black Country Louis Maciel 07392 232225 birmingham@lms.org.uk birmingham-lms-rep.blogspot.co.uk/ All Saints was marked with a Sung Mass at the Birmingham Oratory, a High Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in Wolverhampton and a Low Mass at St Mary-on-the-Hill in Wednesbury. Several private Masses, a \low Mass and a Requiem Mass were celebrated at the Oratory for All Souls, as well as a Low Mass in Wednesbury.

During Advent, Rorate Masses were celebrated on Saturday mornings at the Oratory; a couple were also celebrated on weekday mornings in Wolverhampton.

I attended the 9pm Sung Mass on Christmas Eve at the Birmingham Oratory, one of a record five Masses to celebrate the birth of our Lord, including Midnight Mass and a 10.30am

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High Mass also at the Oratory, and Low Masses celebrated in Wolverhampton and Wednesbury. The usual 12 noon High Mass marked the Octave of Christmas at the Oratory.

The Immaculate Conception, Epiphany and Candlemas were all celebrated with High Masses at the Oratory and Low Masses in Wednesbury.

The first and third Friday Masses at Sacred Heart and All Souls in Acocks Green and St Dunstan’s in Kings Heath continue: in short, currently it is business as usual.

Birmingham (Oxford) Joseph Shaw oxford@lms.org.uk oxfordlmsrep.blogspot.com/ The usual Sunday and Holyday Masses continue in the Oratory, Holy Rood, and SS Gregory & Augustine's. I will let supporters know by email if other events are arranged: please ensure that you are on my local email list.

Birmingham (North Staffs) Alan Frost During the latter weeks of 2021, after a cautious resumption, the fortnightly Saturday morning Low Masses are now reestablished at Our Lady’s, Swynnerton. Several regulars have recovered or are recovering from hospital treatment, though none Covid related. Fr Chavasse soldiers on through his own bouts of ill-health and celebrated a fine Mass for the Feast of the Epiphany adorned by a contribution from a ladies’ schola.

Fr Stefek’s Wednesday evening Masses at St Augustine’s, Stoke, are now sometimes sung, including a Missa Cantata on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception with Fr Goodman of Wolverhampton guesting as cantor. The Feast of St Thomas of Canterbury was celebrated with a Low Mass.

Birmingham (Worcestershire) Alastair J Tocher 01684 893332 malvern@lms.org.uk extraordinarymalvern.uk Facebook: Extraordinary Malvern Following a parish meeting at Most Holy Trinity, Ledbury in late September 2021 called by Archbishop Stack to address disquiet expressed by a small number of local parishioners, the local Traditional Latin Mass arrangements have been somewhat restricted: although weekly Sunday Masses may continue, they must now begin in the afternoon; and Archbishop Stack has expressly prohibited offering the Lord praise either in song or on the organ at those Masses, so that even Low Mass with Music is now precluded. Although attendance dropped a little owing to the less convenient Mass time, we nevertheless continue to see a small but steady stream of new faces in the congregation, some of whom have already begun to attend regularly.

Despite having no Masses to prepare for, the Schola continues to meet to maintain and enlarge its repertoire in anticipation of more favourable circumstances ahead.

Deprived of the opportunity to worship the Lord in song at Mass, the Schola has instead begun singing Compline each

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY week, whereby its singing continues to serve its proper purpose. Some singers also helped organise and sing for a parish Advent Carol Service which was well received by all present.

To the best of my knowledge the Masses in Kidderminster and Redditch continue as previously.

We remain grateful to all our faithful priests for their efforts in providing these Masses and for their pastoral support for all those who attend; also thanks to Archbishops Longley and Stack for their formal permissions enabling Masses to continue.

Advent Low Mass at Most Holy Trinity, Ledbury

East Anglia (West) Alisa and Gregor Dick 01954 780912 cambridge@lms.org.uk Sunday Masses at Blackfriars in Cambridge have now returned to the chapel from their temporary location in the cloister.

In previous editions of Mass of Ages we had issued appeals for new servers to replace students who had moved on from Cambridge, and we would like to thank those who have since volunteered. Further servers – and, for that matter, singers – are always welcome.

East Anglia (Walsingham) Tom FitzPatrick For the past year we, in Walsingham, have been blessed with a regular Mass in the Traditional Rite on the second Saturday of each month. This is celebrated at 9am in the Chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation at the National Shrine and Basilica of Our Lady. The Masses are usually celebrated by one of our Franciscans who work at the Shrine and we are very grateful to them for this and all else they do.

Happily, we have to use the larger chapel, rather than the Slipper Chapel itself, for these Masses as the numbers attending are too great to be accommodated in the Slipper Chapel and it is good to see families attending with their children. Masses said by visiting priests take place fairly frequently in the Slipper Chapel itself but, as a result, they tend to be organised at short notice and it is often not possible to publicise them widely in good time.

We await the appointment of a new Bishop of East Anglia to succeed Bishop Alan Hopes who tendered his resignation on reaching the age of seventy-five in 2019. Bishop Alan was very supportive of these regular Masses both in Walsingham and across the diocese and we continue to pray both for the appointment of a new Bishop and also for one who will be sympathetic to the Traditional Mass.

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Hexham and Newcastle Keith McAllister 01325 308968 07966 235329 k_mcallister@ymail.com Our last quarter of 2021 commenced with an historical reengagement at our redundant ex-seminary Ushaw College, with a High Mass, the first for many years. This was celebrated in the magnificent St Cuthbert’s chapel, which is almost of Cathedral scale, by Canon Michael Brown, with Fr David Phillips as Deacon and Andre Kormos, sub-deacon.

This was the 25th anniversary of the formation of the Rudgate Singers, who have brought so many talented, accomplished performances to Classical Catholic Tradition since their initiation.

On the Feast of St Anthony Mary Claret they delivered a full setting from Kyrie to Agnus Dei by Giovanni Pier Luigi de Palestrina plus Ave Verum Corpus by William Byrd, bringing a most uplifting choral in that sacred space.

On the Feast of SS Simon & Jude, 28 October, there was Low Mass at St Cuthbert’s Durham with a good attendance of about 40, mainly University students.

For All Souls Day we were pleased to have Masses at both Coxhoe and Thornley.

On Christmas day, Fr Paul Tully celebrated at Thornley and followed this with Low Mass for Epiphany. Fr Shaun Swales also brought an Epiphany Mass at Coxhoe, so altogether, a very good provision.

Masses at our new venue, Cheeseburn, are scheduled forward into spring.

High Mass at Ushaw College

Lancaster Bob & Jane Latin 01772 962387 lancaster@lms.org.uk latinmasslancaster.blogspot.com John Rogan 01524 858832 lancasterassistant@lms.org.uk This year at Preston, on the first Saturday of Advent, we had the grace to reintroduce the beautiful devotion of the Rorate Caeli Mass. The vast choir of the church of Saint Walburge was

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Rorate Caeli Mass, St Walburge's, Preston

illuminated with over 400 candles. An American member of the Institute of Christ the King explained this ancient tradition beautifully: "The Rorate Mass is lit only by candlelight.

Because it is a votive Mass in Mary’s honour, white vestments are worn instead of Advent violet. In the dimly lit setting, priests and faithful prepare to honour the Light of the World, Who is soon to be born, and offer praise to God for the gift of Our Lady. As the Mass proceeds and sunrise approaches, the church becomes progressively brighter, illumined by the sun as our Faith is illumined by Christ. The readings and prayers of the Mass foretell the prophecy of the Virgin who would bear a Son called Emmanuel, and call on all to raise the gates of their hearts and their societies to let Christ the King enter; asking for the grace to receive eternal life by the merits of the Incarnation and saving Resurrection of Our Lord."

A goodly number of people braved the cold and the early hour and the intention is to continue this beautiful tradition.

From 30 November to 7 December last year we had the Novena of the Immaculate Conception with a sermon in honour of Our Lady by a different guest preacher each day, with the Feast itself celebrated with Solemn Lauds, the Act of Consecration of the Institute to Our Lady, and Solemn High Mass.

The following day our Christmas Bazaar was well supported with another £1300 or so being added to the Restoration Fund.

At last, the work on the roof has commenced and we pray that it will all go well. You can continue to support this vital work by going to https://saintwalburges.church/sponsor-a-slate/ All Christmas Masses were well supported, with many new faces being seen for the main Mass on Christmas Day. Socials after Sunday Masses are very friendly with an opportunity to chat with newcomers and make them welcome. Our Canons do a wonderful job in introducing people and ensuring no-one feels left out.

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The St Walburge Guild meetings continue on the second and fourth Sundays of the month, after 10.30 am Mass. More new families are starting to come along and Canon Post's talks are well received. The older children meet with Canon Cristofoli for catechism and the little ones have activities with the Sisters Adorers.

In preparation for Lent there will be Forty Hours Devotion at St Walburge's. This commences after Vespers on Sunday, 27 February and is continual, through to the closing Mass at 5.00 pm on Tuesday, 1 March, and ending with a Eucharistic Procession and Solemn Benediction. Ash Wednesday Masses and Distribution of Ashes in Preston are at 8.30 am and 7.00 pm at St Walburge's, and 12 noon at English Martyrs. Every Friday during Lent there will be Stations of the Cross at 6.00 pm at St Walburge's with the opportunity for Confession. On Saturday, 5 March there will be a Lent Retreat Afternoon at English Martyrs commencing at 12 noon with Mass and ending at 4.00 pm. The Easter Mass schedule is in the Mass Listings.

During March we have Feasts for two of the patrons of the Institute, St Thomas Aquinas on 7 March and St Benedict on 21 March. On both days there will be High Mass at 6.00 pm at English Martyrs.

Finally, there will be the traditional Procession for the Feast of the English Martyrs on Saturday, 7 May. This will commence from St Walburge's at 12 noon and process to English Martyrs where there will be High Mass, veneration of the relics and a social.

The weekly Mass on Saturday morning at St Mary's, Hornby continues with a small congregation, on average seven faithful souls plus servers and priest; it would be good to see a few more. As always please check our website for changes and updates.

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY Lancaster (North) Nicholas Steven 07715 539395 warwickbridge@lms.org.uk The Cumbrian Purgatorial Society* held its first Sung Requiem Mass at St Margaret Mary's on Saturday, 6 November.

Fr Daniel Etienne officiated, most ably assisted by Abbé Pedro Duarte Carvalho, on loan from the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest. Our own Schola chanted the Propers and the Brampton Chamber Consort sang Victoria’s four-part Missa Pro Defunctis plus offertory and communion motets by Victoria and Byrd. All combined to chant the Dies Irae. After Mass, Canon Luiz Ruscillo gave us an inspiring talk about Purgatory. A tasty buffet lunch in St Margaret Mary’s Social Club followed and the day finished with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Our regular Saturday 10am Masses at St Margaret Mary, 75 Scalegate Road, Carlisle, continue to be well attended, with Canon Ruscillo and Fr Etienne taking it in turns to celebrate.

Masses in Workington at 7pm on the second Friday of each month are also continuing, but please note that in April, due to Good Friday, this will be two weeks later on 29 April. A number of us travelled to Preston for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. We were especially grateful for the Mass of the Circumcision in Carlisle on Saturday, 1 January.

Besides chatting after Mass, we stay in touch with each other via a WhatsApp group, keeping each other informed about events, Mass readings and retreat opportunities, reminding ourselves about First Fridays and Saturdays, plenary indulgence opportunities, novenas, upcoming Ember Day’s etc, requesting prayers and petition signatures, offering lifts to TLMs, enriching saints days, encouraging each other with holy images, sacred music and inspiring homilies by current heroes of this post TC synodal era. We continue to pray for a Sunday TLM. Please watch this space for future exciting developments and keep us in your prayers. *The Cumbrian Purgatorial Society is dedicated to Our Lady and the Martyrs of Cumbria. Souls of the faithful departed can be enrolled at www.prayforsouls.uk without charge, as can any living soul that might benefit from the future Masses and prayers of the Society. Active participation through prayer or donation are also welcome. Masses for the intentions of the Society are being offered monthly.

Requiem Mass at St Margaret Mary, Carlisle

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Liverpool Neil Addison liverpool@lms.org.uk Events have been relatively quiet in the Archdiocese in the last few months. Traditiones Custodes has not affected the FSSP at St Mary’s who are carrying on regardless. It is sad that other than St Mary’s no other Church in the Archdiocese was allowed to offer Masses in the Traditional Rite over Christmas but we remain grateful to Fr Simon Henry in Leyland and Fr Ian O’Shea in Wigan who continue to offer the Traditional Mass two days a week.

On 17 February the Newman Society have arranged a talk at St Helen’s Church in Crosby on the subject of Traditiones Custodes. It is perhaps unfortunate that the speaker who was selected is a Diocesan Priest who does not say the Traditional Mass and seems to have no contact with Traditionalists whatsoever but maybe I will be pleasantly surprised. I had offered to give the talk on the basis that I was the local LMS representative and being a Barrister I was used to public speaking but my offer was ‘politely’ declined. Nevertheless, I do intend to go to the talk and hopefully will be able to ask a few questions.

I have noticed that an increasing number of people are openly telling me they have attended the SSPX Church in Liverpool, which is based near the Anglican Cathedral. They are clearly feeling the SSPX out and seeing it as the route to go down if TC gets robustly enforced by the Archbishop. As a loyal LMS Rep I do not encourage this but I certainly understand where they are coming from.

Liverpool (Warrington) Alan Frost The Shrine Rector, Fr de Malleray, has witnessed many conversions to the true Faith in his time as a priest. But recently he himself was the convert; not in religious matters but in becoming a British citizen. He became British, and thereby a new British priest at St Mary’s, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The Shrine also has a temporary new deacon, Gwilym Evans FSSP, from Wales.

Deacon Evans was ordained last May. He studied Arabic and Hebrew at Cambridge, during which time he converted from Anglicanism to the Catholic Faith. He then worked for five years in the classical music industry, before joining the FSSP seminary in Bavaria. There he conducted the seminary choir for a Christmas CD (Sancta Nox: Traditional Christmas Matins from Bavaria). He is a Companion of the Order of Malta and has been very active with them in helping the poor and the sick. He was assigned to St Mary’s on pastoral placement until Easter. The Shrine priests and congregation assure him of their prayers during this last stage of his sevenyear formation to the Sacred Priesthood.

The priests extend a ‘well done!’ to St Mary’s Home Education children’s group who sang carols at the local Old Folks’ Home; and from the Regina Caeli Academy who performed a moving Christmas play. The RC Academy happily completed their first term and resumed classes on 10 January.

Earlier in November(13), Fr de Malleray, led a Juventutem day of recollection for fifty young men and women in London, and at the end of the month led a Vocation weekend for 14 young men in Warrington. Further to the recent guidelines from the Holy See, at St Mary’s Shrine the provision for sacraments and sacramentals in the traditional form remains unchanged. It was noted that the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter was granted by the Holy See the use of all the liturgical books in force in 1962. This essential feature of the charism of the FSSP is enshrined in their Constitutions, definitively approved by the

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY Holy See. Attendance at St Mary’s Shrine is stable, with about 500 visits per week (half on Sundays and half on weekdays). In the past trimester, four baptisms took place of babies whose families have moved near St Mary’s recently; and several adults became Catholic. An Open Day for the Warrington Regina Caeli Academy will be announced shortly. A Shrine pilgrimage to York is planned for 5 February, with Mass at the Oratory.

Menevia Elaine Sharpling Meneviastabatmater.blogspot.com/ No changes in Menevia – and this is something for which we are very thankful!

Thanks to the ongoing determination and commitment of Canon Jason Jones, Father Paul Brophy and Father Liam Bradley, Masses have continued in Menevia over the past few weeks albeit with some challenges along the way.

Father Brophy has been unwell but thankfully is recovering and should return to his priestly ministry shortly.

Meanwhile the parish priest at Haverfordwest, has kindly allowed Father Liam to continue to offer the Holy Mass on the 4th Sunday of the month so we are continuing to support attendance there.

Tom has put into action his LMS server training and is regularly serving the Mass in Swansea and Haverfordwest – hopefully we can encourage others to get involved and Tom can take a turn at playing the organ and participating in a Sung Mass.

Just a reminder that Holy Mass at Sacred Heart, Morriston is typically Mass on the 1st, 3rd & 5th Sundays.

At the moment, it is essential to book a place at Mass before travelling although we think that restrictions will be lifted soon.

We continue to post information on our blogspot so please check here for the latest information.

Northampton North (Northamptonshire) Paul Beardsmore 01858 434037 northampton@lms.org.uk Fr Byrne had the sad duty of celebrating his mother's Requiem Mass in the Traditional Rite at St Brendan's Corby, on 23 November. Catherine Patricia Byrne, who had lived with Fr Gerard in her final years, died on 9 November, and is buried in Ireland. May she rest in peace.

Saturday, Sunday and first Friday Masses have continued at St Brendan's, with additional Masses from time to time on special feast days. Sung Masses were celebrated for the feasts of All Saints, Christmas and the Epiphany.

Northampton (South) Barbara Kay 01234 340759 mbky3@outlook.com All has been well in the Northampton Diocese over the past few months, thanks to the support of Bishop David Oakley, and we are in good heart. Our All Saints Low Mass and trinated All Souls Masses duly took place on 1 and 2 November respectively, with good attendance at all of them. The highlight of the year was undoubtedly the High Mass of Reparation for Abortion at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Bedford on 13 November. This was the fourth year in a row that this event had been held. Unlike last year, we were allowed to have a congregation this time and attendance was around 50. Monsignor Gordon Read, National Chaplain to the LMS, was our celebrant and preacher, with Fr Michael Cullinan as Deacon and Fr Gabriel Diaz as Subdeacon.

Polyphony was provided by Dominic Bevan and a group of professional singers. Oliver McCarthy acted as MC and Joseph

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY Shaw, Nicholas Dyson, Steven Hector and Nathanael McCullough served. A special word of thanks goes to Steven, who had come to the Mass with his cassock and cotta “just in case” and we were very grateful to be able to call upon him.

At Bedford at Christmas, for the second year running, there was a Midnight Mass, this year sung for the first time. This was followed by a Low Mass on Christmas Day, with full houses for both. The Epiphany evening Mass was surprisingly busy for a damp, cold January night with many young families coming along.

We continue to have two hours of Confessions each Saturday afternoon, and 8.30 am and 12.30 pm Sunday Masses with a total of 150 – 200 people each week. We have several ladies who have recently had babies or who are expecting them in the next few months, thus ensuring there will be a regular stream of baptisms!

Our thanks as always go to our FSSP priests Frs Goddard and Phipps from Reading, and Frs De Malleray, Verrier and Stewart from Warrington, who serve the Bedford and Chesham Bois communities so generously and willingly.

As always, please see our Facebook page: www. facebook.com/bedfordlatinmass/ or the FSSP fssp.org.uk/ bedford/ for updates.

Nottingham Jeremy Boot 0115-8491556 07462-018386 At last we are making some headway and the Masses at Our Lady and St Patrick, in the Meadows, Nottingham should be resuming monthly on the 3rd Sunday of the month at 3pm (note new time) starting on 16 January. Masses continue on the Sat before the 2nd Sunday at Good Shepherd Thackeray’s Lane, Nottingham at 4.30pm and the weekly Derby Mass at St Joseph’s, Burton Rd, Derby at 8am. All are Sung Masses or Masses with music. The Cathedral Masses so far have not resumed.

St Thomas Becket Mass

High Mass of Reparation

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At Our Lady of the Annunciation, 97 Ashby Rd, Loughborough, Mass is celebrated weekly (with the odd exception) at 6.30 each Wednesday (lLow Mass). We have been very pleased to sing on Our Lady’s Birthday, Requiem Mass in November for the Holy Souls, and again for a private intention in December, The Immaculate Conception, and for the Feast of St Thomas Becket on 29 December. There will be Mass for the Presentation on 2 February.

The Covid pandemic has taken its toll as it has for everyone else, but we are continuing as best we can. Our sincere thanks to our priests, and all who help, musicians and servers and in any way, to maintain these Masses. Thanks also to His Lordship for allowing Masses sympathetically in the wake of Traditionis Custodes.

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY Nottingham South (Leicestershire and Rutland) Paul Beardsmore 01858 434037 northampton@lms.org.uk Canon Cahill continues to offer Mass on a regular basis in Leicester, on Saturdays at St Peter's and on Sundays at Blessed Sacrament.

The funeral Mass for Bernard Davidson, a Leicestershire member who died in November, was offered in the new rite at Whitwick, but there will be a Sung Requiem Mass for him on 25 January at Loughborough, through the kind agreement of Fr Gillham. For other events at Loughborough see the separate report from Jeremy Boot.

On the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury, Fr Crean OP offered a Sung Mass in the Dominican Rite at the church of St Mary, Husbands Bosworth. Thanks are due to Fr Pittam, of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, and the trustees of St Mary's, for permitting this Mass, which I believe to have been the first Sung Mass in the Traditional Rite celebrated in that church for a good many years.

Plymouth (Dorset) Maurice Quinn 07555 536570 devon@lms.org.uk Although the biggest event for us in Dorset was last October’s very successful Latin Mass pilgrimage to Chideock in honour of the Chideock Martyrs (see Mass of Ages Winter Issue 2021) in the presence of Bishop Mark O’Toole, we must not forget the sterling work carried out by Mgr Francis Jamieson at Our Lady of Lourdes & St Cecilia, Blandford Forum. Once every month Mgr Francis has offered a 12 noon Low Mass for us, followed by a free social lunch at which I try to attend. These Masses are beefed up by a regular Saturday morning 9.30am Mass that is especially suitable for those who wish to carry out the 1st Saturday devotions requested by Our Lady of Fatima.

I am pleased to report that Mgr Francis has now agreed to a Latin Mass schedule for this coming quarter, so it would be a joy to meet more new people at Mass and at the social lunch afterwards.

Plymouth (Cornwall) Stefano Mazzeo cornwall@lms.org.uk Christmas at Lanherne Convent was splendid and the Sisters, Canon and seminarian beautifully decorated the little church with candles and festive decorations, the way only Catholics can. We had wonderful Masses all through Christmas, with a High Mass on Christmas morning. Our Traditional community continues to grow and thrive. We now have an excellent little choir who are going from strength to strength and beauty with each Mass.

The latest episode of Christendom Rising will hopefully be live on my YouTube channel by the time this edition of the Mass of Ages hits the stands. We have interviews with Bishop Mark O'Toole of Plymouth, Canon Montjean, and Fr Thomas Crean, to name but a few, plus lots of info on Catholic Tradition in the West Country and further afield.

Many thanks to the actors, crew, co-producer and cinematographer (many of whom are Traditional Catholics) and to everyone who turned up as extras on Dartmoor for our Message of Lourdes filming for EWTN. It was very cold and blustery and although we lost one day to the weather we did get some great work done. Without giving too much away in this film, we show St Bernadette receiving her first Holy Communion at a Traditional Latin Mass.

St Bernadette receiving her first Holy Communion

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Last year’s Chideock pilgrimage

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY Getting back to last year’s successful Chideock pilgrimage (see photograph), I have been contacted by many asking about organizing another one for this year. I can confirm that we are in the process of organizing the next Chideock pilgrimage for the coming September, and when the date has been finalised I will ensure that this information is widely known. Please refer to the Mass Listings for more information, and please contact me if you have any concerns.

Plymouth (Devon) Maurice Quinn 07555 536579 devon@lms.org.uk I am happy to report that the now permanent presence of the ICKSP at the Shrine Church of Holy Angels in Torquay has achieved a long-awaited stabilizing effect on the Devon Latin Mass scene. With regular daily Mass, Vespers, Adoration and Benediction being the new norm, a real ‘community’ has formed at the shrine, with families coming together after

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Sunday Mass for refreshments and to socialize. A young serving team is now a permanent feature of Sunday Mass, with people coming forward to offer their services to clean the church, wash altar cloths and liturgical items, to sort tea and coffee after Mass, and to sing in the choir. The Shrine is looking for more choir members and an organist, so if anyone can help with this or in any other way it would be much appreciated.

Another initiative that breaks new ground locally is a catechetical programme delivered by Canon Tanner after Sunday Mass in alternate weeks for children and for adults.

This initiative recognizes that along with other permanent Latin Mass venues throughout the country, the congregation at Holy Angels is largely young, single men and women, along with married couples having large and growing families of happy children. Opportunities for Confession abound, both before and after Sunday Mass, and during daily Adoration.

Over the Christmas period we were pleased to have Sung Masses on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day, and also at St Edward the Confessor in Plymouth, thanks to assistance

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY given by Fr Miller (RN Chaplain) and Fr Martin Budge, both of whom also celebrated Mass at Holy Angels when Canon Tanner was away. It was also a joy to welcome the diocesan seminarian, transitional Deacon, Rev. Andrew Marlborough, who sat in choir at Holy Angels on the Feast of the Epiphany and preached the homily. Please keep Rev. Andrew in your prayers at this time as we look forward to his forthcoming ordination to the sacred priesthood this coming Summer.

All this good news is somewhat dampened by the continuing situation at St Cyprian’s Chapel, Ugbrooke House, and at Blessed Sacrament, Exeter. Unfortunately, the prevailing Covid situation prevents us from re-starting our monthly programme of Masses at both venues although, obviously, this is subject to change.

Portsmouth Peter Cullinane pmcullinane@hotmail.com I am pleased to say that the congregation at Holy Family Southampton has increased from about 50 to almost 70 on certain Sundays and it is hoped to celebrate a High Mass at some time this year. Thank you, Fr Theobald!

The attendance at St Joseph’s Copnor, in the care of the Marian Franciscans, also continues to increase and coffee after Mass on Sundays provides an informal meeting point for the growing number of young Polish families who attend.

The mission of the Friars and the ethos of the parish were well described on pages 26-27 of the last issue of this magazine and I should particularly like to endorse the writer’s mention that numerous young altar servers are being gently trained by the younger Friars.

I have been impressed by the way boys of visiting families have been integrated so well. The girls, all under 10, not only sing in the female section of the choir but enable their mothers to do so as well by looking after the younger children.

The charity to support the Friars in their mission has just passed its first year and it is hoped that we will be able to publish an update on their activities in both Copnor and Gosport in the not-too-distant future.In the meantime the website is: www.themarianfranciscans.org Donations are welcome as both houses are bursting with young aspirants from all over the world and a further property is required to be rented.

Portsmouth (Reading and Portsmouth north) Adrian Dulston 01491 682909 berks@lms.org.uk Once again a busy Christmas period for the FSSP priests supplying not only Reading but farther afield. Apart from the usual highlights of Midnight Mass there was in the Advent period a candlelit Mass of Our Lady timed for the morning light to grow during the liturgy. To me this symbolised the light of the FSSP apostolate.

The St John Fisher Parish is now a hive of activity: St Bruno Men's Group, with prayers, confessions, talk and Mass; Rosary witness outside BPAS every First Saturday; the St Margaret Clitherow Ladies Group with Mass, 'convivial' breakfast, and talk; altar servers practice; and First Friday Mass and devotions.

There is a vibrancy and growth in this Latin Mass centre which spreads it's light over Reading and beyond.

Thank God for these generous priests.

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Portsmouth (Isle of Wight) Peter Clarke 01983 566740 or 07790 892592 Weekly E.F. Masses continue on the Isle of Wight, as they have done now for almost 35 years. These are usually offered at St Thomas of Canterbury Church in Cowes. Built on 1797, it is one of the oldest purpose built Catholic churches in England.

We were delighted to have Mass on the Feast of the Epiphany.

In his sermon at the Mass, Fr Jonathan reminded the faithful of the Epiphany Season, which lasts until Candlemas:- “Let us remember that there are three Epiphany Mysteries, - the Magi following the star to Christ (today’s feast), the Baptism of Our Lord, and the marriage at Cana, with the water changed into wine being Christ’s first miracle in which He manifests His glory”.

Salford Alison F. Kudlowski salford@lms.org.uk The Extraordinary Form, Low Mass, continues to be celebrated at St Chad’s, Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester on Sundays at 4.45pm. Please check the website of the Manchester Oratorian Community, www.manchesteroratory.org, for updates on news.

At the time of writing, the Bishop has also permitted the celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the Low Mass at St Mary’s in Heaton Norris, Stockport, most Fridays at 6pm.

Please be advised to contact Fr Marlor before making travel arrangements. Refer to Mass Listings for details.

Shrewsbury (Wirral) Neil Addison liverpool@lms.org.uk At the Dome we were fortunate enough to receive the full set of services in the Traditional Rite over Christmas and we continue with daily services and devotions. We are getting used to our new look church and look forward to receiving our new chandeliers which will complete our restoration.

Before Christmas we had a parish meal in a local hotel with many attending and also guests, one of whom was Fr Paul an (ex-Anglican) priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. He administers a small, but vibrant, Orthodox Church in the Wirral. We had quite an ‘interesting’ conversation about the Orthodox view of Traditiones Custodes. It is noticeable that the only serious split that has ever occurred in Orthodoxy was in the 17th Century, when an over-enthusiastic Russian Patriarch tried to make changes in how prayers and liturgy were traditionally offered. The ‘Old Believers’ still exist as an important subgroup of Russian Orthodox and their continued existence shows the dangers of trying to ban traditional forms of devotion and worship.

On 13 March, Bishop Mark will be coming to the Dome to administer the Sacrament of Confirmation. This is something we are all looking forward to; we have always been fortunate in the support we have received from Bishop Mark and he has our loyal support in return. We hope to have a number of Confirmations, and we continue to attract new young families with vibrant, lively children who never fail to bring a smile.

On 24 March, it will be 10 years since the Dome Church re-opened as the first full-time Church for the Traditional Rite since Vatican II. I remember attending that first service simply out of curiosity and 10 years later I cannot imagine life without my weekly Latin Mass.

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY We welcomed a new Priest, Canon Weaver, who is from the USA. He has quickly established himself with us and we hope he will enjoy his time with us. Certainly we wait with interest to see what he has planned for 4 July!

Southwark (St Mary’s Chislehurst) Christopher Richardson chislehurst@lms.org.uk Our Sunday morning Missa Cantata and two weekday Low Masses continue. The Sunday Mass is always well attended. We are particularly blessed by the number of young families in the congregation. Recently a Solemn Mass was celebrated to commemorate the 30th anniversary of ordination of Fr Lynch, our parish priest, with a very enjoyable reception afterwards. The Christmas and Epiphany services were also well attended.

Southwark (Kent) Marygold Turner 01580 291372 Not much has changed in this neck of the woods – we continue Holy Mass every Sunday and Holydays of Obligation at 12 noon at St Andrew’s, Tenterden. Thanks to the generosity of Dr Andrew Czaykowski, we are able to invite Ben Bevan and his Victoria Consort to give us Sung Masses twice in the month. Please check the dates as they vary due to Ben’s commitments.

We were very happy to welcome Fr Richard Whinder here for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. A very old friend, who was D.G. in good health. We had Masses over Christmas and on the feast of the Epiphany.

Fr Behruz has done a great deal to beautify St Andrew’s and there is a new statue of Our Lady. He has also been very fortunate in one of the long-standing parishioners, Katarina Beresford, who is a very expert seamstress, has made wonderful altar clothes and other items.

These replace my efforts of 20 years ago with far more professional and beautiful things. Guy, her husband, served here for many years, so it is a joy to welcome them back after their years in St Simon Stock in Ashford, and the pandemic.

We had the new Synod meetings, which were ordered by the hierarchy: I make no comment!

Fr Gabriel Diaz, the tenant in my cottage, is our main celebrant, and is the rock on which we depend!

Southwark (Wandsworth) Julia Ashenden The Masses continue at The Oratory of St Mary Magdalen as advertised, with a faithful congregation, while also attracting newcomers.

The sung Midnight Christmas Mass (La Messe de Minuit by Charpentier) was beautiful and with hardly a spare seat. This was sung by David Guest’s professional choir, who sing once a month for us, as well as on special Feast Days.

On the Feast of Epiphany there was a Missa Cantata in the evening. This was preceded by the blessing of the Holy Water and of the chalk, with which to write a blessing for the coming year on our house doors. Many parishioners were invited to collect both Holy Water and chalk. There was an enthusiastic take-up.

Among the many families who attend St Mary Magdalen there is an ever growing cohort of young altar servers (although there has never been a shortage) who are keen and impressively good at it.

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The Juventutem meeting and Mass once a month with Fr de Malleray FSSP is another popular addition and well attended, as too is the recently established 10.30am Sung Mass on First Saturdays.

Canon Edwards works tirelessly for his parishioners and we are all hugely blessed.

Westminster Spanish Place Roger Wemyss Brooks wemyssbrooks@gmail.com Despite some continuing restrictions, things are largely returning to normal. Nevertheless prayers need to be maintained for the health of our community whose members are affected by the pandemic to a greater or lesser extent.

In the autumn we had two servers' training days at Spanish Place. These were well attended. It is heart-warming to see a number of young men learning to assist priests carefully and devoutly. I believe further training sessions are planned this year.

The busy season of Christmas and New Year has been successfully blessed with all the usual Masses, particularly the High Mass on 1 January; this was ably conducted once more by Jonathan Hague as MC. Our Celebrant, Fr Mark Elliott Smith, preached on Hope, appropriately in this difficult time for traditional Catholics. He was well supported by Fr Gabriel Diaz Patri as Deacon and Fr David Evans as Subdeacon. Beautiful settings of the Mass and Motets were rendered by the Spanish Place musicians.

With regret, I am standing down as Rep for St James's. It has been my privilege to serve the Holy Mass in this church built so beautifully for this purpose. Anyone interested in filling this role may, in the first instance, speak to me. I shall continue to support Fr Cullinan, and other priests supplying for him, as assistant Old Rite sacristan.

May St James the Great, Patron of pilgrims, continue to support us all with his prayers.

Westminster (Willesden) Anna Grayson-Morley willesden@lms.org.uk 07710 472295 I am happy to report the diocesan provision for the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass continues at the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden every Sunday at 5.30 pm and all Holy Days as listed in this publication.

We have a new assistant priest, Father Jonathon Stogdon who replaces Father Andrew Chamiec who has left the parish for a period of sabbatical.

It is with regret and sadness that I must leave my role as LMS representative for Our Lady of Willesden due to time pressure from other responsibilities. I love the Latin Mass and believe strongly in its liturgy and efficacy and will continue to support it in any way I am able. I will continue to file reports and answer questions until a replacement has been found. If you wish to know anything about the post and what it involves, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Wrexham Kevin Jones wrexham@lms.org.uk lmswrexham.weebly.com The situation in Wrexham remains as it did in my last report. No Masses have or are likely to resume. My letter to the Bishop remains unanswered and information continues to support the notion that we may have seen the last Traditional Mass for some time in North Wales.

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FEATURE

Sad Closure Fr Christopher Basden remembers St John’s Seminary, Wonersh, and one of its great characters, Fr Freddy Broomfield

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ot long before the rupture of lockdown we marked the centenary of the birth of Fr Frederick Broomfield, one of the great characters of the staff at St John’s Seminary Wonersh, Surrey, teaching History and Liturgy from 1959-1982.

As last summer saw the sad closure of Wonersh, I feel it opportune to write this tribute to the seminary itself and to some of the characters who made it such a special place.

One might wonder why on earth Freddy Broomfield was one of the most popular and loved Profs at the Seminary.

After all he was the oldest member of staff: shy, stiff, stuffy, irredeemably English, politically incorrect and maddeningly inflexible. On the other hand, he devoted his life to the formation of future priests. He alone of the staff would dutifully come down nightly to the Dive; the only place after Compline where talking was allowed. He put up with our adolescent nonsense and gave as good as he got, turning his big guns on any heresy or stupidity, much to our amusement.

What an unbelievable tsunami of radical change he lived through!

Our Rector, Mgr James McConnon, cruelly disabled by polio, had taught philosophy since Ordination in 1950. In the tumult of 1968, he took on the reins of the Rectorship, summarily seeing the backs of dozens of seminarians on what came to be known as Black Thursday. Bravely standing up against the whinging of The Tablet about Wonersh Seminary ‘bypassing the Aggiornamento’, the update of Vatican II, he bravely attempted to restore order in a situation of unparalleled chaos. I vividly remember on one St John’s Day, a bevy of Canons encircled him. ‘What is it like being Rector, Jim?’ asked one.

He responded: ‘In the old days it was like driving a train but today you cannot even see the tracks!’ This reveals the utter uncertainly of where the Church was heading.

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Both Fr Broomfield and our Rector had seen life, serving in the forces in World War II, but they were gentlemen of restraint, only gradually realising how the shifting mores of the permissive society had in fact considerably poisoned the life of the Seminary and the Priesthood.

Freddy’s dicta were famous and memorable. To this day they flood back into my mind with the challenges of pastoral quagmires. Here are just a few: ‘Liturgically some call it spontaneity, I call it sloppiness;’ ‘A presbytery without a woman’s touch will soon become a barracks;’ ‘Mysticism often begins in mist and ends in schism;’ ‘A mitre is an artificial extension of a Natural Vacuum;’ ‘The genus student never changes;’ ‘… and he was NOT Ordained;’ ‘Pontifical Degrees? – Roman ‘O’ Levels;’ ‘Do you read French? … the best things ARE in French;’ ‘My dear Bernard (Longley) the day you become a Bishop is the last day you will hear the truth;’ ‘My dear Christopher you are incurably baroque;’ ‘A gentleman is he who uses a butter knife even when alone;’ ‘Prejudice is a state of mind induced by experience;’

‘Nothing goes out of style so quickly as fashion;’ ‘Lacy Albs? – that famous Rubrician finds them more fitting in a bordello than in the sanctuary;’ and my favourite - ‘When there is nothing left to conserve, it is time to react!’

Freddy couldn’t lecture, his speaking voice, even liturgically, was so stilted it was imitated by all. Every year when he would get to Henry VIII he would say ‘… Anne Boleyn – gentlemen … (and before he could continue, they chimed in, having been primed) ‘she was a slut.’

‘Precisely!’ he concurred.

Where he really excelled was in the seminar. In Church history he enthused about the development of Papal power and the East West Schism.

He was passionate about the principles underlying the liturgy and shared his discoveries of the tradition of the East (‘A priest is an Icon of Christ, leading the people in worship’). He left us with a real appreciation of the spiritual sense of Scripture, Typology and he loved the Carmelite Mystics. (‘The Little St Teresa is John of the Cross for the man in the street.’) At my first ever seminar he asked how many of us had read C. S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, saying we could get no better theology. At least I had begun!

Freddy was a most popular Spiritual Director. He enjoined us to grasp the basics of the spiritual life and the foundation of what it is to be a priest.

He steered us away from ‘feelings’ and charismatic ‘spiritual gluttony’. God knows how many good men fell by the wayside before or after Ordination, victims of a toxic zeitgeist, for which despite his warnings they had little other protection. In the recent banter from on high about ‘clericalism’ we hear little about genuine ‘priestliness’. This Freddy had, wearing always the immemorial cassock (‘The cassock is the dress of this house.’). Most of the staff had adopted the bourgeois clerical suit and others the proletarian grey or else dispensing with clerical dress altogether.

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FEATURE Freddy was kind and generous to those in crisis, sick or needy. He banged on about physical fitness, enjoying exercise and swimming. Many turned their nose up that he was not ‘pastoral’ while in fact he had lived in a parish longer than any other of the staff, only coming to live full time at Wonersh in 1971.

He left Fr Gerard Bradley (whom he had Baptised) to carry the torch of this priestly vision at Wonersh 2001-2017, along with Fr Martin Thompson of the National Seminary in Albania and several of us who have endeavoured to accompany young men grappling with a vocation.

At only 63, Freddy was ‘retired’.

He did not fit in to the new regime, whose novelties have proved ultimately shallow and sterile. The preceding desperate plunge into psychological counselling was to some extent deplored by Freddy if substituted for a genuine immersion in the spiritual life.

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Mgr McConnon ended his days dejected and depressed by the downward trajectory of the English Church, its utter decline and the collapse of the priesthood.

Mercifully he and Freddy did not live to see the end of Wonersh, for which they had given their lives. Freddy on the other hand used to joke: ‘The study of Church history is a most consoling subject.’

Towards the end of his life Freddy reconsidered the Liturgical ‘Reforms’.

Before, while teaching, they had been deemed sacrosanct. (‘Mystery is not Mystification!’) witheringly disapproving of some of the liturgical changes, Martin Thompson squealed, ‘But that is not what you taught US!’ ‘No, I’ve changed my mind.’ was the answer. For any liturgical academic to change his mind can only be a rare example of humility.

Before the end, he volunteered to help the LMS although confessing to me he found kneeling as a Deacon or Subdeacon quite an effort. I will never forget the last time I saw Freddy – it was

late Advent 1999 – and he had come to see us sing Traditional Sunday Vespers at St Bede’s, helped by the then St Austin’s Press, (‘Those bows are completely exaggerated!’)

Afterwards there were drinks followed by a hearty supper for the lads. Freddy could stand endlessly nursing his glass, gently pontificating with all. Fr Leszek Kłos (now also with me in Ramsgate) asked, ‘You like Pope John Paul II?’ The response: ‘I am not a Papolater’ and to me, ‘I don’t like Pop Popes!’

We thought the timing of his passing entirely appropriate. On the morning of December 31 1999 he did not appear for Mass, his breviary was marked having completed Compline the night before.

He died just before the dawn of the Millennium, the hype of which he didn’t approve (‘They got the date wrong.’) He left a generous financial legacy to the LMS and he left to so many of us an anchor of traditional wisdom, wit and witness forever valid in a whirlpool of ‘modernity’ and anarchy!

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FAMILY MATTERS

Building on Sacred Tradition James Preece looks at Vatican II “Inventions”

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h, Vatican II. The elephant in the room. What is its status exactly?

Do we reject it in private but begrudgingly accept it in public when the Bishop is listening? Probably best not to talk about it at all if we want to stay friends… Well, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I do accept it. Not only do I accept it, I think it was part of Tradition and a Good Thing.

But. You knew there was a “but” coming. I only accept it in the context of the rest of Sacred Tradition. In other words, I do not believe that the Second Vatican Council came along and “got rid” of all the bad old stuff and replaced it with a whole load of “new stuff” in a kind of ecclesiastical revolution.

We are all familiar with the things Vatican II didn’t say - it didn’t say get rid of altar rails, or that the Priest should face the people, or that Holy Communion should be received on the hand. Those things were all sneaked in afterwards. Maybe we’re also familiar with the things Vatican II very definitely kept, but that never happen – that Gregorian Chant be “given pride of place” or that “steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them”.

What people seem less aware of are the things that Vatican II did say but – crucially – didn’t invent. For example, I recently heard somebody say that Vatican II “for the first time” encouraged ordinary Catholics to read the scriptures.

Tell that to Pope Leo XIII who, in Providentissimus Deus (1893), said that his office compels him “to desire that this grand source of Catholic revelation should be made safely and abundantly accessible to the flock of Jesus Christ” and who later offered an indulgence “to all the Faithful who read these Holy Scriptures for at least a quarter of an hour”. Vatican II didn’t invent lay Bible reading.

Does it matter? If somebody starts reading the bible because Dei Verbum

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told them to – isn’t that a good thing?

Yes, obviously. What concerns me is the impression often given that Vatican II introduced lay scripture study, which in turn gives the impression that Traditional Catholics ought to be against it. Leo XIII says we ought to be all for it.

Somebody will counter that the preconciliar Catholics in the pews didn’t hear what Leo XIII said in his

‘…how can we authentically interpret Vatican II and other recent Church documents in line with the whole of Catholic tradition through the ages?’ encyclicals, they heard some grumpy Nun telling them that only protestants read the Bible. That may be true, but I’m not Doctor Who, I can’t go and check.

Traditional Catholics are often accused of wanting to “take us back” to the 1950s (or 1590s) and I dare say some traditional Catholics might feel that way, but for people like myself who have no idea what the 1950s were like, the question is quite different. It becomes

– how can we authentically interpret Vatican II and other recent Church documents in line with the whole of Catholic tradition through the ages? In order to move forwards, not backwards.

A specific example worth looking at is the role of the laity in the Church.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Second Vatican Council invented “active participation” in the liturgy and the “universal call to holiness”, yet the Catechism of the Council of Trent instructs Priests to “exhort the faithful to lead holy lives and practice every virtue”.

The General Instruction for the 1962 Missale Romanum clearly states “Missa natura sua postulat, ut omnes adstantes, secundum modum sibi proprium, eidem participent” or in English: “The Mass, of its very nature, requires that all present should participate in it, in the manner proper to each one.” People will tell you that the laity do not participate in the old Mass, but the rubrics require it.

In each case we see that the Second Vatican Council does not invent, but rather builds upon Sacred Tradition. It must be understood only in continuity with Sacred Tradition. When this is not the case, funny things happen. Instead of understanding the authentic role of the laity, we give them little jobs in the sanctuary and call it “participation”.

Something is lost.

So, if you are a JP2 or B16 Catholic and curious about tradition – do not be afraid! You don’t have to stop reading the Bible. We are not schismatics, we cling to Rome and the See of Peter – but we also cling to the truths handed down by Sacred Tradition. It can be done. It must be done. One without the other is madness.

Of course, this also works in the opposite direction. If you view Vatican II with suspicion and meet the “stuck in the past” stereotype then you are missing out as well. Remember that Our Lord guaranteed His Church. If a paragraph could possibly be read to mean something contrary to Sacred Tradition – then it can’t be read in that way. Sacred Tradition said so.

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NEWS

World News Paul Waddington reports on reactions to Responsa ad dubia

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n 18 December 2021, Archbishop Roche, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued a document intended to clarify some aspects of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’ Motu proprio. Entitled Responsa ad dubia, it was set out in the form of 11 questions and answers. The clarifications gave a strict interpretation of the original document and went as far as introducing additional restrictions to the celebration of Mass and the other Sacraments in the older form. The more significant provisions include: offering the Sacraments in their older forms using the Rituale Romanum and the Pontificale Romanum is not permitted; Bishops cannot authorise newly ordained priests to celebrate the older form of the Mass without receiving specific authorisation from Rome (the Motu proprio only required that bishops should consult Rome); priests authorised to celebrate the older form of the Mass can only do so within the territory of the diocese of the authorising bishop; a priest cannot celebrate Mass in both forms on the same weekday, or celebrate the older form of the Mass twice on the same day.

Germany

Pro Missa Tridentina, the German equivalent of the Latin Mass Society, said: the “form and content of Responsa ad dubia could not be accepted by traditional Catholics”. The Fraternity of Saint Vincent Ferrer said: “The Supreme Authority of the Church cannot go back on its word given to the members of the Ecclesia Dei communities: it is impossible for the members of our institutes to abandon their liturgical customs.”

Netherlands Bishop Rob Mutsaerts, Auxiliary Bishop of Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands said, in his New Year message: “The ‘pope of mercy’ shows little mercy for those who embrace the Traditional Latin Mass.”

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Chicago On 27 December, an article appeared on Vatican News, a Vatican controlled website, announcing a series of measures being taken by Cardinal Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago, to regulate the provision of the older form of the Mass in his Archdiocese. These measures, which were to come into effect on 25 January, were draconian, and in some instances went beyond the clarifications in Responsa ad dubia.

Most notably, the celebration of Mass ad orientem is to be banned, and the first Sunday of every month is to be added to the list of days when the older form of the Mass is prohibited.

The actual document is entitled: Policies for the Implementation of Traditionis Custodes in the Archdiocese of Chicago and goes into some detail.

The provisions that could have the greatest impact on traditional life in the Archdiocese of Chicago include:

“There is no intention in these provisions to marginalise the faithful who are rooted in the previous form of celebration: they are only meant to remind them that this is a concession to provide for their good.”

It has been widely observed that it is unusual, if not unprecedented, for a document relating to a single diocese to be covered on a Vatican website. Furthermore, the report on Vatican News occurred on the same day as the document became available in Chicago. Many commentators have suggested this is evidence of collaboration between the Archbishop of Chicago and the Congregation for the Doctrine for Divine Liturgy.

• “Priests and those groups that receive permission from the Archbishop of Chicago to celebrate the Mass using the Missal of 1962, are bound on the first Sunday of the month to celebrate Mass only using the Missal of Paul VI. If Latin is used, then the faithful should be provided the means to participate in the responses. Mass is also ordinarily to be celebrated versus populum…”

• “…if the CDWDS, after receiving a request from the archbishop, grants the favour by way of exception to a parish church to celebrate Sunday Mass using the Missal of 1962, the parish must also provide a full schedule of Masses on that same Sunday, using solely the Roman Missal of Saint Paul VI.” • “If the favour of celebrating the Mass according to the Roman Missal of 1962 on selected weekdays is granted, by way of exception by the CDWDS, the parish must provide on that same weekday at least one Mass in the vernacular, versus populum, using the Roman Missal of Saint Pope Paul VI on those days and celebrated by a priest other than the one celebrating Mass according to the Missal of 1962.”

Slovenia In recent years, the hierarchy of Slovenia has only permitted one Traditional Mass per month in the whole country. That Mass, which was in Ljubljana, attracted a congregation of around 300. However, in August 2021, the regular celebrant was replaced by another who failed to abide by the rubrics and introduced a number of novelties. These were described as abuses by the traditionalist blog, Ad Dominum, which advised against attendance at that Mass. As a consequence of this advice, or perhaps because individuals made their own decision, the congregation declined dramatically.

A letter from the Liturgical Commission in response to enquiries about the implementation of Traditionis Custodes made by the St Joseph Group (which was the original promoter of the Ljubljana Mass) takes a hard line against those involved in promoting the Latin Mass in Slovenia.

The overall message of the letter is clearly indicated in the final paragraph: “I firmly believe that - as some bishops around the world have done the preconciliar rite should be entirely forbidden and that we should strive for greater unity and oneness in the Catholic Church in Slovenia. A growing number of young people are attracted to this ‘liturgical independence’ which could give birth to even greater confusion in future pastoral work. I am glad that Pope Francis finally took decisive action and made it clear he wishes to abolish the ‘parallel Church and parallel liturgies’.”

T h ro u g h o u t t h e d o c u m e n t , permission to offer the older form of the Mass is described as a “favour” and is often qualified with the phrase, “by way of exception”. This is exemplified by the explanation:

France In the town of Saint-Germain-enLaye, near Paris, Christmas Midnight Mass was offered in the older form at a temporary altar erected on the steps of the parish church, due to the local bishop refusing admission to the church.

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ART AND DEVOTION

A Meditation on the Passion of Christ Caroline Farey on a painting by Guido da Siena from the 1270s

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he very wood of the cross is speaking in the following quotation from the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood (‘rood’ meaning ‘cross’): ‘Then I saw mankind’s Lord Hasten with great zeal, as though he wanted to climb upon me.’

Written in the 10th century, this poem is one of the earliest instances of the theme of Christ climbing or ‘ascending’ the cross, a theme that can be found in several early medieval devotional texts and images and from several parts of Europe through to the 15th century.

The Dream of the Rood is part of a manuscript in Old English found in the library of the cathedral of Vercelli in North-West Italy, which is therefore called the Codex Vercellensis, or Vercelli book (codex). One commentator proposes that the book may have been taken to Italy by one of the numerous Anglo-Saxon pilgrims on the way to Rome.

This theme of Christ climbing the cross – seen in our painting - is obviously not scriptural yet it portrays profound divine truth, the truth of the Son of God’s irrepressible desire to save us. Another manuscript, from the fifteenth century, imagines the same scene in this way: …the clamouring crowd leads Christ to the place of Calvary, and then, with all of them watching there, He is stripped of His garments… O what great sorrow it was to you, most Holy Mother, when you beheld that sight. Then, when the cross had been prepared, they cry: "Ascend, Jesus, ascend." O how freely He ascends, with what great love for us He bore everything, with what patience, what gentleness! . . .

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‘The ladder has seven rungs which have, in other paintings of this kind, been clearly meant to indicate the ladder of virtue’ Thus, entirely nude, He is raised and extended on the cross. But his most loving mother, full of anguish, placed her veil, which had been on her head, around Him, and covered His shame…

(Pseudo-Bede, De Meditationes Passione Christi ) You will notice that the artist has deliberately made the loincloth around Jesus the same colour as the dress of his Blessed Mother (though maybe not her actual veil here) and her cloak of dark blue, as well as her arm, also wraps around her son.

These all indicate the intense unity of mission and purpose of mother and son in these final moments of Jesus’ earthly life.

St John Henry Cardinal Newman also imagines Christ climbing a ladder, but this time tentatively, on to the cross:

Yes, they set up the Cross on high, and they placed a ladder against it, and, having stripped Him of His garments, made Him mount. With His hands feebly grasping its sides and cross-woods, and His feet slowly, uncertainly, with much effort, with many slips, mounting up, … When He reached the projection where His sacred feet were to be, He turned round with sweet modesty and gentleness towards the fierce rabble, stretching out His arms, as if He would embrace them. Then He lovingly placed the backs of His hands close against the transverse beam, waiting for the executioners to come with their sharp nails and heavy hammers to dig into the palms of His hands, and to fasten them securely to the wood. (Taken from www.newmanreader.org, meditations on the stations of the cross, 11th station).

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ART AND DEVOTION

Similarly, here, we see Jesus reaching forward to mount the ladder with the help of the boy in red perched on the transverse beam. Standing next to Jesus is Mary, the mother of Jesus, the most animated and extraordinary figure in the painting. The Gospel of John speaks of her standing at the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25) but here the artist is depicting more: the great strength of her soul, the passion of her heart and her total unity with her son’s desire for the salvation of mankind.

Mary even holds back, by the throat, one of the crowd, who seems to have a stone in his raised hand, to ensure that nobody holds back the salvation she and her son are longing for and which is about to be accomplished.

‘Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful, Virgin most faithful’ are stanzas from the Litany of Loretto of the 16th century but they are already being depicted here.

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There are two identifiable groups of people also in the painting: the Roman soldiers with their metal helmets and the Jews with the floppy pointed hats in which the medieval world typically painted those Jews antagonistic towards Jesus. Notice that almost all the faces have been deliberately attacked and scratched at some point in time, except for those of Jesus and Mary. There is also one bare-headed man who looks up at the cross from the back of the scene on the left. He is possibly the beloved disciple, or Joseph of Arimathea (Mk 15:43).

The composition is full of drama and detail. The naked man, one of the thieves, is being made ready for one of the other crosses. A man hammers stakes into the ground at the foot of Christ’s cross, presumably to steady it, and a prominent Jew points to his heavy mallet as the better instrument for hammering in the nails held aloft by another.

The ladder has seven rungs which have, in other paintings of this kind, been clearly meant to indicate the ladder of virtue of 2 Peter 1:5-7. The list of virtues begins with Faith and culminates with love. Christ has the fullness of them all, but the indication is that in meditating on such texts and images of Christ’s passion we too will mount the ladder of virtue with Christ.

Factfile Guido da Siena, tempera, part of a wooden polyptych from the 1270s. The twelve panels of the polyptych have been divided and dispersed, with this one now housed in the museum of the Catherijneconvent, Utrecht.

I am indebted to the research of Anna Eorsi for many of the details in this article: https://tinyurl.com/2s42fduj

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FEATURE

Rebuilding the Faith Jeremy Boot on the Catholic Revival in England in the 19th Century

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found a long-neglected book on my bookshelf, Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin and the Catholic Revival by Denis Gwynn, published in 1946. It had survived its neglect very well and I was astonished at its content, not so much the architectural element, but the picture that unfolded of Catholicism and its sudden revival from about 1830 onwards.

Augustus Welby Pugin was a convert to Catholicism, a very talented architect, outspoken, eccentric in his dress and manner and a man who believed passionately that the only true architecture was the Gothic style and anything else – especially the classical – was an abomination. He sincerely believed that its revival in 19th century England, would bring about a wonderful revival of the Old Faith, faded and forgotten in England since penal times. In 1836 he had published Contrasts promoting his ideas and lambasting as much the state of the Church of England for the neglect of its architecture as for its state of religion.

His views won him many supporters and, predictably, enemies.

The state of Catholic England around 1830 was lamentable: a disheartened people, barely visible within society, not well tolerated, and restricted in their civil and religious rights and practice until the Catholic Relief Acts of 1799 and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which removed most restrictions, even allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament.

Most of the faithful worshipped – if they could at all – in Mass centres served by a few fixed or roaming clergy. In London it was easier, with some embassies allowing a small number to attend their chapels and centres for Mass tolerated provided they did not unduly draw attention to themselves. Great houses elsewhere in the country might have chapels at which those within travelling distance could hear Mass from time to time or regularly if there was a resident chaplain. Other areas, for example in Yorkshire and the north west, the faithful fared better and even devotions or processions on feast days were not unheard of, but this was exceptional and isolated.

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Not all the aristocracy had abandoned the Faith. John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, in particular was one who had not. Pugin and he found they were kindred spirits and were to work together successfully for many years to become major players in Catholic revival. Pugin had added much of his own design and extension to his residence at Alton Towers.

Shrewsbury saw that the lack of Catholic churches throughout the country was a serious obstacle to the revival of the Church.

He set about funding a considerable number of new buildings. Ambrose Phillips, another convert and landowner of Grace Dieu manor and Garendon Park, joined them to become another influential player in the team of Shrewsbury and Pugin.

He had, incidentally, also been influential in the conversion of Lord Spencer’s son, George, of Althorp, Northamptonshire.

Much of this new enthusiasm took place at first not in London but in the Midlands.

Nottingham (St Barnabas), Derby (St Mary), Birmingham (St Chads) and Oscott, near Birmingham, Cheadle (St Giles), Mount St Bernard’s Monastery, (Cistercians) and Grace Dieu, Leicestershire. Elsewhere, St Edmund’s College chapel, Ware, plans for Balliol at Oxford and St George’s Southwark come to mind, to name just a few. There were to be countless others.

Best known to the public was Pugin’s contribution to the rebuilding the Palace of Westminster. Charles Barry, the architect, had won the open competition but, having worked with Pugin, admired his work and engaged him to collaborate with him. The detail in that building makes plain what a huge influence Pugin had on the designs.

Pugin received not much above £400 for his efforts however.

The presence of new churches certainly put new heart into the downtrodden Catholic communities. For the old religion, not only were the bricks and mortar of Catholic life missing, but all that went with it: liturgy was sparce, sloppily exercised, vestments ragged or dirty. On his travels around the country, Pugin commented that even the Blessed Sacrament was to be found at times in no more than a box; even in noble houses, altars were barely

more than planks with a cover, fittings missing or improvised. Music was usually non-existent, plainsong unknown (the revival had to wait for Solesmes at the end of the century). All the old ways and former dignity of the old Church was lost, Rome another world apart to most Catholics. There were district Bishops at that time but the re-establishment of the hierarchy did not take place until Pius IXth’s encyclical Universalis Ecclesiae of 1850, to considerable political and national protest, when Wiseman became Cardinal. He had been Vicar Apostolic in Westminster, and before that Bishop in Birmingham.

Co-incidental with this, and equally important, was the growing movement in the 1830s and 40s in the Anglican Church at Oxford. The Tractarians and the Oxford Movement, in brief, was a group of scholars and churchmen who more and more had become convinced of the need for Reunion with Rome and truly believed that the right way to achieve it was by edging towards union, not by any immediate conversion to Rome, since, as they saw it, abandoning the Church of England, they feared, would simply allow it to drift more and more towards an extreme Protestantism.

Fr Frederick William Faber (Blessed) and (Saint) John Henry Newman, among the famous names of these years, shared this opinion with much support from their co-religionists. There was even some sympathy with this idea on the Catholic side since Reunion did seem credible.

Newman struggled much with this concept before his submission to Rome.

His eventual move in 1845 was to prove a bombshell both to the Church of England and the Establishment in general, but it set the seal as the greatest possible gift of the Holy Ghost to the English Catholic Church at last to re-build something vibrant and strong after years of stagnation.

Of equal importance at this time were lesser known figures: Fr Luigi Gentili, a Rosminian, and Fr Dominic Barberi, a Passionist. Both Italian, they brought their (not always well-received) customs with them. Between them, these two clerics alone received many thousands of converts, even from the most unpromising areas.

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FEATURE The growing number of vocations too was having its impact. New churches were being built – many, but not all, by Pugin and his friends – and moribund Catholic communities revived. Fine and solemn liturgies were reintroduced, retreats and the sacraments, in a way unheard of for centuries. Priests in public had generally worn lay, not clerical, clothes, but Fr Gentili now wore the Roman collar, never seen in England, and Fr Barberi his striking Passionist habit: clear signs of the Catholic priesthood which they did not seek to hide.

Father Antonio Francesco Davide Ambrogio Rosmini-Serbati had created the Institute of Charity (Rosminians) in 1828, a society which could serve any bishop who might invite them to serve. Fr Gentili had long had an interest in England and in its Catholic revival and was approached by Bishop Baines of the Western District. He arrived in England in 1835. There were plans for a Catholic university at Prior Park School. Although this did not come about, his enthusiasm and activity there brought back many converts and long-forgotten practices – holy medals, religious emblems, processions and devotions to Our Lady.

But he was recalled to Italy, briefly, then brought back by George Spencer and put to work at Loughborough. There is a plaque with Fr Gentili’s name on it in the church of Our Lady of the Annunciation. He went on to do much work elsewhere: Bath, Bristol and finally Dublin, where he died of fever during his mission to the poor in 1848.

Fr Dominic Barberi’s story is even stranger. He had known in his heart from an early age that he was destined to convert England, although it seemed an absurd and impossible idea since he did not know England, he was no orator, and never spoke English particularly well. Yet it was he who was to receive the future St John Henry Newman into the Church. He suffered much personally. He had been mocked for his appearance, even been stoned and insulted publicly in the streets.

After Mass one day he wept and said he could take no more, but within a year (1843), he had single-handedly received no less than 75 converts. His reputation grew and he went on to receive many more into the Church, including Newman’s closest allies, the trickle of converts from Oxford sympathisers quickly becoming a flood.

Bishop Wiseman had longed to make contact with Oxford and Newman and his friends but had never succeeded.

Newman by now had very much isolated himself from meetings and resided now at Littlemore College near Oxford. He continued to dissuade any to convert yet to Rome, but increasingly his friends were drawn to do just this. Fr Barberi however

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St John Henry Newman: his move to Rome in 1845 set the seal as the greatest possible gift of the Holy Ghost to the English Catholic Church

had business at Littlemore in 1845 and to his great surprise, as he was drying his wet clothing by the fireside, he was astonished suddenly to encounter Newman and two close friends, who fell to their knees and begged to be received into the Church.

Meanwhile, shortly after Newman’s conversion, Fr Faber, who was at Ambleside, moving more and more towards Catholic practices, was received in 1845 by Bishop Wareing, Vicar-Apostolic of the Eastern District. With him came many others who went on to form the Brethren of the Will of God, a community in Birmingham. Lord Shrewsbury offered them a centre at Alton and then Cotton Hall, which he had acquired in addition to land near Cheadle. The expanding community was mainly for convert Anglican clergy who had lost their livings.

Newman, on his return from Rome, founded the Oratories of Birmingham and London (under Fr Faber’s care). He was to move to Cotton Hall but did not do so. The Passionists, who by now had grown considerably in numbers, were to take it over as a House of Studies for their English Province. Lord Shrewsbury had once said disapprovingly, “No Englishman would ever become a Passionist” had been proved wrong.

Pugin built churches from one end of the country to the other, and in Ireland. His health collapsed, in 1847, through overwork; deciding to go abroad to recuperate, he at last found himself in Rome, and unimpressed, saw St Peter’s and wrote of it – “Ugly and vilelyconstructed–badtasteseemstohaverun riot here.” Unsurprisingly his Continental tour reinforced his own absolute view on “True, Christian architecture,” by which

he meant Gothic, and thanked God no such style would ever take root in English churches.

The Oratory in London, under Fr Faber, however was to be built in the classical style and this brought Pugin immediately into conflict with them. Pugin’s criticism and objections were not made quietly. Cardinal Wiseman did not share Pugin’s prejudices or architectural beliefs. There was much correspondence between Shrewsbury and his friend Ambrose Phillips, who, although invited, declined to sit on the Oratory board of advisors, probably mainly out of loyalty to his friend Pugin. The protests came to nothing and although a thorn in their side, Pugin was still much admired and respected.

Newman too praised Pugin’s diligence and work but labelled his views as intolerant, which was hardly an understatement.

Pugin’s health deteriorated through overwork and he was even confined briefly to an asylum, as his mental health had suffered too, before returning to his home in 1852 in Ramsgate where he died and was buried near the house he had built himself. Tributes were widespread and Queen Victoria, no less, granted his widow a pension out of the civil list from her admiration of Pugin’s work.

The idea that the restoration of true Christian architecture alone would restore Catholic England from its centuries of stagnation seems, from our modern perspective, idealistic and bordering on the absurd. Yet it was an example of the right man at the right time and the right place. Pugin’s enthusiasm and energy; the backing of the Earl of Shrewsbury; the new vocations and converts in their thousands, and the Oxford Movement, and particularly St John Henry Newman, Fr Faber, and the Oratorians. How could it fail? Those inspirational men along with such co-workers as Fr Barberi and Fr Gentili and their followers were God-given and wrought such marvellous results.

What are we to learn from all this at a time of the undeniable present decline in the Church in this country and worldwide? We need a new Catholic Revival, particularly as people predict many will not return to the Church after the current pandemic. We need good and holy souls with energy and enthusiasm on a scale we have not seen for many years.

The 19th century Second Spring not only reversed a seemingly hopeless decline, but did so on a grand scale and quickly. Now we seem preoccupied with containing decline, accepting it, or excusing it. Only God knows how and when the next true renewal will come, but come it will. We should be ready, keep the Faith and not lose heart meanwhile.

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MASS LISTINGS

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FEATURE

A fundamentally Catholic work Charles A. Coulombe on J.R.R Tolkien’s deep commitment to the Faith

O

ne hundred and thirty years after his birth, J.R.R. Tolkien needs virtually no introduction to anyone literate in any major language read on Planet Earth. The unassuming Oxford Don was already a celebrity – especially among the Counter-Culture – when he died. The fact that his books are renowned world-wide while the depth of his conviction and devotion to the Catholic Faith are not says more about the Church in his time and ours than it does about him. Had this Professor of Philology flourished at a time when the Catholic Hierarchy were convinced of the absolute truth of the Faith over which they preside, then he would have been his age’s Chateaubriand or Sir Walter Scott: a literary catalyst for a period of strong Catholic revival. That he was not cannot be laid at his door, but at theirs.

Oddly enough, this epitome of English literature was born in Bloemfontein in what was then the Orange Free State, less than a decade before the Boer War which would see it annexed by the British Empire and then incorporated into the nascent Union of South Africa. His religious life began at the still-extant baptismal font in the city’s Anglican Cathedral of St Andrew and St Michael. Tolkien’s father, Arthur, had been sent there with his newlywed wife, Mabel, to take up a banking position. But the hot, dry country (which JRRT remembered) was unhealthy; the future author almost died from a tarantula bite (which he did not remember). When the lad was three, his mother, Mabel, took him and his brother back to their parents’ native Birmingham. Arthur was to join them a little later but, tragically, he contracted rheumatic fever and died in Bloemfontein. Mabel and her sons were forced to live off the kindness of relatives.

When his mother – a highly educated woman who taught the precocious brothers at home initially – converted to Catholicism in 1900, her family cut

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Tolkien: ‘his educated, urbane, but withal down-to-earth and completely believing style of Catholicism is one that resonates strongly with those reared in a world built upon the unreal’

them off. She managed to make ends meet, and was spiritually nourished by the Birmingham Oratory, founded

by Cardinal Newman. She died of the then-incurable diabetes in 1904; years later, JRT would recall: “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.”

Their Guardianship was given by Mabel to a priest of the Oratory, of whom Tolkien would write: “He was an upperclass Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.”

Father Morgan oversaw Tolkien’s education at King Edward’s School and his entrance to Exeter College, Oxford.

Tolkien would meet and fall in love with Edith Brand; complying with Fr Morgan’s strictures, they did not marry

until the eve of JRRT’s 1916 departure for France to fight in World War I. His experiences in the trenches marked him as they did so many; a casualty, he was returned to England, and in 1920 mustered out of active service; all but one of his boyhood friends were dead.

From that time he commenced the academic and literary career that has since made him universally famous.

As is well known, it was during this time that he made the acquaintance of C.S. Lewis, in whose conversion to Christianity he had a major role – but whose Ulster-bred anti-Catholicism kept him out of the Faith, despite Tolkien’s best efforts. World War brought Charles Williams to Oxford, and while Tolkien did not really “get” a good deal of his work, when he died in 1945 JRRT had a Mass said for him at Blackfriars and served it himself.

This of course leads us to the question of just how much Tolkien’s religion affected his work – and particularly his magnum opus. The answer is, very much so. To one correspondent he wrote: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” He was in fact quite explicit about it on numerous occasions; to cite one particularly clear letter: “…I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories), and in fact a Roman Catholic. The latter 'fact' perhaps cannot be deduced; though one critic (by letter) asserted that the invocations of Elbereth, and the character of Galadriel as directly described (or through the words of Gimli and Sam) were clearly related to Catholic devotion to Mary. Another saw in waybread (lembas) viaticum and the reference to its feeding the will (vol. III, p. 213) and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist. (That is: far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy-story.)”

Indeed, as any orthodox Catholic’s faith must be, Tolkien’s religious life

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FEATURE was firmly centred in the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary. In a letter to Robert Murray SJ, he writes of "...Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty, both in majesty and simplicity is founded”. We might compare his elven hymn to Elbereth with the famous Marian hymn of John Lingard.

Here is Tolkien:

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!

O Queen beyond the Western Seas!

O Light to us that wander here Amid the world of woven trees!

Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!

Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath, Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee In a far land beyond the sea.

O stars that in the Sunless Year With shining hand by her were sown, In windy fields now bright and clear We see your silver blossom blown!

O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!

We still remember, we who dwell In this far land beneath the trees, Thy Starlight on the Western Seas.

Compare to Lingard:

Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean star, Guide of the wand’rer here below: Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy careSave us from peril and from woe.

Mother of Christ, star of the sea, Pray for the wanderer, pray for me.

Sojourners in this vale of tears, To thee, blest advocate, we cry; Pity our sorrows, calm our fears, And soothe with hope our misery.

Refuge in grief, star of the sea, Pray for the mourner, pray for me.

So too with the Blessed Sacrament; as noted, Tolkien himself saw it as the inspiration for Elven Waybread. As he wrote to his son Michael: “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. [...] There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste— or foretaste—of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained,

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or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.” He was a staunch advocate of daily Communion: “The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.” He spoke out of sad experience; at one point when very depressed and suffering, his doctor – fellow Catholic and Inkling Howard Havard – prescribed a cure: “All right now, but I've been in a very bad state.

Humphrey came here and told me that I must go to confession and that he would come early on Sunday morning to take me to confession and communion.

That's the sort of doctor to have.”

As the 1960s progressed, The Lord of The Rings became an international bestseller, and was embraced by many in the emerging Counterculture. “Frodo Lives” T-shirts multiplied alongside “Come to Middle Earth” posters. That the hippies should have been enchanted by such a Catholic work seemed odd to many, but not to the Professor himself, who spoke of: “the behavior of modern youth, part of which is inspired by admirable motives such as anti-regimentation, and anti-drabness, a sort of lurking romantic longing for ‘cavaliers’, and is not necessarily allied to the drugs or the cults of faineance and filth.” The emergence of such phenomena as the Christmas Revels, the Renaissance Faires, and the Society for Creative Anachronism at the same time shows that Tolkien indeed saw what others did not: that many young people of the time – just as during the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Inter-war years – were seeking the eternal truths that only the Catholic Faith could give them.

Unlike those two eras, however, the Church of the 1960s was too busy accommodating to the spirit of the age to evangelise; too busy shredding precisely those things about her that had always attracted seekers before – especially the Liturgy. Tolkien, for his part, did not cease to go to Mass.

Nevertheless, his grandson Simon recounted: “I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth.

He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed

the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English.

I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but My Grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.” Nevertheless, as he wrote to his son, “Our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings, folly, and even sins of the Church and its ministers, but I do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons (least of all anyone with any historical knowledge).”

So it was that Tolkien endured the immediate post-Conciliar years and all their horrors; he died in 1975. His life and witness have brought many to the Faith, despite everything; for many of us cradle Catholics, JRRT’s work has deepened our Faith. Certainly, it has in my life - and provided many dear friends from the ranks of Tolkien enthusiasts.

Not too surprisingly, therefore, some have spoken about his beatification, and indeed on 2 September 2017, a Mass was offered for that purpose at St Aloysius’ Church at Oxford. This was particularly poignant because during his academic career, the then Jesuit church had been Tolkien’s parish.

They came to epitomise everything he disliked about the New Church, going so far as to burn all the relics in their famed reliquary chapel in 1971 (Tolkien was mercifully living in retirement with Edith at Bournemouth then). But by the time of that Mass, the Jesuits had surrendered the parish to the Oratorians, to whom Tolkien had been so close in Birmingham. It was truly fitting that one of them should have offered the Sacrifice on that occasion.

Whether or not Tolkien is ever beatified, one thing is certain. When the day comes that the Catholic hierarchy is once again, as a unified body, interested in evangelisation, there can be little doubt that Tolkien’s writings – both fictional and otherwise – will play a great role in the work of converting the Anglosphere. As compelling as the sense of reality is that permeates his fantasies, his educated, urbane, but withal down-toearth and completely believing style of Catholicism is one that resonates strongly with those reared in a world built upon the unreal. The Professor would surely appreciate that.

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COMMENT

Daughter of a king Mary O’Regan on the martyrdom of St Philomena

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was astounded by the reaction to my last column on St Philomena.

I’d known St Philomena to be an awesome advocate, but after I shared my devotion to her with certain young friends of mine, they invited her intercession, and the results were staggering. Some of them are very young and had certainly never heard of her or prayed to her. But when they did, they recovered from illnesses, both physical and mental, and baffled the doctors. I prayed to St Philomena for someone who’d been far from the sacraments for some time and now they have made a sincere confession and they are going to the Latin Mass!

Most especially, a few pregnant women enjoyed Philomena’s help and had very easy labours.

So much so, that champagne corks were flying in the wake of Philomena’s intercession, and we joked that maybe champagne could be a symbol of Philomena’s amazing aid. There was, however, one persistent question asked about her. They were surprised that since Philomena was a princess, the daughter of a Greek king, why did she suffer so horribly under Emperor Diocletian? I mean, if she was royal, did she not have special protection? Could her father have used his regal influence to save her? Well, as it turns out, Philomena was not a powerful princess in this life, but she certainly is in Heaven. So, this is the second in a two-part series about St

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Philomena, where I seek to give her life context, because, in this pandemic, we need her more than ever!

Philomena was born in modern day Corfu. Both her parents were royal, but this was 291 and Greece was under Roman rule. For some years before Philomena was born, her parents had suffered the cross of infertility. They were pagans and sacrificed to their false gods, but they remained childless. They were attended

by Publius, a Roman doctor who led them to Christ and he even promised that they would have a baby if they became Christians. His words proved prophetic.

Not long after they were baptized, they welcomed baby Philomena into their household; Philomena means “Friend of the Light”. The royal couple doted on their little girl. When she was 13, Corfu was threatened by war, and her father decided to go to Rome and negotiate peace with Emperor Diocletian. He went with his wife and daughter, who was young but gloriously beautiful. Diocletian listened to the Greek king implore him not to make war, but kept his eyes on Philomena.

After the Greek king had pleaded his case, Diocletian assured him he would not start a conflict on one condition: “I will place the forces of the Empire at your disposal on condition you give me the hand of your fair daughter Philomena in marriage.” This offer was accepted

by Philomena’s parents. They tried to pressure their daughter into marrying the Emperor, telling her it would be a grand life, to be Empress of the world, but two year earlier, Philomena had vowed to be a virgin for Christ and had pledged herself to be the Divine King’s spouse. There was also the fact that Diocletian was 59 - 46 years older than Philomena. Diocletian was also married to Empress Prisca who was only 18.

Diocletian was not husband material, but Philomena’s parents were in a quandary. Perhaps they figured myriad lives could be saved if they offered Philomena to Diocletian. And there were other reasons, not just short-term, why it would have been politically advantageous for a Greek princess to marry the

most powerful man in the world. Had Philomena “married” Diocletian, she would have been able to lobby for Greece’s best interests for decades.

‘Angels, sent by Our Lord, cut the rope of the anchor and Philomena was seen on the bank, more beautiful than ever’ But Philomena rejected the life of privilege offered her, and when she spurned Diocletian’s advances, the Emperor treated her to the most sadistic torture. First, Diocletian had her thrown in a dungeon and bound in the heaviest chains, in the hope she would consent to be his bride. When she did not, Diocletian had her tied to a pillar and whipped while the nastiest blasphemies filled the air.

Afterwards, she was “one gaping wound” and Diocletian sent her back to prison to die. The sadistic emperor did not count on angels from heaven coming to soothe her wounds while she languished in a prison cell, but after the angels had visited Philomena, Diocletian was furious to see her more beautiful than ever. When she rejected him again, he gave orders that she should be thrown into a river with an anchor tied around her neck.

Angels, sent by Our Lord, cut the rope of the anchor and Philomena was seen on the bank, more beautiful than ever.

The tyrannical emperor was enraged and ordered she be pierced with arrows.

The archers found their arrows refused to leave their bows. The emperor hinted she was a witch and commanded that the arrows be treated in a furnace, that their fiery tips might soar through the air against any spell she had intended, but the arrows turned around and pierced the same archers who had intended them for Philomena. Finally, Diocletian had the object of his obsession decapitated.

Philomena was martyred in the year 304. I beg you to consider that while she was not a powerful princess in this life, she certainly is in eternal life, and I ask you to entreat her intercession for you and your loved ones.

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WINE

On the shores of Lake Garda…

Sebastian Morello on Traditional Catholics, and the wines of Lugana

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eaders of this wonderful quarterly will be aware that in July of last year the Holy Father issued an edict, Traditiones Custodes, aimed at frustrating the religious practice of Catholics who worship as did their forefathers in the Faith. In his accompanying letter, Pope Francis explained that such Catholics tend to identify the Church’s received tradition with what he called the ‘true Church’, and suggested that these Catholics saw the novel experiments and innovations of the past half-century as something of a departure from that ‘true Church’.

Perhaps Pope Francis imagines that traditional Catholics think the Mystical Body no longer subsists in the hierarchical Church – a position comparable to the one Martin Luther adopted, with the ‘true Church’ being seen to be a spiritual entity visible only to God. But that is not what we think. Rather, traditional Catholics tend to think that some, perhaps most, of the Church’s hierarchs have gone offpiste with their theology, to the extent that believing the truths of the Faith can get a Catholic into trouble with ecclesial institutions. In this way, there seem to be two religions, or religious world views, competing within the visible institution of the Church. For this reason, traditional Catholics have repeatedly compared our own times to those of the Arian crisis of the 4th century, except our crisis is more or less world-wide.

Eight years ago, the Latin Mass Society sponsored me to attend the Roman Forum Summer Symposium on Lake Garda, a twoweek scholarly conference during which attendees listen to lectures delivered by erudite academics from around the world and engage in fascinating discussions that continue late into the night over fabulous dinners. I knew little of the Old Rite at that time, but I had read many works by the Roman Forum’s legendary founder Prof.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, philosopher, anti-Nazi activist, and champion of Catholic tradition. So, when I heard that the LMS was offering sponsorship for people to attend the Symposium, I approached them.

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DOC Lugana is a small viticultural area just south of Lake Garda

Those involved in the Symposium share one thing in common: all are committed to defending the tradition of the Catholic Church. At this event I learned – and not because anyone said this to me, but rather by what I observed – that there are indeed two religions subsisting within the visible institution of the Catholic Church. There is the religion I encountered at the Symposium, and there is the religion I have encountered in many places elsewhere. There is the religion whose origin is wholly supernatural and whose purpose is the transformation of fallen human nature by divine grace, and there is a religion which differs not in kind from a sort of optimistic humanism, whose ‘values’ are indistinguishable from the acceptable middle-class sentiments of the modern West. One of these religions was practiced by Paul the Apostle, Francis of Assisi, Thomas More, Benedict Joseph Labre, and Maria Goretti, and one of these religions was not.

It was at this Symposium that I discovered Catholicism as an integrated whole, within which Christian fellowship, liturgy, devotion, creed, the moral life, and the intellectual life are interwoven and inseparable. As one Roman Forum faculty member put it to me, “the Incarnation happened, and now everything is different.” I had known for some time that the religion which I so frequently encountered in the Catholic Church differed from that which I encountered in old Catholic books and lives of saints, but it was on the shore of Lake Garda that I discovered that the latter religion still lives.

At the end of the Symposium, on account of my engagement in

the discussions and debates, von Hildebrand’s brilliant successor, the historian Prof. John Rao, invited me to join the faculty. My experience there had been comparable to a second conversion.

I came home a ‘traditional Catholic’ – what less than a century ago was called a ‘Catholic’. I have returned each year since to deliver papers on various topics – that is, until pandemic-related regulations made it impossible.

Fortunately, over the past two years I have had occasion to visit Lake Garda through the bottle. DOC Lugana is a small viticultural area just south of the Lake, and produces some of the most remarkably subtle, peachy, vanilla-ry, refreshing whites of the whole region.

The terroir is extremely difficult to work with, being up to 50% clay in some areas, but that mineral-rich clay is the magic ingredient for bringing forth such perfect Trebbiano di Lugana grapes (now called Turbiana grapes since the recent DNA discovery that the vines do not belong to the Trebbiano family). This wine, when young, is perfect for white pasta dishes or shellfish, but it bottle-ages beautifully into a robust, complex and nutty wine which is still zesty and invigorating after ten years of waiting for its turn.

My experience is that this is a wine that can be drunk late into the evening on its own, and especially lends itself to roaring debates over whether Anselm’s ontological argument contains a fallacy or – a little later into the night – the merits and demerits of the Jacobite uprisings.

With the world put to rights, this wine ought to be used to toast our ancestors in the Faith, who kept alive the received tradition and liturgy in times of terrible pressure and persecution.

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FEATURE

Press return Robert Asch on the St Austin Press, Britain’s premier traditional Catholic publishing house

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hen I joined the Saint Austin Press in 1999, as a recent convert from Judaism, I had only just discovered the extraordinary riches of the Mass of Tradition. I had spent the years of my approach to Catholicism in Prague (which I don’t believe offered a single TLM in those days). Neither there, nor in the catechesis I received in Christmas and summer holidays in London, did the TLM feature at all. I was not even aware of the liturgical changes which had followed the Second Vatican Council. I recall being puzzled by whole sections of Mgr. Ronald Knox’s Mass in Slow Motion which didn’t correspond to anything I could find in my CTS booklet of the Mass in Latin and English. In those days of the Ecclesia Dei dispensation the Traditional Mass flew largely under the radar for most of us. A kind of ultramontanism obtained, focused essentially on opposing a TabletModernism, particularly on issues of sexual ethics. But London, as I came to discover, was a haven for the TLM, thanks above all to the efforts of the Latin Mass Society and the Oratory.

Then, one day, my brother (another convert who is now the TLM Chaplain for the Archdiocese of Toronto), suggested I accompany him to a Traditional Latin Mass at Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane.

After the Mass, we went for drinks and discussion to the Marquis of Granby around the corner, where I met Ferdi McDermott, the founder of the Saint Austin Press. That evening altered my devotional life forever.

Ferdi founded the Press in 1996 on his own visionary initiative, perceiving that what was both most urgent and neglected in British Catholic publishing were books exploring and elucidating the intricate glories of the Traditional Liturgy as it began to return to altars about the county, superior works of apologetics, and a restoration of key titles by the great authors of the English Catholic revival, neglected or suppressed since the late 60s. Many of these volumes have since been acquired by Baronius and Ignatius

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Exceptional volumes affordable to the common reader

Press, with not a few of the original editions now sought after as collectors’ items.

The success of the Press led to the foundation of the Saint Austin Review (which continues to this day under the direction of Joseph Pearce), and Chavagnes International College in 2002.

Sadly, the demands of running a school soon led to the cessation of the Press’s activities.

Now, in this time of unprecedented crisis in the Church – a period which has also witnessed an extraordinary revival of the Traditional Liturgy - several members of the original team have come together to restore the Saint Austin Press to its original glory and purposes, with a commitment to publishing the most important books, by authors of unimpeachable orthodoxy, on doctrine, liturgy, history, and the spiritual life.

But there is more: the Catholic Church is central to the life of Western civilisation – a civilisation in which books have played a pivotal role.

We believe that the restoration of high standards of book printing and binding are a necessary part of the

rallying behind what T.S. Eliot called the permanent things – in the Church, and in the life of the Western world. To succeed in that mission, we have spared no pains to make these exceptional volumes affordable to the common reader. These are texts every serious Catholic desirous of keeping and strengthening his or her faith should own; they are books every reader will cherish.

It is our conviction that the only path out of the present catastrophe of the Church is orthodox doctrine and traditional liturgy, and it is surely providential that our new titles began to appear just as Traditionis Custodes was published. In these dark times it is heartwarming to be the bearer of good news, and surely the return of a pioneering traditionalist Catholic publishing house in the land that brought the Church the first TLM indult is something we can all rejoice in.

Visit the Saint Austin Press at: www.austinspress.com/ EDITOR’S NOTE: Saint Austin Press books are available from the LMS online shop.

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FEATURE

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CROSSWORD Clues Across 1 Russian composer also leading chemist and founder of School of Medicine for Women (7) 5 See 8 Across 8 & 5 Across: ‘Whither goest Thou?’, Peter’s question to the risen Christ on the Appian Way (3,5) 9 Time of youthful exuberance or the peak of one’s abilities (5,4) 10 In Greek mythology, the Muse of lyric poetry (5) 11 Feast of the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles (9) 14 One of seven including Penance and Extreme Unction (8) 18 Bd. Alan de la, Dominican reviver of the Rosary in the 15thc. (5) 21 Egyptian kingdom lasting from 305 BC to death of Cleopatra (9) 22 Market research In-depth Interview in short (3) 23 Irish county where St. Columba believed to have founded the Abbey of Kells (5) 24 Anti-Pelagian Pope and Saint of early fifth century (7)

Alan Frost: December 2021

ANSWERS TO WINTER 2021 CROSSWORD

Across: 1 Zouaves 5 Mount 8 Rho 9 Reredoses 10 Alibi 11 Confiteor 14 Notre-Dame 18 On The 21 Zucchetto 22 Lea 23 Agnes 24 Odyssey Down: 1 Zurbaran 2 Utopia 3 Versicle 4 Sermon 5 Midi 6 Ursine 7 TASS 12 Ideology 13 Rosemary 15 Tuscan 16 Agatho 17 Stylus 19 Ezra 20 Whys

Clues Down 1 Legacy, endowment, or gift (8) 2 Popular types of wine from Spain (6) 3 Opposite of St. Thomas More’s fictional ideal world (8) 4 Link between Mandela and Trafalgar Square (6) 5 ‘Retro me ---- Satana’, words of Our Lord in Matthew 16 (4) 6 Name for the Devil in Spain, derived from the Latin (6) 7 Emphatic instruction in Guild of St. Clare, we hear, is nothing special! (2-2) 12 Short passages from religious or literary works (8) 13 Pilgrimage and commercial city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee (8) 15 Dome-like structure atop, e.g., a cathedral (6) 16 Substitute, usually of an inferior product (6) 17 Battle after which success Octavian became ‘Augustus Caesar’ (6) 19 ‘---- in Alium’, exceptional motet for 40 voices by Thomas Tallis (4) 20 Son of Adam and Eve (4)

Entries for the spring 2022 competition should be sent to the Latin Mass Society, 11-13 Macklin Street, London WC2B 5NH or scanned and emailed to info@lms.org.uk, to arrive before Friday 11th March 2022.

The winner of the winter 2021 competition is Mrs Ross of Cornwall, who wins a copy of the LMS Traditional Wall Calendar for 2022.

CHRISTMAS COLOURING COMPETITION Thank you to all who submitted entries to the colouring competition, the winners were Hugo Armstrong and Teresa Miller.

CLASSIFIED ADVERTISEMENTS Guild of St Clare: Spring 2022 Sewing Retreat at Park Place, Hampshire, PO17 5HA, 4-6th February 2022, with Fr Stephen Morrison OPraem. Fully booked, but waiting list open on the LMS website.

Guild of St Clare: Autumn 2022 Sewing Retreat at Park Place Hampshire, PO17 5HA, 4-6th Nov. Booking now open on LMS website.

St Catherine's Trust Summer School for children aged 11-17: 31 July to 6 Aug, St Cassian's Kintbury RG17 9SR. To book see www.stcatherinestrust.org LMS Latin & Greek Residential Course, 8-13 Aug, with Fr John Hunwicke, Fr Richard Bailey (tbc) and Mr Matthew Spencer. Park Place Hampshire, PO17 5HA. St Tarcisius Server Training Days / Guild of St Clare Vestment Mending Days: 26 Feb St Mary Moorfields, London; 2 April, St Dominic's Haverstock Hill, London; 21 May, St Mary Moorfields. Please book on the LMS website for the Server Training; email lucyashaw@gmail.com for the Vestment Mending. In both cases all levels of skill are welcome!

Guild of St Clare: Oxford sewing group meets fortnightly on Thursday evenings.

Email for further information: lucyashaw@ gmail.com

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Guild of St Clare: Bobbin Lace for Beginners.

Ongoing course, fortnightly on Thursday evenings, Oxford. Email for further information: lucyashaw@gmail.com Online Christian Latin and New Testament Greek Courses with Matthew Spencer. For ongoing courses, email Matthew Spencer matthewjaspencer@yahoo.com

WANTED Priest to share hermitage

adjoining a Catholic chapel in northern England. Rent-free for the privilege of serving your private Old Rite Masses. thegloryisgods@gmail.com

ACCOMMODATION WANTED

Lady seeks temporary or permanent accommodation: bedsit or room or shared or communal accommodation in London NW3 areas or other areas of London. Please phone 020 7328 4417 or 07950 286956.

Classified advertisements cost j u s t 5 0 p p e r wo rd w i t h a n additional charge of just £5 if you’d like your advertisement in a box, so whether you run courses, a small hotel, a B&B, a retreat or have something to sell or a service to offer that would be of interest to our readers just contact us on 020 7404 7284.

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