Iota Unum talks in London this autumn

The Iota Unum talks which take place in the basement at Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street, are resuming for a brief autumn season.

This Saturday we will hear the Rome-based journalist Edward Pentin, and in November, Edmund Adamus, who has worked over many years for Westminster Archdiocese, Portsmouth Diocese, and now the Order of Malta, in the areas of pastoral formation and Catholic education.

Friday 21st October, Edward Pentin: the Vatican and the Traditional Mass

Friday 25th November, Edmund Adamus: The New Evanglisation -- what does it really mean?

Doors open at 6:30 for the talk at 7pm.

Refreshments are served; £5 is payable on the door.

The talks take place in the basement of the presbytery: please enter it from the Golden Square side.

24 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JR

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LMS Pilgrimage to Oxford, Sat 22nd October

Latin Mass Society

Oxford Pilgrimage

Saturday 22nd October 2022

 

In honour of the Catholic Martyrs of Oxford,

visiting the site of the martyrdom of

Bl George Napier, 1610

 

 11am Solemn Mass in the Dominican Rite, 

in Blackfriars, St Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LY,

2pm Procession to the site of the martyrdom in Oxford Castle, from Carfax

3pm Benediction in Blackfriars

Requiem for Queen Elizabeth: some photos

 

This morning the Latin Mass Society's organised Missa cantata for the late Queen took place. The celebrant was Fr Michael Cullinan.

The singing was superb; for the occasion the Southwell Consort (the LMS's London-based polyphonic consort in London) were directed by Gareth Wilson. They sang Victoria's Missa defunctorum. And yes, we had sackbuts and cornets too.

Requiem for Queen Elizabeth this Saturday in London

A Traditional Latin Requiem Mass will be held in London this Saturday in memory of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to mark a month since the death of the monarch.

The Sung Mass organized by the Latin Mass Society will be held at 11am at St Mary Moorfields church in the City of London. It will feature music by Tomas Luis da Victoria sung by the Southwell Consort directed by Gareth Wilson with the unusual accompaniment of Sackbutts and Cornetts.

Church location: 4-5 Eldon St, London EC2M 7LS; click for a map.

Nearest tube stations Moorgate and Liverpool Street.

Farewell to St Benet's Hall

A Traditional Requiem Mass offered in St Benet's Chapel

The demise of St Benet's Hall, a 'Permanent Private Hall' of Oxford University and my academic affiliation, as a Fellow, since 2004, has now taken place: officially, on 30th September.

I wrote about it in The Critic here, and more recently Dan Hitchens has written about it in The Spectator here. [Link corrected]

Hitchens' angle is rather different from my own: I was concerned with the internal culture of the institution, which had I attended as a student in the 1990s. Hitchens is interested in the role of the University in its closure, which was, indeed, decisive. As I mentioned at the end of my article, without mentioning any names, the University refused to allow the Hall to accept a £40m donation which would have amply solved the problem of financial instability which has been presented as the cause of the decision to close it. We never had any official explanation as to why the donation was turned down, but Hitchen's article, which mentions lots of names, is clearly correct: key figures in the University didn't like the idea of a Catholic institution within the University.

Children, Rigidity and the Synod

Mass at the St Catherine's Trust Summer School in 2022

Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.

There is an interesting article in the Una Voce Scotland Newsletter, from April 2022, by a young mother who took part in the Synod on Synodality discussions in her parish. The article in anonymous. She describes how she explained to the meeting she attended that her own experiences of the Novus Ordo 'children's liturgy' and catechesis had been underwhelming, and that most of her contemporaries had lapsed. She, however, had discovered the Traditional Mass, and her small son was so taken by the bells and smells that he was copying the bell and the thurible in his play.

He takes a rattle in his hands and pretends that he’s ringing the Sanctus bells (kneeling down and saying “ring, ring”) and swings his hands in front of him in the act of censing (“chk, chk!”). Where I was hardly aware of – and even distracted from – what was taking place in front of me during (Novus Ordo] Children’s Mass, my infant son is inspired by the traditional liturgy, his imagination fueled with enough images, sounds, smells and actions to take him through the week. 

My conversation partners, formerly quite talkative, received this account with a stony silence and shifting brows – some rose, some furrowed. The pause was broken by Shona, who wanted to add another problem to our list: “You know, we had a priest in our parish who caused a few people to leave. He wouldn’t accept any change, you see, and didn’t connect well with the people, especially not with the children. He was very set in his ways.” And that was that.