Mass of Ages Winter 2019 edition

Mass of Ages The quarterly magazine of the Latin Mass Society

Issue 202 – Winter 2019 – FREE

Cardinal Burke’s Mass in Corpus Christi Church, Maiden Lane Priest and Server Training A story of God’s grace: Bishop Michael Campbell’s address to the LMS Plus: news, views, Mass listings and nationwide reports

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Contents

CONTENTS

5 Chairman’s Message Be the change you want to see, says Joseph Shaw 6 LMS Year Planner – Notable events

7 Liturgical calendar 8 Mass in Maiden Lane

His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke celebrated Pontifical Low

Mass in Corpus Christi Church 11 Loved and admired

Maurice Quinn remembers Jeremy Hooper 12 A story of God’s grace

Bishop Michael Campbell’s address to the LMS Annual General Meeting 14 Roman report

The new Benedictine Monastery in Norcia is a door to Heaven in the

path of faith, says Alberto Carosa 16 Reports from around the country

What’s happening where you are 24 Joseph Aloysius Hansom, Architect, Inventor and Publisher

Paul Waddington reviews the architectural output of one of the most

prolific Catholic architects of the nineteenth century 26 The Church Suffering

Mary O’Regan makes a pledge in the month of holy souls 27 Innocence lost

Lone Veiler on how a whole generation has been traumatised 28 My First Mass

The Traditional Rite saved my spiritual life, says Adam Harrison 29 Letters

Readers have their say 30 Best and truest

Charles A. Coulombe explores how the 19th century Celtic Revival

brought many to the Faith 32 Priest & Server Training returns

After a break of a year, the Latin Mass Society will be resuming its residential conferences for teaching the celebration of Mass in the Extraordinary Form, as Paul Waddington explains 33 Mass listings 39 Mass on the Marsh

Marygold Turner reports from St Augustine’s Church in Kent 41 A work of restoration Joseph Shaw on how some measure of ancient glory could be passed on to future generations 42 Education for Eternity

By Canon R. Post, ICKSP, Principal of the St Benedict’s Academy 44 Crucial to survival

Joseph Shaw reviews three books on Catholic Faith and Catholic identity 46 Crossword and Classified advertisements 47 Macklin Street and LMS wall calendar The Latin Mass Society 11-13 Macklin Street, London WC2B 5NH Tel: 020 7404 7284 editor@lms.org.uk Mass of Ages No. 202 Cover: Cardinal Burke Mass at Corpus Christi Church, Maiden Lane.

Photo by John Aron

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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.

8 12 PATRONS: Sir Adrian Fitzgerald Bt, Lord (Brian) Gill, Sir James MacMillan CBE, Colin Mawby KSG, Charles Moore COMMITTEE: Dr Joseph Shaw – Chairman; Kevin Jones – Secretary; David Forster – Treasurer; Paul Beardsmore – Vice President; Paul Waddington – Vice President; Alisa Kunitz-Dick; Antonia Robinson; Nicholas Ross; Alastair Tocher; Roger Wemyss Brooks.

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

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CHAIRMAN’S MESSAGE

Grace builds upon Nature Be the change you want to see, says Joseph Shaw

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lsewhere in this issue of Mass of Ages I review two books

by Professor Stephen Bullivant, (See page 44. Ed) which together present a sociological analysis of the current crisis of the Church. Sociology is only one aspect of the situation, but all the same I encourage readers to think about what he has discovered. The key message is that, to survive and flourish, the Catholic Church must again, as it once did, constitute a real community, capable of generating a sense of belonging.

The notion of ‘community’ has been much used by progressives in the Church, so it is a supreme irony that Bullivant’s analysis suggests that it is the changes they have championed which have undermined the Church precisely as a community. A real community is based on shared values, and picked out by markers of identity. It is made up of people who feel they have more than the usual obligations to each other, and with whom they spend more of their time than with others. Values, markers, preferential treatment: all these things were under pressure from post-war mobility, mass consumerism, and the call of the telly, but all have come under extra pressure, for ideological reasons, from Catholic progressives.

They didn’t like the lay sodalities and choirs which were such a feature of parish life up to the 1960s, because they were doing the wrong things: promoting traditional devotions, singing traditional sacred music, undertaking traditional evangelisation, or taking altar serving seriously.

They didn’t like the things which linked one generation to the next, like ex votos and devotional images paid for by pious families, because they were about the intercessions of the saints and prayers for the dead. They didn’t want Catholics to pray using the same words as their grandparents, to honour

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the same saints, or receive the same blessings from their priests, because they didn’t like those prayers, didn’t like those old saints, and thought blessings were superstitious.

They didn’t like markers of identity like eating fish on Fridays, mantillas on the ladies at Mass, processions and pilgrimages, or the distinctiveness of the Catholic Mass compared with Protestant services, again, for ideological reasons.

And for the same reasons they worked to undermine the bonds of shared values and shared cultural references which arise from a thorough and orthodox Catholic education.

Progressives today are sometimes saddened that Catholic parishes, stripped of all shared values, markers of identity, and obligations to each other, have failed to generate a warm and wonderful sense of community. But it is hardly surprising.

We must thank the science of sociology for pointing out the obvious: that for the Church to survive, as a human community, there has to be some content to Catholicism. There must be something distinctive which is taught to Catholic children, something distinctive which Catholics do, and how we relate to each other. And within the Church as a whole, there must be sub-communities, like the lay sodalities of old, taking their tasks seriously, and at the same time supporting their members in their earthly pilgrimage.

In this the Latin Mass Society can be an example to others. Our shared task, to promote the ancient Mass, gives us shared values, bonds with each other and with our predecessors, and a marker of identity. This has also always given the Society a social value. I encourage our readers: do not sit on the sidelines.

Come to events, meet like-minded Catholics, establish those social bonds which reflect and reinforce the spiritual bonds of our shared endeavour. The St Catherine’s Trust Summer School for children, our series of talks in London,

pilgrimages for all ages, a servers’ sodality, groups for singers, a guild for those who want to restore all things in Christ one embroidery at a time: we are doing much, and with your help we can do more. The Church is not invisible: it is a community of human beings, and grace builds upon nature. To appropriate another slogan of the progressives: be the change you want to see in the world.

John Henry Newman The copy deadline for this edition of Mass of Ages approximates to the date of the canonisation of John Henry Newman: convert, theologian, Oratorian, Cardinal, ferocious opponent of theological liberalism, and a mighty apologist for the Traditional Latin Mass.

Many readers will be familiar with the wonderful passage in his Apologia, which begins: ‘to me nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming, as the Mass, as it is said among us. I could attend Masses forever and not be tired.’ Newman had much more to say on this theme, and I am delighted that Peter Kwasniewski has put together a selection of this material in a short book: Newman on Worship, Reverence, and Ritual: A Selection of Texts. Available from the LMS shop, it will make an excellent Christmas present.

‘Come to events, meet like-minded Catholics, establish those social bonds which reflect and reinforce the spiritual bonds of our shared endeavour.’

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EVENTS

LMS Year Planner – Notable Events Confirmations in the Traditional Rite, Saturday, 16 November

Once again, the Rt Rev. John Sherrington, Auxiliary of Westminster, will confer the Sacrament in St James’s, Spanish Place at 11.30am. Solemn Pontifical Benediction will follow the Confirmations.

Mass in Honour of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Saturday, 23 November

For the second year running, the LMS has been invited to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is in The Holy Child & St Joseph's, 2 Brereton Road, Bedford MK40 1HU, where High Mass will be celebrated at 12 noon for the intention of reparation for abortion. Refreshments will be available after Mass.

Sung Mass in Southwark Cathedral, Saturday, 7 December

For the Feast of St Ambrose, there will be a Sung Mass in St George’s Cathedral, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7HY at 10.30am. Music will be provided by Cantus Magnus.

Iota Unum Talk in London, Friday, 13 December

The last in our series of talks for this year in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, London 7pm (doors open 6pm, please use Golden Square entrance). The speaker will be Fr Edward van den Burgh on ‘Spiritual Direction: the good and the bad’. As usual, there will be a charge of £5 on the door to cover refreshments and other expenses.

High Mass for Christmas, Tuesday, 24 December

High Mass of Midnight will be celebrated in St Mary Moorfields, London at 6pm on Christmas Eve. Music, by Cantus Magnus, directed by Matthew Schellhorn.

Looking ahead to 2020

Photo by Joseph Shaw

Holy Week: Sacred Triduum at St Mary Moorfields, London.

Monday, 20 April – Thursday, 23 April (Low Week) Residential Training Conference for Priests and Servers at Theodore House, which is the newly opened Christian Heritage Centre, associated with Stonyhurst College. Full details and booking facility are on our website.

LMS Latin Course, Monday, 17 to Friday, 21 August in Savio House, Macclesfield.

High Mass in the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Sung Requiem in St Patrick’s Cemetery, London, Saturday, 23 November

A Requiem Mass will be sung in the chapel of St Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery, Langthorne Road, Leytonstone E11 4HL at 10.30am for the repose of those buried in the cemetery.

Society of St Tarcisius Server Training Day, Saturday, 30 November

This is another opportunity for men and boys to learn to serve the Traditional Mass, to be held in St Mary Moorfield, Eldon Street, London EC2M 7LS from 10.30am. Booking is required, so the organisers have an accurate idea of numbers attending and what they wish to learn; there is no fee. To book, email tarcisius@lms.org.uk The Guild of St Clare will also be meeting in the basement hall for a vestment mending day.

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St Catherine’s Trust Summer School, Sunday, 2 to Saturday 8 August at St Cassian’s Centre, Kintbury, Berkshire.

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

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LITURGICAL CALENDAR

Liturgical calendar NOVEMBER 2019 Sun 10 XXII SUNDAY after PENTECOST II Cl G Mon 11 S MARTIN B C III Cl W Tue 12 S MARTIN I P M III Cl R Wed 13 S DIDACUS C III CI W Thu 14 S JOSAPHAT B M III Cl R Fri 15 S ALBERT the GREAT B C D III Cl W Sat 16 S GERTRUDE V III Cl W Sun 17 XXIII SUNDAY after PENTECOST II Cl G Mon 18 DEDICATION of the BASILICAS of SS PETER & PAUL lll Cl W Tue 19 S ELIZABETH W III Cl W Wed 20 S FELIX de VALOIS C III CI W Thu 21 PRESENTATION of the BVM III Cl W Fri 22 S CECILIA V M III Cl R Sat 23 S CLEMENT I P M III Cl R Sun 24 XXIV & LAST SUNDAY after PENTECOST II Cl G Mon 25 S CATHERINE V M lll Cl R Tue 26 S SILVESTER Ab III Cl W Wed 27 FERIA IV Cl G Thu 28 FERIA IV Cl G Fri 29 FERIA IV Cl G Sat 30 S ANDREW Ap II Cl R

DECEMBER 2019 Sun 1 I SUNDAY of ADVENT I Cl V Mon 2 S BIBIANA V M lll Cl R Tue 3 S FRANCIS XAVIER C III Cl W Wed 4 S PETER CHRYSOLOGUS B C D III Cl W Thu 5 FERIA III Cl V Fri 6 S NICHOLAS B C III Cl W Sat 7 S AMBROSE B C D III Cl W Sun 8 IMMACULATE CONCEPTION of the BVM I Cl W Mon 9 FERIA III Cl V Tue 10 FERIA III Cl V Wed 11 S DAMASUS I P C III Cl W Thu 12 FERIA III Cl V Fri 13 S LUCY V M III Cl R Sat 14 FERIA III Cl V Sun 15 III SUNDAY of ADVENT (Gaudete Sunday) I Cl V/ROSE Mon 16 S EUSEBIUS B M lll Cl R Tue 17 FERIA II Cl V Wed 18 EMBER DAY II Cl V Thu 19 FERIA ll Cl V Fri 20 EMBER DAY II Cl V Sat 21 S THOMAS Ap II Cl R Sun 22 IV SUNDAY of ADVENT I Cl V Mon 23 FERIA ll Cl V Tue 24 VIGIL of the NATIVITY of OLJC I Cl V Wed 25 NATIVITY of OLJC I Cl W Thu 26 S STEPHEN Protomartyr II Cl R Fri 27 S JOHN Ap Evangelist II Cl W Sat 28 HOLY INNOCENTS MM II Cl R Sun 29 S THOMAS B M I Cl R Mon 30 VI DAY in the OCTAVE of the NATIVITY II Cl W Tue 31 VII DAY in the OCTAVE of the NATIVITY II Cl W

Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 3

SS FABIAN P & SEBASTIAN MM III Cl R S AGNES V M III Cl R SS VINCENT & ANASTASIUS MM III Cl R S RAYMUND of PENAFORT C III Cl W S TIMOTHY B M III Cl R CONVERSION of S PAUL Ap III Cl W III SUNDAY after EPIPHANY II Cl G S JOHN CHRSOSTOM B C D III Cl W S PETER NOLASCO C III Cl W S FRANCIS de SALES B C D III Cl W S MARTINA V M III Cl R S JOHN BOSCO C III Cl W

FEBRUARY 2020 Sat 1 S IGNATIUS B M III Cl R IH Sun 2 PURIFICATION of the BVM II Cl W Mon 3 FERIA IV Cl G Tue 4 S ANDREW CORSINI B C III Cl W Wed 5 S AGATHA V M III Cl R Thu 6 S TITUS B C III Cl W JCHP Fri 7 S ROMUALD Ab III Cl W SH Sat 8 S JOHN of MATHA C III Cl W

JANUARY 2020 Wed 1 OCTAVE DAY of the NATIVITY of the LORD I Cl W Thu 2 FERIA IV Cl W Fri 3 FERIA IV Cl W Sat 4 OUR LADY’S SATURDAY IV Cl W Sun 5 MOST HOLY NAME of JESUS II Cl W Mon 6 EPIPHANY of the LORD I Cl W Tue 7 FERIA IV Cl W Wed 8 FERIA IV Cl W Thu 9 FERIA IV Cl W Fri 10 FERIA IV Cl W Sat 11 OUR LADY’S SATURDAY IV Cl W Sun 12 HOLY FAMILY JESUS, MARY, JOSEPH II Cl W Mon 13 COMMEMORATION of the BAPTISM of OLJC II CI W Tue 14 S HILARY B C D III Cl W Wed 15 S PAUL the FIRST HERMIT C III Cl W Thu 16 S MARCELLUS I P M III Cl R Fri 17 S ANTONY Ab III Cl W Sat 18 OUR LADY’S SATURDAY IV Cl W Sun 19 II SUNDAY after EPIPHANY II Cl G

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IN PICTURES

Mass in Maiden Lane Pictures by John Aron

His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke celebrated Pontifical Low Mass in Corpus Christi Church, Maiden Lane on Monday, 16th September 2019, assisted by Mgr Gordon Read (LMS National Chaplain) and Fr Rupert McHardy Cong. Orat.

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IN PICTURES

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FEATURE

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OBITUARY

Loved and admired Maurice Quinn remembers Jeremy Hooper

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eremy Hooper, an avid supporter of the Traditional Mass, died earlier this year aged eighty-nine.

He often attended St Mary’s, a little gem of a church situated down a leafy lane in the Dorset village of Marnhull. It was here that I first met Jeremy, and was immediately captivated by his friendly demeanour and ability to put people at ease. He was always willing to engage with those around him.

During the Second World War Jeremy was sent to school in America, and on his return attended Bryanston School in Dorset. When he came of age, like many men at the time, he did his National Service, before going up to Cambridge, where he read History.

After graduation, he held various desk jobs but none really suited his temperament, so he went to Wardour in Wiltshire as a farm student. He stayed with a Roman Catholic family, which made a strong impression on him. So much so that, in 1956, he was received into the Church in the Chapel of All Saints at New Wardour Castle.

For a while Jeremy became a strawberry grower living in a small house near Old Wardour Castle. He married Gillian in Oxford, studied for his postgraduate Certificate of Education, and taught in senior schools in Tisbury, Wilton, and then Salisbury.

His expanding family moved into the former Presbytery at New Wardour Castle, which had enough land for them to work a smallholding and an ample garden. The chapel at Wardour filled an important part of Jeremy’s life.

He took on the role of doorkeeper, and, with a learned nod to history, sat on the rough old pew at the back of the chapel where - at the time of the Gordon Riots in the 1780s - a strong man waited, whose job it was to repel any ‘antipapists’ making an appearance. Jeremy also lit the fire for the Easter Vigil in an ancient brazier just outside the doors of the chapel.

That Jeremy had a great regard for the concerns of others was given concrete expression by his election

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Jeremy Hooper: At heart an outdoor man

as a District Councillor. Eventually he became Chairman of Salisbury District Council – he was above all a people person and a man with a social conscience. The Latin Mass had a special place in his heart, and he suffered some disappointment when his efforts to set up a regular Usus antiquior at New Wardour Castle came to nothing. But he lived always in the hope that the problems involved would one day be solved.

At heart an outdoor man, Jeremy’s hobbies included gardening, growing vegetables and fruit, and exercising hunters for the nearby stables. He will be missed locally as a great character

with strong opinions expressed with conviction, but also for a genuine kindness and concern for others.

Jeremy’s Latin Traditional Rite Sung Requiem was celebrated by Fr Martin Budge in a full All Saints Chapel, New Wardour Castle at 10am on Friday, 26 July, served by Dominic Prendergast and me, with organist Nicholas Walker, who was joined by Hugh Hetherington to form a choir. Jeremy would have loved his dignified and reverent Requiem. A rendering of Salve Regina was a last farewell to a man who was much loved and admired. In your charity, please pray for Jeremy and for his wife Gillian and his six children.

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FEATURE

A story of God’s grace

Bishop Michael Campbell’s address to the LMS Annual General Meeting on 20 July 2019.

Photos by John Aron

Bishop Michael Campbell addresses the Latin Mass Society AGM

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aint Augustine of Hippo, North Africa, ranks as one of the towering figures in the history of the Church, and a most distinguished member of that group known as the Church Fathers.

He was born in 354 in the city of Tagaste, modern day Algeria. His parents were Patricius and Monica, the latter of Berber stock. North Africa in his day formed part of the fragmenting and declining Roman Empire. In fact, the sack and fall of Rome in 410 would be the occasion for one of Augustine’s most celebrated literary works, City of God. Augustine’s father appears to have been a lukewarm Catholic, while his mother, Monica, was a devout believer and deeply attached to her faith. As a child, Augustine was enrolled as a catechumen, but was not baptized. It

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would be many years before that came to pass. He was a gifted young man and eventually went to university in Carthage, a city he would later describe as ‘seething cauldron on vice.’ Latin literature and Roman civilisation would have formed the backbone of the curriculum, with a particular emphasis on rhetoric and the art of polished speaking. The works of the orator Cicero and the poet Virgil remained a life-long love for him. It is worth noting that a lost work of Cicero, the Hortensius, set the young Augustine on fire with a love of philosophy and of truth.

While a student at Carthage and to his mother’s horror, Augustine fell in with a sect we know as the Manichees, and it would be ten years before he succeeded in extricating himself from their strange

doctrines and way of thinking. Duality was at the heart of their system, two key and equal principles, one of good, the other of evil, and both in constant conflict. At this time Augustine had a mistress and would father a son by her, Adeodatus. As he relates in his Confessions, his mother, Monica, never ceased to storm heaven on behalf of her son, always convinced that he would one day return to the faith of his childhood.

Augustine eventually moved on from Carthage and crossed the Mediterranean to Rome, deceiving his mother, and leaving her desolate in tears on the quayside. He lodged with the Manichees in Rome but was increasingly disillusioned with their teaching in his quest for the truth. He even despaired of finding any truth that he could believe

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FEATURE

in, and suspended all belief, in common with the so-called Academics. Offered the post of public speaker in Milan, in what was then the principal city of the Empire, he took up residence there, followed closely by his mother, Monica.

Milan marked the turning point for Augustine, for there he came under the influence of Saint Ambrose, the bishop.

In his confusion and bewilderment, he would listen to the preaching of Ambrose, initially to assess his style of speaking and manner of delivery, but gradually the content of the great bishop’s sermons began to touch him.

In his Confessions he describes with great power and emotion a scene in the garden of a villa near Milan where, at the bidding of a nearby child’s voice, ‘take up and read’, he opened the letters of St Paul, saw a passage from Romans 13, which spoke deeply to him, and all at last became clear.

Augustine, his son Adeodatus, and others, were baptised by Ambrose in Milan, Easter 387. Having left worldly ambitions behind, Augustine decided to return to his home in North Africa, Tagaste, but while preparing in Rome at the port of Ostia for the journey across the Mediterranean, his mother, Monica, died. It was Augustine’s intention to live a lay, quasi monastic life of study and prayer, in common with a few friends at the small family estate in Tagaste, and some of his written dialogues survive from that time. This way of life lasted for several years, until Augustine one day went to visit a friend in Hippo and was practically and most reluctantly “forced” to be ordained priest by the old Greek-speaking bishop, Valerius. His reputation for learning and much else had clearly preceded him.

Within the space of a few years he had succeeded Valerius as Bishop of Hippo, and would remain in that city as bishop for about thirty years. As he was dying, in 430AD, the Vandals were besieging the city of Hippo, and in his last illness he recited the penitential psalms.

Despite the breakdown of the Roman Empire, it is remarkable that Augustine’s writings have survived, and they have exercised an enduring influence on the life of the Church ever since. The major works which immediately come to mind are: City of God, On the Trinity, and the Confessions, in which he describes in inimitable fashion his spiritual odyssey and search for God right until

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his baptism at the age of thirty-three.

A work never out of print! Apart from these, are his sermons, (in excess of three hundred), his letters, and major doctrinal works on Manicheism, Donatism, Pelagianism, errors and controversies he had to confront in his work as bishop.

The writings of St Augustine are imbued with the Scriptures. For him, as for the Fathers of the Church, every page of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, breathed Jesus Christ. The coherence of the inspired Scriptures found their centre and coherence in the Son of God, the Word who was made flesh. Each text in some way pointed to Christ.

His Confessions are rich in psychological insight, into the nature of the human person before God, and a person’s incompleteness without God. He saw the providence of God in his own life story, especially in those he encountered, above all Bishop Ambrose and his mother, Monica. The restlessness of the human heart is almost immortalised at the beginning of the Confessions: You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Keenly aware of the transience of all things, Augustine urged the necessity of interiority, of entering into oneself, and even transcending oneself to reach what is unchanging and eternal, God himself. Blessed John Henry Newman’s motto, ‘Heart speaks unto Heart’, reflects his deep familiarity with the thought of St Augustine.

What conclusions can we draw from all this?

The Saint’s acute realisation of divine providence in the often tempestuous years of his early life; contrary to appearances, Almighty God was guiding his steps towards the truth and to the Catholic Church.

The effect of his mother Monica’s prayers on his behalf. She never gave up hope, and ‘watered the ground’ with her tears wherever she found herself. She was aware of the natural gifts and ability of Augustine, and endeavoured from his earliest years to keep him faithful to Christ. It was a long road, but the Church owes a great deal to this simple, devout woman.

Augustine proved to be an exemplary bishop, devoted son of the Church, and a vigorous upholder and advocate of her doctrines: the true nature of the triune God, the all-importance of grace in the life of a believer; against the Donatists, Christ the real minister of the sacraments, despite the possible unworthiness of the particular celebrant.

Saint Augustine has been described as the first Christian psychoanalyst. His ability to describe the inner movements and motivations of the human heart, as in his Confessions, is astounding, and his penetrating insights into the human condition are as relevant today as when he first wrote them. His autobiography, the Confessions, remains perennially fresh, appealing and instructive.

More than any other Father of the Church, Augustine’s influence has been immense.

The LMS AGM was followed by Mass

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ROMAN REPORT

A sign of hope The new Benedictine Monastery in Norcia is a door to Heaven in the path of faith, says Alberto Carosa

T

hree years after a devastating earthquake hit a vast area of central Italy, the Archbishop of Spoleto-Norcia, Mgr Renato Boccardo, lamented that "too many promises" had not been fulfilled. "The feeling of having been abandoned is very strong", he declared during an interview with Vatican Radio Italy (11 July 2019), "Unfortunately, reconstruction, and we know it, is slowly coming about and the bureaucracy makes more victims than the earthquake".

Even amid these bleak circumstances, however, the prelate also mentioned some "signs of a restart", such as the blessing of the first symbolic stone of the Monastery of San Benedetto in Monte.

The event took place on 10-11 July 2019 and coincided with the first 20 years of the Benedictine community in Norcia and the feast of Saint Benedict, patron of Europe.

The two days, open to all, saw the participation of many "Nursini", citizens of Norcia, together with representatives of the hierarchy, such as Mgr Boccardo, Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, and many religious men and women, along with the civil authorities such as the mayor of Norcia, Nicola Alemanno, and the former governor of the Umbria region, Catiuscia Marini, and many faithful not only from Norcia but from the rest of Italy and also abroad for this special occasion.

The concept hinted at by Mgr Boccardo, that is, the construction of the new monastery as a powerful sign of hope after the tragedy of the earthquake, was elaborated on by Father Nivakoff in his speech, including the motivation for the adoption of a new motto.

In fact, on June 12, the monastery celebrated 20 years since its canonical founding in 1999. For this historic anniversary, it seemed right to Father Nivakoff to finally add a motto to the crest of the monastery: Nova Facio Omnia (“I Make All Things New”), a motto which was also carved on the foundation stone inserted into the wall of the monastery under construction on a pre-existing Capuchine convent.

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As explained by the Prior, the verse is taken from the Book of the Apocalypse (Chapter 21, verse 5) and describes the New Jerusalem in all its splendor. “I believe this verse captures both the spirit of our first twenty years and provides an orienting principle for the future”, he said. “The search for what is new springs from the deep desire in the human heart for New Life, untouched by Original Sin.” Newness and youth go together, he went on, bringing joy to the soul which has yet to experience some of the harsher realities of life. “The Church herself calls us always to renew that youthfulness, beginning the Mass with a reminder of how God blesses youth with joy: Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam (To God who gives joy to my youth). Sin makes us old, taking away our innocence and joy”.

As a matter of fact, the dimension of “Newness” is a recurrent feature in the somewhat short life of the congregation.

As recalled in an interview by Father Cassian Folsom, re-founder of this Benedictine congregation and its first Prior (until Father Nivakoff took over in 2016), from the various paths tried for the canonical recognition of the initial Benedictine community formed by himself and three other postulants, Providence chose a completely new path and in a very short time. To sum up: a “special miracle” happened: “on June 12, 1999, the formal decree arrived placing us among the illustrious monasteries of the Benedictine Confederation, but outside a specific congregation”.

Monasteries are normally founded from an older existing monastery which makes a new foundation. We tried this, he said, but Providence suggested a fresh start, exactly as stated by our new motto Nova Facio Omnia.

And so, we began with very clear principles, the Father continued. “The forms have changed over the years but the principles have remained the same. For example, we started in a little apartment, not in an established monastery … We came to Norcia, to the birthplace of St Benedict, and for the

first 16 years lived at the basilica and our main apostolic work was to serve the pilgrims who came to visit.”

But the earthquake has again changed the situation, transforming that service into a more spiritual and supernatural one. Whereas before the monks were in the middle of the city, now they are dwelling on a hill overlooking the city, with a great gain in terms of silence, solitude and separation from the world.

An assumption reiterated by Father Nivakoff in his lecture after Vespers on the evening of 10 July. In fact, in his search for God, the Lord made St Benedict accept the most varied and unexpected circumstances and find in them the way to salvation.

“In the 16 years spent in the city,” said Father Nivakoff, “we realized that the treasure that the saint had, the treasure to be preserved and possibly offered, was not culture, was not even the famous peace ...the treasure that the Saint has kept and wanted us to cherish is Faith”.

“The events of the August 2016 earthquake were clear signs for us,” he went on. "Faith is under attack not only by external forces, but also from within the Church just as then, when they had to defend themselves from Arianism inside and from barbarians outside. And it is in these circumstances of total collapse that the Saint has decided to plant and root, building not a walled building ... but rebuilding people.” St Benedict was a father, in the true sense of the word, in that "he generated new life in his monks by giving them Jesus Christ, the beginning and creator of life itself".

“Even if we hope to rebuild the beautiful Capuchin convent in the next three years and reopen the adjacent church by mid-2020, our hope is not based on that,” Fr Nivakoff pointed out.

Yes, the community is growing, he disclosed, but the future cannot be secure regarding these great projects. "It is God who guides history and not us. If we want to be monks and true sons of St Benedict, we cannot forget the true goal that is not a place, but a person, God.

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ROMAN REPORT

'In his search for God, the Lord made St Benedict accept the most varied and unexpected circumstances and find in them the way to salvation.'

We are sure that for now God wants us here, in San Benedetto in Monte, to live together and accept the mystery of his providence, to make room for God and not to take His place.”

The interventions of Fr Nivakoff continued with his homily during the Solemn Mass of 11 July, a lectio magistralis on the spirituality of the Saint inspired by the epistle in his feast day. In particular, he elaborated on the fact that faith is intimately linked to the taciturnitas (taciturnity), one of the three pillars of the Benedictine rule and spirituality, together with obedience and humility.

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"The age in which we live has lost patience for this taciturnitas and has filled it with explanations, words, noises. When after the earthquake we monks accepted the indication of Providence to plant the roots of the new monastery here, it was with fear and hesitation. Like many of you we asked ourselves: but what will happen, how will we be able to live ... God knows the answers and will make us understand at the right time. " Unable to tolerate this state of uncertainty and insecurity any longer, "the modern secular world seeks with technological, political or commercial

solutions to deprive us of the pain that the mystery of faith requires", because it is in fact "only in the possibility of doubt that one can grow in faith. God has left us free precisely because we will be happier in choosing Him than in not having any choice … Various attempts to ease the weight of faith have just the opposite effect: man becomes less free and consequently less happy”.

The construction of the monastery and the reopening of the church in Monte, "do not solve problems, but if we see in them the path of faith … this will open a door to heaven from here.”

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY

DIOCESAN DIGEST Mass of Ages quarterly round-up Arundel & Brighton Anne-Marie Mackie-Savage 01323 411370 aandb@lms.org.uk Masses in Arundel and Brighton currently remain stable, if thinner on the ground than they have been.

However, with the return to health of Fr Gerard Hatton - Deo gratias - and his return to his parish of St Hugh’s, Knaphill, youth Masses (let the reader understand) have resumed on Thursday evenings at 7.30 pm. The Masses in the Diocese that are available have congregation numbers that are steady at the least, and growing at best: 8.00 am Sunday in particular seem to draw a wider cross section of parishioners than mid-afternoon slots ever have, but that’s not surprising. Extra feast day Masses have been extremely well attended and it’s amazing how many people can sing, unaccompanied, traditional Latin responses with no trouble at all; the volume that can be achieved during a Salve Regina can be quite awe inspiring.

As usual, thanks to all our supporters and the wonderful priests who make this report possible. If anyone has any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Birmingham & Black Country Louis Maciel 07392 232225 birmingham@lms.org.uk birmingham-lms-rep.blogspot.co.uk Several Feast Day Masses were celebrated at St Maryon-the Hill in Wednesbury in this quarter, including for St Bernard, St Bartholomew, St Pius X, the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Guardian Angels, as well as the Assumption and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in addition to the usual third Sunday Low Mass. Please remember that this church is close to junction 9 of the M6, which can be useful if you are looking for a Mass on a particular Feast day.

From September, the first Friday Mass at Acocks Green was preceded by Sacred Heart devotions, including a brief period of Adoration and Benediction. The third Friday Mass at St Dunstan’s took place in the conference centre while the main church is being refurbished. We look forward to moving back to the main church with its new centrally positioned altar and altar rails by the end of the year.

Fr Eamonn has now left Kingstanding parish, but is planning to travel back to celebrate the second Wednesday Mass at Maryvale. However, coverage has been patchy please check the Mass is on before travelling.

At the time of writing, the Pontifical High Mass in honour of the canonisation of St John Henry Cardinal Newman

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has not taken place. Preparation for this did somewhat impact the opportunities at the Oratory to celebrate other High Masses, including the cancellation of the annual Quarant’ore. However, the Feast of the Assumption and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross were celebrated with a High Mass, the latter at rather late notice.

Birmingham (Little Malvern) Alastair J Tocher 01684 893332 malvern@lms.org.uk extraordinarymalvern.uk Facebook: Extraordinary Malvern I am delighted to confirm that Sung Sunday Masses at St Wulstan’s increased from twice-monthly to weekly from September. Broadly speaking, Masses on 2nd and 4th Sundays will continue to be celebrated by Dom Jonathan Rollinson OSB whilst the additional Masses will be celebrated by Canon Scott Smith ICKSP and Fr Anselm Gribbin, who are based at St Winifride’s, Shrewsbury, a mere 65 miles away!

Our thanks to them and to Canon Amaury Montjean of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest for helping make the additional Masses at St Wulstan’s possible.

With the increase in the number of Masses there is naturally a corresponding increased demand for refreshments afterwards so those will now be available every Sunday too. We thank those who have kindly volunteered to organise this and who clear up afterwards.

Although, as I write this report, we are still short of available servers we are nevertheless hoping to celebrate what is most likely the first Solemn High Mass in the Extraordinary Form at St Wulstan’s in the past 50 or so years on the feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday in October.

God willing, it will be the first of many in the years ahead.

That will be followed two weeks later by our annual Sung Requiem Mass on Remembrance Sunday.

Finally, our thanks to Fr George Grynowski who has kindly supplied on a couple of occasions over the past quarter and to our faithful servers and singers for their invaluable contributions.

Birmingham (North Staffordshire) Alan Frost At the time of writing, the celebrant of the weekly Mass at Our Lady’s, Swynnerton, Fr Chavasse, will be in Rome on 13 October for the canonisation of Cardinal Newman.

Over the years, Fr Chavasse has been very involved in the promotion of Blessed John Henry Newman’s cause. We are

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY grateful for Fr Stephen Goodman (Wolverhampton) and Fr Dominic Edwards (Oratory) for celebrating the Mass (each a Missa Cantata) when Fr Chavasse has been away in September and October.

Numbers at the weekly Mass remain fairly stable, with a number of new faces here and there, balanced out somewhat by regulars not being there every week! The attendance at the Saturday morning fortnightly Low Mass remains encouraging. Our thanks to the lads who serve the Saturday and Sunday Masses each week.

Birmingham (Oxford) Joseph Shaw oxford@lms.org.uk Our first St Tarcisius training event in Oxford, in August, was very successful, attracting people from as far as Birmingham and Malvern. Thanks are due to Fr Daniel Lloyd for letting us use Holy Rood, Abingdon Road, in Oxford, to our excellent instructors, and to Alasdair Tocher, the Malvern Rep, for bringing servers to this event.

Quarterly Sunday Masses in Holy Trinity, Hethe, continue. In October we had a lovely Dominican Rite Mass celebrated Fr Richard Conrad OP of the Oxford Blackfriars, with the assistance of two young friars, one as MC and the other in the choir loft. Mass was followed by the blessing of roses for the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, a Dominican custom. On December 15th there will be another Sung Dominican Rite Mass at Hethe, for Gaudete Sunday. Please note that the time of these Masses will be changing from 12 noon to 11am. Do come along to hear Mass in this beautiful historic church.

Masses on Sundays and feasts continue in Oxford: please see the Mass listings. Of particular note, the Sunday Masses at Holy Rood at 5pm are now Sung. And there will be a Sung anticipated Midnight Mass of Christmas at SS Gregory & Augustine’s, Woodstock Road, at 6pm on Tuesday 24th December.

Joseph Shaw, Representative for Birmingham Archdiocese, Oxford area Report from the Society of St Tarcisius Over the Summer there were enrolment ceremonies for the Society at the St Catherine’s Trust Summer School in Ramsgate, during the Walsingham Pilgrimage, in Oxford and in Preston. Training days also continue in London: the last one of the calendar year will be on 30th November, in St Mary Moorfields.

It is very pleasing to see that demand for our training events is not drying up, and indeed we continue to see new faces, as well as servers trained in some roles returning to learn more. Accordingly, we plan to organise new training days in London for next year, approximately every two months, as we have this year.

The vestment mending days organised by the Guild of St Clare, which usually take place alongside the server training (in the basement at St Mary Moorfields, for example) have also continued to attract good numbers, and the Latin Mass Society’s vestment presses will continue to benefit from work done by the Guild’s supporters in 2020.

As always I would like to hear from anyone willing to help organise server training events outside London.

Joseph Shaw, National Coordinator of the Society of St Tarcisius

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Birmingham (Worcester) Margaret Parffrey 01386 750421 Our new Mass times at Mount Carmel Redditch are now the first Friday at 6pm.

We now have a full-time newly ordained priest, Fr Mahoney. We are in need of altar servers; Redditch is a large town and we hope to produce a team of regular servers.

Please ring Fr Mahoney or me to offer your service. We are praying to St Philomena for help (Feast Day 11 August).

Fr Lamb at Kidderminster will say a Tridentine Rite Mass on Remembrance Sunday, 10 November at 3pm and Christmas Day Mass at 9am.

Fr Christopher says, at Evesham, a Tridentine Rite Mass every Monday at 12 noon. Please note this a change from previous times. Please pray for all these priests and servers. Our Lady of Fatima Pray for us.

Brentwood (East) Alan Gardner alanmdgardner@gmail.com We continue to be fortunate in the extended ‘country’ region of the diocese in so many ways. Our regular Masses at Chelmsford, Kelvedon and Leigh are a boon; Saffron Walden is becoming more so (thank you, Lech and all who work for this), with a growing traditional community. For instance, it was a joy to have Fr Ryan visiting from Malta to say his first ‘Old Rite’ Mass on the Feast Day of St Michael the Archangel. We continue to be so grateful to Mgr Gordon Read who travels from Kelvedon to Old Hall Green for a Mass at 3pm on third Sundays for the benefit of a small but faithful congregation – who would welcome more support from those in Hertfordshire and Essex. And, of course, we must remember that Mgr Read also provides a Mass at Epping on fourth Sundays, in addition to his own parish duties and all fifth Sundays when they occur! Let us pray for similar vocations!

At Chelmsford, the Corpus Christi procession was wellrepresented by the traditional faithful – thank you to Abbot Hugh for putting on an extra Mass for us, which facilitated a good attendance. We are in fact blessed with abundant attendance at the bi-monthly Masses in the Priory Chapel, so much so that it is often a somewhat cramped affair! On the plus side, there are many families and young people.

Please continue to pray for the Norbertine Fathers, that ever more vocations might see the provision of the Usus Antiquior in Chelmsford increase, Deo volente.

Other little gems are sent to encourage us on our way; for instance, it was a thrill to see Zachariah receive his First Holy Communion at Leigh (his elder brother serving), whilst the accompanying well-chosen words from Mgr Kevin Hale helped even hoary old shellbacks approach their own Communion with renewed reverence and joy.

There is a great deal of interest in Fr Doyle (his great niece is a Chelmsford parishioner), a war hero killed in 1917, Military Cross, recommended for the Victoria Cross, revered apparently by all who knew him. Having fulfilled his priestly duties in an outstanding fashion for almost two years, he was killed in the Battle of Ypres on August 16, 1917, “having run all day hither and thither over the battlefield like an angel of mercy”. This good shepherd truly gave his

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY life for his sheep. EWTN have now made a film, Bravery Under Fire about the life of Fr Doyle, available on their UK/ Eire website. Fr Doyle’s own accounts of his ministrations to wounded soldiers on the battlefield is incredibly – and heartrendingly – moving. I understand it is hoped to open his Cause in the near future. (The DVD is also available from the LMS online shop. Ed) Cardiff Andrew Butcher 07905 609770 cardiff@lms.org.uk www.lmscardiff.org.uk There have been a couple of changes in the Archdiocese since the last edition of Mass of Ages. The Cardiff Oratory in Formation has now moved to the parish of Saint Alban on the Moors, Splott, Cardiff. Daily Mass is now offered at 7.30am Monday-Friday and 8am Saturday. A Sung or Solemn High Mass is offered every Sunday at 11am. Please note that the church does not have a car park and street parking may be limited until around 10.50am due to the parish Mass at 10am. Please pray for Fr Sebastian, Fr Alexander, Brother Ambrose and Brother Illtyd and the parish community.

All Saints, All Souls and Christmas Mass times have not yet been released, so as always, please keep an eye on the website for the latest Mass times and information.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact either Shaun Bennett (Hereford) or myself. The latest Mass listings have been included in this edition of Mass of Ages.

In Domino.

Clifton James Belt & Monika Paplaczyk clifton@lms.org.uk lmsclifton.blogspot.co.uk Our annual pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Glastonbury took place on Saturday 7 September, with approximately forty people attending. We started with a Solemn High Mass for the Nativity of Our Lady, in the Shrine Church. Dom Bede Rowe, the Rector of the Shrine, was Celebrant, with Fr James Bradley as Deacon and Dom Anselm Redman as Subdeacon. The Rupert Bevan Singers provided the music, which included Byrd's Mass for Five Voices.

After lunch in the parish garden, we visited the ruins of the ancient Abbey to pray the Rosary. The day concluded with Exposition, Confessions and Benediction back in the Shrine Church.

Some of the priests in the diocese have recently moved parishes. Fr Philip Thomas, who was in the parish of SS Joseph and Teresa, Wells, is now Parish Priest of Tetbury and Cirencester. He will continue to celebrate the Latin Mass on Tuesdays and Fridays at St Peter’s, Cirencester (see listings).

Fr Alexander Redman, now known by his Benedictine name of Fr Anselm, has moved from Weston-Super-Mare to Glastonbury, to join Fr Bede Rowe in forming the Benedictine community of Our Lady of Glastonbury. Latin Mass will now be seven days a week at St Mary’s, at 7.30am every day except Sunday, when it will be at 6.00pm, as it is now.

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Also, under this new arrangement, the twice-weekly Masses in Wells will continue; please see listings. We wish Frs Bede and Anselm every blessing in this new venture.

Fr Rupert Allen, Chaplain at Bristol, University, will now celebrate the Traditional Mass on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings, and First Friday evenings, as well as the existing Masses on Sundays. Please call to confirm before travelling (see listings for number).

East Anglia (East) Michael Chenery 07884 491111 the.baron@virgin.net I have been able to attend the Traditional Mass at Our Lady & St Joseph’s Church in Sheringham quite regularly on the last Sunday of each month. Sadly, Fr Denys Lloyd has now retired from the parish and is living in Norwich, but the good news is that he is able to continue celebrating Mass in Sheringham as before. The congregation last week numbered twenty, with quite a few young people present.

At the Cathedral in Norwich the Traditional Mass in still celebrated on the first Sunday of the month. Fr Denys explains that there are now three priest who can say the Traditional Mass in the Cathedral, the other two being Fr Davies and Fr Eburne.

Another piece of good news is that I attend Beccles Minster (Suffolk/Norfolk border) occasionally, a Benedictine Parish served from Downside Abbey. Dom Martin Gorman OSB, the parish priest, is hoping to start celebrating the Traditional Mass in the very near future. There was apparently a good response to his request for interest in serving at Mass and interest from the congregation in general, particularly from younger members of his Parish.

Finally, I have a friend who has recently moved to Norwich and he presently runs a schola called Cantabo Domino. He says he would be more than happy to provide the music at a High Mass should the occasion arise.

East Anglia (West) Gregor and Alisa Dick 01223 322401 cambridge@lms.org.uk Sunday Masses continue as usual at Blackfriars in Cambridge. Having made their simple professions, Br John Church and Br Daniel Rowlands have now departed Cambridge for Blackfriars in Oxford. We would like to thank them for all of their assistance during their time here, not least in their readiness to serve at the Dominican-Rite Masses, and we commend them to readers' prayers as they continue their formation.

Hallam Nicholas Ross hallam@lms.org.uk Thank you to everyone who has volunteered information about the state of affairs in Hallam. Again, I'd like to invite members to please get in touch with me with any information - especially any green shoots where they see there might be potential for exploring our options for a Mass somewhere in the diocese. There will, shortly, be a website going up

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY for Hallam in order that efforts between members can be coordinated, and where announcements can be made.

Details of this will be sent by email to members.

I would also request any servers in the diocese to please email me, as well as those who would like to learn. This is important to ascertain in terms of the resources available in order to be able to approach clergy on a sure-footing.

Hexham & Newcastle Keith McAllister 01325 308968 07966 235329 k_mcallister@ymail.com This has been an active quarter with the Mass schedule maintained. On 6 July, Fr Shaun Swales celebrated a Missa Cantata at Thornley for the intentions of newly married Andrew and Stephanie McDowell, with, most unusually, Andrew as MC; ably assisted by acolytes Paul Duffy (father) and John Duffy (son – age eight). Music and chorals were performed by Paul Dewhirst & choir.

At Ushaw College chapel on 10 July, Fr Adrian Dixon celebrated a Sung Mass with M.C. Andrew Armstrong, to assist in accomplishing these ‘one-off ’ weekday Masses we are thankful for the sanctuary participation of David O’Neill, Leo Darroch and Philip Dillon.

Fr Wilfrid Elkin (retired) celebrated his Diamond Jubilee in July and our diocese is most grateful for his impressive 60year career, underpinned by a robust support to tradition, through liturgies, processions, pilgrimages, etc. as well as training clergy and servers. He is noted as one of the earliest initiators of Latin liturgies within Hexham and Nnewcastle post Vatican II. Ad multos annos!

We sadly report the death on 1 September of Miss Mary Hamill, aged 85, a former nun of the Marie Reparatrice community and retired schoolteacher. Mary had been a stalwart of Latin Mass celebrations over many years, using her immense musical experience and talent to grace hundreds of Masses and other services; she will be greatly missed.

Final arrangements are in place to reinstate the monthly Latin Mass at Barnard Castle (initiated by Fr Elkin many years ago) on second Tuesdays at 6.15pm starting on 12 November, thanks to the generosity of time and travel by Fr Shaun Swales.

Lancaster Bob & Jane Latin 01524 412987 lancaster@lms.org.uk latinmasslancaster.blogspot.com John Rogan 01524 858832 lancasterassistant@lms.org.uk By the time this goes to print, Canon Ruscillo will have departed for Jerusalem on Sabbatical where he will stay until April 2020. There will therefore be no Traditional Masses at St Mary's Hornby until May 2020. So far, we have been unable to find an alternative in the Lancaster area.

There have been clergy moves in Carlisle which has meant a change to the monthly Mass at St Margaret Mary. The First Sunday Mass has been discontinued but Fr Docherty now says Mass at 7.00 pm on Second Fridays. With the departure

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of Canon Ruscillo from the Diocesan Education Service, Fr Docherty's responsibilities there have increased so at Easter 2020 he will be moving to a parish nearer Lancaster; the Traditional Mass will continue in Carlisle until then.

Nineteen children started the new term at St Benedict's School in Preston, which is very encouraging for the Traditional community. However, it does mean that the premises at English Martyrs is somewhat crowded and the ICKSP are intending that, in due course, the school will move to the parish hall at St Walburge. Before this can happen, however, the first priority is to get the roof and dry rot fixed, an estimated cost of £322k. Another plan is to refurbish the old convent building at St Walburge and to move the Sisters Adorers there so that Perpetual Adoration can be set up – this refurbishment is estimated at £253k. Grants have been applied for and the ICKSP are placing their trust in the Providence of God; if you can help to make this happen then please go to their website www.stwalburge.org to donate.

Liverpool Jim Pennington 0151 426 0361 liverpool@lms.org.uk All the regular Sunday and Holyday EF Masses in the Archdiocese continue, as do the weekday Masses at Holy Spirit, Ford, and St John’s, Wigan.

With the departure of Fr Sean Riley to continue his studies we now have only one diocesan priest, Fr Leo Daley, able to offer Sunday Mass at St Anthony’s for us. The Canons of the Institute of Christ the King at SS Peter & Paul and St Philomena have generously offered to say Mass on three Sundays of each month. Nevertheless, it is important that diocesan priests should continue to have a prominent role in providing a regular city centre Mass, so we continue to look out for willing and able priests.

Northampton (South) Barbara Kay 01234 340759 mbky3@outlook.com Our numbers at Bedford continue to grow! Over four Sundays in late September and early October, the Diocese of Northampton asked us to count the number of people attending Mass. Our normal attendance is around 100 and the first week we counted, we were able to report an all-time high of 111. This represents a very significant growth in our numbers from 16 since the Bedford Mass began just over four years ago. On this day (22 September) Gabriel Bozzino served for the first time; he has three younger brothers so there may be a whole Bozzino serving team in years to come.

Our Family Catechism Days started again on 29 September, led by Fr Patrick O’Donohue, FSSP. The under8s had a Bible study, the under-16s started to look at the Ten Commandments, and the adults focused on the Old Testament, starting with Genesis and the Fall.

On 6 October we reached the two-year mark of the FSSP priests ministering in Bedford. As always, we extend our gratitude to them and look forward to the years ahead.

Our Patricians group, run by the Legion of Mary, continues on the second Saturday of the month and has seen some lively discussion about various ‘hot topics’ related to our Faith.

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY Perhaps our most exciting event in this quarter, after 18 months of prayer and planning, was the opening in mid-September of the Regina Caeli Academy UK, a hybrid home-schooling organisation based in the USA, of which the Bedfordshire Academy is the first in the UK. 17 children aged from 4 to 10 attend the Academy on Mondays and Thursdays, and work at home the rest of the week. Visit https://www. rcahybrid.org.uk/ to find out more. We hope to have a full report about the Academy in the Spring edition of Mass of Ages.

We have planned our usual evening Mass for All Saints and our morning Mass for All Souls. For the first time, Fr O’Donohue will trinate, or say three Masses in succession, for the latter.

By the time you read this, the Mass of Reparation at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the Church of the Holy Child and St Joseph, Bedford on 23 November will either be imminent or have already taken place. We are delighted that Fr O’Donohue returned for a second year to celebrate the Mass, assisted by Fr Gabriel Diaz and Br Albert Robertson OP as Deacon and Subdeacon respectively. Also returning to play and sing was our Director of Music, Matthew Schellhorn.

Looking ahead to the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, we have our usual Christmas Day Low Mass at 8.30 am and a Low Mass for the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January at 7.30 pm.

Our Facebook page is www.facebook.com/ bedfordlatinmass/ where you will find full details of our activities.

Nottingham Jeremy Boot 07462 018386 Our regular Masses have not changed and continue to attract a stable congregation. Students come and go and are welcome, as are our various regular families, parishioners and everyone who attends.

Our Masses at the Good Shepherd, Nottingham (Saturday before the 2nd Sunday 4.45pm) and the Mass of the 3rd and 4th Sundays at Our Lady and St Patrick, Nottingham at 2pm are sung (3rd Sunday), with the 4th Sunday a Low Mass, but having also some music. Our monthly Mass at 6.15 on first Wednesdays at the Cathedral are Low Masses with Juventutem interest afterwards.

The photograph shows a Missa Cantata at Our Lady and St Patrick with Fr Paul Gillham IC as celebrant. He has regular Masses in his own church of St Mary’s in Loughborough, usually on Wednesdays at 7pm.

Thanks, as ever, to all, clergy and lay, who give their valuable time and services to maintain all these Masses.

Nottingham (Lincoln) M. Carroll mcarroll3@hotmail.co.uk The Latin Mass continues being celebrated at two locations in Lincolnshire. On the second Sunday of the month the Latin Mass is said at St Hugh's, 34 Broadgate, Lincoln, LN25AQ (there are plenty of parking spaces at the rear of the church). On the fourth Sunday of the month the Latin Mass is celebrated at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, 22 Grosvenor Road, Skegness, PE25 2DB on the 4th Sunday of every month

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Missa Cantata at Our Lady and St Patrick

at 5pm. If you are travelling far, please check the Skegness Sacred Heart church website (skegnessrcparish.org) for any changes to the Mass times.

Plymouth (Devon) Maurice Quinn 07555 536579 devon@lms.org.uk I am happy to report that things have been going very well indeed in both Exeter and in Plymouth, where we have seen a small but noticeable increase in congregation numbers.

At the weekly 11.30am Sunday morning Sung Mass at St Edward the Confessor in Plymouth, where Fr Anthony Pillari is the celebrant, the increase consists mainly of young men attracted to the spiritual depth of the Traditional Rite, joining the many families with young children, the latter making infant baptisms a normal part of life for this ‘parish within a parish’. On my visit to St Edward’s during September, I was pleased to meet Miloz, a new young server learning the ropes under the expert guidance of the MC, Matt Villa Real (see Dorset report). Fr Anthony has full pastoral responsibility for the Latin Mass congregants at St Edward’s, and, as such, he carries out home visits, house blessings and everything that is expected of a pastor, including Confessions before Sunday Mass.

With the retirement of Mgr Adrian Toffolo (see previous issue of Mass of Ages), and with Fr Guy de Gaynesford being moved to north Devon as chaplain to the new order of contemplative nuns, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star (Maria Stella Matutina) at Lynford, the situation regarding celebrants for the usus antiquior in South and East Devon is now a serious matter, and may involve some unavoidable cancellations, so please contact me directly before travelling any distance. However, I am happy to report that Fr Peter Coxe - always willing to fulfil a real pastoral need - has agreed to celebrate all Latin Masses for the rest of the year at both Blessed Sacrament in Exeter and at St Cyprian’s, Ugbrooke house, Chudleigh, where Fr Guy de Gaynesford celebrated his last Latin Mass for us on the fourth Sunday of August. Fr Guy, ever popular among the Latin Mass congregations at both Buckfast Abbey (sadly no longer available to us) and at St Cyprian’s, is sorely missed, and we thank him for giving up his time over many years, wishing him well for the future.

It is worth noting that for the rest of this year, and for the whole of 2020, the regular third Sunday afternoon Sung Mass at Blessed Sacrament, Exeter, will be celebrated on the second Sundays and not the third as has been the case to date. Even with the loss of Buckfast Abbey as a Latin Mass venue, and the

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY retirement/movement of our clergy celebrants, 2019 has been a good year for us in Devon, and we look forward to 2020 with the real possibility of adding one, or perhaps two, new Latin Mass venues to our calendar once the logistics are sorted out, but more of this in a future issue. There is more good news for us in that we have managed to obtain the services of Mr Charles Bradshaw, who has kindly agreed to MC the Latin Mass celebrations for us at Blessed Sacrament in Exeter.

Please also note that Canon Jason Jones (Cardiff), Chaplain of the World Apostolate of Fatima, let me know (whilst at Fatima) that if enough Latin Mass people accompany him to Fatima on the 2020 WAF pilgrimage, he would be happy to celebrate a daily Traditional Rite Latin Mass for them (servers to bring cassocks and cottas). Finally, an invitation and heartfelt plea to all diocesan clergy to help fulfil a very real and growing pastoral need, by learning to celebrate the Traditional Rite Latin Mass. This pastoral need ought not to be ignored, especially as more Latin Mass venues are on the immediate horizon in the South Devon (and Dorset) areas.

Mass at Chideok

The Parish Priest of Bridport, Mgr Keith Mitchel, in whose parish the church is situated, gave a welcoming talk before Mass asking us to pray to the Martyrs for our country in this time of political turmoil. This theme was picked up in Fr Anthony’s homily, when we were reminded of the eight men who died rather than give up adherence to the same Mass which we were celebrating today, and who, in troubled times, held firmly to the rock of the teachings of Christ and of His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and that we must do likewise.

We have to thank the music department led by Mr Andrew Proctor, who provided the organ music and directed the choir, which consisted of Dr Andrew Beards, Dr Mary Coghill, and Mr John Tristram. The music consisted of pieces by Domenico Zipal and Bach, while full plainchant was sung with Ecce Panis Angeloram at Holy Communion, with the whole congregation raising the roof singing Faith of Our Fathers to conclude the celebration.

We have to thank Mr Amyas Martelli for giving us a talk on the history of the church after the celebrations, and also the team of ladies - Irene Richardson, Brigid Crawford, Chrystine Riley and Karen Warburton for tea, coffee and biscuits after Mass, and a very special ‘thank you’ to Gaby Martelli for her constant work, support, help and advice, without whom this special day would not have happened. On behalf of the Trustees of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs & St Ignatius, Gaby Martelli thanks everyone for such a generous financial donation from the collection for the upkeep of the church. We also have to thank those intrepid servants of Holy Church – Knights of St Columba – especially Bro. John Webber (Torbay Council 329 Province 19) who did such sterling unseen work throughout the day. Also worthy of thanks is Suzette Glover, who widely advertised this event around the Bournemouth area, Mrs Mary Quinn who greeted people and ensured that all who entered the church knew something about the Chideock Martyrs, and the other clergy who attended the day such as Mgr Francis Jamieson, Fr Timothy Finigan, and Fr Jose Romero OAR. During the day people took a tour of the church, including a visit to the ‘secret chapel’ in the loft, and spent time in the museum, where tables were set for pilgrims’ use during lunch. I might just add, that as many requests were made for a possible repeat celebration next year, preliminary work on this has already started.

We must not forget that the big Latin Mass event at Chideock was built upon the stable bedrock of our usual two Latin Mass celebrants in Dorset, Fr Martin Budge (St Mary’s, Marnhull), and Mgr Francis Jamieson (Our Lady of Lourdes & St Cecilia, Blandford Forum), who stoically celebrate the Old Rite for us in their respective churches on alternate months, followed by a free social lunch for everybody. We also have to thank Fr Martin for standing in for Mgr Francis at Blandford Forum for the noon Low Mass on Thursday, 19 September when the latter was away, and serves to show the real dedication and pastoral concern of these two priests.

Finally, please pray for Jeremy Hooper R.I.P., a stalwart of the Old Rite, whose Latin Requiem took place at New Wardour Castle on 6 August, and for his surviving wife Gillian and family, and take a look at the Obituary (elsewhere in this publication) of this very interesting, multi-faceted family man of faith.

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© Maurice Quinn

Plymouth (Dorset) Maurice Quinn 07555 536579 devon@lms.org.uk The Dorset Latin Mass scene suddenly burst into life with a renewed energy on Saturday, 28 September at the beautiful and historic Church of Our Lady Queen of Angels & St Ignatius in the village of Chideock, when around 100 people including young children crowded into the building in order to honour the oft forgotten martyrs (see article in previous issue of Mass of Ages) associated with Chideock. People have forgotten when the usus antiquior was last celebrated at this venue (please contact me if you have any information on this), where just above the present sacristy, in what used to be the loft of an old barn, Holy Mass was celebrated in secret during penal times.

Fr Anthony Pillari (who travelled up from Lanherne Convent in Cornwall) led the pilgrimage and celebrated the Mass of Many Martyrs (Missa Cantata) which began at 10.30am and was followed by Veneration of the Relics, placed on the side altar of St Ignatius Loyola – a patron of the Weld family. The MC, Matt Villa Real, assisted by brothers Oliver and Alajandro Proctor (aged 9 and 10 respectively), gave a masterclass of serving on the sanctuary, enhancing this beautiful celebration for all present.

REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY Portsmouth Peter Cullinane 023 9247 1324 portsmouth@lms.org.uk The most notable event this quarter has been the introduction of a 9am Sunday Old Rite Mass at Holy Family Church, Redbridge in Southampton.

Numbers currently are about 30- 35 and I do urge anyone living in the Southampton area to attend if at all possible, in recognition of the opportunity which Fr Bradley has made available: ideally, we would like to swell those numbers to 50.

The Sunday Mass is in addition to the regular Thursday evening Mass at 7 pm.

I attended the Mass on the Feast of the Assumption and it was a wonderful liturgy celebrated by Fr Tim Finigan, preceded by a procession. More than 100 people of at least 15 nationalities attended, together with their delightfully well-behaved children, who did not seem become restless during the hour and a half ceremony. Luckily, we could socialise in the hall after Mass.

Shrewsbury (Chester) Andrew Nielsen 01352 713633 The monthly Mass at St Clare's in Chester was in doubt over the summer as it looked as if the Institute of Christ the King

Sovereign Priest, with increasing commitments elsewhere, would not be able to continue to supply a priest.

The July Mass had to be cancelled. The August and September Masses, being the X and XIV Sunday after Pentecost were celebrated by Canon Francis Doyle of Wrexham Diocese, a stalwart of the Latin Mass, who says the regular Masses at Holywell and Buckley.

Fortunately, after reviewing the situation at their recent General Chapter, the Institute has been able to recommit to the Chester Mass. Thanks to Canon Amaury Montjean and the Institute for their continued support and to Canon Doyle for helping out.

Shrewsbury (The Wirral) Stefano Mazzeo 0151 638 6822 More good news from the Wirral, the Carmelite Monastery in Birkenhead is now having a daily Mass in the Extraordinary Form celebrated at 8:15am from Monday to Friday, and at 8:00am on Saturday and Sunday. The sisters have had a lot of work done to their extern house, which is now divided into two flats for traditional priests. This accommodation would be to provide a place of rest and retreat for priests, and a place where they can celebrate their private Masses in the chapel. They are asking for a suggested donation on a daily rate, so this little enterprise will help the Monastery to recover the outlay of the renovation,

The pressing of St Margaret Clitherow, a scene from a new EWTN film

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REPORTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY and also to ensure a little income for their own repairs and maintenance. They are also currently fundraising to pay for the costs of the repairs and renovations. Please visit their website http://www.carmelitesbirkenhead.org.uk/our_carmel or send donations to The Carmelite Monastery, 12 Grosvenor Place, Birkenhead, Prenton CH43 1UA. The Canons at the Shrine Church of SS Peter & Paul and St Philomena, (The Dome of Home) have been a great boon to the Traditional Catholic community on the Wirral and Merseyside, providing Masses and support throughout the area. They are also engaged in a programme of faith formation and catechism classes: please see the Dome's website for dates and times. It is perhaps because Catholics have such a rich and deep knowledge of their faith that we have been at the forefront of Pro-Life and Pro-Natural Family causes.

We say goodbye to Fr Gribbin who has now been installed at the Institute of Christ the King's mission in Shrewsbury. Thank you for all your work at the Dome, Father! Fr Gribbin is also a noted historian and I'm very pleased that he has agreed to help with EWTN's The Reformation and Mary Queen of Scots films, especially as he is a proud Scot himself.

Regarding these projects, many have helped from the Dome and further afield making costumes, props or as actors and extras.

We do not yet have any dates and times for broadcast but please check out my Twitter and Facebook accounts for news on this.

Please contact Canon Montjean or Canon Poucin for information on the Dome and their projects on 0151 6386822, email: newbrighton@incrisp.org Southwark (Kent) Marygold Turner 01580 291372 We continue to carry out faithfully the rota for four parishes, arranged in 2002 by Bishop John Hine, who was asked to do this by the then Archbishop of Southwark, Kevin McDonald. We owe the Archbishop huge gratitude! But it’s not easy: we rely on our beloved priests as always.

The main event has been our Missa Cantata at Snave Church, on the Marsh, and one of the Romney Marsh Historic Churches Trust’s buildings, now redundant. (For more on this see our feature on page 40). This was our fifth year and the most well attended with about 85 people. A beautiful autumn day, and the Mass was superb, with Fr Gabriel Diaz the celebrant, and the Victoria Consort, as always, singing as if in heaven! The acoustics of the church are excellent. We are very grateful to be invited again, and thank the Trust most warmly.

A new development has been Missa Cantatas at St Simon’s, Ashford – on the 2nd Sunday of the month at 12.30pm. The Victoria Consort, under Ben Bevan, have most generously invited themselves to come due to their changed circumstances, and with the invaluable help of the two Robinson boys (Hugo being the MC) we have been able to have two marvellous Masses so far and are promised more as a regular fixture.

In the summer, Monsignor Conlon was well enough to stay with me and celebrate Mass for us in July - a great joy, likewise Dom Andrew Southwell, and recently Fr Hunwicke came all the way from Oxford for Mass at Ashford.

Westminster (Spanish Place) Roger Wemyss Brooks spanishplace@lms.org.uk Once again, we have many priests to thank for supplying Masses when Fr Michael Cullinan is away for his duties at Maryvale. Fr Mark Elliott-Smith is now happily resident in the

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Spanish Place Rectory; others come from far and wide – newly ordained Fr Rosario Joseph Mary from Gosport, Fr Michael Rowe from Western Australia (celebrating his 25th anniversary of ordination with us), Fr Gabriel Diaz Patri from St Bede’s, Clapham Park, and Fr John Hemer from Allen Hall Seminary.

We are blessed to have such inspiring priests who share our devotion to the usus antiquior. It is no easy matter finding priests who know the Old Rite and who are free to help us on a Sunday.

Please always say a prayer for each of them.

Please also spare a prayer for our sacristan, Linda Helm, who has been incapacitated for several months with a broken leg. And also, for our dedicated team of servers Joe, Steven, James, Anthony, Andrew and Michael. I was at another training day for servers recently, attended by a good crowd of men and boys eager to learn the ceremonies of our beloved Rite. Their enthusiasm and the skills they learn will be a blessing to the Church here and abroad.

Westminster (Willesden) Anna Grayson-Morley 07710 472295 willesden@lms.org.uk We had the great joy of welcoming Fr Rosario Mary Joseph on 9 July to celebrate his first Marian Mass. As many readers will know, he was ordained priest in the Traditional Rite at Portsmouth Cathedral on 5 July, as reported in the autumn 2019 Issue of Mass of Ages.

We also welcomed Fr Tomasz Margol who covered one of our regular Sunday Masses this September while Fr Stephen was away. Fr Tomasz was recently ordained, on 20 July 2019, at St George’s Cathedral, Southwark by Archbishop Peter Smith. Fr Tomasz is Assistant Priest at St Bartholomew’s in Norbury. His personal humility and moving homily touched more than a few attendees.

Fr John Scott, Chaplain at Westminster Cathedral, kindly celebrated Mass on the 25 August, on what was probably the hottest day of the year in London. He confessed his favourite spot to beat the heat was in the Cathedral’s crypt!

Lastly, we are very pleased to offer our heartfelt congratulations to two of our young regular E.F. Mass attendees, Yagoda and David, who were recently married in Poland. We wish them a long and fruitful marriage.

Wrexham Kevin Jones 01244 674011 wrexham@lms.org.uk lmswrexham.weebly.com Masses continue at St Francis of Assisi, Llay (2nd Sunday), Our Lady of the Rosary, Buckley (2nd Saturday) and St Winefride’s, Holywell (4th Sunday).

The usual break at Llay took place in August, which afforded Canon Lordan his well-deserved period of leave. We resumed the Mass at Llay in September and our numbers were quite depressing!

I urge all those who can attend Masses to come along. These Masses have been arranged with supporters of the Traditional Mass in mind and with priestly time extremely limited these days, to have low numbers in attendance begs many questions.

On Saturday, 12 October at the Cathedral in Wrexham, will be the annual pilgrimage and Sung Mass in honour of St Richard Gwyn at 11.30am – Canon Post ICKSP will celebrate and give blessings of a newly ordained priest immediately following veneration of the relic.

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Architecture

The Duke of Norfolk paid for the Church of Our Lady and St Philip Neri at Arundel in Sussex

Joseph Aloysius Hansom, Architect, Inventor and Publisher Paul Waddington reviews the architectural output of one of the most prolific Catholic architects of the nineteenth century

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Joseph Aloysius Hansom: he believed every architect should also be a competent joiner, mason and surveyor 24

oseph Aloysius Hansom was born in 1803 into a Catholic family living at York. His father was a builder, and the young Joseph joined the family business at the age of 13 as an apprentice joiner. However, Joseph’s ambitions lay elsewhere, and he persuaded his reluctant father that he should train to be an architect. An apprenticeship was arranged with Matthew Philips who had an architectural practice in York at the time. On completing his apprenticeship, Joseph found employment with John Oates, a Halifax architect, where he spent three years gaining valuable experience.

Not content to be a mere employee, at the age of 25 Joseph formed a partnership with Edward Welsh, who was also working for Oates. The two of them set up in practice back in York, finding work in and around the city, as well as in Welsh’s native North Wales. However, Hansom, who was the driving force behind the partnership, hankered after more prestigious

commissions, and in 1831 submitted an entry for a competition to design the new Town Hall at Birmingham. There were 67 entries, including some from the most distinguished architects of the time, so it came as a great surprise that the winner was the unknown J. A. Hansom.

Hansom’s proposal was inspired by the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum, and met with great acclaim. It was a huge project for a relatively inexperienced architect to take on, and, unfortunately for Hansom, he mismanaged the financial side of the undertaking. The procurement and transport of the massive blocks of stone required for the external columns, proved particularly difficult, resulting in delays and additional costs that Hansom had to bear. The result was the bankruptcy of both the contractor and Hansom, his dismissal from the job and the dissolution of the partnership. Although the project was within an ace of completion, Hansom

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ARCHITECTURE was denied all credit for what became Birmingham’s premier building.

With his architectural career in tatters, Hansom found temporary employment as the Agent to Dempster Hemming, the owner of a 12,000 acre estate centred on Caldecote Hall near Hinckley in Leicestershire. In his spare time, he took on some minor architectural jobs, but his most notable achievement in this period was his invention of the “Hansom Cab”. First seen in the streets of Hinckley in 1834, it later became ubiquitous, particularly in London, where thousands were employed. Without the capital to develop his invention, Hansom sold the patent for £10,000, but never got paid. For the second time, he had come up with a world class design but failed to receive any financial reward.

Whilst living in Hinckley, Hansom made some friendships which enabled him to regain some independence and to restore his architectural career. He met Ambrose Phillippe de Lisle of Grace Dieu, the wealthy convert to Catholicism and friend of Augustus Welby Pugin. He was also introduced to Bishop Ullathorne, then Vicar Apostolic for the Central District. With these contacts, he picked up a number of commissions, including no less than three convents not far from his home. These were the Dominican Convent of the Rosary at Atherstone, a Benedictine Convent at Colwich in Staffordshire, and the much larger St Mary’s Priory (also Benedictine) at Princethorpe. He was also invited to design the Church of Our Lady of the Angels in Nuneaton.

By 1840, Hansom had built up enough confidence to move his practice to London, and in 1841 took over the offices of Charles Barry, who was moving to be closer to the Palace of Westminster, which he was designing. During his eight years in London, Hansom indulged himself in two projects that were a distraction from his main career. In 1843, he founded, and was the first editor of, The Builder, a weekly architectural magazine. Although this flourished, and survives to this day under the name, Building, it was another disaster for Hansom. Due to having insufficient capital, he was forced to sell the title for very little money.

One might think that, by now, Hansom would have learnt his lesson, but he pursued another idea of his, which was to open a Building College. Nowadays, we would call it a School of Architecture, except that Hansom wished to teach not only the principles of architecture, but also all the trades associated with the building industry. Hansom believed that every architect should also be a competent

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The Church of the Holy Name in Manchester was built for the Jesuits between 1869 and 1871

joiner, mason, surveyor etc. Not surprisingly, the building college never materialised, but Hansom persisted with the idea until all his funds were exhausted.

Hansom moved to Leicester in 1849 and whilst there his commissions included Ratcliffe College, which he designed for the Rosminians. His brother Charles, fourteen years his junior, was involved in various aspects, as was A. W. Pugin, but Joseph played the major role.

Joseph Hansom’s greatest works and his most prolific years were yet to come.

In the years from 1845 to 1858 he built 20 churches, two cathedrals, six schools or convents and about 20 other projects.

In this period, he had a close association with the Jesuits. He designed for them Mount St Mary’s School at Spinkhill in Derbyshire, the Church of the Immaculate Conception (also at Spinkhill) and St Beuno’s Theological College near St Asaph in Wales. With these successes, it is not surprising that the Jesuits selected him to design their new church in Preston. The Church of St Walburge has been described in an earlier article in this series. Hansom moved to Preston in 1847 to work on this project, which also included two schools and a presbytery.

The Cathedral of St Mary and St Boniface in Plymouth was built between 1856 and 1858. The slender spire resembles that at St Walburge’s, although is not as tall. At this time, Joseph was in partnership with his brother, Charles, so they collaborated on the work.

The Church of Our Lady and St Philip Neri at Arundel in Sussex was built between 1867 and 1873 at the expense of the Duke of Norfolk. This is the only one of Hansom’s churches that was not built to a budget, and contains all the ornamentation that one might expect in a mediaeval cathedral. Even so, the spire was never built. Now dedicated to Our Lady and St Philip Howard, it serves as

the Cathedral Church for the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton.

The Church of the Holy Name in Manchester was built for the Jesuits between 1869 and 1871 to serve what was then a working-class area of the city. Of all Joseph Hansom’s churches, it is probably the one where he allowed his imagination the most freedom. The shape is unconventional and the interior is particularly impressive. A central tower was planned, but was not built because it was thought that the ground conditions would not bear the weight. This omission was corrected in 1923 when Adrian Gilbert Scott successfully added a very light structure.

Another well-known church Hansom built for the Jesuits is that of St Ignatius Gongoza in Oxford, which opened in 1878. The apsidal sanctuary includes an impressive array of 52 statues of saints, beneath a well-designed ceiling. Now served by the Congregation of the Oratory, many of its original features are being restored.

Joseph Hansom returned to London in 1862, and in 1869 took his son Joseph Stanislaus into partnership. Joseph Aloysius died in 1882, leaving Stanislaus in charge of the business. Although Stanislaus lacked the flair and ambition of his father, his input was significant.

The Cathedral of St John the Evangelist at Portsmouth and the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Bognor Regis were his work.

The Architectural legacy of Joseph Aloysius Hansom is huge, amounting to about 200 buildings, most of which are churches, schools, convents or presbyteries. Their imaginative and varied designs are a fitting tribute to a very great architect.

The Cathedral of St Mary and St Boniface in Plymouth was completed in 1858

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COMMENT

The Church Suffering Mary O’Regan makes a pledge in the month of holy souls

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riends and acquaintances of mine were close to a comedy writer who died a young man. He was a lapsed Catholic who did not live an exemplary life of virtue. But he was dearly loved by them, and I’ve heard him described as a kind-hearted genius. I was left cold after watching a movie about his life, because of its flippant treatment of his tragic death and I felt a strong call to pray for his soul. I doubted the call and asked for a grace to be given me through the Sacred Heart of Jesus whereby I be sent a sign: if I were to find the comic novel he wrote, I’d have a Mass offered for him.

Precisely two days later I was helping some nuns in a convent and went in search of a misplaced log-book in a cupboard. A surge of electricity went through my hand and I was guided to a spot where I pulled out a book and to my consternation, I found it was the writer’s comic novel, the exact signal I had requested. It was entirely unlikely to find it where it was, because these sisters do not read a lot in English.

Somewhat alarmed, I wasted no time. I got in touch with a prelate and asked him to offer Mass for the deceased comedy writer’s soul. Shortly afterwards I found out that while he was still alive the writer had made a request that he and his friends attend a sung Latin Mass in Boston to hear the beautiful music.

And he made this request twice. He’d attended Harvard shortly before the

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new Mass came in and I invited them to honour his request, even though he would not be bodily present, and so promptly they arranged a trip to Harvard where they would pray for his soul.

Prayers and Masses had been offered for his soul, and as a good work for the writer, I asked his friends that they avail themselves of the Sacred Heart novena for their personal use. One dear friend bought exquisitely beautiful holy cards of the Sacred Heart and gave gifts of them to the others, which they faithfully carry with them.

The efforts I made for the young writer rekindled in my heart my love for the holy souls and my desire to ease their pain as they are purified. So, I decided to re-take a vow called the Heroic Act of Charity for the Holy Souls whereby I pledged to give these souls all the satisfactory value of all my good works, and all the pain of purification which I may be given after death. November, the month of the holy souls, is upon us, so may I invite you to consider making the Heroic Act of Charity for the holy souls?

In doing so, you will make a complete gift of all your works of the satisfactory value, and all the satisfaction from your good thoughts, good words and good works will go to the suffering souls in Purgatory. Some close friends of mine have also taken the vow. The beauty of the vow is that you will be heroically helping the holy souls while simultaneously you are in the throes of fighting the good fight. These are just a few examples: when you plan a kind gesture, when you say something to cheer up someone who is feeling down, or when you collect a prescription for someone bed-bound. You may make a profoundly generous donation of all your works of satisfaction, by offering this Heroic Act: Oh Holy and Adorable Trinity, desiring to co-operate in the deliverance of the souls in Purgatory, and to testify my devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, I cede and renounce on behalf of those holy souls all the satisfactory part of my works, and all the suffrages which may be given to me after

my death, consigning them entirely into the hands of the most Blessed Virgin, that she may apply them accordingly to her good pleasure to those souls of the faithful departed whom she desires to deliver from their sufferings. Deign, O my God, to accept and bless this offering which I make to Thee at this moment.

Amen.

'The efforts I made for the young writer rekindled in my heart my love for the holy souls and my desire to ease their pain as they are purified' This is such a sublimely selfless gift to the holy souls that you may find yourself rewarded like St Gertrude, who, when she was about to die, Our Lord appeared and made known to her that because she gave the holy souls all her works of satisfaction, that she would not suffer any pains of Purgatory and that her glory in Heaven would be significantly increased. It is a cruel irony that in this new supposed Church of Mercy, the Church Suffering is often abandoned by the Church Militant. Should we not make a complete commitment to them and invite others to do so, and perhaps thereby help restore the traditional and true understanding of the Mystical Body of Christ as existing here on Earth, in Purgatory, and in Heaven?

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LONE VEILER

Innocence lost Lone Veiler on how a whole generation has been traumatised

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n spite of the rain lashing the windows and the gale howling down the chimney, Autumn has always been one of my favourite seasons. I like the leaves subtly changing colour, how the air freshens, the grey skies. I look forward to Ember Days. The way the Liturgical Year recognises and commemorates the changing seasons, and with them the call to thank God, to pray, and to fast, is reassuring.

A far cry from the potentially p anthe i s t i c n e o - c ol o ni al nature-fest the latest Synod threatens to be. A far cry from conforming to Christ. Of course, as a Catholic laywoman I rely on a wide range of media sources from which to glean information, not just one. But the gleaning over the last few months has filled me with little confidence, and less trust, in the hierarchy than ever before.

This is a good thing I have decided; prefer nothing to the love of Christ, especially when some form of undermining of the faith and church is afoot from within it.

Everyone knows it’s a really bad sign if the secular world is behind you. The secular world doesn’t understand, nor does it seem to have any desire to understand, the fact that we aren’t called to make ourselves worldly and fashionable. We shouldn’t be going all Gaia and being ‘mindful’, we should be addressing real problems, currently so evident in the Church it’s embarrassing.

I’m thinking particularly of the Real Presence. It’s a scandal that reception of Holy Communion is treated so lightly, but that’s a rant I have already had, and where I am, thankfully we have priests who are absolutely orthodox. I haven’t always been quite so lucky. Thankfully, too, we are so far free from pitch and putt and fairground rides although we are treated, and often treat ourselves, like the slowest dodgem, the easiest target to aim at and hit. Repeatedly.

It’s not that we don’t as an institution deserve a good drubbing.

The lamentable involvement with, and reactions of hierarchy to scandal, sexual, financial, and theological, seem to demand one. It’s amazing the power you can believe you possess when your coffers are bulging and you are not checked. Or if you are, can slam back at how judgemental or un-ecumenical any

hierarchy of England and Wales said anything about this? Under the guise of RSE (that’s Relationship and Sex Education for the uninitiated), children are being taught, no-holds barred, exactly how to engage in gay sex.

How many children are going to end up on juvenile sex offender registers for acting out those lessons in the loos or in in the playground? Factor in online access to every kind of porn, and we have a totally traumatised generation unable to form genuine relationships with the opposite sex, or anyone at all. None of the teachers I know are anything other than horrified by the way state education is going. Teacher in-service training frequently consists of staff having to spend hours (yes, hours!) being lectured by speakers from groups specialising in this kind of thing. When I was a child, dressing up was make believe, it was playing, and didn’t require psychological evaluation and a visit from an infant school transgender worker. I spent most of my tender years wanting to be Batman and wearing a cape and cowl. Now I would run the risk of being diagnosed as a transgendered bat. For the record, I identify as a woman, and although I have always liked bats, I don’t like them that much.

So, bent on ignoring the salacious and unsavoury, I made sweet and wholesome bara brith alongside the usual loaves. There’s nothing like pummelling bread dough, or the kitchen full of the wonderful smell of baking bread. It’s one of those things I love to do, and, thankfully, the family love to eat. Sometimes it makes it to the freezer.

It’s positively therapeutic watching dough rise and tapping hot crusty loaves straight from the oven. It’s still raining, but not blowing the gale it was. Time for us to have tea and buttered bara brith in front of the telly. Ben Hur, I think.

‘None of the teachers I know are anything other than horrified by the way state education is going…’

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critical questioners are. Questioners, ah yes, that infamous lobbyist for all things LGBT, but mainly G and T (and no, that’s unfortunately not the tipple). The media priest pops up all over the place, usually when you are least mentally prepared, doing his bit at undermining the faith one inclusive day at a time, often in a photo, wearing civvies, a big grin, and a bottle of rainbow vodka behind him.

This is just part of the mire that Our Lady of Salette told us of. Innocence lost at an ever-younger age, and modesty laughed at.

Speaking of innocence lost, another absolutely appalling order from our secular leaders relates to the most recent instructions for in-school sex and relationship education. Has the

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MY FIRST MASS

The Traditional Rite saved my spiritual life Adam Harrison

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ike so many Englishmen before me, my conversion to Catholicism was from the Anglican Church.

After many years’ attending Anglican services, and of studying church history, I discovered I was not where I ought to be. This revelation played on my mind until – while doing my basic military training - I finally ‘crossed the Tiber’ at the age of 22, being Confirmed by the Roman Catholic Padre.

Upon leaving the military I worked abroad for a while and spiritually lost my way. I came back to the UK and had another revelation – I had somehow slipped into becoming a lapsed Catholic.

Much soul-searching ensued, which led me to realise that something had to change if my spiritual life was to be retrieved and revitalised. I started to attend Holy Mass in various churches in the area, but what I found was not very inspiring.

I went to a series of really lax and quite frankly more Protestant style services than the Anglican ones that I has attended in my youth. Each Novus Ordo Mass that I attended left me uninspired to the extent that I was brought low. I felt

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thoroughly lost among the thorn bushes, asking myself where was the fire in my soul of the ‘New Evangelisation’ much spoken of in church circles today? It was not in the Masses that I was attending.

In a state of melancholy, I started to give up. I honestly felt as if the Lord had given up on me and that I was no longer welcome in his house. Where could I go?

I had already left the Anglican Church, and the Masses in my new spiritual home seemed somehow superficial, not touching my deeper needs.

I cannot overemphasise how low I felt at this moment, when something happened that proved to be a lifechanger. I was walking out of church after a Novus Ordo Mass, when I bumped into people coming in. I asked some of them what was going on and was told that a Traditional Rite Mass was to start in a short time. Intrigued, I decided to stick around for the first fifteen minutes out of curiosity. The Holy Mass began and from the very start I was mesmerised. Although I did not understand any of it my soul did. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before, and, as the Kyrie began, I almost wept with a deep sense of spiritual joy, a joy that stayed with me long after the Mass had finished.

'Although I did not understand any of it my soul did. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before...'

I began to attend the usus antiquior every week, learning more about the Faith as I did so. I discovered that the more I learnt about the Mass, the more my love of Jesus increased. Many people say that it is much better to understand the Mass in the vernacular, but through my own experience I would beg to differ. I have been able to connect with Jesus in a more meaningful way during the Old Latin Rite that was not possible before – it put me in a true state of focus, allowing me to meditate on being with Christ without having to interrupt my prayer by having continually to do something distracting. In some way that I cannot quite put my finger on, the transparency of the vernacular in the Novus Ordo somehow seemed to obscure the great mystery of the Mass, with the result that it became virtually meaningless and, quite frankly, boring.

The hitherto incomprehensible Latin of the Traditional Rite, however, along with the celebration’s deeply spiritual and reverent dignity had the opposite effect.

The great incomprehensible mystery being made present on the altar at the hands of the priest became very real to me at the deepest level of my being.

Attending my first Latin Mass was like seeing a lighthouse in a storm giving me a glimmer of hope. I was lost at sea preparing to give up without even realising it. Whereas attending the Novus Ordo was nothing more than a chore to be dreaded, to be got through at any cost, I now look forward to going along and praying the Old Rite every week, receiving many graces and blessings from God. Becoming a regular congregant at the Latin Mass has led me to take spiritual retreats, singing Lauds and Compline at home, praying the rosary daily, doing charitable work and much more. All this started with just one usus antiquior, when the Lord kept me in church after a Novus Ordo for just a few minutes out of curiosity, throwing me a lifeline at a crucial moment. The Traditional Rite Latin Mass saved my spiritual life.

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LETTERS

Letters to the Editor More on the Broad Stone I was very pleased to read Charles Coulombe’s feature on “The Broad Stone of Honour” by Kenelm Digby (Mass of Ages, summer 2019). As he explains, it forms part of an extraordinary library of Catholic knowledge but, sadly, it is little known.

I met Charles recently at the Chavagnes International College summer conference and we had a brief conversation about the works of Kenelm Digby. One of the main reasons for this work not being widely read is probably its length – over 2,000 pages.

A few years ago (when I was completing my ‘formation’ before being dubbed at Chartres as a Chevalier de Notre Dame) my final project was a study of this book and I prepared a summary and precis (a mere 14 pages). This would give anyone interested a brief introduction to the book and might inspire them to read it in its entirety.

This summary can be found under the section ‘News and Thoughts’ dated 19th February 2019 on the MSM website - https://militiasanctaemariae.org.

Ian Gordon St Bede’s Parish Clapham Park

Spanish saint

deeper meditation on the suffering and death of Our Saviour and High Priest. Thank you so much to Mackenzie Robinson, the author of the article.

J P Fitzgerald Via email

More history, please I don’t know about other readers but for me one of the great delights of reading Mass of Ages magazine is the number of historical articles you publish. It is easy to forget – and this is true of Catholics as much as it is true of anyone else – how the society in which we live today is the product of Catholic values and ideas. These ideas may have been altered, perhaps even supressed, since the Reformation but they are always there forming the bedrock of our spiritual and indeed intellectual lives. With this in mind I wanted particularly to say how much I enjoyed Joseph Shaw’s article ‘Traces remain’ in your autumn issue.

Alan Kelly Liverpool

Letters should be addressed to:

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

I am quite an ancient member (4999) of the LMS resident in Spain.

In relation to the interesting article on Shrewsbury Cathedral in Issue 200 (congratulations!), please note that the saint in question is Saint Peter of Alcántara (San Pedro de Alcántara) not of Alacantara.

The Spanish place name is derived directly from the Arabic, qantara, which means a bridge, and the Alcántara of Extremadura (where the saint was from) does indeed possess one of the finest Roman bridges in Spain.

If in doubt you can check the Oxford Dictionary of Saints where it appears correctly, though there they confuse Estremadura (which is in Portugal, in the area of Lisbon) with Extremadura, a region in the SW of Spain.

Mervyn Samuel Via email

Turin meditation I should like to express my thanks and admiration for such an inspiring article explaining the link between the window and the Shroud of Turin in the Summer 2019 issue of Mass of Ages.

As an occasional visitor to Buckfast Abbey I have sometimes felt ambiguous about this great window, but now the article has helped to open this imposing image to a much

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Please pray for the souls of all members who have died recently Requiescant in Pace Departed: John Wheatley Blench Edith Hamill Agnes Rutherford 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: Michael O’Brien.

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FEATURE

Best and truest Charles A. Coulombe explores how the 19th century Celtic Revival brought many to the Faith

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ver since the Anglo-Saxons made themselves at home in the ruins of Roman Britain, there have been greater or lesser amounts of antagonism between the English and the denizens of the so-called Celtic Fringe – Ireland, Man, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and to some degree portions of the north and west Counties of England itself.

Expressed in the Middle Ages by the combat between the reigning English Monarch and such figures as Owen Glendower and Sir William Wallace, the Reformation added an ideological element to the struggle. Ireland and districts in the Scottish Highlands and Islands remained bastions of Catholicism – Wales and Cornwall, as their 16th and 17th century struggles for the Faith showed – doubtless would have done the same, had priests fluent in their languages continued to be trained.

As it was, loyalty to the ill-starred House of Stuart against its successive Cromwellian, Williamite, and Whig opponents united them in a single cause for over a century. The defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1746 and the recognition by Pope Clement XIII of his rival George III as King of Great Britain two decades later marked on the one hand the practical defeat of the Stuart cause, and on the other the separation between the official Church Hierarchy and Jacobitism (although on his father’s death, the rectors of the English, Irish, and Scots Colleges in Rome all honoured the Prince as “King Charles III,” and were summarily fired

by Clement).

In any case, outside Ireland the Catholics were a small minority of the Celtic peoples in the British Isles by 1800, although there were small preserves scattered from Lanherne in Cornwall to Barra in the Hebrides.

Celtic culture as a whole was at a low ebb – its languages dying, many of its traditions either neglected or officially

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proscribed. But this was all about to change, as Romanticism, having cast its life-giving glow on Germany and France, arrived in the United Kingdom.

Its foremost practitioner was Sir Walter Scott. Almost single-handedly, he rescued the Medieval from its reputation for barbarism – and gave the impression that perhaps even its Catholicism was worth investigating.

Alongside this, he rehabilitated the Jacobites and Scots history in general.

Even George IV became a fan, going so far as to pay for the Stuart tombs and monument at St Peter’s in Rome, and visiting Scotland and Ireland to great popular local acclaim – something that Monarch was not used to among his English subjects. As Prince of Wales he had already engaged the great Edward Jones – reviver of the Welsh musical tradition – as his personal harpist.

To be sure, the seeds of all of this had been laid before Scott to some degree – with the work of James McPherson in his Ossian poems and Robert Burns. At first glance, the embattled Catholic minority in Great Britain would seem to have played very little role in these events – but in fact, Burns, despite his Masonic and Presbyterian memberships, was devoted to the memory of the Stuarts.

Moreover, he numbered several Catholics among his close friends – something unexpected in one of his background and upbringing. John Geddes, vicar apostolic of western Scotland, prized both the man and his work: he prevailed upon the Scots monasteries of Regensburg and Wuerzburg and the Scots colleges of Paris, Douai, and Valladolid (now Salamanca, Spain) to subscribe to the 1787 Edinburgh edition of Burns’s poetry, which work put him on the literary map of Europe.

After the rise to fame of the Laird of Abbotsford, a host of movements owing their inspiration at least partly to his work arose. Scott’s work ignited a great interest in all things Medieval – from

Gothic Architecture to knighthood (hence the adventure of the Eglinton Tournament), to an actual rekindling of interest in Catholicism – coinciding with the political agitation on its behalf in Ireland, led by Daniel O’Connell.

But the Oxford Movement, the PreRaphaelites, and the Arts-and-Crafts also emerged therefrom. In addition to all of these, as the 19th century wore on, were the efforts at recovering – or, often enough, inventing – the traditions of the Celtic countries, from Irish legends to Scots tartans to the Welsh Eisteddfod. Most of those involved in this Celtic Revival were Protestants of various kinds – often entranced by the dreamy if inaccurate vision of a “Celtic Church” – Catholic, but independent from Rome. But there were in the first half of the 19th century several Catholic-friendly or even actually Catholic pioneers: among them were Welsh popular historian William Owen (1785 - 1864), called Y Pab – “The Pope” for his sympathies; deathbed convert and Cornish folklorist, Robert Hawker (1803–1875); and the decidedly dodgy brothers, John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart (real names John Carter Allen and Charles Manning Allen) whose Catholicism and influence in reviving Scottish customs were as real as their genealogy was fake. John Hobson Mathews (1858-1914) combined Catholic evangelisation with reclaiming the country’s language and heritage.

In the meantime, starting in 1830, with the overthrow of Charles X, France, Portugal, and Spain became engaged in a series of dynastic conflicts pitting senior and more devout lines of the local Royal Families against junior and more liberal cousins. When the exiled French King came to Edinburgh in the year of his deposition to live in Holyrood, it was Sir Walter Scott himself who took the exile under his wing, transforming the locals’ hostility to a cordial reception by virtue of his own eminence. Although the British

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Ireland and districts in the Scottish Highlands and Islands remained bastions of Catholicism

government was firmly in favour of the liberal lines against their Legitimist foes, and the Catholic Vicars Apostolic – and then hierarchy after it was revived – kept a strict neutrality, many of the more prominent Catholic laymen felt drawn to support the French Legitimists, Spanish Carlists, and Portuguese Miguelists. Most outspoken of these was the convert Bertram Ashburnham, 5th Earl of Ashburnham (1840 – 1913).

British agent for the Carlists, he had lent his own yacht to smuggle guns to the beleaguered party; but his interest in Legitimism caused him also to support Irish Home Rule and the NeoJacobite Revival, which he could be said to have spearheaded. For a time in the 1890s very active, his Order of the White Rose (OWR) drew attention to the superior claim to the British throne of the Queen of Bavaria, who had inherited the Stuart claims.

While an interesting story in itself – and reaching America in the persons

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of such notables as Ralph Adams Cram and Isabella Stewart Gardner – more immediately the OWR is important because among its most active members were several Catholic figures who would later be prominent in Celtic folklore and politics. Among these were Henry Jenner (1848 – 1934), reviver of the Cornish language; L. C. R. DuncombeJewell (1866–1947), War correspondent and Cornish Nationalist; Ruaraidh Erskine (1869 – 1960), co-founder of what became the Scottish Nationalist Party; and fellow SNP co-founder Sir Compton Mackenzie (1883 – 1972), who headed the OWR’s still extant successor, the Royal Stuart Society, for a number of years.

Not directly deriving from that milieu, but affected by its views were Welshmen and Catholic converts Saunders Lewis (1893 – 1985), a Plaid Cymru co-founder, and Henry W.J. Edwards, who combined Tory activism, Chesterton’s friendship – and Distributism, and Plaid Cymru

membership; they were also stout Latin Mass proponents after Vatican II. So, what may we draw from all of this? In a sort of inverse of the story of the Irish cultural and political revival where Protestants played a role out of all proportion to their percentage of the Emerald Isle’s population, Catholics were a much larger percentage of the Scots, Welsh, and Cornish revivals than their numbers would seem to justify.

Unfortunately, in all four Celtic lands, the Catholic influence on present-day nationalism – as on any other political grouping - is virtually nil. Nevertheless, as the Gorsedds, Eisteddfods, Mods, and all the rest of Celtic continue to flourish, it would be good to become acquainted with the Catholic element in those cultures.

So many of the figures we have looked at came to the Faith because they realised that it was responsible for all that was best and truest in their traditions.

This is a knowledge we need to share with their current successors.

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FEATURE

Priest & Server Training returns After a break of a year, the Latin Mass Society will be resuming its residential conferences for teaching the celebration of Mass in the Extraordinary Form, as Paul Waddington explains

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riest and Server Training Conferences were started in 2007, the year in which Pope Benedict XVI issued his motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, enabling the widespread use of the older form of the Mass.

Conferences were held in 2007 and 2008 at Merton College, Oxford; and later at various venues, including Ushaw College, Downside Abbey, Buckfast Abbey, Belmont Abbey, Ratcliffe College and All Saints Pastoral Centre in the Westminster Diocese.

In 2016, the event found a regular home at Prior Park College in Bath. Prior Park has a beautiful chapel with several side altars making the venue very suitable for our purposes. However, it is not available to us in school term time, which in some years precludes our favoured Low Week. This happened in 2019 and will happen again in 2020.

A new venue has been found for 2020: Theodore House, the newly opened Christian Heritage Centre, situated alongside Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. The adjacent St Peter’s Church will provide a fine setting for the daily Masses, and its side altars are suitable for the tuition.

Over the years, nearly 200 priests have attended these conferences, with some returning several times. Our most

The Christian Heritage Centre associated with Stonyhurst College

distinguished student was Bishop Slattery from Lincoln in the USA. We have also had priests from Australia, Spain, Italy, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the West Indies, as well as all parts of the British Isles.

The Latin Mass Society will be offering training for priests and servers wishing to learn to celebrate or assist at Mass in the Extraordinary Form. Tuition will be given by priests who have extensive experience of celebrating Mass in the older form, or, in the case of servers, laymen with similar experience.

St Peter’s Church will provide a fine setting for the daily Masses

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According to the requirements of the students, there will be groups studying Low Mass, Missa Cantata and Solemn Mass. Both priests and servers will be expected to be proficient at Low Mass before progressing to the more complicated forms.

Theodore House is the newly opened Christian Heritage Centre associated with Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit school. It has a full range of modern facilities, and all rooms are en suite.

The Priest and Server Training Conference will be held at Theodore House, Stonyhurst, Lancashire BB7 9PT from Monday, 20 to Thursday, 23 April 2020.

The conference will begin at lunch time on the Monday and end at lunch time on the Thursday.

Cost is £120, which includes full board and lodging. Participants willing to share a room will be charged £100, and seminarians will be accepted free of charge if they are prepared to share a room. Non-residents may attend for £30, which will include lunch.

Applications to attend should be made via the Latin Mass Society website: lms.org.uk

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FEATURE

Mass on the Marsh Marygold Turner reports from St Augustine’s Church in Kent Photographs by Clare Bowskill

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ur annual visit to St Augustine’s Church in Snave, on Romney Marsh, took place on Saturday, 28 September 2019.

There was a Missa Cantata celebrated by Fr Gabriel Diaz, with music from The Victoria Consort, under the direction of Matthew Vine.

This was the fifth year running that Mass had been celebrated at St Augustine's, by kind permission of The Romney Marsh Historic Churches Trust, who are entrusted with the care of this, now redundant, church.

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FEATURE

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A work of restoration Joseph Shaw on how some measure of ancient glory could be passed on to future generations ‘In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory… and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone.’

JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King, p260.

However, the English Catholic programme of restoration suddenly came to a halt, in the 1960s, ushering in a period of extraordinary hatred of the past, and a kind of spiritual as well as physical vandalism. In the words of Saruman, near the end of the Return of the King: ‘I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives.’

Like many of his generation, Tolkien found himself betrayed by those placed in positions of authority in that Church. He is said to have made loud responses in Latin On May 14th, 1854, Bishop Ullathorne at the English Mass, which first appeared called on the [Curé d’Ars] and asked in 1965. It can give us little satisfaction to him to pray for England. The bishop of note that the new programme, an attempt Birmingham relates that the man of God to make the Church relevant to a modern said with an accent of extraordinary world in which medievalism seemed conviction: ‘Monseigneur, I believe that to be losing its allure, coincided with the Church in England will be restored to the most disastrous period of apostacy its splendour.’ and lapsation, of priests and religious Dom Ernest Graf, The Cure of Ars abandoning their vocations, and the closure of churches and communities, he century and a bit from about the which is possible to imagine outside of a 1830s to the end of the 1950s was a period of severe persecution. period of restoration.

Tolkien’s own literary One aspect of this was the achievement, which in its revival of interest in the own way ‘preserves the Middle Ages, not as a period memory and the glory of darkness, horror, and of the years that were Catholicism, but as intriguing, gone’, has on the contrary romantic, and profound. endured and proved an Although not only a project extraordinary success. of Catholics, the Catholic May it continue the work Church in England played an of making imaginative enthusiastic part in this. The room in its readers for the glory the Medieval Church restoration which we need might seem unattainable, but today even more than at some things could be saved, the time it was composed. some new things could be Towards the end of the Lord of Rings, Merry built in the ancient spirit, contemplates the corpse and, to paraphrase Tolkien, of Saruman and hopes it some measure of the ancient glory could be passed on to Tolkein: ‘He is said to have made loud responses in Latin at the English Mass’ marks the ‘very last end of the War’ future generations.

‘I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve So, in Oxford, once a great Catholic the point, this restoration is described university filled with every kind of twice, first for Gondor, and then for the cleared up the mess.’, said Sam gloomily. religious order, in the late 19th and Shire. And this indeed is the Christian ‘And that’ll take a lot of time and work.’ early 20th centuries it was possible for vocation: the restoration of God’s image the Benedictines, Dominicans, and in man, with respectful gratitude to our A longer version of this paper was Franciscans to return. Around the predecessors in the Faith, and in unity of delivered to ‘More than Memory: Tolkien country impressive Cathedrals and spirit with them.

Spiritual Conference’ on 25th May 2019.

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monasteries were built: in Buckfast, the monks themselves raised a stunning new church, literally on the foundations of a 12th century monastic church, which had been destroyed in the Reformation.

The ancient landscape of holy places, too, was painstakingly restored, at first with pitifully modest shrines, but with increasing confidence and splendour as time went on: Walsingham, Holywell, Glastonbury, Willesden, Caversham: the list goes on. [All of these shrines are honoured by pilgrimages organised by the Latin Mass Society: Ed.] The parallel with the world of the Lord of the Rings is too obvious to labour. The melancholy of past glory is everywhere present in Middle Earth, but it is not the melancholy of despair. It might not be possible to turn the clock back, but it is possible to restore the King, to save the still-free lands, to defeat the enemy in his current incarnation, and to make some measure of repair and renewal, morally, spiritually, and physically. Underlining

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FEATURE

Education for Eternity

By Canon R. Post, ICKSP, Principal of the St Benedict’s Academy

Staff and pupils: ‘Each day begins with prayer and a short catechetical talk’

Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

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t is noteworthy that the preparatory Psalm of Holy Mass weaves together two key ideas: sacrifice and joy.

Supernatural happiness is the only sufficient motive to inspire the sacrifices necessary to live out the faith.

At Saint Benedict’s Academy, it is our firm hope that a profoundly Catholic education will instil within children the spirit of sacrifice and of joy. The reality of sacrifice is present in many ways—we see the sacrifices made by our generous benefactors, the sacrifices of volunteer teachers working to communicate to children the beauty of nature and of grace, and we are edified by the sacrifices of our families, many of whom have moved or travel long distances each week to keep strong within their children the precious light of faith.

Nevertheless, we hope that this spirit of sacrifice will also foster joy. As priests of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, we are confident that the riches of a spirituality drawn from

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our holy patrons, St Benedict, St Thomas Aquinas, and St Francis de Sales will go a long way towards fostering in young Catholic men and women a sense of balance, love of the truth, and Christian charity.

Sadly, we can observe all too easily that so many children who pass through schools come out with their faith badly damaged or entirely lost. Even families who do their very best to instil the Catholic faith in their children often experience the tragedy of apostasy.

Gregorian chant with a Sister

What is needed then, now more than ever, is a Catholic education which seeks to foster in children a sense of their supernatural vocation. God has called each of his children, adopted in the waters of baptism, to be eternally happy with Him in heaven. Only by responding joyfully to this call do we have the possibility of fulfilling our potential now, while also receiving a foretaste of the happiness of eternal life.

It is our desire that Saint Benedict’s Academy will serve this finality. Each day begins with prayer and a short catechetical talk; likewise, class always begins and ends with prayer. The presence of three Canons of the Institute and two teaching Sisters also creates an environment in which responding to the call to priesthood or religious life will not appear alien to the children. Finally, we have the extraordinary treasure of the Mass of Ages, particularly on Fridays and Feast Days when our students and religious Sisters sing a Missa Cantata. It is a great joy to see the enthusiasm with which the boys look forward to their turn on the Mass serving rota.

Our Academy is still in its infancy; this January will mark our second anniversary. However, like the mustard seed of the Gospel, we think that, if it be God’s holy will, Saint Benedict’s will grow rapidly and offer a sure refuge for

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FEATURE

A lesson in progress many Catholic families. Already we have seen significant growth this year with the addition of four new families, while we continue to receive frequent enquiries for the years to come.

Following the Holy Mass each Friday, the children of the Academy approach the altar to recite a Litany to the forty English martyrs and venerate the relics of St John Southworth and Blessed William Howard. Certainly, it is a fitting end to the week. While we may not be called upon to shed our blood, we all need the grace of the martyrs’ intercession to remain faithful in a world ever more hostile to Christ and His holy Church.

Science class

• Saint Benedict’s Academy accepts children aged 5-18

•S aint Benedict’s follows a part-time, hybrid model, combining the education given at the academy with homeschooling.

• Subjects taught at the academy include Catechism, English, Maths, Science, History, French, Latin, Greek, Music and Art.

• There is a cohesive, classical curriculum which seamlessly blends the education received at the academy with that received at home.

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• Run by the ICKSP, Saint Benedict’s offers families the traditional Mass and Sacraments • The Academy benefits from the presence of teaching priests and religious sisters • Enquiries may be addressed to saintbenedicts@icksp.org.uk or Canon Post 07856 720900

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BOOKS

Crucial to survival Joseph Shaw reviews three books on Catholic Faith and Catholic identity

Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America Since Vatican II by Stephen Bullivant. Oxford, 2019; 302pp; £25 Why Catholics Leave, What They Miss, and How They Might Return by Bullivant, Knowles, Vaughan-Spruce, and Catherine Knowles. Paulist Press, 2019; 148pp; £15.99

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hat can sociology tell us about why the Catholic Church has declined, in numerical terms, since Vatican II, and the place of the Traditional Mass in responding to the crisis? Professor Stephen Bullivant, a Catholic theologian and sociologist of religion, and occasional Traditional Mass attender, does an excellent job of telling us in these two books.

The second, and shorter, of the two books is the analysis of an unusual survey undertaken in 2015 for the Diocese of Portsmouth, which asked self-identified lapsed Catholics (ie baptized but nonpracticing) why they left.

The first, and longer, book uses the Portsmouth data, and other sources, for a comprehensive sociological analysis of what has gone wrong in Britain and America.

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The central thesis relates to the changing nature of the Catholic community in both countries. According to the sociological theory of ‘social network effects’, a religion (or any other world view) is less likely to lose its adherents insofar as those holding it are part of a tightly-knit community. A great many of our Catholic predecessors of fifty and more years ago were members of such communities: they read Catholic papers, their friends tended to be Catholic, they met fellow parishioners in the street and where they spent their leisure time; they married other Catholics and sent their children to Catholic schools. This community had a ‘wall’ around it, so to speak, as Catholics actively sought out the company of their fellows, had much in common with them, and could recognize them in all sorts of ways. There were ‘markers’ of Catholic identity, such as the keeping of feast and fast days, eating fish on Fridays, and the like, and Catholic worship and devotions were very distinct from those of other denominations (High Anglican imitations notwithstanding).

In the context of such communities, another sociological phenomenon can flourish: the ‘Credulity Reinforcing Expression of Belief’, or ‘CRED’. When

people, Catholic or not, read about members of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom walking for nine days from London to Walsingham, when they saw in their parish church that a local family had donated a fine stained-glass window, when the paterfamilias took a slot in the small hours to watch before the Blessed Sacrament during a FortyHours devotion, or when they witnessed a whole parish turning out to dig the foundations of a new church (as they did), they can see that these people really believe. This kind of thing has great power to reinforce the Faith, and to draw people into it.

The Second World War, however, and the social changes which came after it, loosened the bonds of family and place.

The war itself threw together people from quite different backgrounds, and post-war rehousing, rising numbers going to university, television, and the expanded possibilities of travel, meant that members of such formerly tightlyknit communities increasingly had relationships and ideas with and from a wider range of sources than before, and correspondingly less contact and sense of solidarity with fellow Catholics.

In the middle of this process came the Second Vatican Council. The timing makes the separation of different factors more difficult, but it is not coincidental.

Progressives, at the Council and after it, consciously wanted to ally themselves with the forces undermining the depth and strength of Catholic communities.

They felt that they were on the winning side: they stood with open-minded modernity, against the grumbles of the older generation. It was an illusion, however. At bottom, it wasn’t so much the young chafing against artificial restrictions: it was, rather, that the old, social, restrictions were simply disappearing. The question the Church faced at that fateful moment was whether to find ways to counteract the dissolution of the Faith community, before the mutual example and support which is so necessary to it was fatally weakened, or whether to accelerate and

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exaggerate the process by demolishing even those aspects of Catholic identity which would otherwise have survived the social changes. The Church’s hierarchy and intellectual elite chose the latter.

Part of the reason for this decision was given by Annibale Bugnini, when he wrote (L’Ossovatore Romano 19/03/65): And yet it is the love of souls and the desire to help in any way the road to union of the separated brethren, by removing every stone that could even remotely constitute an obstacle or difficulty, that has driven the Church to make even these painful sacrifices.

He was talking about the Intercessions on Good Friday, but his words have a wider application. The cult of Our Lady and of the English Martyrs; the use of Latin in the Mass; Catholic customs like Friday abstinence: all such markers of identity, these ‘walls’ around the community, must be razed to let people in. It should have been obvious that this would also let people out, and undermine the very community which outsiders might notice from outside and want to join.

The removal of devotional images from churches, the smashing of altars and the destruction of stained-glass windows, were also motivated more directly by a rejection of what these things expressed and stood for. In Britain and America, where they had often been installed only a generation earlier by struggling local communities, the effects can easily be imagined. Surveys of lapsed Catholics from long after the reform still identify respondents complaining about the loss of Catholic identity. Some 10% of the Portsmouth survey’s respondents lamented the unavailability of the Latin Mass.

Professor Bullivant’s books will reinforce the growing sense among conservative Catholics that crucial to the survival, let alone the revival, of the Church in the West is a deepening of Catholic identity. The restoration of Friday abstinence, and of the traditional dates for some of our Holy Days of

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Obligation, by the Bishops of England and Wales, can be seen as tentative moves to addressing this, as can the revival of Corpus Christi processions and Benediction, and the restoration of some churches to look recognizably Catholic.

To make a measurable difference, however, things will have to change at a deep level. As some of the Portsmouth respondents noted, even parish catechists can be ignorant, or contemptuous, of the Faith, and the same is true of teachers in Catholic schools. It is quite impossible to form a community with a deep sense of Catholic identity around such institutions, and they undermine efforts to form one around the Church as a whole.

Clearly, the Traditional Mass and the Traditional Catholic movement can make a contribution here. Traditional spirituality makes possible many markers of Catholic identity (the Brown Scapular is a popular example); the formation of children in Catholic spirituality and world view is regarded as paramount; and the Traditional Mass itself sets us apart from others. Our national events and pilgrimages also make possible ‘Credulity Reinforcing Expressions of Belief’. This is what the Church of the future will look like: if it is still visible at all.

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Ego Eimi – It is I: Falling in Eucharistic Love A Treatise on the Sacrament of the Most Holy Eucharist by Fr Armand de Malleray, FSSP Many readers will know Fr de Malleray of the Fraternity of St Peter from his tireless work for souls in Reading, Warrington, and elsewhere. He has also found time to write this intriguing, popular work on the Blessed Sacrament, which engages the reader with anecdotes, literary parallels, and history, while setting out a great deal of very useful material on Eucharistic theology and the Traditional Mass.

It is a popular, rather than a technical, work, but in his engaging way Fr de Malleray brings out the significance of all sorts of details which will interest and edify even the most well-informed Catholic reader: the punctuation of the words of Consecration; the ‘canonical fingers’ of St Isaac Jogues which were cut off by his Iroquois captors; the difference in significance between the celebrant’s genuflection before the elevation and his genuflection after it.

The Blessed Sacrament lies at the very centre of Catholic spiritual life. Fr de Malleray takes our understanding of this to a new level, discussing the opening words of the ‘Preparatory Prayers’: ‘Judge, me, O God’.

‘In Holy Communion, Jesus, the cornerstone, is a touchstone, revealing our moral fulfilment. Such is our prayer then, altogether contrite and blissful.

We ask God made Man, Jesus Christ, our Victim and our Judge, to deign to come within us according to His will and make us now such as He wishes to find us at the hour of our death. Holy Communion is our judgment already enacted. When scorned or carelessly or unfaithfully received, it condemns us.

When received in the right dispositions of humility and trust, it leads us into the open arms of the One Whom we revered as our Judge, and Who embraces us as our Saviour.’

All three books are available from the LMS bookshop.

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CROSSWORD Clues Across 1 ‘Apologia Pro ---- ---’, a history of his religious opinions, by St John Henry Newman (4,3) 5 Vestment worn by priest under his chasuble (5) 8 Holy man spared the destruction of Sodom, but not his wife (3) 9 Heretics whose founder was instrumental in the rise of Protestantism (9) 10 All of these lead to Rome it is said (5) 11 Runs contrary to reason (9) 14 Put forward for a position or award (9) 18 Louis, composer who practised with Beethoven and created the violin chin rest (5) 21 Something for which a person prays and asks others to pray (9) 22 A cask, once a measure of 252 gallons of wine (3) 23 Poet of the classic ‘Divine Comedy’ written in Italian rather than Latin (5) 24 ‘------- Romanum’, book containing the texts and rubrics of the traditional Latin Mass (7)

Alan Frost: September 2019

ANSWERS TO AUTUMN 2019 CROSSWORD

Across: 1 Seducer 5 Sling 8 Ely 9 Casuistry 10 Hyena 11 Manichean 14 Dominican 18 Viper 21 Schneider 22 IHS 23 Summa 24 Electra Down: 1 Shepherd 2 Dryden 3 Cyclamen 4 Ruskin 5 Scio 6 Intone 7 Gwyn 12 Converse 13 Nebraska 15 Mayhem 16 Candle 17 Uplift 19 Usus 20 Beda

Closing Date & Winner

Entries for the winter 2019 competition should be sent to the Latin Mass Society, 11-13 Macklin Street, London WC2B 5NH or by email to info@lms.org.uk, to arrive before Friday, 13th December 2019. The winner of the autumn 2019 competition is Dr Porilo of London, who wins a copy of the LMS Traditional Catholic Calendar 2020 and the booklet Traditional Prayers for Christmastide.

Clues Down 1 Emperor, under whose persecution ‘13 Down’ was killed (8) 2 Painter of the famous Jesus and Magdalene Noli Me Tangere (6) 3 Belonging to a Congregation of priests and brothers founded by St John Bosco (8) 4 Relating to heavenly bodies (6) 5 End of prayer (4) 6 Nature of a letter that is not upright (6) 7 A ‘Chapel of ----’ built in a parish for those who cannot conveniently reach the parish church (4) 12 Unexpected gifts that may be divine for those in need (8) 13 Early martyr Saint, dedicatee of several churches in Rome, one ‘outside the walls’ (8) 15 Tours of France associated with early bishop Saint (6) 16 Belief in the existence of God without attachment to a religion (6) 17 ‘O Salutaris ------’ St Thomas Aquinas hymn sung in Benediction (6) 19 ‘The ---- and the Panther’, Catholic poet laureate Dryden’s explanation of his conversion (4) 20 St ---- Line, Tyburn martyr and convert executed for sheltering a priest (4)

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LMS Latin Course 2020: advance notice. Mon 17th August until Friday 21st inclusive. With Fr John Hunwicke and Fr Richard Bailey. At Savio House, Ingersley Road, Bollington, Macclesfield, Cheshire, SK10 5RW St Catherine’s Trust: Summer School ​ 2020, advance notice. Sunday 2nd August to the morning of Saturday 8th August, at St Cassian’s Centre, Wallingtons Road, Kintbury, Berkshire, RG17 9SP. Guild of St Clare: Bobbin Lace for Beginners. Ongoing course, fortnightly on Thursday evenings. Email for further information: lucyashaw@gmail.com Guild of St Clare 2020 Lent Sewing Retreat, with Fr Stephen Morrison OPraem, at Douai Abbey, 28th February–1st March. Douai Abbey, Upper Woolhampton, Reading, RG7 5TQ. Booking open at www.lms.org.uk Guild of St Clare vestment mending day at St Mary Moorfields, London, 30th November 2019: email lucyashaw@gmail.com

Guild of St Clare: Autumn 2020 Sewing Retreat, advance notice. At Douai Abbey, 20th–22nd November. Douai Abbey, Upper Woolhampton, Reading, RG7 5TQ. Society of St Tarcisius training day: St Mary Moorfields, London, 30th November 2019.

Booking open at www.lms.org.uk Secondhand Books Wanted The secondhand books section of our website is proving to very popular with our customers. If you have any books you would like to donate, please contact the LMS Office info@lms. org.uk

To rent Villa/Apt. with panoramic views for rent in Saint Lucia. With all amenities, close to the beach, shops, supermarkets etc. From £30 per person per night.

Sleeps 4. Email: casenbas_rentals @yahoo.com

Classified advertisements cost just 50p per word with an 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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WINTER 2019

MACKLIN STREET

Early days

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our eyes do not deceive you - the 'Macklin Street' column is still here... and the LMS is still in Macklin Street!

Negotiations on a lease on another office collapsed at the last minute as we were – literally - signing documents, when the landlord insisted on an unreasonable and wholly unacceptable change to the break clause in the lease. Had we accepted the change, we would be forced to look for yet another office within two years. Fortunately for us, our present landlord came to the rescue and offered a twelve month extension to our current lease, which the LMS Officers accepted.

Therefore, it is business as usual in Macklin Street!

Roger Wemyss Brooks (a member of the LMS Committee and Local Representative for St James's, Spanish Place) has spent a great deal of time in the Office sorting the many boxes, bags, files and folders which contained our archives. The papers are now in some semblance of order, although more sorting and cataloguing needs to be done.

Some of the material dates back to the very early days of the Society, and before. Roger's work has brought to light many very interesting documents from the likes of Geoffrey Houghton-Brown, Alfred Marnau, Sue Coote and Antony Roper, to whom, among others, the Society owes its existence.

The Society is very grateful to Roger for the time he has spent, and continues to spend, on preserving our archives. If any of our readers has anything that could be added to our collection, we would be very grateful to receive it. We do not necessarily

WINTER 2019

ask for original documents, if you would rather keep them, but a photocopy or scan would enrich our archives. Please contact Stephen Moseling, the General Manager, if you have material to submit.

Elsewhere in this edition of Mass of Ages you will see we have available our 2020 Ordo, 2020 Wall Calendar and our selection of Christmas cards for this year. Orders for these may be placed online or by telephoning the Office. While you are on our website, please do peruse (and purchase from) the 'Advent & Christmas' section, where you will see a selection of books and other items for these seasons. For those readers without internet access, we have highlighted a few of these on the insert stapled to the centre of this magazine.

The LMS has a very good and long-standing relationship with Westminster Cathedral. Our Annual Requiem and the High Mass on the day of our AGM are both celebrated at the High Altar of the Cathedral. In addition to these, there has been a monthly Low Mass in the Cathedral for many years.

Following requests from some who attend it, from January 2020 the monthly Saturday Mass in the Lady Chapel will move to the first Saturday of each month, at 4pm. We urge readers to support this Mass where possible.

The LMS Office will be closed for the Christmas holiday from Monday, 23 December and will re-open on Thursday, 2 January. The staff in Macklin Street wish readers a very blessed Advent and a happy and holy Christmas.

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