Una Voce Bulletins

by Joseph Shaw

Readers of Gregorius Magnus who are on our email list will already know that I have begun an occasional series of short news-related emails called ‘Una Voce Bulletins’. I aim to send about one a month, but as they respond to news items, they don’t have a fixed schedule. So far I have written about reactions to Fiducia Supplicans, the Traditional Mass celebrated in the US Capitol building, and the latest twist in the saga of the German Synodal Way. I hope that these make members and supporters of the Federation feel more connected and better informed.

Anyone can receive these, at no cost. You can sign up for them through the website, www.fiuv.org.

Here follow the two most recent Bulletins, to give readers an idea of what they are like.

Una Voce Bulletin Number 3 (1st February 2024): Mass in the US Capitol

From the President: A conservative Catholic is baffled by the Traditional Mass

Conflicts on social media between fanatical opponents of the Traditional Mass and its defenders take place every day, and are of little significance. Much more important to the public perception of our movement are the words of people who have some credibility, who cultivate a reputation as balanced, or even as conservatives.

A prime example of this is the American-based Catholic news outlet The Pillar . Their reasonable and informative articles are seasoned with frankly bizarre attacks on figures close to the traditional movement. In 2021 it was Cardinal Burke; in 2022 it was Prof Thomas Pink. This year it is the Traditional Mass itself.

A Traditional Mass was celebrated in a meeting room in the Capitol, the seat of America’s legislature, at the invitation of a politician wishing to make amends for something that happened a year ago. This was the leaking of an FBI report (a body normally concerned with organized crime), characterising Catholics who attend the Traditional Mass as farright extremists.

Ed Condon, one of The Pillar’s founding editors, was in attendance. He admits that his absurd preconceptions about the kind of person who attends the Traditional Mass were shattered. Nevertheless, he was unable to abandon his equally absurd preconceptions about their motivation in doing so.

He writes:

Because if the extraordinary form of the liturgy is about anything, it’s about the aesthetics – right? The look, the sound, the smell, the totality of people and place and thing, that’s what is supposed to make it seem so timeless, so magical, to newbies like me.

What I was not expecting was a modest set-up, in a hastily repurposed conference room, gray carpet with a bare folding table for a makeshift altar.

Since the people were there anyway, could there be more to it than aesthetics after all? Apparently not.

What the people I met say they want – and are determined to have whatever the Church tells them to the contrary – is the TLM. But shorn of the ‘extras’ afforded by grander settings, what they have got seems not vastly different to what I want and have most Sundays: simple, reverent liturgy.

Comment

Our determination to hang on to the liturgy, Mr Condon might like to note, derives both from the Fourth Commandment (Honour thy father and mother) and from this liturgy’s incalculable theological and devotional richness, which has been expounded in thousands upon thousands of pages of commentary.

Condon doesn’t care. ‘So, what’s the big deal? I don’t mean that rhetorically. It’s a serious question’. But it is a question to which he prefers not to hear the answer.

Hearing the answer and taking the answer seriously is indeed a dangerous undertaking. It is the reason why so many priests and lay people, and even a good number of bishops, have suffered marginalisation and worse for the sake of this Mass.

Mr Condon has no intention of following us into the ecclesial wilderness. As we prepare for the season of Lent, however, we know that Our Lord has been into the wilderness before us.

Una Voce Bulletin

Number 4 (26th February 2024): German Synodal Way hits a snag

From the President: The Vatican finally gets tough

The Bishops’ Conference in Germany has been collaborating with the radical activist laity of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) to establish new institutions which would have a decisive role in governing the Church in Germany. The next, and crucial, step in this process was to have been the creation of a ‘synodal committee’, a majority of whose members would be laity (partly because of the refusal of some bishops to participate), and which would have important powers.

On the eve of a meeting to approve the statutes of this committee, the bishops received a letter warning them against this step signed by the Prefects of three Dicasteries: of the Secretariat of State (Cardinal Parolin), of the Doctrine of the Faith (Cardinal Fernández), and of Bishops (Cardinal Prevost).

This was followed by public interventions in support of the letter by two important German-speaking Cardinals, Schönborn and Kasper.

The Synodal Committee’s statutes were removed from the German Bishops’ agenda.

It is possible make a long list of occasions on which senior Vatican officials have criticised the German Synodal Way, including harsh criticisms of it by Pope Francis in an interview in January last year.

However, the reality is more complex. In November 2022 the German Bishops made an ad limina visit to Rome, which would have been the natural opportunity to apply the brakes, but instead the bishops returned home determined to continue. The Conference President Bishop Bätzing suggested that they were travelling in the same direction as the Vatican’s own ‘Synod on Synodality’.

Comment

One reading of the situation would be that the German Synodal Way usefully brought radical proposals into the Church’s conversation, making the Synod on Synodality look more acceptable to theological conservatives by comparison. Perhaps the German Bishops themselves have taken this view.

This would explain why relatively minor deviations from Vatican policy by conservative bishops continue to be treated harshly, whereas there seemed to be no negative consequences for German bishops ignoring repeated criticisms. These criticisms were just for show.

Whether that was true or not, it seems that the Pope Francis has determined that the Synodal Way must be stopped, if not from contradicting sacramental theology and the Church’s discipline, then at least from undermining the role of bishops, and therefore of the Holy See, as the ultimate wielders of spiritual authority in the Church.