The Mass that divides
Traditional Latin Masa
To understand why Pope Francis felt he had to act to end the experiment of allowing the old form of the Roman Rite to continue, his biographer spoke to Catholics in an English market town whose parish life and worship has been devastated by a group of traditionalists
The half-hour Sunday morning 9.30 parish liturgy at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in the south Herefordshire town of Ledbury is spoken and perfunctory, and the 25-odd parishioners leave briskly, just as the traditionalists start arriving. Their Missa Cantata is not until 11.30, but there are rehearsals and eucharistic devotion before the Tridentine liturgy begins. There have been sung High Masses with Communion on the tongue in this yellow-brick church since July 2020, notwithstanding Covid restrictions, attended by up to 40 people driving in from across three counties. The liturgies are followed by the Rosary, and bring-and-share packed lunches in the parish hall until well into Sunday afternoon.
Between the church and the car park, a late-middle-aged woman approaches with a broad smile: am I the one doing the article about what has happened here? As she begins to tell me what I’ve already heard many times by now, tears well in her eyes. “It’s just so awful,” is all she can manage as she chokes up. “It was such a lovely parish. It has all broken down now.”
For Ledbury’s parish priest, Fr Adrian Wiltshire, 71, the pandemic was an opportunity last year to give the pre-Vatican II liturgy pride of place. As a result, many in the parish community felt sidelined. Pope Francis’ July edict restricting and regulating the use of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) has meant that Fr Wiltshire is now celebrating liturgies using the 1962 Missal without the permission of his bishop, George Stack of Cardiff. And the parishioners have fresh hope they can get back their parish.
Although he has been its priest for nearly a decade, it was only recently, they say, that Fr Wiltshire was “radicalised” by the Tridentinists. No one had minded that for years he had celebrated an “Extraordinary Form” Mass at 9 a.m. one Sunday in the month for the few parishioners who liked it. But last year he made two changes. First, with public Masses officially suspended for health reasons, he began celebrating Mass daily in the old rite, letting it be known that the back door of the church was open to anyone wanting to attend. (Now, post-lockdown, weekday Mass continues to be in the old rite.) Second, he offered the parish as a base to Extraordinary Malvern, as the Worcestershire branch of the Latin Mass Society (LMS) is known. It had failed to agree terms with two previous parishes, in Worcester and Malvern.
As its leader, Alistair Tocher, reports in the LMS magazine, Mass of Ages, Fr Wiltshire gave Extraordinary Malvern “the prime late-morning slot” every Sunday at Ledbury. He has celebrated a full-blown Missa Cantata with its choir, the Schola Gregoriana Malverniensis, every week since the second Sunday of Advent last year. Extraordinary Malvern’s Holy Week liturgies in Ledbury this year were all “fully sung”, Tocher reports with pride, and even had “two cantors” on Maundy Thursday. Ledbury’s parishioners say their Maundy Thursday liturgy was cut to the bone – no Altar of Repose, for example – to make space for the visitors’ TLM sung Mass.
The Tridentine visitors donate generously, and Fr Wiltshire has not
hidden his pleasure at having them. For the faithful parishioners of
Ledbury parish, on the other hand, the experience has been one of a loss
for which they are grieving. For years their 10.30 parish Mass had been
an hour-long community liturgy attended by dozens, with incense, a full
choir, involvement from readers and eucharistic ministers, fresh
flowers and tea and coffee afterwards. But when the churches reopened
for public Mass last August, the parishioners found they had been
“shunted” (as one parishioner, John Leahy, puts it) to a new pared-down
9.30 slot, to clear the rest of the morning for the traditionalist
visitors. They even found the altar was now dressed for a Tridentine
Mass (huge candles, kneelers), and Fr Wiltshire began to celebrate the
weekly parish Mass with his back to them.
Following a visit from
Archbishop Stack, for the last few weeks their priest has at least
faced them again. But he has turned his back on them in other ways.
There is still no choir or music: Fr Wiltshire – a music teacher before
he was in the wine trade (he was not ordained until his late-fifties) –
has told parishioners he gets his “music fix” from the 11.30 schola. Nor
is there any post-Mass gathering, because the traditionalist visitors
are rushing in to set up. The message the parishioners have received
could not be clearer. “The Tridentine Mass has become the parish,” as
Kathryn puts it. “The main Mass is the Tridentine Mass.”
“Kathryn”
still goes to the 9.30 and, like some of the other parishioners I spoke
to, prefers her name not to be used. But John Leahy and Bernadette
Eakin don’t mind: along with many others they now go to other parishes
after fruitless attempts to engage their priest in dialogue. Fr
Wiltshire has scrapped the parish council and dismisses their
complaints, telling them: “We have to move forward.” Parishioners have
written several times to the archbishop. Many have cancelled their
standing orders in protest. I spoke to six of these parishioners, and
met three. They are impressively committed, passionate Catholics, the
kind any parish would be delighted to have, who love the Church and
serve in its ministries. They are patient and forgiving of their
priest’s autocratic, eccentric ways, and stress they have nothing
against the “Latin Mass” in the traditional rite, per se. Some have
tried to engage and welcome the TLM folk. But building bridges is not
easy. They are shocked by the invective against Pope Francis and their
sneering at the “modernist” Mass (Eakin shuddered when the TLM people
laughed derisorily at the idea of women altar servers, calling them
“serviettes”). And the parishioners remain upset at the way the bishops’
Covid guidelines, there to protect the community’s health, have been
cast aside.
It is the arrogance that grates. “They think of
themselves as above the law,” says Leahy, who says many elderly
parishioners have stopped coming to Mass because of the Covid
recklessness at the 11.30 and at the gatherings afterwards. “Tina”, whom
I meet for coffee after Mass in the Feathers Hotel, says a lot of the
hurt is in a feeling that their priest regards them as uneducated and
unsophisticated in comparison with his traditionalist visitors. “Our
Mass is miserable now,” she says. “He’s just waiting for us to go so he
can be with his people.”
Can you find a word? I ask. She does. It is “disenfranchised”.
“It’s
as if it had been drafted to address the division in Ledbury parish at
this time,” says Eakin when I ask her about Traditionis Custodes. One
line in particular stands out from the Pope’s letter to bishops
accompanying the motu proprio, where he asks them to prevent the
establishment of “parishes tied more to the desire and wishes of
individual priests than to the real needs of the ‘holy People of God’”.
Francis acted on testimony from bishops across the globe that
Benedict XVI’s attempt to allow greater use of the abrogated 1962 Missal
had led to serious divisions in parishes and the spread of toxic and
fundamentalist ideologies. This was particularly true in the US, which
has 6 per cent of the world’s Catholics but 40 per cent of the locations
that celebrate the pre-conciliar Mass, almost all of which are
identified with “rad-trad” ideologies and anti-papal groups. One US
bishop told me that he, among many others, had raised the issue on their
autumn 2019 ad limina visits to Rome. They gave the Pope what the
bishop called “a polite and discreet earful” about “the vitriolic
attacks” on him. Many had been fine with Benedict’s “live-and-let-live”
approach, but the growing attacks on Vatican II from TLM groups pushed a
lot of the bishops “over the edge”. Even without the toxic accretions –
the subcultures of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and the anti-vax
conspiracies that cling to the TLM groups – it was clear that Benedict’s
hope of a twofold use of the same Roman rite, one “ordinary” and the
other “extraordinary”, that would gradually merge over time, had
road-crashed. Thirteen years after Benedict’s motu proprio, Summorum
Pontificum, “the thing has gotten totally out of control and become a
movement, especially in the US, France and England”, Archbishop “Gus” Di
Noia, American adjunct secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), told the Catholic News Service.
Francis
asked Di Noia’s team at the CDF last year to carry out a survey of the
world’s bishops and, with the new staff at the Congregation for Divine
Worship under its recently appointed prefect, Yorkshire-born Archbishop
Arthur Roche, to process the results. The survey showed how, in Di
Noia’s words, the TLM movement “has hijacked the initiatives of St John
Paul II and Benedict XVI to its own ends”, so that, “what we have got
now is a movement within the Church herself, seemingly endorsed by her
leaders, that sows division by undermining the reforms of the Second
Vatican Council through the rejection of the most important of them: the
reform of the Roman Rite”.
Faced with this evidence, Francis
had no choice but to act. As the Pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, put it in
Last Testament, “the moment one sees a church schism looming, the Pope
is obliged to do whatever is possible to prevent it happening.” Despite
Benedict’s sincere hope that the two forms of liturgy would “enrich one
another”, Francis explained in his letter accompanying Traditionis
Custodes, the TLM had been used “to widen the gaps, reinforce the
divergencies and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block
her path and expose her to the peril of division”. Hence the need, now,
to withdraw those concessions, and restore to bishops the authority to
allow or forbid Tridentine celebrations after they had assessed “the
reality of the groups which celebrate with this Missale Romanum”.
Francis’
goal is clear: that the traditionalists “return in due time to the
Roman Rite promulgated by Sts Paul VI and John Paul II”, which sought to
raise up, in a variety of languages, a single prayer that expressed the
Church’s unity. “This unity I intend to re-establish throughout the
Church of the Roman Rite,” Francis told the world’s bishops. Yet that
“return” will require a deep-seated conversion. For it is not just that
the TLM movement has become associated with toxic ideologies; it has
itself become an ideology. As someone very close to him recently put it
to me, Francis felt compelled “to deal with the growth of this
discarnate ideology with charity, understanding and courage to put
things in their place”.
For Francis, there is a discernment of
spirits at stake. In the post-conciliar use of the TLM he sees the
resurgence of an ancient Gnostic heresy, one that denies – not overtly
or consciously, but in practice – the Incarnation itself. Francis said
as much to a meeting of Latin-American Religious on 13 August when he
spoke of the inseparability of evangelisation and inculturation. When it
does not enter into the life and culture of the people, Francis said,
Christian life “ends up in the most bizarre and ridiculous Gnostic
postures” as happens with “the bad use of liturgy”. When what matters
is ideology rather than “the reality of the people”, he said, “that is
not Christianity”.
When Christians abandon the Incarnation for
ideology, as Francis has often said, the diabolos is not far behind, and
division follows. The bad spirit will be known by the disturbance and
division it sows, and the arrogance and indignant victimhood that
characterise it. This is what the bishops reported, and this is why
Francis had to act.
The theologian Karl Rahner described
ideology as “a fundamental closure in face of the ‘wholeness’ of
reality, one which turns a partial aspect into an absolute”. It fears
change; its motto is semper idem. It is present in the idea of a special
knowledge in which contingent ideas and rubrics – the Gnostic idea, for
example, that receiving Communion on the tongue rather than the hand is
somehow more “holy” – are absolutised, given an importance far beyond
what they possess in God’s overall plan. A major sign of Gnostic
ideology is when people create an abstract “system” with its own rigid
laws and black-and-white divisions of the world into “us” (good) and
“them” (bad). The ideological mindset has great difficulty in admitting
mistakes and weaknesses.
The traditionalist responses to
Traditionis Custodes have ranged from astonishingly vicious anti-papal
invective of the “rad-trad” kind to victimism, seeing themselves as a
persecuted faithful “remnant” of the true Church. What they have in
common is a total absence of contrition. Nowhere is there a suggestion
that the scorn and contempt for which they are notorious could indicate
the need to be purified. In vain one searches for any humble
recognition that this could have been brought on themselves; the edict
is seen as an act of aggression by an autocratic pope against innocent
victims. (Tocher did not answer my question whether the LMS accepted any
responsibility for healing the divisions in Ledbury parish. Fr
Wiltshire declined to be interviewed.)
Nor is there the slightest hint of recognition that it is not the old
rite Mass itself that Francis is acting against, but the ideology of
those who use it to undermine the Church. Under the headline “Back to
the catacombs?” LMS chairman Joseph Shaw explains in the new edition of
Mass of Ages how “traditional Catholics” must respond to the “new
attitude of the Holy See” of “official hostility towards the traditional
Mass”. He asks his followers to steel themselves for mockery and
persecution, to suffer for the “spiritual treasure” that they are “under
a duty to preserve”. He suggests they read his books and attend classes
for vestment-sewing (women) and altar-serving (men). “God is calling
us to atone for our sins and to make reparation for those of the
Church,” he adds at the end. But nowhere does Shaw urge an examination
of conscience, or admit faults with the LMS itself.
As for
Ledbury, it is unclear what will happen in the wake of Traditionis
Custodes. Archbishop Stack tells me he has made “no definitive judgement
on the need or necessity of the celebration of Mass in the
Extraordinary Form in the diocese” and is seeking some clarifications
from Rome. He has been in contact with three of the four priests in the
archdiocese who celebrate the Tridentine Mass but Fr Wiltshire “has not
yet requested the permission envisaged in the motu proprio”. The LMS
Masses at Ledbury, in other words, are not just divisive but, at the
moment, canonically illicit.
And the People of God in Ledbury still don’t know if they will get back the parish they once loved.
Austen Ivereigh is the author of Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (Henry Holt £21.25; Tablet price £19.12), and collaborated with the Pope Francis in the writing of Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (Simon & Schuster, £10.99; Tablet price £9.89).
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