Friday 24th April, 7:30pm
Reposted. This also coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the Latin Mass Society's first public meeting. The following is an extract from an unpublished history of the Society's early years.
[T]he Society’s
first Press Officer, Kathleen Hindmarsh, clarified its aims:
The
society will exist to ensure the preservation of the Latin Low, and Sung Mass
forms, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy,
relating to the Latin rite. It is associated in its basic aim—that of
preserving the Latin liturgy—with the Una Voce Society of Europe, and the
Catholic Traditionalist movement of America, although the peripheral aims of
the three societies are not necessarily identical.
The meeting was
attended by over 400. Sir Arnold Lunn, who had agreed to act as the Society’s
first President, said: ‘We want the Latin Mass, which we
regard as the norm. We see the vernacular as an extra…, a melancholy and
regrettable concession to human frailty.’ The
Tablet reported:
Many
of the comments and questions showed an understandable but distressing
bitterness and bewilderment: the less rational voiced a fear of schism and even
a suspicion that some fifth column was conspiring to destroy the Church from
within. As any anthropologist could have predicted, the sudden compulsory
abandonment of a sacred collective art-form, an ancient and accepted matrix of
devotion, is bound to leave high, dry and desolate both those brought up to it
and those who have discovered in it a living and continuing symbol of
supernatural, supernational, changeless and eternal faith. An excellent young chairman ruled the
storm, advocating charity and gently reiterating that the society was not
another Pilgrimage of Grace.
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High Mass with Polyphony for Persecuted Christians,
on the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
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