Voris in London: how to witness to the Faith

Witness to the Faith: the Walsingham Pilgrimage, in August. Book now.

On Friday evening I went to see Michael Voris give a talk in London, organised by the remarkable John Rodger of St Paul Street Evangelization. Voris spoke with great eloquence about the importance of personal holiness in the current and developing situation in the Church, in which we are experiencing the beginning of a serious persecution by the secular authorities.

On this persecution, he referred to the case before the Supreme Court in the USA about same-sex marriage. If they find it to be a constitutional right, everything changes: and not for the better.

I think the emphasis on the importance of being in a state of grace, which I've seen from some other orthodox Catholic sources in recent years as well, is extremely good. It can't be stressed too much that if you are in a state of mortal sin you have no sanctifying grace in you; you have lost the friendship of God and the life of God in your soul. Not only will you go to hell if run over by the proverbial bus, but you can't expect to be effective in situations of what we might call spiritual combat. You won't be able to stand up well to temptations; you won't be able to give good advice to friends and colleagues who need it; you won't be a witness to the faith. If you've committed fornication, if you've used contraception, if you've been complicit in an abortion, engaged in vindictive gossip, fiddled your taxes, or cheated your employer or an employee: for heaven's sake get to confession.

There's another aspect of what he said which, in the same spirit of constructive criticism I employed after his last London talk, I want to question. For he said repeatedly that as good Catholics we should challenge people, such as family members and colleagues, about religion. He said it was not enough, for example, to have a statue of Our Lady by your place of work, hoping it might stimulate enquiries or conversations; you must go out and initiate these conversations.

The Lay Apostolate and the web

'Lay Apostolate' series
Part 1: Where next?
Part 2: What do we need?
Part 3: The Lay Apostolate: a proposal
Part 4: Why not existing groups?
Part 5: The Lay Apostolate and the Internet

This is, I think, the last of my posts in this series. I have argued that, however admirable they have been and in some cases still are, existing groups for the Catholic laity, groups intended to add some value-added to weekly attendance at Mass, don't supply a particular thing - sanctification of members based on the liturgy - in a particular way - face to face meetings, but not too frequently. This is what the Confraternity of St Gregory sets out to do.

In this post I deal with the challenge of the internet and the social media. This is, after all, the big thing which has happened in the last couple of decades. And it is true that Catholics have done their best to use these to counter the isolation caused by the collapse of civil society. We may not know our neighbours, we may never see our fellow parishioners except for an hour a week during Mass, but we can engage in friendly chats with a bloke from Minnesota who shares our interest in fanons.

We have to come to some kind of view about how the internet fits into the range of things we do, or could do, as Catholics seeking to build up the Body of Christ. On the one hand, blogs and other social media make up to some extent for the lack of community on the ground; on the other hand, by doing so they have contributed to the further erosion of that community. For example, it is very difficult to get people to attend talks or buy magazines and journals, and the plausible consensus links this to the existence of unlimited (though generally shallow) information and commentary on the internet. Why pay for what you can get for free?

The overwhelming fact is that the internet can't provide us with face-to-face relationships. In some ways it undermines them, and in some ways it facilitates them, but it doesn't render them unnecessary. And while it may appear less necessary for us to meet each other if we read each other's blogs, it may actually be more necessary. Because blogs, and the social media in general, create (with or without our deliberately willing it) a public image of ourselves which can diverge from reality. And relationships built up on the basis of such public personae don't really reach us or sustain us.

Here's a slightly horrifying account of what romantic relationships can be like when facilitated by text-messaging and Facebook. It is true of blogging too. What am I really like, for example? Probably at least six inches taller than you imagine, for example, if you've never met me, and tubbier.

But above all we bloggers shouldn't fall into the assumption that the Catholic Church consists only of bloggers. What about everyone else? Most readers don't even comment. (Imagine that!) They are engaged in the phenomenon of social media as onlookers rather than participants. But I'm not complaining. Where there is a higher level of engagement, as with discussion forums, in my experience misunderstanding is more likely than a meeting of minds.

We need to drag ourselves away from blogs, Facebook, and twitter, long enough to meet our fellow Catholics in the flesh, to pray with them, to make pilgrimage together, to put their words (or silence) into the context of their faces and their body-language. If you want to look at it this way round, this will enormously enrich your on-line experience. But that's a crazy way of looking at it: we need to see each other because that is a fundamental human need, and the internet is offering us only an ersatz substitute.

The internet is fantastic for spreading information; it is good at encouraging debate; it is ok at keeping people in touch with each other; it is not terribly good at forming and maintaining relationships. But it is also mesmerising. The Confraternity's commitment to at least quarterly outings to the real world, to a real community, may be exactly what we need to keep sane.

Audience at the LMS One-Day Conference

The Lay Apostolate: why not existing groups?

'Lay Apostolate' series
Part 1: Where next?
Part 2: What do we need?
Part 3: The Lay Apostolate: a proposal
Part 4: Why not existing groups?
Part 5: The Lay Apostolate and the Internet

I've now outlined my cunning plan for a Guild, which will commit members to meeting on a regional, rather than local, basis, on a quarterly, rather than weekly, basis. They will be bound together by their attachment to the Extraordinary Form.

I don't suppose anyone will object to this in itself, but many will say this is not the solution to our difficulties, and will continue to push other models. So here's a post about why existing Catholic membership organisations won't do what the Confraternity is setting out to do.

I've already argued that anything which relies on Catholics popping round to a central location in a parish at frequent intervals is going to be very difficult, because we no longer have either the time nor the population density which made it so straightforward in the Good Old Days. Another factor which is relevant, which is a self-inflicted wound for the Church, is that one cannot rely on a new parish priest being supportive of a group founded by a previous one, and in most dioceses one can't rely on a priest being in a parish more or less for ever. The consensus that a group promoting devotion to the Sacred Heart, or for that matter knitting their own Fairtrade sandals, is a good and helpful thing in a parish, does not exist. And of course this goes for the faithful as well as for the clergy. Parish groups can easily be seen as controversial and divisive. They can easily be pigeon-holed in terms of Church politics, and become a political football.

In densely populated places - London, for example - parish groups can still have life in them, and I don't wish to denigrate them. But they are only ever going to flourish with the support of a priest who really believes in what they are doing; again and again they collapse when there is a change of parish regime. It is impossible to envisage such groups having a wide impact under current conditions, because only a small minority of priests would put in the work to support groups with a conservative or traddy agenda, and many of that minority are stuck in rural parishes where it is impossible anyway.

The groups based on face-to-face meetings which have survived are those organised at a supra-parish level: circles of Catenians, for example, the Knights of St Columba, or the Newman Association. A catchment area much larger than a single parish helps these groups, but they have found it a challenge to maintain their traditional model of fairly frequent meetings, and to recruit new members.

Next item: shall we sing a Latin Sanctus at Mass?

I've nothing against these groups, but they don't and couldn't do what the proposed Confraternity wants to do, for a simple but important reason. Few of them can be described as principally spiritual and liturgical in character; generally, that was never the point of them. But furthermore, all of them have a problem today with their spiritual side: spirituality, and the liturgy, has ceased to be something which unites Catholics; it is now something which divides them. What sort of prayer should be used to start a meeting? What sort of annual Mass should be celebrated? What sort of retreat giver should be invited? What sort of religious imagery, if any, should be used for publications or the website? A committee of upright, educated, practicing Catholics representative of the Church's normal spectrum of opinion - excluding the extremes - could argue forever about these questions. And whatever they decide, it will sadden, embitter, or enrage a section of the ordinary members. Groups have an unenviable choice between perpetual trench warfare, secularisation, or coalescence around an inoffensive milk-and-water spirituality and liturgy which will not provide its members with nourishment.

A group with a serious commitment to the sanctification of its members, using the public prayer of the Church, the liturgy, for that end, must start with a clear conception of its spirituality. This needn't be as specific as a particular school of spirituality (Ignatian, Benedictine etc.); a commitment to the Extraordinary Form will do very well. If you become enraged when you see no female Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, and hear no bidding prayers for nuclear disarmament, at Confraterntiy Masses, don't join, it's not for you. It might look as though we are excluding people of particular liturgical tastes, but in fact we are basing ourselves on a conception of the liturgy which is uniquely able to transcend differences of politics, education, and culture.

The next post will consider the role of the internet.

The lay apostolate: a proposal

'Lay Apostolate' series
Part 1: Where next?
Part 2: What do we need?
Part 3: The Lay Apostolate: a proposal
Part 4: Why not existing groups?
Part 5: The Lay Apostolate and the Internet

The problem: the kind of lay groups we know about from the past have become difficult to maintain because they relied on the fact that people could pop round to the parish hall on odd evenings for frequent - say, weekly - meetings. People are too busy and too thinly spread out to do this today with any ease. This is even more true of those attached to the Traditional Mass, who often have to travel long distances to get to a venue for the Extraordinary Form.

The opportunity: the need for this kind of group, both the social need and the spiritual need, has not gone away. On the contrary, traditional Catholics can easily feel very isolated. As well as wanting something like this, the common feeling among those attached to the Traditional Mass provides an opportunity for a group with a strong sense of identity and common purpose, which can cut across geography, and social and cultural differences.

Following from yesterday's post, here's the idea, which I set out in my Chairman's Message in the new Mass of Ages.

The Confraternity of St Gregory the Great, affiliated to both the Latin Mass Society and the Una Voce International Federation, will commit members to some (moderate) daily prayer, and to attending at least quarterly meetings with other members. These meetings may be simply meetings of the Confraternity, but they can also be the Latin Mass Society's regional or national events. They will however include a silent retreat, one for men and one for women, which would be organised specially. Silent retreats are something currently largely missing from the traddy scene in the UK, so this is a good thing in itself.

A lot of LMS members may be doing something along these lines already. But by committing to it, and by encouraging more people to do it, we can set up a situation in which one can expect to meet a widening circle of people at events in a fairly wide geographical area, in the context of prayer in common.

It is possible for people to get in the car and travel to events some distance away, and it is possible for people to set aside a weekend for something: people in the 21st Century go to rock concerts and stag parties, they travel to see family members and they go on holiday. What is impossible is asking people to do this every week. On the other hand, unless you do this with a degree of regularity, you are never going to establish the face-to-face relationships with like-minded people, and the moments of spiritual refreshment at a special liturgical event, which could provide the social and spiritual support more necessary for a faithful Catholic life today than ever before. And of course you won't get to to attend the Traditional Mass in the wonderful shrines, historic houses, and Cathedrals which are part of our Catholic culture and heritage.

At the moment the Latin Mass Society's pilgrimages and annual events look more or less like this. These can easily be supplemented by Confraternity events, which are at the simplest just Mass and a set of prayers together, with two or more Confraternity members.


View LMS Pilgrimages and Annual Masses in a larger map

Here's the official description of the Confraternity, and the Guild we plan to establish within it, from the Chairman's message:

it is to be a 'Guild, for the sanctification of its members and with the special vocation of supporting the work of the Society, which also connects members to the international movement. More information will be supplied to anyone inquiring, and if there is enough interest we will set it up. Here is a brief description from the Federation: “The FIUV is launching an International Confraternity to honour Saint Gregory the Great, its Patron Saint. Where a number of individuals are interested, a Guild of the Confraternity will be erected to meet four times a year for Mass in the Extraordinary Form and devotions and to make an annual retreat together. The purpose of membership will be to grow in personal holiness in the context of the Traditional Liturgy, Gregorian Chant, devotion to Saint Gregory and loyalty to the Holy See, and to be active as a group in some of the activities of the Society.” If you are interested in participating, contact the LMS, ideally by email: info@lms.org.uk 

This is only going to be established if a critical mass of people want to join. So don't wait for everyone else to set it up: get in touch now!

The lay apostolate: what do we need?

The local Church?

'Lay Apostolate' series
Part 1: Where next?
Part 2: What do we need?
Part 3: The Lay Apostolate: a proposal
Part 4: Why not existing groups?
Part 5: The Lay Apostolate and the Internet

To summarise the conclusions of yesterday's post:

It is very hard to get people to come to physical meetings with any frequency. They are too busy and are spread too thinly.

Therefore, groups of any kind which depend upon people coming to weekly or even monthly meetings are going to find it very difficult to make headway.

But that is exactly the historical model we have for the lay apostolate: people getting together to meet, to worship or pray together, to do some kind of good work, to talk about the difficulties of being a Catholic in their professions, or whatever it might be.

The tempting idea that people should be shamed or compelled to give more time to this kind of thing is mistaken because Catholics are NOT being unreasonable. It is genuinely harder to get to these meetings than it was in the past. They live further from the parish church, or any other fixed meeting place, and they have less time. They haven't become more selfish: Putnam has some interesting data on how the amount of volunteering has actually increased over the same decades as all these groups have been withering, and the withering has affected leisure and business groups just as much as charitable or religious ones. We can't blame the wind and the sea, we have to work with them as best as we can.

If you like this, then...

So: what exactly do we want to achieve in a lay group?

We do want to give people a sense of belonging, and contact with like-minded people. The collapse of local groups and local community has made people need this more than ever. Sodalities which never meet - like the Latin Mass Society's Sodality of St Augustine - have their uses, but they don't meet this need.

I mention the social aspect first because I've come to this through Putnam's research, but obviously we also want to advance the good things which were once advanced by the local groups: personal sanctification and all kinds of good works. Groups and extra parish devotions and activities have always taken the average Catholic beyond the basic level of going to Mass on Sunday, and this is still needed.

So: what we need must have the following features.

...you've got a lot in common with them.

1. It must operate on a regional and national level, and not at a parish level. Parishes are great at fostering face-to-face relationships, but since only one in ten (or maybe one in 100) people in a congregation are going to join anything 'extra', under the conditions of today, they don't have the necessary scale. A group of five people is great for praying the Rosary, but it isn't going to work for many of the things we need groups for. It is too dependent on every single person turning up and not moving away. It has a very shallow talent pool. It is too easily dominated by a single personality. And so on.

2. Physical, face-to-face meetings are a necessary supplement to anything based on a newsletter or internet communication, because we just have to meet people in the flesh to get to know them. (Think of the desire bloggers have to meet up: an interesting side-phenomenon of the new media.) But we have to think more in terms of quarterly events rather than weekly ones. Some events can be multiday events, such as retreats, which make long-distance travel worthwhile, and facilitate more social interaction.

3. In order to work, members must be connected by common experience and aspiration far more than in the standard parish group. This will be the case if the group is committed to the traditional Mass, because attachment to the Traditional Mass will give members at least the same level of common experience and attitude which, fifty years ago, you'd have had in a local group of Catholic writers or plumbers, or the parish ladies.

Ok, so what is the proposal? See the next post.

The lay apostolate: where next?

'Lay Apostolate' series
Part 1: Where next?
Part 2: What do we need?
Part 3: The Lay Apostolate: a proposal
Part 4: Why not existing groups?
Part 5: The Lay Apostolate and the Internet

I'm currently reading Robert Putnam's 'Bowling Alone', about the decline of what he calls 'civil society'. All sorts of groups which put people in touch with each other - religious, charitable, recreational - had a boom in the first half of the 20th century, and went into decline in the second half. The networks they provided were hugely important for facilitating every kind of interaction, business or social, because they expanded the number of people each person knew and trusted. They created 'social capital', in addition to the good work many of them did explicitly, such as hospital visiting or whatever.

This is part of the background to the difficulties we have witnessed in the Church, and the sociological changes effecting organisations like the Church must be separated from ideological and other issues.

The kind of groups which did so well in the mid century, and have been having such a lean time since then, are groups where people meet up regularly: for card games, reading groups, feeding the homeless, sports, music, or anything. The parish system, and the guilds and sodalities which used to exist within parishes, are of course an example of this kind of group. To belong, you have to go along to face-to-face meetings. To really belong, you have to go along regularly, and go to extra meetings. This is something which people are much, much, less inclined to do today than 50 years ago.

Some reasons for this are very straightforward. Here are three:

1. The decline of population density: the move to the suburbs. The catchment area for a bowling club or parish of a given size increases, or the groups shrink. Not only are meetings less convenient, but membership of local groups is less likely to be reinforced by meeting the same people in the shops, schools, and so forth.

2. Other calls on people's time:  not only do you have to travel further for your local group, but there are so many other things to do: not just home-based entertainment (notably the Telly), but work. Since the 1970s people have less leisure, they are worried about losing their jobs; they also have to commute further.

3. Geographical mobility: you can't put down local roots, make strong friendships based on locality, if you move every few years. Local groups are constantly disrupted by people coming and going; they can't develop long-term plans if key people keep disappearing.

The striking thing about these factors is that there is absolutely nothing we can do about them. We could in theory encourage people to live in cities close to their work and get an undemanding job, but it would be like encouraging water to flow uphill. (Actually Leo XIII did discourage the aspects of worldly ambition which were socially disruptive, such as urbanisation. Thinking about the social consequences of our life-plans, for ourselves, our families, and our communities, should be part of a Catholic outlook.)

This is a sociological nightmare for the parochial system, but Catholics do at least feel a strong motive to go to church on Sundays. For the lay apostolate, it has been a unmitigated disaster. Having traveled all the way to Sunday Mass to sit among strangers in a parish with which you feel little or no family or historic ties or loyalty, you trail home with invitations to a prayer group on Tuesday evening, a pro-life group on Wednesday evening, and a meeting of the fundraising committee on Thursday evening, and you say: no, I'd actually quite like to spend at least half an hour with the children, after my 9-to-5 day and an hour-long commute back from work. I don't blame you.

But I have a proposal, which may seem a little more attractive: to follow.