Juventutem London: Mass for Persecuted Christians

Friday 24th April, 7:30pm

St Mary Moorfields Church, London EC2M 7LS (click for a map)

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 The following is an extract from an unpublished history of the Society's early years.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. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

High Mass with Polyphony for Persecuted Christians,

on the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.