Following our unsatisfactory contacts with the Bishops’ Conference earlier this year, the LMS decided to prepare a forthright submission and send it to Rome well in advance of the bishops’ five-yearly ad limina visit this October.
A huge effort was made, researching the background of our document and liaising with all our diocesan representatives to get up to the minute information on the situation in each diocese. All this information was drawn together into a sixteen page report which explained the current situation in England and Wales and gave a short list of detailed and specific requests. Most importantly, the document also contained an extremely frank analysis of the performance of each bishop in his diocese in fulfilling the Holy Father’s explicit wish for generous permissions for frequent celebrations of the traditional Mass.
After much hard work, the document was despatched to Cardinal Arinze at the Congregation for the Sacraments and Divine Worship, Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos at the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Ratzinger at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Cardinal Sodano at the Secretariat of State on 4 September – five weeks in advance of the bishops’ ad limina visit.
Subsequently, Cardinal Arinze wrote to acknowledge receipt and that he had ‘taken note’ of the contents, and Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos also wrote: the letter sent on his behalf hoping that ‘your detailed report on the present state of the Dioceses of England and Wales with regard to the celebration of the Mass according to the 1962 Missal will be put to good use.’
To coincide with the bishops’ arrival in Rome, it was decided to release large parts of the document (with the section of reports on the bishops excised) and a detailed press statement to the effect that we had specifically named and shamed nine bishops to all the Catholic papers and the main quality secular dailies and weeklies.
The results were interesting. The Catholic Herald was on the telephone to us immediately and ran a reasonable story on page two after interviewing David Lloyd. We had no contact whatsoever from The Tablet, The Universe or the Catholic Times. However, the LMS Development Manager was very quickly telephoned by Mark Morley, Director of the Catholic Communications Service of the Bishops’ Conference who must have been tipped off by one of the Catholic papers. He was rather irritated that the LMS had presumed to go public on its report to Rome and asked the Development Manager, in confidence, to share the names of the nine bishops with him. The Development Manager declined.
Not one word about our initiative which, agree with it or not, was a solid story backed by proper documentation appeared in The Tablet, The Universe or the Catholic Times.
Elsewhere, the Daily Telegraph showed great interest and interviewed David Lloyd. Unfortunately, because of our refusal to provide bishops’ names, the story was crowded out by events in the secular world.
A subsequent ‘letter to the editor’ from the Development Manager to those Catholic papers which had declined to use our press release and which informed their readers as a matter of interest that the LMS had taken a certain course of action in relation to the bishops’ ad limina visit, was also ignored, although The Universe used it as the basis of an ambiguous ‘news brief’ which it eventually ran three weeks after our initial press release.
And there the matter rests, with the entire Catholic weekly press, apart from the Catholic Herald, refusing to inform its readership adequately or at all of the LMS’s initiative.
Happily, Christian Order (PO Box 14754, London SE19 2ZJ, telephone: 020 8771 1051) plans to publish most of our report in its January 2004 issue. The LMS will also shortly be posting all the material (except the section on the individual bishops) on our website: www.latin-mass-society.org. Any member who wants a hard copy of the report and press material should send an A4 SAE (34 pence) to the LMS office.
So what was achieved? We will have to wait and see. Life goes on as normal, i.e. Bishop Brain of Salford annouces the closure of ten churches in his diocese (in the double-speak of post-Vatican II that counts as ‘growth’). We do not know if Rome used our material or not. We will have to see if the climate for the traditional Mass in England and Wales improves over the next year. But it is important for the LMS to fight its corner and for its members to know that it is not afraid to confront any bishop who richly deserves confronting or that, conversely, it will be vocal in praise of any bishop who willingly implements the wishes of the Holy Father and even goes the extra mile in supporting the LMS’s efforts to preserve the traditional Mass, to inculcate the Faith in our young, to encourage our burgeoning traditional Catholic families in their demand for all the Sacraments and a traditional parish life, and to introduce the traditional priestly orders into the English and Welsh dioceses.
Are there any such bishops? There are a growing number in America, Canada, Australia, South America and Europe. Only in the British Isles does the Vatican II ice age still seem solid. But in a number of forthcoming initiatives, the LMS will attempt to crack that ice. Your prayers in abundance will be welcome.