Michael Davis attacks home-schoolers

The quiz at the end of the St Catherine's Trust annual Summer School, attended
by about 50-50 home-educated and school-educated children. Details of this year's here.

Cross-posted from Rorate Caeli.

(Supporters of Home Education may like to support this petition on the latest UK government attack on it.)

A while ago the Catholic Herald journalist Michael Davis thought he'd do a good turn to the Traditional Catholic movement (with which he apparently identifies) by describing us as hateful bigots and antisemites. Now he's decided to do a similar favour to homeschoolers.

It works like this. First, Davis starts the article with a reference to the staggering success of homeschoolers: it seems that they are providing 10% of vocations to the priesthood in the USA, a proportion vastly in excess of their numbers.

Second, Davis lists all the tired old criticisms of homseschooling. Homeschooling is against the teaching of the Church; the children aren't 'socialised'; the parents are 'helicopter parents' who 'seal off their children in a bubble'; even the apparent good of the vocations is undermined by the snarky suggestion that the vocations aren't genuine and the priests won't be good pastors.

Step three is to hold up his hands and say: Oh well, maybe these problems can be avoided by some homseschoolers. Citing one particular group, he says vocations coming from it 'won’t be stereotypically paranoid, socially awkward homeschooled kids': unlike all the other homeschooled children, right?

Letter on older Traditionalists, in the Catholic Herald

The LMS Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Caversham last weekend.

Today the Catholic Herald has published my letter answering Michael Davis (not to be confused with the late Michael Davies), who criticised the older generation of Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass.

I have written a blogpost about his article here.

Sir,

Michael Davis’s attack on the ‘older generation’ of Traditional Catholics (Comment, 16th Feb) misses the mark. The tone of the mainstream lay movement for the preservation of the Traditional Mass, represented by the Latin Mass Society and it sister organisations around the world, was set by men like Dietrich von Hildebrand and Eric de Saventham, both of whom risked their lives for their opposition to Hitler; Hamish Fraser, a convert from Communism; and Hugh Ross-Williamson, deselected as a Labour parliamentary candidate for being too left-wing. The extraordinary devotion of Traditional Catholics to the Papacy, over decades when they received little but hard knocks from the hierarchy, prevented them from taking the easy option of leaving the structures of the Church. Now that their central argument has been vindicated—the ancient Mass was never abrogated—we can see that their obedience to the bishops of their day was supererogatory.

An attack on older Traditionalists in the Catholic Herald

Because of the flurry of posts I've published in the last few days I'm putting this back to the top of the blog.

I'm cross-posting this from Rorate Caeli.

Davis in the Catholic Herald

In last weekend's Catholic Herald (Feb 16) Michael Davis (not to be confused with the late, great, Michael Traherne Davies) makes an extraordinary attack on the older generation of Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass. He does so in the context of an alleged contrast with younger Traditionalists. You can read the first part of his article, or pay to read the whole thing; I include some screenshots to give a flavour.

To generalise about Traditional Catholics as 'going out of [their] way to be nasty' or tainted by 'repugnant anti-Semitism' is wearily familiar, and I would not dignify it with a response but for the fact that Davis presents himself as a 'Traditionalist' (as he puts it), and the Catholic Herald is one of the more trad-friendly Catholic newspapers. Furthermore, Davis is the paper's US Editor, on the eve of their big launch in the USA. Rorate's Twitter feed put it well: what we see is the phenomenon of the "the self-hating self-righteous not-really-trad Trad." I've discussed other examples of the type here.

Guest post on The Tablet blog: and factionalism

The day that Damian Thompson decries 'factionalism' is the day irony dies. Nevertheless, he has a point: the temperature of internal debate had gone up in recent years to levels not seen since the 1970s, the immediate post-conciliar period of ecclesial introspection and the ferocious persecution of those thought to be innsufficiently in tune with the 'spirit of Vatican II'.

The reception of Amoris laetitia has similarly stirred up a hornet's nest. I feel in fact that the frayed tempers on social media reflect something really worrying. A lot of Catholic commentators, from across the spectrum of opinon, feel as though they are in a pressure-cooker. Careers and livlihoods are on the line, along with fundamental issues of the Faith.

Here is something I wrote about factionalism back in the innocent days of November 2012. I've reposted the linked piece which had been on The Tablet blog on my philosophy blog, since it is no longer available on The Tablet website.

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

Today The Tablet has published a guest post mine on their own blog: see it here. It is a response to George Weigel's article in last weekend's Tablet, which itself was a response to John Haldane's article calling for married clergy.

See if you can spot the pattern here. In introducing his remarks, Haldane takes a moment to describe the two dominant traditions in the Church, conventionally called the 'conservative' and 'progressive' (or 'liberal') approaches, as, respectively, 'nostalgic and slavish' or 'faithless and craven'. Having thus established his bona fides as a non-partisan, independent thinker, he proposed the most predictable and re-heated item on the liberal menu, the ordination of married men, as the solution to the Church's difficulties.

Are traditionalists paranoid?

Over on Unam Sanctam blog, the old canard of the 'obnoxious trad' is wheeled out. Apparently the author has met a couple of priests don't like the people who come to the Traditional Mass; one has stopped celebrating it. Hmm. Maybe these Catholics were sinners, in need of the sacraments. It seems they won't be receiving them with much good will from these priests.

It has been well answered by Brian Williams at the Liturgy Guy here. Catholics attached to the ancient liturgy are accused of 'chasing' the traditional Mass from parish to parish, and not coming to other parish events. Williams points out that this is simply a consequence of the fact that they are not having their legitimate aspirations for the sacraments in the traditional forms met in any one parish, and very often have to travel long distances to attend services and events. A priest who declines to go beyond what he describes as a 'semi-regular' provision of the EF can hardly complain about that. I don't necessarily blame the priests for not doing more: I don't know what their other committments are. But by the same token no one is in a position to criticise laity for not making multiple two-hour round trips each week for extra events at a parish which has not given them a liturgical home.

Fr Longenecker, the Latin Mass, and the magic bullet

Reposted from October 2015.

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

An act of revence during Mass before the Blessed Sacrament Exposed, for Corpus Christi:
it tells us something, does it not? (What does the little chap on the left think?)

Further to my post the other day someone noted a recent post on this topic by Fr Dwight Longenecker: 'Is the Latin Mass a Magic Bullet?'. In it he attempts to put the thoughts of those 'conservative' Catholics who don't much like the Traditional Mass, about the relationship between the crisis in the Church and the liturgy, into order. The result is fascinating. Some key quotes, with a few comments of mine in black.

The problems in the Catholic church are not due to lack of reverence at Mass. The lack of reverence at Mass is due to the problems in the church. But it can't help, can it?

Simply obeying the rubrics or performing the Mass in this direction or that direction or standing here or there or wearing this particular vestment or that particular vestment or holding your fingers together there and bowing properly there do not necessarily make a Mass reverent. It makes the Mass more formal. .... So what's the point of them?

Here is my main point: I think those who blame all the problems of the church on the Novus Ordo are simply missing the point. If there are things wrong with the Novus Ordo they are symptoms, not causes. The core problem in the church is not the Novus Ordo or the liturgical abuses or the bad hymns and liturgical dance and all that awful stuff. So why exactly are these things 'awful'?

The reason the Latin Mass seems to be ‘more reverent’ is not because the language is in Latin or because the priest obeys all the rubrics or because he faces East. (remember I am not against all those things!) The reason the Latin Mass seems more reverent is because the people who attend the Latin Mass are far more likely to be well catechized Catholics ... So why do they go to this Mass and not another?

Fr Rosica: are liberal and conservative blogs cesspools of venom, hatred, and vitriol?

Conflict is inevitable. Here is the Oxford Pro-life Witness last Saturday, with attendant
counter-demonstration, who try to stop us praying by playing music.

Never one to ignore the mote in someone else's eye, Fr Dwight Longenecker has used comments by Fr Thomas Rosica about how horrid the internet can be to attack 'traditionalists', and lists his least favourite blogs as examples.

It is interesting to note, however, that Fr Rosica does not single out traditionalists, and I think it is extremely unlikely that he has ever sampled the wares of little-read, marginal figures like Mundabor, 'Novus Ordo Watch', and 'TradCathKnight', mentioned by Longenecker. The Crux article reporting his remarks noted, instead, his conflict with 'conservative and pro-life' sites. This is Fr Rosica's description of what he doesn't like:

the obsessed, scrupulous, self-appointed, nostalgia-hankering virtual guardians of faith or of liturgical practices are very disturbed, broken and angry individuals, who never found a platform or pulpit in real life and so resort to the Internet and become trolling pontiffs and holy executioners!

Obviously, that can apply across the spectrum of opinion. Fr Rosica's personal conflicts aside, the interesting question is where we find this kind of 'venom, hatred, and vitriol' among those who are widely read, who are taken seriously, who are respected as mainstream voices among their ideological fellow-travellors: as opposed to those who are not.

Reply to Mgr Pope: Lazy Traditional Catholics?

Evangelising in difficult conditions (the rain): the LMS Walsingham Pilgrimage

Mgr Charles Pope has written a blog post about how those who love the Traditional Mass should make greater efforts to evangelise for it. He says this because he thinks, on the basis of anecdotal evidence, that attendance at the EF has stopped growing. He links this with the very lethargic attitude he once noticed, of Novus Ordo Catholics faced with the prospect of losing their parochial school. I confess I don't understand the parallel.

These Novus Ordo Catholics of a couple of decades ago, mostly older people (people, he says, with grown-up children and grandchildren), whom the young Fr Pope talked to about their school, were members of the first, or the beginnings of the second, generation of Catholics who failed to reproduce and failed to pass on the faith. They had typically been brought up in significantly larger families, been given systematic catechesis in the old style, and had been introduced to Catholic traditions of all kinds: grace before meals, daily prayers, dressing up for Sunday Mass, an expectation that Catholic boys and girls should marry other Catholics, and the Traditional Mass. Nearly all of them chucked it in, everything except going to Mass on Sundays. 'What I have received, I have not passed on': that was the motto of that generation. Sometimes with regret, sometimes with relief, sometimes with the fierce joy of the vandal. But by the end of their lives, there was very little left. Their children had mostly lapsed. About half of them had lapsed themselves. The young ones still turning up at church were sometimes clueless about the Faith. Catholics today don't even necessarily know that the Church teaches the Real Presence.

Mgr Pope thinks that the Traditional Catholics of today are like them?

George Weigel's internecine attack on internecine attacks

Winston Smith's great moment of clarity, in his cell
(George Orwell, 1984)

When vulgar and uncharitable personal abuse is aimed at people these days, it usually seems to be justified by the claim that the victims have been lacking in charity in some way. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, to see a similarly self-defeating attack on 'intra-Catholic wars' by George Weigel, one of the most ferocious captains of perhaps the most desperate tribe involved in these wars, the neo-cons.

Weigel's view of the respect and obedience due to the Pope only narrowly falls short of Rex Mottram's in Bridehead Revisited. Rex's insincerity about becoming a Catholic is revealed by his falling for the the spoof Catholicism proposed by the mischevious Cordelia Flyte:

Then again I asked him: 'Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said 'It's going to rain', would that be bound to happen?' 'Oh, yes, Father.' 'But supposing it didn't?' He thought a moment and said, "I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.'"

Compare Weigel, who quotes a 'distinguished Catholic philosopher' with approval:

“If the Holy Father said that ‘2+2 = 5,’ I would say publicly, ‘Perhaps I have misunderstood His Holiness’s meaning.’ Privately, I would pray for his sanity.”

I can imagine what the fathers, saints and doctors of the Church would say to that attitude, and it's not only the Pope's sanity that I'd be praying for. Is this the meaning of being soldiers of Christ, of holding fast to the Faith: publicly pretending, really, really, hard, that everything is ok, when it isn't?

Weigel's appearances in the English Catholic press seem these days to be limited to attacking everyone in the Church (apart from the Pope, naturally) who doesn't agree with him. He did it a while ago in The Tablet, and I replied, on behalf of both progressives and traditionalists, in The Tablet's own blog with a guest post. He's done it again in The Catholic Herald, so I've written a letter, published last weekend.

SIR

How thoughtful of George Weigel (Cover story, November 27) not only to decry the “intra-Catholic wars”, but to give us such a vivid example of this sad phenomenon – in his own article. 

Catholics are divided into camps, and the ones with the temerity to disagree with him are not engaged or analysed, but thrown playground insults: “traditionalists’ ” ideas lead to “self-constructed catacombs”, thanks to them being “somewhat self-indulgent”; “progressives’ ” ideas lead to “the Church’s implosion”. 

Mr Weigel does not stoop to draw out these ideas, and his readers are left entirely in the dark as to what form they might take. To a truly tribal participant in the Church’s internecine conflict, of course, that doesn’t matter.

As Mr Weigel mentions, “progressives” and “traditionalists” share a sense of the radical nature of the Second Vatican Council and the reforms that followed it. This understanding is increasingly supported by the historical record, as more information comes to light: the recently published diaries of the Council peritus and member of the liturgical reform Consilium, Louis Bouyer, is only the latest example. If we are to address the problems of today, we must engage with this reality, and not start from inside a bubble of self-delusion.

Yours faithfully,

Joseph Shaw

Chairman, the Latin Mass Society
See also my post about criticising the Pope.

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

Was Constantine the Great a Clericalist?

It is an obvious point, but if you have a world view which requires you to assert things which are clearly absurd, then you have a problem with your world view. I've been reading Russell Shaw's 1993 book about clericalism, To Hunt, To Shoot, To Entertain, and this point has been borne in on me with great force.

Russell Shaw (RS) is an American neo-conservative Catholic. The importance of the 'neo' is considerable. A quick characterisation of neo-cons might be that they defend the teaching of the Church without being concerned about the ancient liturgy; perhaps that is how they see themselves. But as this small volume demonstrates, they have adopted so many of the premises of the liberals that their positions would be totally unrecognisable to orthodox Catholics of any time up to about 1970. In the case of RS' characterisation of clericalism (I'm interested in his book because I agree with him that it is a historical and contemporary problem), his analysis is distorted by two fundamental liberal claims: first, that the Church must be 'separated' from the state in an American sense; and second, that the liturgy glimpsed in the earliest surviving sources, and extrapolated from archaeological traces of the earliest surviving churches, wrongfully excluded the Faithful from meaningful participation, and went on doing so until the Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated in 1969.

Infallibility, Ultramontanism, Sede Vacantism

The Cross stands while the world turns.

Over on Rorate Caeli there's an interesting article by John Zmirak. I agree with the general thrust of the article, although some of it lacks theological precision, and I want to focus on something which is clearly, and sadly, true. Asking what will happen if there is an official accommodation with adulterous relationships, he writes:

Some conservatives who value authority over truth will dutifully defend this papal decision, and pretend that they never argued against it in the first place. Some traditionalists will split off altogether, and claim that Pope Francis became a heretic and lost his office as pope. They may even gather and elect an anti-pope.

We have here the twin temptations of faithful Catholics who see, or think they see, a divergence between perennial moral (or other) teaching and papal authority. Deny the one, or deny the other.

Why liberals are united and conservatives divided: Part 3

Part 1 of this series.
Part 2 of this series.
Part 3 of this series.

In the aftermath of Vatican II, opponents of the radical deconstruction of the Church (what Pope Paul VI, soon to be 'Blessed', called its 'autodemolition'), had to decide on a strategy. Since this was not going to be a purely negative strategy of attacking something from all and any side, like the radical liberal strategy, it was going to require serious thought and difficult judgments.

(As an aside, conservatives are perfectly capable of allying with others when a purely negative objective is in view. Explaining his alliance with Stalin, Winston Churchill said: 'If Hitler had invaded Hell, I would at least have made a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.')

The people we call 'neo-conservatives' decided to accept the reformed liturgy, give the best interpretation possible to everything coming out of Rome, and to rally round those aspects of doctrine which were being most vigorously upheld in the Papal Magisterium, which were issues of sexual morality and abortion. Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae condemning contraception; St John Paul II turned out to have even more to say on this, and on abortion as well; Pope Benedict XVI also had a very clear track-record on these issues.

Why liberals are united and conservatives divided: Part 2

Part 1 of this series.
Part 2 of this series.
Part 3 of this series.

The key to the unity of the liberals and leftists is that their immediate aims are negative: they aim at destruction. The common ideological thread is that traditional structures, whether economic or social or doctrinal and liturgical, are oppressive and stop people from flourishing. They unite to destroy these things. Since they can be undermined and destroyed from many angles, having different groups working at it from idiosyncratic perspectives is a positive advantage. Radical feminists want to destroy marriage because they see the family as a patriarchal power-structure; homosexual activists want to destroy marriage because they want their own relationships to be accorded equal status as married relationships. These two groups do not agree about anything apart from the importance of destroying marriage, and they attack marriage with completely different arguments. The incoherence of the overall attack doesn't matter; it serves only to make the anti-marriage coalition appear all the more comprehensive.

Why liberals are united and conservatives are divided: Part 1

Part 1 of this series.
Part 2 of this series.
Part 3 of this series.

This isn't a bad moment to reflect on something which is often said: while liberals support each other in their efforts, conservatives often don't, and lose out that way. Peter Kwasniewski mentioned it today, in an aside. Speaking of Bugnini and his colleagues, he writes:

They were men who seized their opportunities and did not sit on their hands wondering when other people would do the job for them, or worse, waste their time on endless bickering and hairsplitting. Like our political liberals, they could lay aside small differences for the sake of gaining major objectives.

My question is: why is it so often the case that liberals and leftists are able to present a united front and their conservative opponents cannot? And can it be remedied?

Bishop Conry, Fr Longenecker, and forgiveness

Opening the trad-bashing neo-conservative Fr Longenecker's blog post on Bishop Conry I thought I'd be reading something with which I could agree, for a change, but it was not to be. Here comes Fr Angry.

Forgiveness may be offered, but for it to activate it has to be asked for. It takes two to forgive. You may wish to forgive someone, but unless they acknowledge what they’ve done and sincerely request forgiveness it remains a one way street.

...

Conry went on to put up his hand and say, “Yup. I did wrong. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry I let you down.” Combined with his other statement this sounds more like, “Hey guys. It looks like the tabloids have got the story. You caught me. My bad. I’m out. See ya.” In other words, no real repentance and not so much “I’m sorry” but “I’m sorry I got caught.” What we did not hear was Bishop Conry’s full affirmation of the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage and sexual morality.

There is something seriously wrong with both quoted passages.

Tracey Rowland replies: Part 2

Freakish? Perfectly normal people at the LMS Conference

In my last post I gave a long, edited quotation from Professor Rowland's conference paper, now published in a book of the proceedings. Having given an initial response to what seems to me to be the most fundamental problem, I want to address a couple of specific points.

Here's something she says:
In short, liturgical issues need to be disentangled from the interpretation of Vatican II issues.

What is peculiar about it is that she presents this as part of her sociological observations about the failings of traditional Catholics. Ok, she's worked out a complex interpretation of the Council in which these issues can be 'disentangled' (though I wish her luck doing that when the Council is actually talking about the liturgy). If she wants to run this line, that's her affair, and other writers will criticise it. What is downright weird is her suggesting that people who disagree with her are obviously and morally in the wrong. She does this even while conceding that, well yes, 'there is an overlap between the two'. Right, so the matter is one of a delicate set of distinctions which are strongly contested by 'some theologians': for which, read, an awful lot of people who aren't called 'Tracey Rowland'. But the ordinary traditional Catholics in the pew, who haven't heard of Tracy Rowland, are, she implies, to feel ashamed of themselves for not agreeing with her. They are letting the side down.

She has a vivid mental picture of how discussions of the Council during coffee after Mass go. On the one hand, she suggests, of the traditionalists:
Their world-view would be shattered if they suddenly realised that for twenty-seven years John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger laboured to present Catholics with a wholly different understanding of the Council ...

On the other, she says of the non-trads:
they probably are people who can distinguish between the genuine Conciliar reforms and what Cardinal Ratzinger called the "rationalistic relativism, confusing claptrap and pastoral infantilism" which was marketed as the fruit of the Council in the 1960s and 70s.

In other words, the trads haven't even noticed that Pope Paul VI has died and that his successors had a somewhat different take on things, but the people who wander in from the street have read all of Cardinal Ratzinger's works and have higher degrees in theology.

I'm sorry, this is just loopy. I've talked to a lot of trads, and a lot of people who've wandered into celebrations of the Traditional Mass off the street, and I've seen many interactions between the two, and I can tell Prof Rowland that the Trads are infinitely better informed than the newcomers. Most Catholics know nothing - NOTHING - of substance about the Council or the liturgical reform. (37% of American Catholics, remember, don't know even that the Church teaches the Real Presence.) Most haven't caught up with the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. It's the trads who start making distinctions and citing Church documents in these discussions. Their position as an embattled minority has forced them to become well informed. Obviously, their failure to agree with Tracey Rowland on highly complex and controversial issues is unforgivable. But she should ask a few people in the average Novus Ordo parish what they think of the 'Trinitarian Christocentric interpretation of the Council', and see how far that gets her.

What she is doing is nothing more or less than negative stereotyping. It's not big and its not clever. It is rude, uncharitable, uninformed, and stupid.

The other area in which her desire to judge outruns the information she has about her victims is the matter of clothing. The nub of it is: are those who attend the Traditional Mass less well dressed than the average Novus Ordo congregation? Well, has she seen an average Novus Ordo congregation?

Let's take a little step back. First off, as Rowland appears dimly to apprehend, the world of clothing, particularly clothing for women, and particularly in the English-speaking world, is going through a profound crisis, like every other aspect of our culture. The result is that only a small minority of people are what you might call 'well dressed', in the sense of wearing clothes which are beautiful in themselves, practical, modest, flattering, well made, appropriate to the occasion, and not such as to strike the onlooker as outlandish. Most people wear clothes which are ugly and unflattering; the extreme, but ubiquitous, example, being jeans and t-shirts. Such clothes are supposed to convey the impression that the wearer is too cool to bother with formal attire. They are part of the same anti-formalist ideology which has afflicted the liturgy, the ideology which says that formality is inauthentic. Wake up, Tracey: these are not separate issues. Martin Mosebach has traced the connection between the liturgical issue and the general cultural issue.

In this context most people, when not required by work or a special occasion to dress more formally, look a mess, not by accident, but on purpose. People with a very acute sense of style and very good looks can still look fabulous, but the kind of judgments such people make about the details of their 'relaxed' clothing are a complete mystery to nearly everyone else.

Add to this general situation an almost total collapse of regard for female modesty, and you have a cultural catastrophe. You can witness that catastrophe by walking into a Novus Ordo Mass anywhere in the English-speaking world on a warm day. Australia, I understand, has many warm days.

More normal people at the Family Retreat

Those who resist the modernist ideology of clothing are, of course, attacked by its proponents. Men are described as 'fogeys', and women in the sort of charming terms Rowland dishes out. Notice how Rowland's first instinct is that anything old-fashioned is bad; she then accepts that there might be exceptions. In a footnote:

Ann Krohn, the Convenor of the Australian Catholic women's network called Anima, has suggested that a distinction can be drawn between a 'smart retro look' which can even be avant-garde, and the Amish puritan style...

If Prof Rowland needed Ann Krohn to point out that 'retro' can be fashionable, she has obviously been living under a stone for the last twenty years. But notice that, for her, it can be justified if it can in some way be 'avant-garde'. What if we don't want to be avant-garde? What if, like Martin Mosebach, we have a cultural analysis which rejects what he calls 'the senile avant-guardism of 1910'? The relentless rejection of the past and of formalism which has been reprised in art and fashion over and over again since before the First World War? Are we to be trapped in this sterile ideology forever?

Rowland says patronisingly:
the problem here seems to be that members of traditionalist movements often lack a hermeneutical framework for cultural analysis.

What sort of 'hermeneutical framework for cultural analysis' does Rowland have? It is prettty obvious that, as far as clothing and fashion is concerned, she doesn't have a clue. Is it relevant that, as I was so lambasted for pointing out in my original post, she was badly dressed when making these remarks? I'm afraid it is. It is not a matter of personal abuse, it is a matter of understanding. Does she understand the issues? No, she does not.

Why should she? She's a theologian. There is a long tradition of female academics who evince simple disdain for their personal appearance. I just don't expect them to lecture the rest of us about fashion.

To return to the central point, if we are not applying double standards, the question is whether those at the Traditional Mass are generally worse dressed than those at the Novus Ordo. What we find, what Rowland herself says, is that there is something noticeable about the former, they are bucking the trend a bit. Once we realise that the general trend is a disaster, we won't want to assume, as Rowland does, that anyone not following it slavishly is worst dressed than everyone else. The way they are bucking the trend is by making an effort in the direction of modesty. Could Rowland find it in herself to acknowledge that, in the current climate, this effort is both a good thing, and heroically difficult?

It doesn't follow that the ladies at the EF are invariably well styled. It is extremely difficult to find clothes which are both modest and good in every other way - and affordable. Can we cut them a little slack here? Just a little? Can we acknowledge that they are making a sacrifice for the sake of morality?

But finally, they can look pretty dreadful and still be superior, all things considered, to the people in the average OF congregation, who have given no thought either to modesty or to style. Who include people in jeans and t-shirts, quite possibly jeans cut short with nail scissors, accessorised with flip-flops. They don't exactly put up stiff competition in the fashion parade. Rowland finds them acceptable because they conform to the utterly debased standards of modern culture. Are these really the only relevant standards?

Two members of the Guild of St Clare

There is a grain of truth in Rowland's contention that Traditional Catholics have been influenced by conservative Protestants. (Not the Amish - that is just silly.) It's not hard to see why: the Catholic intellectual leadership, Rowland included, has completely failed to rise to the challenge presented by the crisis of modern fashions, and you have to take your inspiration from where you can find it. It is also true that Protestant theology has a distinct view of women and indeed of beauty which Catholics need to be wary of. I am going to publish some guest posts on this blog which address the question of a truly Catholic attitude to clothing.

For present purposes, it suffices to say that Rowland's response is completely unhelpful. It is unhelpful because it is crassly uninformed, as well as grossly uncharitable. It is one of those attempts, which are so wearying, of intellectuals who recognise some of the importance and truth of the liturgical tradition trying to distance themselves from the little people who actually do their best to live that tradition in the very difficult conditions of the modern world. She doesn't want to get involved and help them do it better: that would tarnish her. She just wants to look down on them from a great height and ridicule them.

I'll leave the last word to Fr Glen Tattersall, who ministers to Traditional Catholics in Melbourne: the real ones, not the ones who inhabit Tracey Rowland's fervid imagination.

1. Dr Rowland rarely attends Mass in the Extraordinary Form in Melbourne - I can recall having seen her once at Mass (a Low Mass on a weekday) in the last two years;

2. I do not recognise as present among the Catholic Faithful I am privileged to serve any of the problems she alleges in her interview.

To see and hear some English traditional Catholics, watch our 'vox pop' video interviews with some of them, such as this one about the Walsingham Pilgrimage.

Tracey Rowland replies to her critics: Part 1

It would be so much less off-putting to non-Trads if they could just sort themselves out into
hermetically sealed social categories who never talked to each other.

Readers may recall the video of Prof Tracey Rowland attacking the clothes-sense of women who attend the Traditional Mass, and a few other things, at a liturgical conference in Rome in July last year: I replied to her here, and defended my reply here. The book of the proceedings of the conference has now come off the presses, and her talk is included. The written  version is somewhat toned down from the video, and there is an explanatory footnote added. Since her attack on Traditionalists caused a lot of controversy at the time, here is an edited version of its written form.

From Sacred Liturgy (ed Alcuin Reid) pp132-7

Nonetheless, this conclusion comes with a few caveats which have nothing to do with the Rite as such but with the culture of some of the communities who worship according to it. Some proponents of the usus antiquior can be their own worst enemies and foster practices and attitudes which deter so-called 'mainstream' Catholics from attending Masses according to this form.

...
Spikey aesthetes for whom no "performance" is ever good enough, are something of a deterrent to parents with children who want their children's experience of parish life to be an experience of embodied charity.

Second, some Catholics who attend the usus antiquior are not only opposed to the post-conciliar form of the Mass but they are also opposed to contemporary modes of dress. While there is no doubt that some contemporary fashion styles are highly problematic from the point of view of feminine dignity, one can dress modestly without turning out like an escapee from an Amish farm. If mainstream Catholics who attend usus antiquior Masses feel as though they have landed on the set of a movie based in a nineteenth-century American mid-west or Pennsylvanian town, populated by Protestants who have a problem with modern forms of transport, they are not likely to come back. People like to feel as though they are mixing in a milieu where people are socially well-adjusted. they don't want to join a community which feels like a ghetto.

Note:
This issue is not a problem in every community which worships according to the usus antiquior. It appears to arise in social contexts where those who take a stance of outright opposition to all things modern are either tacitly or consciously influenced by the anti-modern movements within Protestantism. When this paper was first delivered at Sacra Liturgia 2013, which took place on the premises of the Opus Dei University in Rome the author was accused by 'rad trad' bloggers and Twitterers of being a member of Opus Dei, ... [She's not. She's a member of the Knights of Malta and the Constantinian Order.]
End note

Theologically, the problem here seems to be that members of traditionalist movements often lack a hermeneutical framework for cultural analysis. In the absence of any framework for judging what elements of contemporary culture to accept and which to reject, they often end up adopting practices from a past 'golden' era. This is sometimes connected to the problem of an understanding of tradition which is static rather than dynamic. ... While both Catholics and Brethren-style Protestants have good reasons to be critical of the culture of modernity, the theological explanations are remedies are different. This is especially so in the territory of attitudes towards women and the human body.
...

Thirdly, and most importantly, so called ordinary Catholics do not want to feel as though in attending the usus antiquior they are making a political stand against the Second Vatican Council. ... they probably are people who can distinguish between the genuine Conciliar reforms and what Cardinal Ratzinger called the "rationalistic relativism, confusing claptrap and pastoral infantilism" which was marketed as the fruit of the Council in the 1960s and 70s. Some members of traditionalist communities however continue to believe that the 'claptrap' was the Council and they hold onto that belief with great tenacity. Their world-view would be shattered if they suddenly realised that for twenty-seven years John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger laboured to present Catholics with a wholly different understanding of the Council ...

In short, liturgical issues need to be disentangled from the interpretation of Vatican II issues.

While there is an overlap between the two in so far as some theologians did indeed interpret the Council as a call to accommodate or correlate the Church culture, especially her liturgical culture, to the culture of modernity, there is an alternative reading of the Council, what might be called the Trinitarian Christocentric reading. ...

There are some things here which, if not exactly fair, are at least attempts to articulate widely-held anti-trad attitudes. But taken as a whole it is riven with confusion. For example, is Rowland seriously expecting those who attend the EF to be on best behaviour, hide their true beliefs, and discard their usual attire, when a non-initiate comes through the church door? But the main problem is like this.

1. What sort of traddies is she talking about?
As I pointed out in my original posts, her first point appears to be directed against culturally highly sophisticated EF-attenders, and the second and third against unsophisticated, indeed downright simple-minded and culturally obtuse, EF-attenders. In the aural version, there was a telling connection between the first group and the occasions she attends the EF (ie, she goes with bitchy aesthetes), and the second group and 'families' she has met who attend the odd EF (she's the agony aunt to families who go and endure the more proletarian experience). It is of course possible she is talking about separate EF communities, but she gives no indication of this.

2. What sort of 'mainstream' Catholics is she talking about?
In reaction against the first problem, she talks about families, who are put off by the bitchy aesthetes. In reaction to the second and third problems, she seems to be talking about intellectuals, who are put of by trads' lack of sophistication. Hey, don't they understand the Trinitarian Christocentric reading of the Council? What sort of ignoramuses are they?

This is what Rowland really objects to:
Catholic inclusivity

It would appear that Prof Rowland has two completely different groups of trads, and two completely different groups of non-trads, in mind. It would also appear that the conflict between the trads and the non-trads she is talking about has got very little to do with theology, and a great deal to to with class. She worries that lower-middle class people going to the EF will be put off by upper-middle class regulars looking down their noses, and she worries about upper-middle class people going who will be put off by lower-middle class regulars lowering the tone with their poor standard of dress.

If her chums are so class-conscious and snobbish, it might be a suggestion that they simply go to a church where they feel more at ease. The housing market frequently arranges things so that parish churches only cater for people of a specific income bracket. This neat social apartheid is disrupted by the need for trads to travel long distances to get to the Traditional Mass. Personally, I've always valued the more complete social community which arises from this mixing, but it seems Prof Rowland's friends can't hack it.

Perhaps, then, the problem is not so much in the trads, as in the 'mainstream' newcomers who've been complaining to Rowland.

Rowland would no doubt object that the issues of clothing and attitude to the Council are ideological. But this won't wash. She's just contributed to a conference full of people with fundamental objections to the Council-as-usually-perceived. She footnotes the possibility of 'a 'smart retro look' which can even be avant-garde'. What she is objecting to is precisely the lack of sophistication in implementing these ideas. She is condemning trads for their lack of money, education, and intellectual and cultural sophistication. She is condemning them, in short, for being ordinary Catholics.

I will focus on some more specific issues, including the clothing issue, in another post.

Pope Francis and the Neo-Cons: scandal and denial

I'm still catching up on things which happened either during the Chartres Pilgrimage or during the busy period of preparation before it, so readers must forgive me for reflecting on something which happened (shock!) more than five minutes ago.

It was Pope Francis' interaction with an Italian priest, Fr. (Don) Michele de Paolis. It would seem that Fr de Paolis was invited to Rome to concelebrate with the Holy Father at one of his private Masses, and that in saying goodbye Pope Francis kissed his hand.

Fr de Paolis is well known as a campaigner for a change in the Church's teaching on homosexuality, so this, as LifeSiteNews (LSN) expressed it, 'raised eyebrows'.

It is interesting to note this little incident; it was public, intended for public consumption, it was photographed and reported and Fr de Paolis wrote the whole thing up on his Facebook page.

The really interesting thing, however, is what happened next. LSN, in the person of the hugely respected Hilary White, had written the story with a completely straight bat. That is to say, she simply reported the facts, as they were in the public domain: what happened, and why it might be thought interesting that it happened, namely a little about Fr de Paolis' work and the public perception of him in Italy. There was no speculation about Pope Francis' intentions; there was, after all, no public statement about them. This report, however, caused a sort of psychological melt-down among a group of what we must call American 'Neo Conservative' Catholic writers, who started attacking LSN and Hilary White. The crucible of this melt-down was the Facebook page of the blogger Simcha Fisher, where she was joined by her husband Damien Fisher and the blogger Mark Shea, among others. See the whole thing here. A taster of this Lord-of-the-Flies type of cyber-bullying:

Mark Shea: LSN has fulfilled the classic definition of journalism: translating complex ideas into execrable prose. Eponymous Flower as a source for something? And Hilary White tasked with writing objectively about Francis? Seriously? God save the Church from the Greatest Catholics of All Time and their endless hatred for this good and holy Pope.
...

Damien Fisher: How about some basic respect for the Holy Father and the faith rather than using a biased and anti-Catholic writer to cover Pope Francis? (Tell me how Hilary White, who condemns Catholics for attending the NO Mass is the right person for the job.)

AND, JJ how dare you try to lecture me about respect. Your news organization demonstrates no respect for the truth, no respect for the faith, no respect for human beings. Have you done anything to correct your exploitation of the suicide victim? Have you cone anything about the oped blaming the UCSB mass shooting on divorce? Will you retract the latest slander against the Holy Father that YOU published?

Giving LSN a little fraternal correction.

Mark Shea decided to blog about it as well, but despite the opportunity for sober reflection which (one would hope) this would afford, he came out with this:

I’m so sick of these people. The author of the piece hates Francis with a white hot passion, a fact that must be as surely known to her editors as to anyone else with a pulse capable of reading her many literary acts of voiding her rheum in the Holy Father’s face. Likewise, her main source, the deranged Eponymous Flower, hates him even more. The piece makes so many logical leaps and ill willed assumptions, it’s hard to keep count. It’s all calculated to gin up hatred for the Holy Father. God forgive them.

To which all one can say is, with Hamlet's mother: Alas, he's mad.

The claim these delightful people are making is that the story is in some sense an attack on Pope Francis. What they are not claiming is that it is in any way false or even misleading: not one of them at any point seems to have put a finger on what is actually wrong with the story in its relationship to the facts. (If there are so many 'logical leaps and ill willed assumptions', would it have cost you so much to specify just one of them, Mr Shea?) Furthermore, they feel so strongly about it that they are willing to disregard all charity, to accuse the whole of LSN as guilty by association, and to bring up everything they've ever read on the site which they didn't like as confirmation that LSN is, really, evil. Oh and Hilary White likes the Traditional Mass, that shows she's wicked too.

How could reporting Pope Francis' actions be regarded as 'slander', something only a 'biased and anti-Catholic writer' would do? The implication would seem to be that it is Pope Francis who is attacking Pope Francis, by presenting himself in a bad light, and that anyone who repeats these attacks must hate Pope Francis.

In other words, these neo-Conservatives are so deeply scandalised by what Pope Francis did, that they want to hush it up, and will engage in a sort of Hate Week against anyone who won't play along.

Why are they so scandalised? Why is it so intolerable for them to hear about Pope Francis making this gesture?

First off, here's my own thought about this action of Pope Francis. Pope Francis has a consistent policy of being friendly to people at the level of personal meetings. He's been friendly to Bishop Fellay of the SSPX. Obviously he thinks that it is good to be nice to people, it makes everything easier if one has a personal rapport. All the same, he went the extra mile with this priest and the danger of scandal is increased; it begins to look like the sort of policy I have criticised before, where the enemies of the Church are given a warmer welcome than her most loyal sons. If I were Pope, I wouldn't do this.

On the one hand, I don't expect Popes to be perfect in the formulation and application of prudential policies about how to deal with dissidents. If someone says to me: 'here's a Pope, today or in history, who made a prudential mistake', I don't immediately have a heart-attack.

On the other hand, while Catholics can criticise such policies, I don't expect my own judgement always to be superior to that of the Pope, who has more information at his disposal and the grace of his Office to aid him. The Pope is fallible on such things, and obviously I am as well.

Why can't the Neo-Cons look at the situation calmly, like this? Why are they getting so worked up? For two reasons. As I have written before, they are are very keen on the medicine of punishment. They think that the problems of the Church arise from a lack of discipline, and can be solved by an application of discipline. They want, as patriotic Americans, to kick ass. By the same token they want to stop people talking about the subtle but pervasive effects of bad liturgy: see me on Mark Shea, and on Simcha Fisher. So when the Pope tries to deal with a problem priest by kissing his hand, and not by having him publicly flogged, this is peculiarly painful for them.

More, Fisher, Houghton: Martyrs for the Papacy, but not Ultramontanists.

The other reason is that they have adopted a positivistic Ultramontanism, which says that for practical purposes the Pope cannot err. In theory they accept the standard distinctions between fallible and infallible teaching, and between dogmatic and prudential issues, but in practice they have a very strong tendency to roll all the issues together and say that we must not just accept but regard as above criticism everything the Pope says and does. They do this without abandoning all their own positions, however, so they have to engage in absurd interpretations of what the Popes do and say to make them fit in with what they, personally, want them to do and say. The most gloriously loopy of these so far must be Jimmy Akin's suggestion that, if the Pope suggested, over the phone, to a woman married to a divorcee, that she could receive Communion, he might have annulled the first marriage and validated the second right there and then, on the phone. (Akin later took this lunacy off his blog.) I suppose we can look forward to more such intellectual contortions as time goes on. But when they get the chance to deny that something ever happened, or hush it up, that is, naturally, even better.

There is a terrible danger with this kind of Ultramontanism. Not only is it false, but it is the flip side of Sede Vacantism. The Sede Vacantists think that the Popes must be pretty-well perfect, and they realise that the men elected as Pope and regarded by everyone as Pope are not perfect, so they conclude they can't be Pope after all. The Ultramontanist has only his own self-delusion to rely on to fend off the same conclusion. Heaven help anyone who punctures that self-delusion! These Neo-Cons will defend it to the death.

The greatest danger to it, however, is not Hilary White or LifeSiteNews, but Pope Francis himself, who is delightfully free of the Neo-Con ideology. The other day he made a revealing remark, in the course of defending the war record of Pope Pius XII:

I do not mean to say that Pius XII did not make mistakes - I myself make many...

St Peter doubted, but Our Lord gave him the Keys anyway. Let's not forget either.
Mosaic in the Crypt of Westminster Cathedral.

Radical trads spoiling it for everyone?

High Mass in Westminster Cathedral.

The favoured explanation of what went wrong in the Fisher More College affair, among those (you know who you are) who wish to support the banning of the Traditional Mass by the bishop, now seems to be that this is a case of extremist supporters of the Traditional Mass spoiling things for everyone: by linking the Vetus Ordo with extreme views, they left the bishop no choice but to prohibit it. I don't know if this is Bishop Olsen's view, and unless they have inside information on his state of mind - which they do not claim to have - neither do they. But we have all heard the argument before. Oh boy, have we. At the end of this post I will quote the locus classicus.

The policy, though familiar, is both self-defeating and hypocritical.

It is self-defeating because severe restrictions on the EF confirm the suspicions of those who think that, because there has been such a radical discontinuity in the theology of the Church with Vatican II, the theology of the Old Mass directly contradicts the official theology of the post-conciliar Church. Unwillingness to allow celebrations of the ancient Mass suggest that those in charge don't agree with it, and don't think it should be allowed to influence the way people think and pray.

This is given further support when the EF is specifically not allowed for students and young people, or in the context of religious orders which are successful and are spreading. Those who make such restrictions appear to want to stop the theological ideas implicit in the old Missal to infect new generations and new places, and are sometimes quite happy (or at least, a lot happier) to allow the Traditional Mass to be celebrated for the older generation.

This is not a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. It reflects the openly stated views of the more extreme liberals. Cardinal Ratzinger himself attributed opposition to the celebration of the Traditional Mass to a widespread rejection of the theology of Sacrifice as understood by the Council of Trent. The TLM was a 'most intolerable contradiction' of their (heretical) views. Ratzinger's call for the liberation of the ancient Mass, which he subsequently brought about at Pope, signalled that he had no problem with the theology of Trent, and that the Church as a whole has no problem with it. This was the necessary first step on what should be a process of the healing of discontinuities, real and perceived.

When bishops, religious superiors and indeed priests consider requests for the Traditional Mass, they would indeed do well to consider the effect that granting such a request will have on those supporters of the Mass who are tempted by the claims of radical discontinuity. Will refusing permission for the Vetus Ordo strengthen such temptations, or weaken them? The question answers itself.

The idea, in short, that denying people the Traditional Mass is an effective way of combatting the more extreme claims of some traditionalists is clearly false. The people making this argument simply can't have thought it through. It may be a way of punishing them - sure, and everyone else who would have benefited from the celebration. But in the Church punishments should be medicinal: they should aim at making things better. A punishment which makes things worse is just vindictive; it has no place in the Church.

Remember also that in giving permission, those exercising authority take control. They can determine who the celebrants will be. They can bring congregations out of private homes and irregular Mass centres. They can be visited by the Bishop, they will receive Episcopal letters to be read to the congregation. For a parish priest, bishop, or religious superior to prefer the Traditional Mass to be available only outside the official structures of the Church is... well let's just say it is extremely strange.

So the idea that the EF must sometimes be stopped because of 'extremists' is self-defeating. It is also hypocritical.

This is because of the obvious parallel with liturgical practices in the Novus Ordo. Think about when a bishop allows Altar Girls, Communion in the Hand, Communion Under Both Kinds on Sundays, and 'instituted' Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion: these all, remember, need the permission or intervention of the Bishop, and do so because of the dangers in them which were recognised explicitly when Rome gave permission for them. If the bishop were to ask himself: are these practices going to give comfort and support to radical liberals in the diocese who wish to undermine the teaching of the Church? the answer will very often be a very clear 'yes'.

Very little googling is needed to see liberals who want the ordination of women instrumentalising the permission for Altar Girls for their ideological ends. The connection between practices in which the Blessed Sacrament is treated with less reverence, and the undermining of the doctrine of the Real Presence, is obvious, and again these things are used by radical liberals to advance their theological agenda. It would be easy to give many more examples involving liturgical abuses which are in practice tolerated.

Do the bloggers who talk sadly about how those dreadful radical trads have made necessary the banning of the Traditional Mass in one place or another, do they go on to say that innumerable practices in the Novus Ordo have been made intolerable because of the way these are used by clearly heretical liberal extremists to further their goals? No doubt these bloggers don't entirely approve of these practices. But a sense of urgency and obviousness about how they should be immediately banned, regardless of the pastoral collateral damage, is strangely absent. They are, in short, applying different standards to traditionalists than they demand for everyone else.

But of course the parallel is not perfect. Because although banning the Traditional Mass is clearly counterproductive in opposing the claims of discontinuity used by extremists attached to the EF, banning the practices which are so useful to the projects of extremist liberals would not be counter-productive. The liberals' arguments make use of the fact that the practices in question have been officially approved. Again and again they say: Altar Girls have been officially approved, and this shows that that the traditional position on the role of women was just time-bound misogyny; any day now the Church must and will approve women priests. If Altar Girls were banned in more dioceses, this argument would lose its force.

To summarise: the argument that the official Church is today in radical discontinuity with the Tradition is strengthened by banning the TLM; the argument that soon the Church will allow the ordination of women and give up on the Real Presence would be weakened by banning the above-noted practices of the Novus Ordo which, it would seem, there is absolutely no appetite on anyone's part to ban. The claim that radical trads have to be slapped down by stopping celebrations of the Traditional Mass is, then, not only self-defeating but also hypocritical.

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

Here, as promised, is the classic expression of this argument, that moderate traditionalists should be punished for the misdemeanors of anyone who likes the Traditional Mass who expresses extreme views. It is from Bugnini's The Reform of the Liturgy pp295-7, talking about the very earliest days of the implementation of the Novus Ordo Missae.

'Not all traditionalist groups accepted the extreme conclusions of the most fanatical. Some [Eric de Savanthen and the FIUV] limited themselves to petitioning that "[the Traditional Mass] may have its place among the universally recognised rites for the celebration of Holy Mass." These groups regarded the Holy See's rejection of the petition as excessively harsh.'
...

'If there had not been the danger of seeming to approve the opposition between the Tridentine and Pauline Missals, as though the former, unlike the latter, was a symbol of orthodoxy, the Holy See would certainly have taken a more lenient attitude.'

That's right: kick the cat to punish the dog.

Is the EF dangerous to souls?

A number of people have commented on the Fisher More College situation, saying that the Bishop's banning of the Traditional Mass on campus is a response to various Bad Things happening in the college. Exactly the same thing has been said about the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate.

The people who say this often add that banning the EF seems an odd way to address the problems, and I agree. But while I don't know if the claims about the motivations involved in either case are true, I would like to address the idea that frequent attendance at the Traditional Mass can be a danger to your soul. This argument was often hinted at before Summorum Pontificum, and if it is making a comeback that is a little worrying.

A brief autobiographical note. As I've mentioned before, for a number of years I attended the Novus Ordo in Latin. I bought myself a little booklet with the Latin and the English side by side. After a while I noticed something rather strange. Here is the booklet I used to use, open at the bit in Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon) immediately after the Eucharistic Acclamation. The Latin is on the left, the English, the official 1974 ICEL translation, on the right.

The weird thing is that the Latin text is a lot longer than the English translation. It is exaggerated by the fact that the Latin is divided into more paragraphs than the English, and uses shorter lines, but closer examination reveals that a large number of words and indeed whole phrases were not being translated.

Now this is the scandal of the 'old ICEL' translation which has now been addressed by the new translation. At what cost of effort and conflict, we all know, and we must be grateful to Bl John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for persisting with it. Because what 'old ICEL' said was this: there had been a concerted effort, accepted if not instigated by the very highest authority in the Church - let's not say, 'conspiracy' - to present a systematically one-sided - let's not say, 'falsified' - version of the Church's liturgical tradition. If you get into this, if you start reading about it, you realise it neither began nor ended with ICEL. And I don't mean reading books written by tin-foil hatted trads; the strongest dosage of conspiracy theory-stuff can often be found in the books of triumphalist liberals.

Once you become aware of all this, one can become a bit distracted while attending the Novus Ordo, by being reminded of all the things which are missing, added, or changed, for highly controversial reasons, and also by liturgical abuses. (At one point I started counting liturgical abuses at the Masses I attended. Not a good was to participate in the Holy Sacrifice.) Furthermore, every celebration of the Novus Ordo, one realises, can be read in terms of the views and preferences of the celebrant, and the battles he may have had with members of the congregation. Bidding Prayers are often the scene of conflicts, and what they are like can tell you a lot about the parish. The use of Extraordinary Ministers, and exactly what they do, is also fascinating, in a deeply unhelpful way. (Do they receive Communion at the same time as the Priest? Do they cleanse the Sacred Vessels? Do they put things in and out of the Tabernacle? Do they genuflect?)

In this frame of mind, it can be a huge relief to go to the Old Mass, the Vetus Ordo. It can feel as if, for the first time for a long while, one is able to stop worrying about the political meaning of every detail, and just pray. What happens in Mass is, essentially, what the Church has done for centuries. It happens simply because the Church has done it for centuries. I don't mean it has no meaning, I just mean that the priest hasn't decided that because of his personal views this meaning is good and let's do it today. He is doing it in accordance with Tradition. Those attending can stop campaigning for more Latin, for fewer Marxist bidding prayers, or to stop the Extraordinary Ministers wearing skirts which make genuflection either impossible or indecent. They can just participate in Mass and develop their spiritual lives.

We used to hear a lot about our desire for the Traditional Mass being a 'personal preference', with the implication that this was a bad thing. I can't help being amused by this. Have those who use this phrase not noticed the role of personal preferences in celebrations of the Ordinary Form?

I am by no means saying that everyone who attends the Traditional Mass has gone through this mental process. I do think, however, that the ones which people - perhaps including Bishop Olsen of Fort Worth, Texas, or Fr Volpi, the Commissioner of the Franciscans of the Immaculate - are most worried about, may well have. The ones who those people worry might end up with the SSPX or as sede vacantists; the ones who get a bit worked up about these things.

What I want to say is this: those people, the ones who get worked up, are not going to be helped by being deprived of the the Vetus Ordo  and forced to go to the Novus Ordo. If they are really worked up, it is more likely to drive them even more nuts. For them, Pope Benedict's liberalisation of the Extraordinary Form was truly pastoral: it made it possible for them to remain in the Church in a serene fashion, and to make spiritual progress. To calm down, in fact.

Attending the Traditional Mass may make people realise that the Mass has changed rather radically, and this may start the train of thought I described above. But any contact with reality can do that: looking at the religious art in an art gallery, reading about the history of the Church, looking at old church buildings. You can't hope that people will never realise that the Mass used to be said in Latin and ad orientem. What you can do is to make the point, as Pope Benedict did, that however much has changed, the Church has not repudiated the past. What was sacred in the past is sacred now; what was doctrine in the past is still doctrine now. This relieves us of the necessity of double-think, which actually drives you mad after a while.

Suppose the wretched Franciscans of the Immaculate are as bad as their critics claim; suppose the wretched Michael King, President of Fisher More College, is as bad as his critics claim. For heaven's sake don't deprive them of this spiritual solace, of the Traditional Mass. It is cruel, it is unjust, and it will make whatever theological or political problems there may be much, much worse.



Photos of Low Masses celebrated during the LMS Priest Training Conference in Leicester in 2013.