The Cultural Elite Stands Up for the Traditional Mass

Dr Shaw looks at the open letter in The Times directed at Francis, begging him not to destroy the Traditional Latin Mass. As I've said, I doubt it will do any good.

From The European Conservative

By the Hon. Joseph Shaw, DPhil (Oxon), FRSA, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Fœderatio Internationalis Una Voce

"The traditional liturgy is a ‘cathedral’ of text and gesture, developing as those venerable buildings did over many centuries."

On 6th July, the Catholic composer Sir James MacMillan introduced a joint letter in The Times newspaper asking the Holy See not to restrict the Traditional Mass. The 48 signatories include a great many musicians, but also politicians from across the political spectrum, historians, journalists, and arts administrators; it includes both Catholics and non-Catholics. In particular, the current custodians of much of Britain’s cultural heritage signed it: the director of the Wigmore Hall, John Gilhooly; the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tristam Hunt; and the chairman of Historic Royal Palaces (which runs six royal palaces which are open to the public), Sir Nicholas Coleridge. Similarly, the 1971 petition which led to the English Indult—the mouse-hole of permission that allowed public celebrations of the Traditional Mass to continue without a break in England and Wales—was signed by the director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark; the director of the British Institute in Florence, Major Ian Greenlees; the president of the British Academy, Sir Maurice Bowra; the BBC controller of music, Sir William Glock; and the controller of the BBC’s cultural flagship, the “Third Programme,” Harman Grisewood. Grisewood, in fact, was also a Papal Chamberlain, and briefly a chairman of the Latin Mass Society.

Pope Francis has already been presented with petitions by what we might call ‘ordinary’ Catholics: Catholics without fame, powerful institutional connections, or money. Notably, following the first document restricting the Traditional Mass, Traditionis custodes (July 2021), and the follow-up Responsa ad dubia (December 2021), he received the very touching petition from the ‘Mothers of Priests’ who wheeled a printed copy more than 1,000 kilometres from Paris to Rome, on foot.

The ancient liturgy is breathtaking in its beauty and serves to lift the hearts of countless souls to God. It attracts diverse and often marginalized Catholics, including many young people and families. Prayerful participation in the Traditional Latin Mass has led many into a profound and sincere relationship with Jesus Christ and His Church.

As viewers of Episode 3 of the film trilogy Mass of the Ages know, in May 2022 Pope Francis received the leader of the Mothers of Priests in a public audience, listened to her statement explaining herself, and expressed his sympathy. When the mothers returned home, the next major item of news about the Traditional Mass they read was yet another clampdown: the ‘Rescript’ (February 2023). Now they are hearing talk of a fourth.

And so, not to leave any stone unturned, some members of the British cultural elite have also organised a petition. No one should object to them doing so: important people have a right to have their say, just as much as the unimportant. Seriously, prominent people, such as Princess Michael of Kent, the Italian-American billionaire Robert Agostinelli, Lady Getty (the name speaks for itself), and even a veteran Catholic activist like Lord Alton, are constantly having their ears bent by people who want them to sprinkle star-dust on a pet project. They have to choose their causes carefully, and it means something that they have chosen the Traditional Mass: truly, the Cinderella of worthy causes. 

They wrote, of the possibility that the Traditional Mass be further restricted: “This is a painful and confusing prospect, especially for the growing number of young Catholics whose faith has been nurtured by it. The traditional liturgy is a ‘cathedral’ of text and gesture, developing as those venerable buildings did over many centuries. Not everyone appreciates its value and that is fine; but to destroy it seems an unnecessary and insensitive act in a world where history can all too easily slip away forgotten.”

Austen Ivereigh, Pope Francis’ biographer and always the first, and sometimes the last, to defend the Holy Father on social media (particularly on the subject of the art of the serial rapist Fr Marko Rupnik), reached for the most British of reactions: inverted intellectual snobbery. He wrote on Twitter: “Artists and celebrities, most not Catholic, liken it [the TLM] to an old cathedral facing destruction. Church qua museum for cultural elites who argue for preservation of ‘heritage’.”

The Traditional Mass is indeed like an old cathedral facing destruction: the organisers of the 1971 petition used that analogy, inspired by the growing movement for the preservation of the world’s fragile cultural treasures. The 1960s had seen a terrible flooding of Florence, concerns about the future of Venice, and the building of the Aswan Dam in Egypt, which flooded vast numbers of ancient monuments. Each of these led to enormous efforts of conservation, importantly, not only by those most culturally connected with them, but by an international community that appreciated local cultures as components of world culture.

Those efforts led to many things being preserved in museums, which presumably even Austen Ivereigh would prefer to their being lost forever. But this is not an option for the Traditional Mass. The museum has yet to be built that can preserve a form of worship.

A form of worship, like other intangible cultural artefacts—languages, dances, festivals, structures of belief—exists only insofar as it is practiced. It can be recorded, but if no one is living it, it has ceased to exist. The prospect facing the Catholic Church is not the relegation of the Traditional Mass to a museum, but its relegation to books and photographs, at which the scholars of the future would peer in an effort to get a sense of what Catholic worship was like for more than a thousand years. The “Mass of Ages,” as it is sometimes called, would be extinct.

The preservation of the living flame, to borrow a favourite analogy of Pope Francis, as opposed to the preservation of its ash, requires constant effort: not just vigilance, as if we were guarding Stonehenge against environmental activists, but its careful transplantation from place to place, and the replacement of celebrants, their assistants, and all the paraphernalia of worship, as they grow old or wear out. A cultural practice is indeed like a flame, inasmuch as it is a recognisable phenomenon which retains its identity over time, and yet whose material component parts are constantly being replaced.

I am slightly more optimistic, in fact, than the petition, which describes the Traditional Mass as “a treasure not easily replicated, and, when gone, impossible to reconstruct.” As a matter of fact it could be reconstructed, as spoken Hebrew was revived in the state of Israel, Gregorian Chant was revived at the Abbey of Solesmes, Morris dancing was revived by enthusiasts, and lost embroidery techniques have been reverse-engineered by the specialists of the Royal School of Needlework. It can happen that a practice dies, but enough information is retained for it to live again, as the practice of the Law of Moses and the Temple Cult was revived, thanks to the preservation of written texts, by King Josiah, the prophet Ezra, and the Maccabees. 

Traditions are resilient and can come back from the dead. The question is not so much of the chance that Pope Francis could in reality destroy the Traditional Mass for all eternity. It is rather of the pastoral wisdom of putting worshippers through the heartache that the crucifixion and resurrection of the Church’s most venerable liturgical forms would imply.