New Mass venues in Westminster

St Batholemew's, St Albans

LMS Press Release: some very good news.

We are delighted to announce that there will be weekly Sunday Masses in the Extraordinary Form at two new venues in the Archdiocese of Westminster in the near future.

The Masses will take place in St Albans in the parish of St Bartholomew’s, 47 Vesta Avenue, St Albans, AL1 2PE, and in Willesden, north-west London, at the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden, Nicoll Road, London NW10 9AX. In both cases, the parish priests have been asked by the archdiocese to learn and celebrate Mass in the Extraordinary Form.

Our Lady of Willesden, London NW10

Neither Fr Tim Edgar of St Albans nor Fr Stephen Willis of Willesden has previously celebrated the Extraordinary Form, but both are approaching the opportunity of offering the ancient form of Mass with a very positive and pastoral attitude. It will obviously take some time for them to reach the necessary level of proficiency to start offering Masses publicly. Nevertheless, training has begun and regular weekly Masses on Sundays will start later this year on dates and at times yet to be announced. Their parishioners have already been consulted and informed about the introduction of the Extraordinary Form in their parishes and the reaction has been positive.

Interior of Our Lady of Willesden

This very good news follows meetings between the LMS and the archdiocese over a period of a year or more, in which LMS Chairman Dr Joseph Shaw, Local Representative for Hertfordshire Mike Mason, and LMS General Manager Mike Lord met with Bishop Alan Hopes and Bishop John Sherrington a number of times to discuss wider provision of the Extraordinary Form.

The LMS would like to thank Bishop Hopes, Bishop Sherrington and Archbishop Vincent Nichols for their work in helping to make the Traditional Mass available in these areas of the Archdiocese of Westminster.

LMS General Manager Mike Lord commented: ‘We are very pleased at this positive response from the archdiocese to what has been something of a pastoral crisis in Hertfordshire and north-west London in recent years for Catholics attached to the Extraordinary Form of Mass.

'It is doubly pleasing that the parish priest in each case has been asked to be the principal celebrant. The Traditional Mass needs to become a full and accepted part of parish life in dioceses across the country with an important role to play in drawing the faithful closer to Christ, especially in this Year of Faith. In the cases of St Albans and Willesden, the Extraordinary Form is set to do just that.’

Ends.

I've taken some more photographs of Our Lady of Willesden, taken when I did a little devotional tour of London Marian shrines.

Cost of the monarchy?

Hat-tip to Fr Hugh.

I love this. But it does miss something out: in talking of the 'cost of the monarchy' you have to take account of what the alternative would cost. The UK would still need a head of state, that person would still need a place to live, he'd still need to give dinners to foreign dignatories in posh houses, he's still need police protection etc.. Exactly what part of the £40 would be saved?


I blogged about praying for the monarch, as we do on Sundays at Sung Mass in the Extraordinary Form, here.

Mass for the election of a Pope, Westminster Cathedral

Photographs from a new perspective! Not by me, I should say, but an enterprising member of the congregation who knows he way around - taken from the gallery.

The Mass took place on Saturday 2nd March, it was the LMS' annual Lenten Day of Recollection, and in the circumstances we made the Mass a Votive Mass for the Election of a Pope.
 
Mass was celebrated by Mgr Gordon Read, the LMS National Chaplain.
The full set is here.

Hypocrite Cardinal? Hypocrite journalists?

The liberal media has got us where it wants us. Anyone foolish enough to defend Cardinal O'Brien up until yesterday has just had the rug pulled from under him by the Cardinal's apology for the 'times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal' (see the full statement on Rorate Caeli). But even this sudden reversal of the Cardinal's position doesn't make clear what happened, to whom, or when, so it is impossible for anyone to place the matter into a wider context. Maybe the Cardinal made a flirtatious gesture with 'drink taken', as they say up there, thirty years ago, for which he has been wearing a hair-shirt ever since. Maybe he's been having the kind of sexual career which Archbishop Weakland had, and hasn't stopped yet. The two possibilities call for very different responses from Catholic commentators, and yet we have no idea which it is.

The lack of information is not necessarily the Cardinal's fault. He is not at liberty to disclose the secrets of others, people whom he wronged, even if they are not behaving with perfect justice towards him. Damian Thompson's rejection of the apology as too 'vague and guarded' misses the point dramatically. By announcing a withdrawal from the Conclave and from public life the Cardinal is imposing upon himself a penalty and penance commensurate with the most serious possible interpretation of the accusations, given that there has been no suggestion of criminal acts. If he had gone into greater detail, it could easily not only have given greater scandal, but whetted the appetites of the media to identify the accusers and bring every sordid detail to light.

It seems clear enough that O'Brien should never have been made Archbishop or Cardinal. This exposes a problem in the Church, but we should be careful where we assign the blame. There was much talk, at the time, of ferocious opposition to his elevation to Cardinalate by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to conclude from Cardinal O'Brien's failings that his opposition to same-sex marriage was insincere - as Damian Thompson sneeringly suggests, that it was motivated by a sense of rivalry with the English bishops. ('I know, I'll get one over the English by upholding the Gospel, making myself a national hate-figure' - nice try, Damian). As I have blogged before, being subject to same-sex attraction does not make it impossible genuinely to believe that same-sex marriage is a bad idea. One could multiply examples; as Janet Daley remarked

a straw poll of my gay friends showed about a third strongly in favour of single-sex marriage, the rest being indifferent or positively opposed.

And why not, for heaven's sake?  As for moral lapses, Shakespeare put it best:

...It is a good divine that
follows his own instructions: I can easier teach
twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the
twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may
devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps
o'er a cold decree...

Portia (in The Merchant of Venice) is not talking about hypocrisy, but weakness of the will; it is confused with hypocrisy by people who don't believe that we have a will.* Hypocrisy is when your words, or how you present yourself, do not match up with your real beliefs - it is a form of lying. Now what about those journalists who enjoy positions of influence and respect in the Catholic world by presenting themselves as Catholics, who do not, in their hearts, actually believe in the teaching of the Church?

Peter Stanford I've already blogged about. He is quite clear in his writing that he rejects the teaching of the Church; those who think that his blog, or The Tablet where he writes, is representative in any sense of a Catholic view, have only themselves to blame for their mistake.

Damian Thompson is a contrasting case. While he has built a whole on-line persona on being teasingly open about past sins, he is extraordinarily cagey about his actual beliefs. With public figures like Cardinals, you'd expect to know more about their convictions than about their private lives; with DT it is the other way round: he seems to see himself as one of those celebrities loved for his flaws, not a commentator respected for his principles or insight. Here's a classic statement of his:

'The Catholic Church's teachings about homosexuality may (and I think will) evolve – but they will never encompass gay marriage.'

Er, right, glad we got that out in the open.

Frankly I don't give a bean what he really thinks about same-sex marriage, or same-sex sex come to that, but his studied ambiguity tells us something. Maybe his Catholic friends know that he's orthodox, and he doesn't want to alienate his secularist blog followers or employers. Maybe it is the other way around. But in either case, there is a mismatch between the way he presents himself to one half of his audience, and what he actually believes.

There's a name for that. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it begins with an H...

*A philosophical footnote: what happens to weakness of the will for those who don't believe in a free will? The weak-willed person has a mismatch between moral beliefs (adultery is wrong) and desire (a desire to commit adultery); the will is the faculty which determines whether we stick to our convictions or give way to temptation. A common way of rejecting this view of agency is to say that all there is, in an agent, is a lot of desires: moral beliefs, if we must talk about them, are just tendencies to act in certain ways, just as desires are. The mismatch between moral beliefs and desires is turned into a simple conflict between different desires, and the agent will act on the strongest one. If an agent commits adultery then it follows that he is being hypocritical (he is lying) when he claims he thinks it is wrong, because clearly the strongest desire in him is to commit adultery,

So please note that (a) abstruse philosophical distinctions can not only have consequences, but can actually bite you on the backside in public debates; and (b) the people saying sinners can't 'really' believe that what they've done is wrong are relying on a theory which is totally implausible when you get it out in the open.

Loftus at it again

This is the letter which The Catholic Times has refused to print...

Sir,

Basil Loftus (Vatican Counsel, 17th February) misrepresents the law of the Church and the will of the Holy Father when he suggests that permission is given for the Extraordinary Form for ‘those who, exceptionally, are so conditioned by the pre-Conciliar liturgy that they need it for their spiritual good’. Pope Benedict XVI made it clear that there he had no such limited group in mind when he liberated this form of the Mass in 2007: since the Council, he wrote, ‘it has clearly been demonstrated that young persons too have discovered this liturgical form, felt its attraction and found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them.’

Everyone can benefit from experiencing the ancient liturgy, because, as the Holy Father again wrote, ‘It behoves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer’. These riches should not be hidden away, even if not everyone wishes to base their spiritual lives upon them. 

Mgr Loftus’ suggestion that there is something improper about the other sacraments being celebrated according to the 1962 is absurd, and clearly contrary to the legislation embodied by Summorum Pontificum (see Article 9). 

What Mgr Loftus is perhaps unable to understand is that a liturgy celebrated in Latin, in part silently, and with some rituals partially hidden from view, can engage the Faithful just as deeply, though in a different way, to a vernacular liturgy celebrated in words of one syllable. As Bl. Pope John Paul II pointed out in Dominicae Caenae (1980), the ancient Latin liturgy is ‘an expression of the unity of the Church, and through its dignified character elicited a profound sense of the Eucharistic Mystery’. That unity, and that sense, constitute the most important kind of ‘full, active’ participation, ‘as befits a community’. 

Yours Faithfully, 

Dr Joseph Shaw

Sede Vacante

We now have no Pope.

The Church is under attack as never before in recent times - in some ways the attack is less severe than the French Revolution, the Protestant Revolt or the Arian Crisis, in some ways worse, but it's not a competition. The next Pope, like the last two popes, has everything to do just to make the Church function properly internally, let alone to address her external opponents in an effective way.

We laity can - must - pull our weight both spiritually and non-spiritually; by the latter I mean intellectually, culturally, by way of example and so on.

The Confraternity of St Gregory I have been talking about on this blog is designed primarily to address the spiritual side of things. It will unite members in prayer, wherever they are, and give them opportunities for mutual moral support. Isolation is going to be an increasing burden as the general culture of our society becomes less tolerant. The Confraternity will help us have the courage to live counter-culturally, even if we don't inhabit a traditionalist hot-spot where all our friends have ten children.

Benediction last night in Oxford, beginning at the very moment of the end of Pope Benedict's pontificate

The intellectual side is something which needs to be addressed. Everyone has the obligation to know the Faith, and to know it in a way, and to a depth, appropriate to his education and abilities, and the circles he moves in. No one can opt out here. The least gifted Catholic may be the only person who can reach particular people who need to hear something direct and from the heart. The most subtle person shouldn't imagine he can finesse his way out of every dinner party conversation, without letting on what the Church actually teaches.

I've been meaning for a while to put a sort of reading list on the LMS website, obviously it is a big project if the books are going have a useful description. The best books about the crisis in the Church are among the most neglected. It is important to understand the Faith in its fullness, not some watered-down version, and also the reasons why people want to water it down. In an attempt to make the Church acceptable to the World many people have implicitly accepted principles which make even what they want to defend indefensible. For an example, on marriage, see the last paragraph of this post. This has got to stop: the world is going to hate us anyway, we need to start making some progress in explaining ourselves in a way which makes sense.

Goodbye, Pope Benedict.

And thank you for Summorum Pontificum.

This evening at 7pm there will be a special Benediction, with Polyphony, in SS Gregory & Augustine, Woodstock Road, Oxford, to mark the end of his pontificate.