Silence in the Traditional Mass: video

Building on the FIUV Position Papers published on Rorate Caeli last year, we at the Latin Mass Society have started a series of short videos to introduce the issues in a very simple way. Having tackled Septuagesima (a position paper on this is in preparation), I can now present a video on Silence in the Liturgy.

The original posting of this paper on Rorate Caeli on this can be seen here. The Position Paper itself is only 1,600 words, plus footnotes. You can download a pdf here; see the whole set of publishes papers here.



The series of Position Papers is ongoing, I will be posting the next one, on the Pax, on Rorate Caeli in a couple of weeks.

Mgr Loftus attacks Cardinal Nichols, again

A while ago Mgr Basil Loftus attacked Archbishop Nichols, as he then was, for appealing for money (for a charitable group dedicated to this specific cause) to repair the fabric of Archbishop's House in Westminster. This weekend, he goes after him, this time by name, for defending the Church's discipline on Communion for those divorced and remarried.

'Matters have not been helped by Cardinal Vincent Nichols' recent comment that when he was a youth there was a more reserved attitude to the Eucharist. Indeed there was. But it cannot be relied upon to support in any way the exclusion of the divorced and remarried from Holy Communion. John Paul II roundly condemned it as "not so much a feeling as unworthiness as a certain ... lack of hunger and thirst, which is also a sign of of lack of adequate sensitivity towards the great Sacrament of love and a lack of understanding of its nature". (Dominicae Caenae, III, xi)

...

'Such purely juridicial considerations of marriage totally ignore its continuity, a continuity which is indestructibly preserved until death, in the partners' love for their children and grandchildren, and indeed for one another, and in the continuing psychological and spiritual memory, or more accurately 'memorial', of their conjugal union. Not only is the question of Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried a positive consideration in its own right - it also helps to focus minds on the often negative and harmful purported 'solution' of marriage nullity.'

On the second quoted paragraph, Loftus' position, as far as it is possible to discern what it is, beggars belief. He thinks that Catholics should not seek annulments for (presumably, null) failed marriages, but are better off living in concubinage: a formalised adultery. This state, he goes on to say (referring to Cardinal Kasper's talk) should be 'tolerated' but not 'accepted': there is no question of remarriage in Church, or, presumably, sacramental absolution, but the parties should go to Communion in order to make their descent into Hell more secure... or something.

He claims that this was the practice of St Basil: that after 6 months penance an adulterer would be given Communion again. That I can believe: but not that St Basil said that during and after this penance the adulterer should carry on committing adultery, because it had become (as Loftus suggests) psychologically impossible for the 'penitent' to stop. I should like to have been around had this argument ever been put to the great saint.

The first paragraph represents what I think must rank as one of the top handful of manifestly dishonest things Loftus has written: and there is a very strong field. It goes beyond being grossly misleading, and actually involves a lie. This can easily be shown by giving a longer quotation from Bl Pope John Paul II, Domicae Cenae 11:

Moreover our Catholic communities certainly do not lack people who could participate in Eucharistic Communion and do not, even though they have no serious sin on their conscience as an obstacle. To tell the truth, this attitude, which in some people is linked with an exaggerated severity, has changed in the present century, though it is still to be found here and there. In fact what one finds most often is not so much a feeling of unworthiness as a certain lack of interior willingness, if one may use this expression, a lack of Eucharistic "hunger" and "thirst," which is also a sign of lack of adequate sensitivity towards the great sacrament of love and a lack of understanding of its nature.

However, we also find in recent years another phenomenon. Sometimes, indeed quite frequently, everybody participating in the eucharistic assembly goes to Communion; and on some such occasions, as experienced pastors confirm, there has not been due care to approach the sacrament of Penance so as to purify one's conscience. This can of course mean that those approaching the Lord's table find nothing on their conscience, according to the objective law of God, to keep them from this sublime and joyful act of being sacramentally united with Christ. But there can also be, at least at times, another idea behind this: the the life of our communities to lose the good quality of sensitiveness of Christian conscience, guided solely by respect for Christ, who, when He is received in the Eucharist, should find in the heart of each of us a worthy abode. This question is closely linked not only with the practice of the sacrament of Penance but also with a correct sense of responsibility for the whole deposit of moral teaching and for the precise distinction between good and evil, a distinction which then becomes for each person sharing in the Eucharist the basis for a correct judgment of self to be made in the depths of the personal conscience. St. Paul's words, "Let a man examine himself,"(64) are well known; this judgment is an indispensable condition for a personal decision whether to approach Eucharistic Communion or to abstain.

The lie is that Loftus claims that Pope John Paul was talking about the old attitude, connected with what Cardinal Nichols remembers from his youth, ie 40 or so years ago, when he says 'a lack of Eucharistic "hunger" and "thirst," which is also a sign of lack of adequate sensitivity towards the great sacrament of love and a lack of understanding of its nature'. He isn't: having just mentioned in passing the older attitude, which was connected with an 'exaggerated severity', he is now talking about an attitude which is seen in the post-Conciliar era, something he was aware of as current at the time of writing (the document dates from 1980).

What is grossly misleading is to omit to mention that, although Pope John Paul wants to oppose the spiritual ennui which replaces the hunger and thirst for the Eucharist which is the healthy attitude, he immediately goes on, at greater length, to condemn the opposite and more widespread problem, of people going up to Communion regardless of their spiritual state. Quite clearly John Paul II, exactly like Cardinal Nichols, can see that something good has been lost from the past when people took the reception of Communion more seriously, even if in the past this was sometimes 'exaggerated'. Now we have gone to the opposite, and much more dangerous, extreme. It is no longer a matter of missing out on spiritual opportunities, but of plunging more deeply into grave sin.

Loftus' complete lack of intellectual integrity is a warning to everyone reading about this debate. The liberals' attempt to force open the Church's discipline on marriage and communion has an air of desperation. They are not interested in a thoughtful discussion, but at forcing this through, and they will stop at nothing to do so. Loftus article suggests why this might be:

'the average age of bishops and theologians who campaign on their [remarried divorcees] behalf is increasing. Men like Ladislaus Orsy who have done so much to keep this issue alive are now in their 90s. Even octogenarians such as Walter Kasper will "be cut off, and fly away" before many of today's younger people are fully fledged. So, yes, the need for young blood in the theological fight for mercy is urgent.'

Yes, Mgr: the clock is ticking, and time is not on your side.

Photos: the younger generation receiving Communion at the St Catherine's Trust Summer School. I don't think they will be flocking to Loftus banner any time soon.

The Church, the Jews, and the Piranha tank

I am pleased to see that the lay theologian Dr John Lamont has published an article on the Jews and the Church: 'Why the Jews are not the Enemies of the Church' in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review.

Dr Lamont is extremely sympathetic to the Traditional Catholic cause, and this is by no means an attack on that. It is a corrective, however, to claims made by some attached to the Traditional Mass, and specifically to some remarks of Bishop Fellay, Superior of the Society of St Pius X. I do not regard the SSPX, as an organisation, as anti-Semitic either in theory or practice: anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that the SSPX has the habit of ejecting members who have clearly anti-Semitic views. What is evident, however, is that there is a current of conspiracy-theory thinking which can be found in Traditional Catholic circles which can easily lend itself to anti-Semitism.

Dr Lamont's article on the Homiletic and Pastoral Review website is already generating the kinds of comments which give Traditional Catholics a bad name: anyone addressing these matters on the internet steps into a tank of piranhas. These commenters - perhaps they will make an appearance on this blog as well - are not representative of the Traditional Catholic movement. Since they are attracting the attention of many who are open-minded about or hostile to the Traditional Catholic cause, I believe that it has become dangerous simply to ignore them. It is time the rest of us made it clear that we do not agree with them, and why.

The same task falls to those on both the political left and right in the UK, the fringes (and not just the fringes) of whose movements attract their own versions of the unpleasant views which can be found on the fringes of Traditional Catholicism.

I also think it is important to set out the reasoned case, from a perspective friendly to Traditional Catholicism, against the key claims of the conspiracy-theory types, since this case involves historical facts which are not all widely known even by those not at all attracted by the conspiracy theories.

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Here are some extracts (in red) of, and paraphrasing summaries from, the article.

The reason why Rabbinic Jews are not enemies of the Church can be put briefly. Such Jews do not seek to convert Christians to Judaism, or to prevent non-Jewish Christians from exercising their faith. They only refuse to become Christians themselves, which does not suffice to make them “enemies” of the Church.

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Rabbinic Judaism is something which, properly speaking, arose only after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Furthermore, as a result of the massive pogroms against Jews carried out by the Romans in the wake of the various Jewish Revolts, Rabbinic Judaism derives overwhelmingly from Jewish sources outside the Roman Empire, notably in Babylon. The Jewish antecedents of Rabbinic Judaism who lived in the time of Our Lord, therefore, were many hundreds of miles away from Jerusalem when He was crucified.

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The statements of St. Peter condemn those Jews who were themselves personally involved and responsible for the death of Christ in bringing about his crucifixion. The term “adversary,” that is used by St. Paul, is applied to the Jews who sought to prevent the first Christians from preaching the Gospel to the Gentiles. It is this attempt to prevent the preaching of the Gospel that constitutes the Jews as “enemies” of all men in St. Paul’s eyes since they are trying to prevent the message of salvation from reaching the rest of the human race. Since Rabbinic Jews make no effort to prevent the preaching of the Gospel to Gentiles, and the founders of Rabbinic Judaism lived some time after the death of Christ, these condemnations cannot be applied to them.

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When the Talmud was burnt in Paris at the instigation of [the Jewish convert to Catholicism] Nicholas Donin, French Jews appealed to the Pope, who judged that it could be permitted, if it was expurgated of any anti-Christian remarks. A similar judgement was made by the Council of Trent. A commission of Jews approached the Council to request that it rule that the Talmud could be printed. The Council passed their request on to the Congregation for the Index, which again ruled that it could be printed if any anti-Christian statements were removed. This evaluation of the Talmud was more positive than that given to the works of Luther, Calvin, Peter Abelard’s Introduction to Theology, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela – all of which were banned in their entirety by the Church.

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“Because Rabbinic Jews deny the doctrine of the Trinity, they do not believe in the same God as the Christians.”  The claim makes the mistake of inferring the psychological state of the believer from the logical consequence of his beliefs. It is true that since God is necessarily a trinity of persons, it necessarily follows that any being that is not a trinity of persons is not God. However, it is not true that every believer accepts all the logical consequences of his beliefs, simply because they do not always draw these logical consequences; and, indeed, are not capable of drawing all of them, since these consequences will be infinite in number. In the particular case of inferring that no being who is not a trinity of persons is the true God, it is only Christians who are capable of making this inference; the belief that God is necessarily a trinity of persons is needed to make it, and this belief can only be acquired through an act of Christian faith. Thus, from the facts that the Jews reject the doctrine of the Trinity, and that the denial of this doctrine entails that the true God does not exist, we cannot conclude that Jews do not believe in the existence of the true God.

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However, the Jewish organizations who insist that the Church should accept that the Mosaic law is still valid for Jews, are not representative of Jews as a whole. Most religious Jews are realistic enough to understand that the Church is not going to change her fundamental teachings, and are content with a vigorous rejection of anti-Semitic hatred and discrimination by Catholics. In defence of these Jewish organizations, it should be said that they are not necessarily well-informed about Christian thought, and that they have been assured, by some individuals with high positions in the Church, that Catholics no longer consider that they need to be saved by belief in Christ. They naturally take these assurances to correspond to what Catholic teachings now assert. When they are told that this is not, in fact, the case, they consider this to be an attempt to cheat them by going back on prior agreements. Some apologies are owed to them for having been given false assurances. The ecclesiastics who gave these assurances sought to use Catholic-Jewish relations as a pretext and disguise for advancing their own theological agenda, which was one of modernist promotion of all religions as good, and as paths to salvation. The Jews who accepted these assurances got caught up in an internal game of subversion of the Church, which was not their objective.

Full article here.

Radical trads spoiling it for everyone?

High Mass in Westminster Cathedral.

The favoured explanation of what went wrong in the Fisher More College affair, among those (you know who you are) who wish to support the banning of the Traditional Mass by the bishop, now seems to be that this is a case of extremist supporters of the Traditional Mass spoiling things for everyone: by linking the Vetus Ordo with extreme views, they left the bishop no choice but to prohibit it. I don't know if this is Bishop Olsen's view, and unless they have inside information on his state of mind - which they do not claim to have - neither do they. But we have all heard the argument before. Oh boy, have we. At the end of this post I will quote the locus classicus.

The policy, though familiar, is both self-defeating and hypocritical.

It is self-defeating because severe restrictions on the EF confirm the suspicions of those who think that, because there has been such a radical discontinuity in the theology of the Church with Vatican II, the theology of the Old Mass directly contradicts the official theology of the post-conciliar Church. Unwillingness to allow celebrations of the ancient Mass suggest that those in charge don't agree with it, and don't think it should be allowed to influence the way people think and pray.

This is given further support when the EF is specifically not allowed for students and young people, or in the context of religious orders which are successful and are spreading. Those who make such restrictions appear to want to stop the theological ideas implicit in the old Missal to infect new generations and new places, and are sometimes quite happy (or at least, a lot happier) to allow the Traditional Mass to be celebrated for the older generation.

This is not a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. It reflects the openly stated views of the more extreme liberals. Cardinal Ratzinger himself attributed opposition to the celebration of the Traditional Mass to a widespread rejection of the theology of Sacrifice as understood by the Council of Trent. The TLM was a 'most intolerable contradiction' of their (heretical) views. Ratzinger's call for the liberation of the ancient Mass, which he subsequently brought about at Pope, signalled that he had no problem with the theology of Trent, and that the Church as a whole has no problem with it. This was the necessary first step on what should be a process of the healing of discontinuities, real and perceived.

When bishops, religious superiors and indeed priests consider requests for the Traditional Mass, they would indeed do well to consider the effect that granting such a request will have on those supporters of the Mass who are tempted by the claims of radical discontinuity. Will refusing permission for the Vetus Ordo strengthen such temptations, or weaken them? The question answers itself.

The idea, in short, that denying people the Traditional Mass is an effective way of combatting the more extreme claims of some traditionalists is clearly false. The people making this argument simply can't have thought it through. It may be a way of punishing them - sure, and everyone else who would have benefited from the celebration. But in the Church punishments should be medicinal: they should aim at making things better. A punishment which makes things worse is just vindictive; it has no place in the Church.

Remember also that in giving permission, those exercising authority take control. They can determine who the celebrants will be. They can bring congregations out of private homes and irregular Mass centres. They can be visited by the Bishop, they will receive Episcopal letters to be read to the congregation. For a parish priest, bishop, or religious superior to prefer the Traditional Mass to be available only outside the official structures of the Church is... well let's just say it is extremely strange.

So the idea that the EF must sometimes be stopped because of 'extremists' is self-defeating. It is also hypocritical.

This is because of the obvious parallel with liturgical practices in the Novus Ordo. Think about when a bishop allows Altar Girls, Communion in the Hand, Communion Under Both Kinds on Sundays, and 'instituted' Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion: these all, remember, need the permission or intervention of the Bishop, and do so because of the dangers in them which were recognised explicitly when Rome gave permission for them. If the bishop were to ask himself: are these practices going to give comfort and support to radical liberals in the diocese who wish to undermine the teaching of the Church? the answer will very often be a very clear 'yes'.

Very little googling is needed to see liberals who want the ordination of women instrumentalising the permission for Altar Girls for their ideological ends. The connection between practices in which the Blessed Sacrament is treated with less reverence, and the undermining of the doctrine of the Real Presence, is obvious, and again these things are used by radical liberals to advance their theological agenda. It would be easy to give many more examples involving liturgical abuses which are in practice tolerated.

Do the bloggers who talk sadly about how those dreadful radical trads have made necessary the banning of the Traditional Mass in one place or another, do they go on to say that innumerable practices in the Novus Ordo have been made intolerable because of the way these are used by clearly heretical liberal extremists to further their goals? No doubt these bloggers don't entirely approve of these practices. But a sense of urgency and obviousness about how they should be immediately banned, regardless of the pastoral collateral damage, is strangely absent. They are, in short, applying different standards to traditionalists than they demand for everyone else.

But of course the parallel is not perfect. Because although banning the Traditional Mass is clearly counterproductive in opposing the claims of discontinuity used by extremists attached to the EF, banning the practices which are so useful to the projects of extremist liberals would not be counter-productive. The liberals' arguments make use of the fact that the practices in question have been officially approved. Again and again they say: Altar Girls have been officially approved, and this shows that that the traditional position on the role of women was just time-bound misogyny; any day now the Church must and will approve women priests. If Altar Girls were banned in more dioceses, this argument would lose its force.

To summarise: the argument that the official Church is today in radical discontinuity with the Tradition is strengthened by banning the TLM; the argument that soon the Church will allow the ordination of women and give up on the Real Presence would be weakened by banning the above-noted practices of the Novus Ordo which, it would seem, there is absolutely no appetite on anyone's part to ban. The claim that radical trads have to be slapped down by stopping celebrations of the Traditional Mass is, then, not only self-defeating but also hypocritical.

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Here, as promised, is the classic expression of this argument, that moderate traditionalists should be punished for the misdemeanors of anyone who likes the Traditional Mass who expresses extreme views. It is from Bugnini's The Reform of the Liturgy pp295-7, talking about the very earliest days of the implementation of the Novus Ordo Missae.

'Not all traditionalist groups accepted the extreme conclusions of the most fanatical. Some [Eric de Savanthen and the FIUV] limited themselves to petitioning that "[the Traditional Mass] may have its place among the universally recognised rites for the celebration of Holy Mass." These groups regarded the Holy See's rejection of the petition as excessively harsh.'
...

'If there had not been the danger of seeming to approve the opposition between the Tridentine and Pauline Missals, as though the former, unlike the latter, was a symbol of orthodoxy, the Holy See would certainly have taken a more lenient attitude.'

That's right: kick the cat to punish the dog.

Marriage: Cardinal Kasper's options - a critique

The proposals Cardinal a Kasper made recently are not intended to be definitive, they are, he says, 'suggestions'. As such I think it would be useful to comment on them. I base my remarks on the extracts of his talk posted on Rorate Caeli.

There are two suggestions, in relation to two kinds of case: one, where an annulment seems possible, and another, where it seems impossible.

On the 'First Situation', Kasper says this:

“Familiaris Consortio” affirms that some of the divorced and remarried are in conscience subjectively convinced that their irreparably broken previous marriage was never valid. [. . .] According to canon law the evaluation is the task of the ecclesiastical tribunals. Since these are not “iure divino,” but developed historically, we sometimes ask ourselves if the judicial way should be the only one for resolving the problem or if other more pastoral and spiritual procedures could also be possible.

As an alternative, one might think that the bishop could entrust this task to a priest with spiritual and pastoral experience as a penitentiary or episcopal vicar.

This comes down to one of the options I discussed in my earlier posts on the Church and remarriage: of making the marriage tribunals radically more lax, or, what comes to the same thing, transferring responsibility to some other party, who will be expected to make a decision without reference to boring things like canon law, witnesses, justice, or truth.

The problem with this, as I explained in the earlier post, is that a rubber-stamp system is unjust at several levels.

First, if it is true that pretty well any Catholic couple could get their marriage annulled if they asked, this radically undermines the stability of those marriages, and the confidence their children can have in their permanence. The proposal is to place a huge temptation in the path of every married Catholic whose marriage goes through a difficult patch, or whose eye falls on an attractive person.

Secondly, and to look at this in another way, to say that pretty well any marriage the Church performs could subsequently be annulled, is to say that pretty well all these marriage are invalid. That the graces of the sacrament are not available to most Catholics. It undoes, in effect, Christ's institution of the Sacrament of Marriage.

But perhaps this would not be true, because the Rubber Stamp system would be issuing declarations of nullity for marriages which were perfectly valid. But this means, in turn, and this is the third point, that the Rubber Stamp would be of no value: it would give us no confidence that the couple were free to marry again. This would be unjust towards those who had been in a genuinely invalid marriage: their path to a completely above-board second marriage, recognised with confidence by everyone, will have been blocked.

We might ask: who is this good for? It harms existing valid marriages, by weakening the marriage bond. It makes the validity of future marriages permanently unclear. It prevents couples in invalid marriages establishing their bone fides for future valid marriages. Who is actually going to benefit?

The answer, I suppose, is a group of remarried divorced Catholics whose only interest is in receiving Communion. People who have abandoned a sacramental marriage and contracted a subsequent civil marriage without going through the necessary Church procedures. They go to church and they feel a bit left out, because these days, as Bl John Paul II and Pope Benedict observed, everyone goes up for Communion out of habit, and people even feel they haven't been to Mass properly if they've not received.

Could this happen? Could the marriage tribunals be converted into or replaced by Rubber Stamp centres? Yes it could. It has in some measure already happened in some places at some times. It could become universal by sheer negligence, or by Rome making changes to procedural rules. It would not involve an explicit denial of any doctrine, just a refusal to follow doctrine's pastoral implications. Christ has not guaranteed that the Church will not destroy the structures built up over centuries to safeguard the Faith and the spiritual good of her children. Traditional Catholics will be able to think of precedents...

But recognising the limitations on what even an Diocesan Penitentiary could do in claiming, without recourse to a serious investigation or legal expertise, that marriages were invalid, Cardinal Kasper proposes a different solution to the 'Second Situation': where a laxer procedure of annulment would not be enough.

The early Church gives us an indication that can serve as a means of escape from the dilemma, to which Professor Joseph Ratzinger referred in 1972. [. . .] In the individual local Churches there existed the customary law on the basis of which Christians who, although their first partner was still alive, were living in a second relationship, after a time of penance had available [. . .] not a second marriage, but rather through participation in communion a table of salvation. [. . .]

The question is: This way that stands beyond rigorism and laxity, the way of conversion, which issues forth in the sacrament of mercy, the sacrament of penance, is it also the path that we could follow in the present question?

In terms of my earlier discussions, this looks more like the 'orthodox option'. The references to the practice of the Early Church are, in fact, spurious: in the Early Church remarriage after divorce was never allowed. The modern practice of the Orthodox Churches developed later. They allow what Kasper wants: after penance, a return to Communion. However, the way they do it is to say that the second marriage (which follows the penance, rather than preceding it) is valid. What Kasper seems to be saying is that the couples don't need to do penance so much about the first marriage, but about the second one, because the second one is illicit and invalid. He can't get over the Council of Trent's teaching that if annulment is impossible, and the spouse is still alive, a second union cannot be valid.

What keeps the couple in the second union are the obligations which have arisen, for example to small children. They want to come back to the sacraments, but they don't feel they can just ditch the new set-up. This is the classic case pressed by those theologians who want to overturn the Church's discipline, so it is no surprise to see Cardinal Kasper talking about it. The problem with this case is, of course, that however much we may talk about penance and conversion, ex hypothesi we are talking about a situation in which the couple intend to maintain their adulterous sexual relations. If they did not have that intention, everyone agrees that they could go to Confession, be absolved, and go to Communion: that's not the problem. The problem arises when they can't repent, because repentance implies an intention to stop committing the sin we are repenting. You can't say sorry for something you are still doing and intend to carry on doing.

(The liberal theologians sometimes say that stopping sexual relations would be psychologically impossible for the couple, suggesting that we are, in fact, no longer dealing with free and responsible moral agents, but that is another story.)

If you have a unrepented mortal sin on your soul, it is impossible to be given sacramental absolution for any of your sins. Talk of a return to sacramental life in the Church is therefore useless: you can't fulfil the obligation of annual confession, and you can't put yourself into the State of Grace necessary for a worthy confession.

The solution we are being offered would seem to be this. To say to them: yes, you are in a state of public sin, but I am going to give you Holy Communion which will make you spiritually worse off. It will make it harder for you to repent and, if you don't repent, will place you in a lower and hotter pit in Hell. But hey, what's important is to see a smile on your face as you return to that state of human respectability which is represented by your place in the queue for Communion, and which is of greater value than the love of Christ or the salvation of your soul.

This is madness, but it is already happening in many parishes, in many dioceses. Could it become the universal, official policy of the Church? Yes. It is not ruled out by the Church's indefectability; it is not a formal or explicit denial of any teaching, it is just a criminally wicked pastoral policy.

Orthodox Catholics are right to worry about this: to pray, to do penance, and to prepare some kind of response, both to head off such proposals, and to cope with them were they implemented. What would happen to faithful bishops and priests if this happened? They will need our support.

This may be a long Lent.

Is the EF dangerous to souls?

A number of people have commented on the Fisher More College situation, saying that the Bishop's banning of the Traditional Mass on campus is a response to various Bad Things happening in the college. Exactly the same thing has been said about the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.

The people who say this often add that banning the EF seems an odd way to address the problems, and I agree. But while I don't know if the claims about the motivations involved in either case are true, I would like to address the idea that frequent attendance at the Traditional Mass can be a danger to your soul. This argument was often hinted at before Summorum Pontificum, and if it is making a comeback that is a little worrying.

A brief autobiographical note. As I've mentioned before, for a number of years I attended the Novus Ordo in Latin. I bought myself a little booklet with the Latin and the English side by side. After a while I noticed something rather strange. Here is the booklet I used to use, open at the bit in Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon) immediately after the Eucharistic Acclamation. The Latin is on the left, the English, the official 1974 ICEL translation, on the right.

The weird thing is that the Latin text is a lot longer than the English translation. It is exaggerated by the fact that the Latin is divided into more paragraphs than the English, and uses shorter lines, but closer examination reveals that a large number of words and indeed whole phrases were not being translated.

Now this is the scandal of the 'old ICEL' translation which has now been addressed by the new translation. At what cost of effort and conflict, we all know, and we must be grateful to Bl John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for persisting with it. Because what 'old ICEL' said was this: there had been a concerted effort, accepted if not instigated by the very highest authority in the Church - let's not say, 'conspiracy' - to present a systematically one-sided - let's not say, 'falsified' - version of the Church's liturgical tradition. If you get into this, if you start reading about it, you realise it neither began nor ended with ICEL. And I don't mean reading books written by tin-foil hatted trads; the strongest dosage of conspiracy theory-stuff can often be found in the books of triumphalist liberals.

Once you become aware of all this, one can become a bit distracted while attending the Novus Ordo, by being reminded of all the things which are missing, added, or changed, for highly controversial reasons, and also by liturgical abuses. (At one point I started counting liturgical abuses at the Masses I attended. Not a good was to participate in the Holy Sacrifice.) Furthermore, every celebration of the Novus Ordo, one realises, can be read in terms of the views and preferences of the celebrant, and the battles he may have had with members of the congregation. Bidding Prayers are often the scene of conflicts, and what they are like can tell you a lot about the parish. The use of Extraordinary Ministers, and exactly what they do, is also fascinating, in a deeply unhelpful way. (Do they receive Communion at the same time as the Priest? Do they cleanse the Sacred Vessels? Do they put things in and out of the Tabernacle? Do they genuflect?)

In this frame of mind, it can be a huge relief to go to the Old Mass, the Vetus Ordo. It can feel as if, for the first time for a long while, one is able to stop worrying about the political meaning of every detail, and just pray. What happens in Mass is, essentially, what the Church has done for centuries. It happens simply because the Church has done it for centuries. I don't mean it has no meaning, I just mean that the priest hasn't decided that because of his personal views this meaning is good and let's do it today. He is doing it in accordance with Tradition. Those attending can stop campaigning for more Latin, for fewer Marxist bidding prayers, or to stop the Extraordinary Ministers wearing skirts which make genuflection either impossible or indecent. They can just participate in Mass and develop their spiritual lives.

We used to hear a lot about our desire for the Traditional Mass being a 'personal preference', with the implication that this was a bad thing. I can't help being amused by this. Have those who use this phrase not noticed the role of personal preferences in celebrations of the Ordinary Form?

I am by no means saying that everyone who attends the Traditional Mass has gone through this mental process. I do think, however, that the ones which people - perhaps including Bishop Olsen of Fort Worth, Texas, or Fr Volpi, the Commissioner of the Franciscans of the Immaculate - are most worried about, may well have. The ones who those people worry might end up with the SSPX or as sede vacantists; the ones who get a bit worked up about these things.

What I want to say is this: those people, the ones who get worked up, are not going to be helped by being deprived of the the Vetus Ordo  and forced to go to the Novus Ordo. If they are really worked up, it is more likely to drive them even more nuts. For them, Pope Benedict's liberalisation of the Extraordinary Form was truly pastoral: it made it possible for them to remain in the Church in a serene fashion, and to make spiritual progress. To calm down, in fact.

Attending the Traditional Mass may make people realise that the Mass has changed rather radically, and this may start the train of thought I described above. But any contact with reality can do that: looking at the religious art in an art gallery, reading about the history of the Church, looking at old church buildings. You can't hope that people will never realise that the Mass used to be said in Latin and ad orientem. What you can do is to make the point, as Pope Benedict did, that however much has changed, the Church has not repudiated the past. What was sacred in the past is sacred now; what was doctrine in the past is still doctrine now. This relieves us of the necessity of double-think, which actually drives you mad after a while.

Suppose the wretched Franciscans of the Immaculate are as bad as their critics claim; suppose the wretched Michael King, President of Fisher More College, is as bad as his critics claim. For heaven's sake don't deprive them of this spiritual solace, of the Traditional Mass. It is cruel, it is unjust, and it will make whatever theological or political problems there may be much, much worse.



Photos of Low Masses celebrated during the LMS Priest Training Conference in Leicester in 2013.

The EF banned at Fisher-More College

Over in Texas, in the diocese of Fort Worth, there is one of those small, conservative, Catholic, 'liberal arts colleges' which are a feature of the higher education scene on the other side of the pond. They are all fairly new, because all the older instutions have been taken over by liberals. Fisher-More College is particularly new and, inevitably, financially struggling. One important feature, which the slightly less new versions often do not share, is a genuine friendliness to the Traditional Mass. For the last three years it has been celebrated on campus every day. With the permission of the bishop - obviously.

The diocese has a new bishop, the Most Rev Michael Olsen, who has written to the college President, Mr King. The bishop thanks the students for their spiritual bouquet, and informs Mr King that the EF is forthwith banned on the campus.

The letter is over at Rorate Caeli.

This is a truly stunning move. Is the bishop ignorant of the effects of Summorum Pontificum? Perhaps not quite: let's not jump to conclusions. Rorate has a legal opinion pointing out that the Faithful have a right to the EF. Yes, but look at the wording of the letter. If the bishop's command is not obeyed, what will happen? Will he take canonical steps against the celebrant? No, because he can't. What he can do, however, is suspend permission for the public celebration of Mass on campus at all, and their right to reserve the Blessed Sacrament. The chapel is a private chapel, presumably, and the bishop's permission is needed to celebrate public Masses there, and for reservation.

It is as someone should say: I have no legal right to insist that you do what I want, but I can make life mighty inconvenient for you in other ways if you don't buckle down.

There is a word for this: blackmail.

What if the students asked for the EF? The chaplain would be obliged to celebrate it for them: it is a legal matter. He would in law not be able to fulfil the Bishop's wishes. But he would still suffer the consequences.