Saturday, September 28, 2019

Good Counsel Network: annual ball

From the Good Counsel Network.

I am really pleased to invite you to Good Counsel’s Annual Pro – Life Fundraising Ball on the 9th November, and being held at the Royal Garden Hotel in South Kensington. This is our biggest event of the year and helps raise thousands of pounds for our life-saving work.

We would really love as many of our supporters as possible to come and have a great night out. We can promise a great night with a superb 3 course, 5 star meal, a brilliant live band, with even more time for dancing than last year and lots of fun throughout the night with games, a silent auction and an opportunity to continue supporting the vital pro-life work of the Good Counsel Network.

The following are the key details:

DATE: Saturday 9th November 2019

TIME: Arrival from 6pm with dinner starting at 7pm, please don't be late as we will not be able to wait for you!

LOCATION: The Royal Garden Hotel, 2-24 Kensington High Street, London, W8 4PT. Please look for the Palace Suite (The Palace suite has its own exclusive entrance to the right of the main doors.)

TICKET PRICE: £95 per person. Tables of 10 cost £900.
TO BOOK TICKETS YOU MUST EMAIL GCNBALL@GMAIL.COM OR CALL 07886000882.

DIETARY REQUIREMENTS: All dietary requirements can be catered for, but these requirements must be given to us at the time of booking.

DRESS CODE: Black Tie

We look forward to hearing from you and hopefully seeing you soon.

God bless

Conor
Support the Latin Mass Society

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

Sir James MacMillan: London performances

Sir James MacMillan is a Patron of the Latin Mass Society, and I am pleased to pass on this notice about a forthcoming performance of his work, from the man himself.

-----

Le grand Inconnu is coming to London on 14 October. (The BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the premiere is below.) 

Performed by The Sixteen, Genesis Sixteen and the Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican that evening it is paired with my The Sun Danced, based on the miracles at Fatima. 

Also two of my favourite composers in the programme - Arvo Part and Benjamin Britten. 

Come and join us! 


Support the Latin Mass Society

Monday, September 23, 2019

'Breaking with the Pope'

My latest on Life Site.
The canon lawyer and journalist Edward Condon declared to his Twitter followers the other day, ‘If someone tells you the only way to be authentically Catholic is to break with the pope and the bishops, they are — at best — a Protestant’.
Perhaps I can help him out. Like Condon, I believe that Jorge Bergoglio was validly elected as pope and reigns today, as a matter of the law of the Church, as Pope Francis. Also like Condon, who has written extensively and often very well on recent crises in the Church, I have some concerns about some of the things which Pope Francis has done and said. Perhaps he and I also agree that it would be good if Pope Francis were to clarify some of his more puzzling remarks, even if Condon prefers not to clarify his own. 

Thursday, September 19, 2019

Cardinal Burke in London: photos

PSX_20190916_234633

His Eminence Raymond, Cardinal Burke, celebrated Low Mass in the Shrine Church of Corpus Christi on Monday 16th September, at the request of the Latin Mass Society. We were very honoured by his kindness in doing this, which is very characteristic of him.

PSX_20190916_232244

This church is one of London's historic Catholic churches, and has a special place in the history of the Traditional Mass, as thanks to various parish priests over the years the celebration of the ancient Mass never ceased here. Today it is, of longstanding custom, celebrated every Monday evening, a Mass organised by the Latin Mass Society, and on some other occasions as well. Cardinal Burke was a very special celebrant, therefore, for this regular Mass, which is usualy a Missa Cantata.

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Reminder: Server training in London this Saturday

IMG_9688
Enrollmemts into the Society of St Tarcisius on the Walsingham Pilgrimage
The training days for Altar servers have been a great success, regularly attracting a dozen participants. The servers' sodality we have established, the Society of St Tarcisius, now has 59 enrolled members, from as far away as Bristol and Edinburgh.

In the London events, the Guild of St Clare has a vestment-mending day running alongside the server training, making use (at St Mary Moorfield's) of the large and well-appointed basement.

The next two events, on this Saturday, one next month, are both in St Mary Moorfields, 4-5 Eldon St, London EC2M 7LS (click for a map):

Saturday 14th September (booking page here)

Saturday 30th November (booking page here).

Please book for the server training; if you wish to participate in the vestment mending, email the Guild of St Clare. (It really helps to know how many people are coming!)

Support the Latin Mass Society

Monday, September 09, 2019

Gender theory is ruining theatre

My latest on LifeSiteNews.
By the time I finally stopped watching television, more than a decade ago, even the shows I liked best were being spoiled by the producers’ need to include politically correct themes, issues, and characters. There can be no objection to having, for example, bad people, in fiction, who are nominally Christian, or good people who are same sex–attracted, but if they invariably turn out that way, one begins to wonder if something strange is going on. At the same time, writers were having to make their plots more and more macabre to maintain a constant level of shock value. Between the obeisance to political correctness and the display of dismembered corpses, the human interest of the drama seemed to have slipped away.
The decay of modern culture manifests itself in a different way in theatre. I watch a fair number of plays, including open-air Shakespeare and student productions in and around Oxford. The summer season has just come to a close, and while some of the productions have been excellent, others have been problematic. When presenting classical drama, a view has taken hold, less so at the top level of professional theatre, but elsewhere, that the sex of a character does not affect the relationships between that character and others.

Friday, September 06, 2019

Eucharistic Adoration is not the answer to the crisis of faith in the Real Presence

IMG_2995

My latest on LifeSiteNews.
Recently, it was reported that more than half of self-described Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence at all. As I have written before, this represents an emergency, a pastoral crisis, which has received a somewhat lethargic response. Not long before the survey about beliefs came out, Stephen Bullivant’s survey on lapsation recorded lapsed Catholics complaining that their parish catechists didn’t believe the Faith and were not passing it on. It seems that some of our lapsed brothers and sisters would like to insist on higher standards of orthodoxy than some of our priests and bishops.
Apart from catechesis and preaching, one traditional response to error about one doctrine or another is to emphasize the correct teaching liturgically. Bowing or kneeling at references to the Incarnation (in the Creed, when we say “and was made man”), for example, helps to hammer home the truth about that. I am a strong believer in the power of the liturgy to reinforce the Faith: for one thing, it is impossible to get adult Catholics to go to catechism classes, but if they come to church at all, they will experience the liturgy. Can Eucharistic Adoration help, then, in restoring the sense among Catholics that Christ is truly present in the Host?
Support the Latin Mass Society

Thursday, September 05, 2019

Paganism old and new

My latest on LifeSiteNews.

recent study by the London-based Benedict Centre has shown that up to half of self-described atheists and agnostics across different countries believe in ‘underlying forces of good and evil’ and that ‘significant events are “meant to be”’. This is a reminder that a large part of the decline of religious practice and belief in the West is not about rejecting the supernatural realm, but adopting a kind of vague paganism. This should not be confused, however, with the paganism of the ancient world.
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, the people of ancient Greece and Rome had an uneasy conscience about many of the practices Christianity later suppressed, which are re-emerging today. The Greek historian of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, praised Rome’s mythical founder, Romulus, for making marriage a holy and indissoluble institution (Roman Antiquities II.25), from which it later declined. It’s far from clear what historical basis there might be to this claim, but it represents an ideal, a golden age, from which the Romans and Greeks of Dionysius’s own day fell short.
Carry on reading.

Support the Latin Mass Society

Wednesday, September 04, 2019

Cardinal Pell and contempt for justice

My latest on LifeSiteNews.

---

As I have written before, the conviction of Cardinal Georgy Pell, despite being upheld on appeal, is difficult to understand. On the one hand, as Pell’s legal team painstakingly explained, it was essentially impossible for Pell to have abused two choristers (as alleged) in a sacristy, while still vested, without anyone noticing, at a time when he would actually have been outside the front of the cathedral talking to Mass-goers. On the other hand, the only evidence against him is the word of one accuser; the other alleged victim denied that the abuse took place.
However the jury and two court of appeal came to their decisions, doubts will continue to be voiced, especially in light of the carefully argued dissenting opinion by one of the appeal-court judges.
Carry on reading.

Support the Latin Mass Society