Chairman’s Message

For the good of souls

Joseph Shaw on what we should all be promoting

The dust continues to settle on Pope Francis’ApostolicLetterTraditionis Custodes, and the consequences remain mixed. Some people have been badly affected by it; in many places it has made no practical difference; in a few the ancient Mass has continued to make progress. All things considered we must be grateful to the bishops of England and Wales—or to nearly all of them—for their common sense, moderation, and pastoral concern.

I never doubted that the celebration of the ‘former Missal’, or whatever we are supposed to call it, would survive Traditionis Custodes, but this reality is becoming evident even to those least friendly to it. We do not have to wait for a change of policy in Rome to go back to the work of promoting this liturgy: we have never stopped it.

Readers may have seen a leaked letter from a Roman Congregation fretting about this word ‘promote’, which appears in the Latin Mass Society’s legal name: ‘The Latin Mass Society for the Promotion of the Traditional Roman Rite’. It is not clear, however, what the problem is supposed to be. Pope Francis tells us that bishops should permit the old Mass for the good of souls: ‘to provide for the good of those who are rooted in the previous form of celebration’, to quote his exact words. It follows that it must be ok to promote it for the good of souls. The good of souls is what all Catholics should be promoting, and they should do this through those pious practices, devotions, and liturgical forms which the Church nurtures for this purpose.

It would perhaps have surprised the Catholics of the middle of the 20th century to see what an important role the laity have today in this work. The Congregation—soon to be renamed ‘Dicastery’—for Divine Worship does not wish priests to list the Traditional Mass in their parish newsletters, which has led to some ambiguous phrasing appearing, but readers can rely on the Latin Mass Society’s Mass Listings, printed here in MassofAgesand online, and can join our Telegram group for updates. Similarly, the Latin Mass Society continues to organise pilgrimages, including our great walking SUMMER 2022

'Onceupon a timetherewassomethingcalled"Benediction", andthiswas whattheyusedforit.' HubertVan Zeller(BrCholeric) Cracks in the Clouds 1976. pilgrimage from Ely to Walsingham, and Masses, devotions, and training opportunities all over the country. The St Catherine’s Trust Summer School, supported by the Latin Mass Society, will take place again this year after a two-year gap caused by Covid.

This lay activity, however, is not an anomaly, but a return to a longerterm normality. Wealthy families and guilds and sodalities of working men, housewives, and even children, built and supported churches, stipended priests, and organised devotions, processions, and pilgrimages, throughout the Middle Ages. Again, religious orders of men, as well as of women, were generally founded not as communities of priests, but of men in the lay state with a priest to say Mass for them: and sometimes not even that. The Second Vatican Council emphasised the role of the laity in evangelising the secular world; what it could not have anticipated is the way that the clergy would lose their moral authority in the eyes of the world, as a result of scandals. The Latin Mass Society cannot substitute for priests, but we can support them: and in the realm of the Traditional Mass, this support has always been crucial. We follow the example, as well as invoke the intercession, of the Society’s two Patron Saints: St Margaret Clitherow and St Richard Gwynn, married lay people who laid down their lives to promote the Church’s ancient liturgy and support the priests who celebrated it. Such devotion made the suppression of the Catholic Faith impossible in the Penal times of the 16th and 17th centuries. Our devotion, in these much less dangerous times, will ensure that the same Mass and associated devotions will not be eradicated in the 21st century either. However often we are written off as dying, we remember, this Easter season, the words of G.K. Chesterton: ‘We follow a God who knows His way out of the grave.’