Editorial - August 2007

The future has arrived

Julian Chadwick, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society, writes:

In May I predicted that the Holy Father’s long-heralded Motu Proprio would be published in May. As we all know it arrived on 7 July, a day which will go down in history. For all the members of the Latin Mass Society, and all those associated with it, it is the culmination of years of watching, waiting, hoping and praying. I feared lest the well-publicised last minute attempts to delay or water down the Motu Proprio would succeed; but the LMS’s Officers and staff, and other bodies such as International Una Voce, lobbied hard and confidentially in Rome. We have reason to believe that this lobbying played a part in the final successful outcome. We will never know the pressures and blandishments that the Holy Father faced, but in his Motu Proprio he has once again proved himself to be a man of courage.

The effects of the document will take many years to work out – and we cannot be sure what the future holds. However, it is clear that this is not just a document for the ‘Traditionalist faithful’. We are not a sect separate from the rest of the Church. It is quite clear that the Holy Father wishes to enrich the liturgy for the whole of the Latin Church and not merely to protect our right to assist at Masses and to receive the Sacraments in the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite. Sadly, early indications from some theologians and liturgical ‘experts’ wedded to the ordinary form to the exclusion of all else suggest that they will try to marginalise the Holy Father’s document by regarding it as a mere extension of previous Indults. It is not!

We must therefore approach the future in a positive and confident frame of mind. We know that the 1962 Missal was never abrogated and it is hard to see how that could ever now happen; of course the Missal can be updated by careful and organic changes, but that was always the case. But let us be on our guard against triumphalism or anything which smacks of a party spirit. Those who have opposed Traditionalists in the past have normally done so in good faith and in the light of the teaching and formation they themselves received. Just as we expect our former opponents to be generous, so we must be. We are in a new world, the future has arrived – let us not rake over old coals.

Now is the time to remember those who have died praying for this day. Michael Davies, of course, must rank first as a man who did extraordinary things for the Traditional Mass.Then there are the thousands whose work for the cause and for the good of the Church is now often known only to God – people (LMS members and others) who were battered and hurt by the excesses of liturgical reform, who sadly often did not find the comfort and reassurance they needed from their pastors who had been infected with the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 70s.

The Latin Mass Society will work hard in the service of the Church to restore the broken fabric of our liturgy. We believe that the deformations in the new liturgy to which the Holy Father makes reference have helped cause a crisis in Mass attendance and in vocations to the priesthood and religious life which will take a long time to correct. This work of restoration will take many decades and the LMS is determined to play a full role. What we are doing is God’s work and its fruit may not be seen in our lifetimes.

LMS members and supporters will also take comfort from the document, ‘Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church’, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 29 June dealing with the nature of the Catholic Church. Our wise and brave Holy Father has confirmed that the Second Vatican Council “neither changed nor intended to change Catholic teaching on the Church” [and that the Church founded by our Lord Jesus Christ is the Catholic Church.] This will do much to put an end to false eirenicism and will reassure those who have been scandalised by rash ecumenical statements and activity.

Our Holy Father has repeatedly affirmed his commitment to ‘the hermeneutic of continuity’, and his Motu Proprio and the CDF document allow us to affirm what Catholics have always believed – that our Church is the Church of the Apostles, and our Mass is the Mass of all times and all ages.

Thank you Most Holy father. Ad multos annos.

[Taken from "Mass of Ages" August 2007, The Latin Mass Society's quarterly magazine]