Gregorius Magnus Issue 20 Winter 25/26

The voice of the Foederatio Internationalis Una Voce

Gregorius Magnus: biannual magazine of Una Voce International

The FIUV’s magazine is dedicated to St Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I), who died in 604 AD, a Pope forever associated with Gregorian chant and the Gregorian rite of Mass (the Traditional Mass).

Gregorius Magnus magazine aims to be a showcase for the worldwide Traditional Catholic movement: the movement for the restoration to the Church’s altars of the Mass in its traditional forms. We draw features and news from our supporters all over the world, including the magazines published by some of our member associations.

Gregorius Magnus is published twice a year: in March and in October.

The Editor wants to hear from you! We want to spread the news, good or bad, about the movement for the restoration of the Church’s liturgical traditions, from all over the world.

The production of the magazine is supported financially by the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, and we wish to record our thanks to them.

ʻHe who would climb to a lofty height must go by steps, not leapsʼ.

St Gregory the Great

Please send contributions to secretary@fiuv.org, for our two annual deadlines:

15th February, for the March issue

15th September, for the October issue

FIUV News

President ʼs Message 4

Obituary: Rodolfo-Francisco Vargas Rubio

Una Voce: The Cult of the Sacred Heart

St Mary Margaret and the Apparitions of the Sacred Heart

Dominus Vobiscum: On the Divine Virtue of Hope

The Little Flower: Interview with Fr Angelo Van der Putten, FSSP

How

Features and News from Around the World

The Deep 'Romanitas' and Catholicism behind England's Christian Foundation

Tradition on Display: Rome's Jubilee Doors Open to the Latin Mass by Michael Haynes

The Fall of Adam and Eve: The Ultimate Metaphor of St Francis de Sales by Robert Lazu Kmita

Making Our Appeal to Pope Leo by Joseph Shaw

News from Scotland by Dorothy McLean

A Holiday Experience of the Tridentine Mass in the Diocese of Prato, Italy by Anthony Bailey

Book

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt by Joseph

Editor: Joseph Shaw

Website: http://www.fiuv.org/ For further queries, please email secretary@fiuv.org Designed by GADS Limited

Gregorius Magnus is published by the Foederatio Internationalis Una Voce. The FIUV is a lay movement within the Catholic Church, founded in Rome in 1965 and erected formally in Zürich in January 1967. The principal aims of the FIUV are to ensure that the Missale Romanum promulgated by Pope St John XXIII in 1962 is maintained in the Church as one of the forms of liturgical celebration, to obtain freedom of use for all other Roman liturgical books enshrining ‘previous liturgical and disciplinary forms of the Latin tradition’, and to safeguard and promote the use of Latin, Gregorian chant, and sacred polyphony.

The Council of the International Federation Una Voce, renewed at the 2023 General Assembly

President:

Joseph Shaw (Latin Mass Society, England and Wales)

President d’Honneur: Jacques Dhaussy (Una Voce France)

Vice Presidents:

• Felipe Alanís Suárez (Una Voce México)

• Jack Oostveen (Ecclesia Dei Delft, The Netherlands)

Secretary: Andris Amolins (Una Voce Latvia)

Treasurer:

Monika Rheinschmitt (Pro Missa Tridentina, Germany)

Councillors:

• Patrick Banken (Una Voce France)

• David Reid (Una Voce Canada)

• Jarosław Syrkiewicz (Una Voce Polonia)

• Fabio Marino (Una Voce Italia)

• Rubén Peretó Rivas (Una Voce Argentina)

• Uchenna Okezie (Una Voce Nigeria)

President’s Message

by Joseph Shaw

Welcome to Gregorius Magnus, the edition which coincides with our General Assembly in Rome marking the 60th anniversary of our foundation.

Many reading these words in Rome that weekend will be about to experience, or will have just experienced, the first fruits, from the point of view of the movement for the preservation of the Traditional Mass, of the new pontificate: the celebration of the ancient Mass in the Chapel of the Throne in St Peter’s Basilica, by Raymond Cardinal Burke. At the time I was preparing the last edition, Pope Francis was in his last illness: requiescat in pace.

However much we may have disliked Traditionis Custodes, we should not forget that Pope Francis also helped us –making provision for the marking of the feasts of newly canonised saints, giving the Society of St Pius X authorisation to hear confessions, and giving the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest the use of a basilica in Rome. Finally, he refused to countenance what appears to have been a final attempt to crush the Traditional Mass. In the famous words of Thomas Grey’s ‘Elegy’:

No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God.

Now we address ourselves to Pope Leo, with simple and filial confidence. I have written a feature in this edition explaining my own optimism. To take a different approach to the question, we might ask: given the typical assumptions and habits of mind of the higher clergy, and of lay Catholic opinion-formers, what would a normal, ‘establishment’ view of us and our aspirations be?

First and foremost, we are a group of Catholics with pastoral needs, like everyone else. We are fortunate that there has always been an important number of priests and bishops, and popes as well, who understand the pastoral stakes: the real harm that would be done by stopping the

celebration of the Traditional Mass completely. At first, the pastoral harm that concerned the ecclesial establishment was naturally to the older generation. Later, as this generation was thinned out by the passage of time, the people attached to the Traditional Mass must have appeared to them like a band of eccentrics: for the most part, I think, harmless eccentrics. Since 1988, and even more so since 2007, many of them have come to see that the Traditional Mass sustains the spiritual lives of many young people and young families: indeed, it not only sustains them but also facilitates family formation and vocations to the priesthood and the religious life. At the same time, the number of marriages and vocations in the Church as a whole is falling to worryingly low levels, to such an extent that our movement, small as it is, begins to look significant.

One possible reaction to this is anger: that somehow those traditionalists have stolen some of the energy and life

that ought by rights to be animating the structures of what we must call the ‘mainstream Church’. A more mature judgement would be that the ancient Mass, the Church’s traditional spirituality, and her artistic patrimony constitute resources that it would be foolish to squander.

This more positive assessment is not yet universal in the hierarchy and among lay commentators, but it is becoming an obvious one. Those who refuse to see things in this way should be challenged. Perhaps things have developed in an unexpected way; perhaps the Holy Spirit hasn’t worked quite as you would have preferred. But what are you going to do about it? Will you tell these young people, who want to worship as their predecessors worshipped for many centuries, that they are not welcome? Or, at a moment when the Church is threatened from within and from without in so many ways, will you grant them the right to exist, where they may even do some good?

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'It is vitally important that these new priests and religious, these new young people with ardent hearts, should find—if only in a corner of the rambling mansion of the Church— the treasure of a truly sacred liturgy still glowing softly in the night. And it is our task—since we have been given the grace to appreciate the value of this heritage—to preserve it from spoliation, from becoming buried out of sight, despised and therefore lost forever. It is our duty to keep it alive: by our own loving attachment, by our support for the priests who make it shine in our churches, by our apostolate at all levels of persuasion...'

Dr Eric de Saventhem, founding President of the Una Voce Federation, New York, 1970

Obituary: Rodolfo-Francisco Vargas Rubio, 1958-2025 FIUV Secretary, 2007-11

by Leo Darroch

Rodolfo-Francisco Vargas Rubio was born in Lima, Peru, on 23rd November 1958. He was also known as Francisco de Morandé, from the surname of one of his ancestors. He studied at the Jesuit school of Lima, the Colegio de la Immaculada, where he was a student of the great apostle of devotion to the Sacred Heart, Fr Florentino Alcañiz García. When he was a young pupil of the Jesuits, his patron was St Stanislaus Kostka, a young Polish boy who was educated by the Jesuits and died in Rome in 1568 at the age of 17 on the Feast of the Assumption. St Stanislaus is the patron saint of novices, youth, young students, and seminarians. On leaving the Colegio de la Immaculada, Rodolfo studied Law and Political Science at the University of Lima.

He entered the seminary at Écône, Switzerland, and received the clerical tonsure from Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, but while visiting home in Peru, he broke his leg and neglected to tell his superiors that he would be late returning, and so was asked to leave. He then spent some time studying philosophy at the diocesan seminary of Cuenca (Spain); in Rome, he studied at the International Seminary Mater Ecclesiæ, a seminary built by then Cardinal Ratzinger for Traditional seminarians, and later studied for a bachelor’s degree in Sacred Theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), as a seminarian for the Diocese of Venice in Florida, USA. He was subsequently accepted at the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest in Gricigliano, Italy. This, however, was cut short by health problems, when he suffered a stroke. It was his poor health throughout his life that prevented him from being ordained.

When Rodolfo was studying in Rome, he spent all his time in his room reading. When exams came around, his great friend Mgr Apeles one day asked him if he had already taken the oral exam for a subject, and he didn’t even know he was enrolled for it. He went straight to the exam and obtained the highest grade. He was extremely well educated in all theological and historical subjects, but quite incapable of conforming to administrative norms. His character was very free-spirited, and he never managed to stay very long in one place: it could be said that he had little sense of reality.

Rodolfo presents his book to Pope Benedict

Rodolfo Vargas’ book

In Spain, he studied history at the National University of Education, the largest university in Spain. He also studied law, political science, theology, and geography. He moved to Barcelona, since his mother was Spanish, and he was able to settle there. With the encouragement of Michael Davies, he founded the Roma Aeterna association to establish an Una Voce presence in Spain, and the association was welcomed into the International Federation in November 1997.

He tutored numerous students and worked as a lecturer and historian for Áltera Publishing House. He was commissioned to write several articles for the Spanish Biographical Dictionary of the Royal Academy of History. In 2005, he published TheLastPope?BenedictXVI and His Time: A Biographical Profile of Pope Ratzinger, and was delighted to be able to present a copy personally to Pope Benedict XVI during an audience in 2009.

Rodolfo was indefatigable in pursuing the cause of the traditions of the Church. He was the founder of the International Committee for the Exaltation of Benedict XIII (Papa Luna), and of the Sodalitium Pastor Angelicus in 1998, an association of laypeople that aims to disseminate knowledge of the life and work of Pope Pius XII and to advance the cause of his beatification and canonisation. Rodolfo was born in 1958, the year that Pope Pius XII died, and he commented that the more he read about this wonderful Pope, the more he regretted that he had not been born 30 years earlier. He was delighted when, on 21st December 2009, Pope Benedict XVI conferred the title of Venerable on Pope Pius XII.

Rodolfo was also a Knight of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, a dynastic order of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, recognised by the Holy See and several states, including Spain and Italy. At the invitation of Michael Davies, he would wear the cape of the order while attending Masses in Rome during the FIUV assemblies. Rodolfo also had an attachment to the cause of the French monarchy.

At the FIUV General Assembly in Rome in 2007, he reported that the situation in Spain had improved remarkably. In 2005, the only member association in Spain was Roma Aeterna, but since then two more have been established: Una Voce Seville and Una

Voce Madrid. A Spanish chapter, Una Voce Hispania, was constituted for admitting new associations in future. It was in 2007 that Rodolfo was elected to the FIUV Council and accepted the office of Secretary, a post he held for four years. He was extremely effective in this role, especially on visits to Rome for meetings with the Ecclesia Dei Commission and the various Roman Congregations, where his facility with languages was particularly helpful.

At the 19th General Assembly in Rome in 2009, the Federation was, for the first time, granted permission for a Traditional Latin Mass in the upper Basilica of St Peter: previously, we had had to be content with Mass in the Crypt. It was celebrated in the Chapel of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple. The altar is the final resting place of St Pius X. Rodolfo had arranged for the celebrant, Mgr Pablo Colino Paulis, former Chapel Master of the Basilica and Director of the Capella Giuli Choir, whom he knew from his time studying music in Rome. Although it was intended to be a Low Mass, Monsignor turned to the delegates at the Kyrie and suggested that they sing – which we did with gusto. It was probably the first time a sung Latin Traditional Mass had been sung in the Basilica since 1970, and it attracted a number of visitors who came over to join the delegates.

In 2009, Rodolfo’s links with the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America proved of great value when he was contacted by associations in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru, which became members of the Federation. The following year, he was instrumental in welcoming groups from Cuba, Argentina, Honduras, and Portugal, and taking inquiries from Panama and Puerto Rico.

He had always suffered poor health and seemed to spend his entire life going from doctor to doctor and from hospital to hospital. From 2011, his problems grew worse, and it was for health reasons that he stood down from his role of Secretary. In all these troubles, his faith never wavered and he was more concerned for others. He worried about his ‘beloved Peru’ being ‘under attack from communist and terrorist forces with complicity of Latin-American red dictatorships and socialist governments’. He prayed that ‘Our Lady and Saint Rose of Lima have mercy on my other homeland’.

On 8th May 2024, because of failing health, he moved to Valencia to live initially with his brother while he convalesced; later, he rented a small house in Sueca, his mother’s birthplace. Unfortunately, he found that the nearest Traditional Latin Mass was in Valencia, some 22 miles away, and he was too infirm to travel. He thanked God that the parishes kept ‘a decent Eucharistic worship and the celebrations were quite correct’. He was also consoled that the local churches were beautiful and very traditional.

He died on 31st August 2025 and his funeral Mass was celebrated at the Church of Our Lady of Carmen, Sueca. He is buried in the Sueca cemetery. The International Federation Una Voce has many reasons to be thankful for the presence and devoted service of Rodolfo Vargas Rubio, and we mourn his passing.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace.

– Leo Darroch. With appreciation to Alfonso Vargas Rubio and Monsignor Jose-Apeles Santolaria de Puey y Cruells for important contributions.

Rodolfo serves Mass for Mgr Colino in the Chapel of the Presentation of Our Lady

Una Voce is the magazine of Una Voce France

From Una Voce, the magazine of Una Voce France, number 352, June-August 2025

This edition devotes a series of articles to the cult of the Sacred Heart, in this 350th anniversary year of the apparitions of St Margaret Mary at Paray-le-Monial.

The Cult of the Sacred Heart Today

by Anne-Marie Epitalon

This jubilee year of the apparitions of the Sacred Heart to St Margaret Mary at Paray-le-Monial reminds us of the importance of this devotion, which is too often wrongly associated with a sentimental spirituality. The Sacred Heart is the fleshly heart of Our Lord. Throughout history, the heart has been the symbol of love. The Sacred Heart symbolizes Jesus’ human love for His Father and for us, as well as the divine love for us, since humanity is united with divinity in Jesus. The entire history of salvation is explained by God’s infinite love for mankind. This is why Pope Pius XII wrote on 15th May 1956: ‘The devotion to the Sacred Heart is not just any form of piety that one could underestimate, but the perfect expression of the Christian religion’. It is true that until the seventeenth century there was no developed doctrine on the Sacred Heart, but merely a simple presence of the Heart of Jesus in the

lives of Christians. The source of this devotion is found in the Gospels, when the Heart of Jesus was pierced by the soldier’s lance: ‘Then when he came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, he did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out’ (Jn 19:33-34).

Even though the early Christians did not explicitly venerate the Sacred Heart of Jesus, they recognised the immensity of God’s love and Christ’s love for humanity. However, from the very first centuries, the Church Fathers looked at the wound in Christ’s side and saw the Church being born from it. This devotion would be relayed and spread by numerous saints: in the eleventh century, St Bernard; in the thirteenth century, the Benedictines St Mechtilde and St Gertrude, who loved to contemplate the Heart of their Master with a joyful piety; in the fourteenth century, St Catherine of Siena; in the sixteenth century, St Teresa of Avila; and in the seventeenth century, St John Eudes, who introduced this devotion into the liturgy. During the same period, when the Christian faith was shaken by Protestantism and Jansenism, and when piety had waned, it was through St Margaret Mary that Jesus chose to

manifest the riches of His Heart. This devotion has continued to spread to this day, and bears many fruits of conversion.

The jubilee year of the apparitions at Paray has reminded us of the importance of this devotion for today’s Christians, particularly through Pope Francis’ encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Dilexit nos (2024), 214: ‘The wounded side of Christ continues to pour forth that stream which is never exhausted, never passes away, but offers itself time and time again to all those who wish to love as he did’.

More recently, our new Pope Leo XIV addressed the Conference of Bishops of France in May 2025, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the canonisation of St John Eudes, St JohnMarie Vianney, and St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, to reaffirm the necessity of drawing from this source of life and charity in order to awaken hope and inspire a new missionary fervour among Catholics. Leo XIV reminds us that these three saints drew their strength to fulfil their mission from the love of the Heart of Jesus: ‘Is not St John Eudes the first to have celebrated the liturgical worship of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary? Is not St John-Marie Vianney the passionately devoted priest who asserted, “The

priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus”? And finally, is not St Thérèse of the Child Jesus the great Doctor in the Science of Love that our world so desperately needs? ... God can, with the help of the saints He has given you, and whom you celebrate, renew the wonders He has accomplished in the past’.

Let us not hesitate today to dedicate ourselves to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to draw the necessary graces to persevere in Faith, Hope, and Charity, which are essential for the new missionary impetus to which the Pope invites us. ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus, I trust in You; Sacred Heart of Jesus, make my heart like unto Thine; Sacred Heart of Jesus, reign over France!’

Testimony of pilgrims – Jubilee pilgrimage to Paray-le-Monial

At the shrine of the Sacred Heart of Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, a jubilee was celebrated from 27th December 2023 to 27th June 2025, to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the apparitions of Jesus to St Margaret Mary. This jubilee provided a special opportunity to undertake a pilgrimage to the Chapel of the Apparitions at the Monastery of the Visitation.

In the seventeenth century, Christ revealed His Heart to Sister Margaret Mary, a nun of the Order of the Visitation in Paray-le-Monial, which is now part of the Saône-et-Loire department in the Diocese of Autun. The three principal apparitions took place on 27th December 1673, on the first Friday of a month in 1674, and in June 1675.

The message has three dimensions: Jesus reveals His Heart, which has loved the world so greatly, filled with passionate love for all mankind; He laments receiving only ingratitude and indifference in return; and He asks for reparation for this lack of love, notably through the establishment of a feast to honour His Divine Heart. Thus, returning love for love means welcoming Jesus’ personal love for each of us, repairing the lack of love that He endures, and entering into the compassion of His Heart for those who are in great need of consolation. A jubilee approach is an invitation to begin a journey to respond to Jesus’ call: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, for I am gentle and humble in heart’ (Mt 11:28). Passing through the jubilee door is to enter into the Heart of Jesus to be profoundly renewed in our baptised lives and to give Him love for love.

St Margaret Mary and the Apparitions of the Sacred Heart

by Catherine Bosson

Jesus loves to entrust great treasures to humble creatures, fragile and even ignorant. Our saint from Paray-leMonial is one of those humble beings to whom Jesus revealed the fervour of His love. We shall delve into the significant events of her existence, then pause to consider the main ‘revelations’ that Jesus imparted to our saint, and finally we will outline how we can respond to this message of the Sacred Heart.

Historical context

St Margaret Mary was the daughter of Philiberte and Claude Alacoque, a royal judge and notary in Charolais, Burgundy. They already had three sons when, on 22nd July 1647, a girl was born, who was given the name Margaret at her baptism, three days after her birth.

At that time in France, the reign of Louis XIII (1601-43) came to an end and the Regency of his wife, Queen Anne of Austria, began, and continued

until 1651. The long-awaited heir to the crown, Louis XIV, was born in 1638, after twenty-three years of his parents’ childless marriage. This long-awaited birth was the result of the intercession requested by Brother Fiacre before Our Lady of Graces, to whom the religious performed three novenas of prayer to obtain ‘an heir for the crown of France’. In gratitude to the Virgin for this unborn child, the king signed the Vow of Louis XIII, dedicating the kingdom of France

to the Virgin Mary and making 15th August a public holiday throughout the kingdom. In 1660, Louis XIV and his mother would go in person to Cotignac to pray and thank the Virgin.

At the age of four or five, Margaret spent an extended stay with her godmother, Madame de Fautrières. For the first time, she heard about a life dedicated to God and religious vows, since Marie-Bénigne de Fautrières, her godmother’s daughter, was a nun at the Visitation of Ste-Marie in Parayle-Monial. The little girl felt a constant urge to say and repeat these words: ‘O my God, I consecrate my purity to Thee, I make a vow of perpetual chastity’. One day, she uttered this formula during the two elevations of the Mass. These words acquired such significance in her eyes that she recalled them, twenty years later, as having marked her life.

After the early death of her father (in 1655, when Margaret was only eight years old), Madame Alacoque had to face serious material concerns and could no longer care for her children, who went to boarding school. Margaret was sent to school at the Clarisses of Charolles. Everywhere, her fervour and love for the Most Holy Virgin were noticed. Every day, she recited the rosary with extraordinary devotion. However, a long illness interrupted her studies when she was eleven years old, and forced her to leave the convent of Charolles. She remained paralyzed in her bed for four years. The child then promised Mary that she would one day become a nun if she recovered her health. ‘As soon as I made this vow’, Margaret would say, ‘I received healing’. This miracle inspired a new surge of Marian piety in her heart: ‘The Holy Virgin’, she tells us, ‘then became the mistress of my heart ... She governed me as being dedicated to her, corrected me for my faults, and taught me to do the will of God’.

Upon her recovery, Margaret and her mother were compelled to leave their home and take refuge with the paternal grandmother, who was also joined by an aunt and the latter’s motherin-law. The three of them claimed absolute rights over Margaret and her mother. Margaret was treated worse than the servants, who themselves were mistreated by these terrible women. However, Our Lord comforted her and made her understand that He

had chosen her to share in His painful Passion: ‘I wish to make Myself present to your soul to enable you to act as I have acted in the midst of the cruel sufferings endured out of love for you’. Margaret would later say: ‘One must often delight the adorable Heart of Jesus with this dish so delightful to His taste, I mean the precious humiliations, contempt, and abjections with which He nourishes His most faithful friends here below’.

When Margaret was eighteen years old, her relatives, particularly her mother, considered arranging her marriage. The young girl enjoyed worldly celebrations, and this influenced her calling. Finally, after six years of struggle, she decisively chose to enter religious life. On 26th May 1671, she went to the Visitation of Ste-Marie at Paray-le-Monial. As soon as she entered the parlour, an inner voice assured her: ‘This is where I want you’. A month later, she entered this monastery for good. On 25th August of the same year, Margaret received the religious habit and added the name of Mary to her baptismal name. On 6th November 1672, she made her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. She was assigned the role of caregiver at the infirmary.

From December 1673, shortly after her first vows, Margaret Mary began to receive revelations from Jesus regarding the Sacred Heart. A long path of suffering opened up for her, as her superior and the other sisters took her for a madwoman, subjecting her to terrible humiliations and vexations. However, from 1675 to 1678, a Jesuit priest, Claude La Colombière (who has been beatified), was appointed to Paray-le-Monial, and he was able to soothe her and make her understand that they were both called to the same mission: to better make known God’s love for His children.

Margaret Mary completely yielded to Jesus as He had requested of her, and she was appointed mistress of novices until 1686. Her novices admired her and quickly became attached to her; to celebrate St Margaret, they organized a surprise in the novitiate hall and created a large pencil drawing representing the Sacred Heart. The novices took turns all day reflecting in front of this image, represented for the first time. Gradually, devotion to the Sacred Heart developed within the convent, and one day in the refectory, a message by Father La

Colombière, now deceased, was read, in which he recounted the requests made by the Heart of Jesus. In the monastery, a chapel dedicated to the Sacred Heart was completed in 1688. Margaret Mary continued to write down the promises that Jesus revealed to her, but she sensed that He would soon call her to Himself. She passed away on 17th October 1690, at the age of fortythree. (She was beatified in 1864 and canonized in 1920.)

The revelations of the Sacred Heart

On 27th December 1673, during the feast of St John the Evangelist, Margaret Mary was in the chapel. Jesus ‘made her rest long on His divine breast, where He revealed to her the wonders of His love and the inexplicable secrets of His Sacred Heart, which He had until then hidden from her’. Jesus also said to her: ‘My Divine Heart is so passionate in love for men, and for you in particular, that, unable to contain the flames of this ardent charity any longer, I must pour them out ... it is you I have chosen’.

From this day forward, Margaret Mary received the stigma of the wound of the lance inflicted on Jesus on the cross at her side. Jesus asked her to receive Holy Communion every first Friday of the month, and to unite with His agony in the Garden of Olives from 11 p.m. to midnight every Thursday, through a ‘holy hour’ of prayer and suffering in atonement for the sins of the world. Then Jesus requested that ‘a special feast be established to honour this love of my Heart for mankind, on the Friday following the week during which Corpus Christi is solemnized’.

Then the saint had other revelations, which she took care to note at the request of her confessors. Among the promises of devotion to the Sacred Heart, we can mention:

1 That all those who will be devoted and consecrated to Him will never perish

2 That, as He is the source of all blessings, He will abundantly pour them out in all places where the image of his Divine Heart will be set and honoured

3 That He will reunite divided families and protect and assist those who are in any need and who address themselves to Him with confidence

4 That He will pour the sweet anointing of His ardent charity upon all communities that honour Him and place themselves under His special protection

5 That He will divert all blows of divine justice from them to restore them to grace when they fall

The fifth promise concerns the apostles of the cult of the Sacred Heart: ‘My divine Master made me understand that those who work for the salvation of souls will work successfully and will have the art of touching the most hardened hearts, if they have a tender devotion to His Sacred Heart, and if they work to inspire and establish it everywhere’.

Then in 1675, there came what is called the ‘great promise’. The feast of Corpus Christi had just been celebrated and Margaret Mary remained as much as possible in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament. Pointing to his heart, Jesus said to her: ‘Behold this Heart that has loved men so much that it spared nothing, even exhausting and consuming itself to bear witness to its love; and instead of gratitude, I receive from most only ingratitude, indifference, and even contempt in this sacrament [the Eucharist]. But I suffer even more when it is consecrated souls who act this way’. He added: ‘I promise you, in the excessive mercy of my Heart, that my all-powerful love will grant to all those who receive communion on the nine first Fridays of the month in succession, my grace of final penitence, not dying in my disgrace and without receiving their sacraments, my Divine Heart becoming a sure refuge at the last moment’.

In what ways can we respond to the requests of the Sacred Heart?

‘If you only knew’, Jesus said to Sister Margaret Mary, ‘how much I thirst to be loved by men, you would spare nothing: “I thirst, I burn with desire to be loved!”’ The love of Christ compels us, says St Paul (2 Corinthians 5:14); it especially compels us to return love for love.

A privileged means of manifesting our love for Jesus is to honour Him in the Most Holy Eucharist. ‘I have a burning thirst’, Jesus confided to our saint, ‘to be honoured and loved by men in the Most Blessed Sacrament, and I find almost no one who strives, according to my desire, to quench my thirst by

making some return to me’. Our Lord particularly desires that Christians receive Him in Holy Communion in a spirit of reparation, offering to the Eternal Father His Heart, truly present under the Eucharistic species.

We understand what a devotion to the Sacred Heart will consist in. Does God love us? The devotion to the Sacred Heart makes us love Him in return. Are men ungrateful? The devotion will consist of loving Him greatly to repair, comfort, and make reparation. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor of 8th May 1928, on the Sacred Heart, wrote: ‘The creature must offer, regarding uncreated love, a compensation for the indifference, forgetfulness, offences, outrages, and insults it endures: this is what is commonly called the duty of reparation’. The Pope says this consolation is mysterious but very real. And he quotes the words of Scripture that are put on the lips of Our Lord: ‘I looked for someone to grieve with me, but no one came; I looked for someone to comfort me, but I found no one’ (Ps 68:21).

To concretely repair the ingratitude of man towards the Sacred Heart, the Pope recalled the devotion of the first Fridays of the month, which consists of making a reparative communion. St Margaret Mary explains: ‘My Divine Saviour commanded me to receive communion on the first Fridays of each month, to repair, as much as possible, the outrages He has suffered throughout the month in the Most Holy Sacrament’. The saint often experienced the power of reparative communion

herself to soften the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In order to make such a communion, it is advisable to confess within eight days before or after it.

Always with the aim of making reparations, we can also attend the Holy Hour before the exposed Blessed Sacrament. Our Lord said to his apostles in the Garden of Olives: ‘So, could you not stay awake one hour with me?’ (Mt 26:40). May our presence before the altar allow us to respond affirmatively. To console the Sacred Heart, we can also strive to practise fraternal charity, which Our Lord has elaborated on. Finally, a great means of comforting Our Lord is found in the enthronement of the Sacred Heart in families. Father Matéo, from the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, to whom we owe this practice, declares: ‘It can be stated, in all truth, that in opposition to the campaign of social apostasy, enthronement is a true act of reparation’.

The enthronement in families is an official and social recognition that the king of the family is the Sacred Heart. This recognition is made visible by the solemn installation of the image of the Sacred Heart in a place of honour. It is also made lasting by an act of consecration of the family to the Sacred Heart.

He also invites us to pray as a family before his image: ‘There is the Eucharistic tabernacle, there must be the family tabernacle. If you need a God to worship in a temple, you also need a God to pray to in your homes’. The Cult of the Sacred Heart, although it had been initiated well before St Margaret Mary, saw tremendous growth after her death; it is hard to count the publications, confraternities, and orders that placed themselves under its protection and spread its devotion across all continents. St Margaret Mary would have wanted Louis XIV to consecrate his kingdom to the Sacred Heart; he did not, and France paid a heavy price. However, in July 1873, the National Assembly voted for a law to build what is called the basilica of the National Vow, the basilica of the Sacred Heart in Montmartre, where Adoration is perpetual.

Finally, in 1899, Pope Leo XIII made the consecration of mankind to the Sacred Heart an official act of the Church. On the feast of Christ the King, in front of the exposed Blessed Sacrament, one can renew this act of consecration.

St Margaret Mary

Dominus Vobiscum is the magazine of Pro Missa Tridentina Germany

The following contribution is the slightly revised manuscript of the lecture given at the Pro Missa Tridentina General Assembly on 10th May 2025 in Frankfurt. This is a shortened translation for Gregorius Magnus.

On the Divine Virtue of Hope

by Dr Sebastian Ostritsch

What is hope? A first approach

What does it actually mean to hope? In a common usage of the term, ‘to hope’ is merely a synonym for ‘to wish’. When someone starts a message with the words ‘I hope you are doing well’, they are articulating a wish: essentially, ‘I do not know how you are, but I would be pleased if you were doing well’.

As Josef Pieper noted in his essay ‘On Faith’, the proper and unique meaning of a word becomes clear where it cannot be replaced by another without changing the meaning of the sentence.1 In the case of hope, to hope for something is to orient oneself with full confidence towards that thing in the future. However, there is more to Christian hope, which – like charity and faith – is

a ‘theological’ or ‘divine’ virtue. Both the concept of virtue and the adjective ‘divine’ (or ‘theological’) require further explanation.

What is virtue?

The best and primary reference point for clarifying the concept of virtue is and remains the ethics of Aristotle. It is the questionable intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant that we equate the concept of morality – where we take it seriously at all –with an unconditional duty; a duty that does not concern itself with whether it contributes to our personal happiness or not. In contrast, Aristotle’s virtue ethics begins with the question of the highest good for man, eudaimonia. The common translation of eudaimonia as ‘happiness’ is, however, only partially correct. For it involves, contrary to what the English word may suggest, something more than a mere feeling.

For feelings are fleeting, but the highest good of man must be something enduring. Eudaimonia refers to the good, flourishing life as a whole. However, what constitutes a good, flourishing life cannot be discussed with regard to humanity without first understanding what man essentially is.

As a living being, man possesses a physical, sensory side, which he shares

partially with plants and partially with animals. However, what distinguishes man from plants and animals, thereby marking him as a human being, is that he possesses a rational soul. A rational person is so in two respects. On one hand, he is capable of shaping his natural strivings, his affections, desires, and passions, in accordance with reason. On the other hand, humans possess intellectual or cognitive abilities. In other words, man can think and reflect. This dual aspect of rationality makes humans human. Therefore, an individual leads the life most suited to him when he realizes this rational nature in the most excellent manner possible. In doing so, a person expresses in every respect what he fundamentally is, namely, an animal rationale, a rational being.

With the term ‘excellence’, we are already touching upon virtue. For the Greek word aretē, which we translate as ‘virtue’, fundamentally means ‘excellence’. Therefore, the virtuous person is nothing other than an excellent person, one who embodies what it means to be human in an outstanding way. But what does it concretely mean to be virtuous? Virtues come in two forms, corresponding to the two ways the soul is rational. The so-called intellectual virtues pertain to excellence in reasoning and thinking, while ethical virtues relate to the rational handling

of our passions (such as fear, for example). To be virtuous, in this latter case, means to find the right balance in dealing with them.

This balance is not an absolute, quasi-arithmetic average. Instead, it concerns the golden mean between two destructive extremes, that of too much and too little. In the example of fear, this means: Those who know how to find and maintain the right measure in dealing with a frightening situation are courageous. In contrast, an excess of fear is cowardice, while a lack of appropriate fear is foolhardiness – and both excess and defect are considered vices rather than virtues. What is cowardly, foolhardy, or courageous depends on the specific circumstances, including the nature of the actor: A well-trained police officer who fails to confront a perpetrator will incur accusations of cowardice, whereas an unsuspecting layperson who runs into a burning house that has been cordoned off by the fire service is acting foolhardily.

However, being virtuous is not merely about hitting the right mean occasionally. Rather, virtue requires a virtuous character or habit (habitus), which enables a person to consistently strike the right mean in a stable manner. Therefore, virtue ethics is less concerned with merely doing the right thing and more focused on ‘the rightness of the person’, as articulated by Josef Pieper.2 We refer to someone as virtuous only when the virtues have become second nature to him, when they have been ingrained in his very being.

Is worldly hope a virtue?

Against the backdrop of this brief virtue-ethical sketch, we can now turn to the question of whether natural (that is, not theological) hope can indeed be considered a virtue. First, let us ask whether natural hope can be conceived as a mean between two extremes. One can certainly affirm this. For there is both an excess and a deficiency of hope. Those who have too much hope are naïve, out-of-touch optimists. They will inevitably fall flat on their faces with this attitude. After all, there are situations where scepticism towards fellow humans, societal institutions, or oneself is warranted.

On the other hand, those who have too little hope will close themselves off from their fellow human beings.

Their lack of hope that the world could treat them well will prevent them from seizing the opportunities that arise.

But what does the right measure of worldly hope look like? Natural hope, as a middle ground between naïve optimism and bitter pessimism, should be such that one expects bad things yet can still accept that bad as part of a life worthy of affirmation. But this cannot be considered a moral virtue, because it is not necessarily oriented towards something good.3 A bank robber may be filled with hope of getting away with his crime, yet the objectively good outcome – even for him – would be that this hope is not realised. As Josef Pieper comments: ‘Hope can, in the natural realm, also turn towards the objectively evil, without thereby ceasing to be truly hope’.4

The supernatural virtue of hope

Whereas natural hope is directed towards earthly things, theological hope pertains to God. More precisely, according to Aquinas, it is directed towards being with God, towards the vision of God, inasmuch as it entails eternal happiness (beatitudo aeterna).5 Since God is not only good but Goodness itself, the hope directed towards Him cannot be morally misguided like secular hope. Therefore, supernatural hope fulfils the requirement of virtue,

which is to always be directed towards the objective good. In order for us to truly speak of a virtue, the confident orientation towards God must not be a one-time act. Virtues are, after all, stable character traits. Thus, the supernatural virtue of hope must involve a stable attitude, consisting in the confidence of attaining eternal happiness with God.

The theological virtues – faith, charity, and hope – possess certain particularities in comparison with the ordinary moral virtues. One notable characteristic is the manner in which they are acquired. While moral virtues are developed through moral education, ethical training, and ultimately through habituation, the divine virtues cannot be acquired through natural means. Rather, they are gifts of grace from God, infused into the soul of man by Him.

The theological virtues are not, in the same manner, a mean between extremes as the moral virtues are. For while there can be an excess of fear or courage, there is no excess of supernatural hope: we cannot

1. See Josef Pieper, Über den Glauben [On faith] (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag, 2010), ch. 1, 13–28.

2. Josef Pieper, Das Viergespann [The cardinal virtues], 6th ed. (München: Kösel, 1991), 9.

3. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (ST) I-II, q. 55, a. 3.

4. Josef Pieper, Über die Hoffnung [On hope], 3rd ed. (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag, 2022), 27.

5. See ST II-II, q. 17, a. 2.

The Creation, by Melchior Bocksberger (1575)

believe, love, and hope too much. However, what this hope refers to is solely God’s assistance – for we can never overestimate this. What we can certainly overestimate, though, is our own contribution to the hoped-for state of being with God. Only in this sense can there be both an excess of hope – that is, presumptuousness (praesumptio) – and a lack of hope – which is despair (desperatio).

The presumptuous individual is certain of his eternal salvation, completely independent of whether and how he accepts God’s grace. One of the clearest expressions of this presumption might consist in living with the false certainty that hell is, under all circumstances, empty. As Pieper has shown, presumption can take two forms. The first is, in a sense, Pelagian in nature and is based on the misconception that a person can achieve his salvation through righteous deeds. For Pieper, this is the expression of a ‘typically liberal-bourgeois moralism’, which holds the belief that ‘a “decent” and “orderly” person, who “does his duty”, will – solely based on his personal moral performance – also “be declared righteous before God”.’6 The other, opposing form of presumption lies in the heresy that the free acceptance of and consent to God’s gift of grace plays no role in the process of salvation.7

The despairing person, on the other hand, suffers from the opposite deception. He believes his own corruption to be so great that God could not possibly atone for it through His grace. To live in this despair is, according to a saying of Isidore of Seville, to ‘descend into hell’.8 According to Aquinas, it is the damned who live forever in hopelessness. Thus, it is part of the ‘unfortunate condition of the damned that they are aware that they can escape damnation in no way and cannot attain bliss’.9 Or to embellish an image made known by C.S. Lewis: the damned have not only locked hell from the inside but they have also thrown away the key. One can better understand the sin of despair when one considers its two roots with the help of St Thomas Aquinas.10

On the one hand, despair can be a consequence of hedonism (luxuria). The hedonist may derive such pleasure from worldly sensory delights that he even loses the desire for supernatural happiness, i.e., for eternal life in communion with God. In this case, despair manifests itself in the form of a person who says: ‘Life here on earth is so beautiful and fulfilling that I feel no longing for eternity’. The second possibility of how despair can arise is lethargy (acedia). This vice is more than mere laziness or sluggishness. Aquinas defines it as tristitia quaedam deiectiva spiritus, as ‘a kind of sadness that casts down the spirit’.11 The difficult-to-attain

goal of eternal life seems unattainable to the man subject to acedia – and neither man nor God can seemingly change that.

At the same time, despair is paradoxically not only a religious sin but above all a decidedly Christian sin. Or perhaps better said: in the despair that only a Christian can fall into, there is expressed a spiritual-religious depth that transcends everything one could associate with the despair of a pagan person. This is because despair is the sinful mirror image of the supernatural virtue of hope, which envisions for humans an infinite, allencompassing future happiness. ‘For the same lightning that reveals to us the reality of supernatural grace’, as Pieper states, ‘also illuminates the abyss of creaturely estrangement from God and sin’.12

Even though they may be accompanied by emotional or mood-related hues, hope, despair, and presumption are not, in truth, emotions or affections but acts of will, movements of will. This point may initially sound purely theoretical, but it also has practical relevance. First, regarding the theory: Aquinas distinguishes between different faculties of the human soul. One of these is the appetite, which is directed towards the good or what is perceived as good. The appetite is further divided into a sensual and an intellectual part. The sensual striving faculty is accompanied by passions: here, fear, anger, sorrow, and so forth come into play. The intellectual appetite, on the other hand, is the will –and it is independent of the affections. Hope, insofar as it is directed towards an invisible, immaterial, supersensible God, cannot possibly be assigned to sensual appetite but only to the intellectual – that is to say, to the will. The same holds true for the aberrations of hope: presumption and despair.

So much for the theory. It is practically relevant because it follows from it that despair is not something one ‘falls into’, as Pieper writes, ‘but rather something that one commits to’. Thus, there is freedom at play! The same is of course true in the case of presumption and hope. With hope, it can only be considered a virtue – even if it is one infused by God – because it involves an act of free will on the part of the individual. Conversely, despair and presumption are sins precisely insofar as individuals freely consent to them.

6. Pieper, Über die Hoffnung, 70.

7. Ibid., 7.

8. Quoted by Pieper, Über die Hoffnung, 49.

9. ST II-II, q. 18, a. 3.

10. ST II-II, q. 20, a. 4c.

11. Ibid.

12. Pieper, Über die Hoffnung, 52.

Hope and the status viatoris

Starting from the theological virtue of hope, it can be clarified in what way we are ‘pilgrims of hope’ or at least should be, as the motto of this year’s Holy Year proclaims. Our entire earthly existence is a pilgrimage. This characterizes the true condition of our existence. According to Christian teaching, we are in a status viatoris. The viator is the wayfarer, this our fate during our earthly lives.13 Only after his death does the final state of man begin – the status comprehensoris, the comprehensor being one who has reached his goal and encompasses it.14

Human beings are, by nature, striving individuals. In their pursuit of the good, they do not seek a chaotic multiplicity of goods but rather a well-ordered hierarchy of goods, at the pinnacle of which stands that which is unequivocally worthy of pursuit: something that represents the complete fulfilment of all our aspirations and actions. This is the aforementioned happiness (eudaimonia), which consists in a good and flourishing life.

The anthropological insight that man strives for happiness (eudaimonia) has been adopted by Christianity from Aristotle. However, the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages also recognised that Aristotle’s philosophy, which is limited to this world, offers only an incomplete happiness. In contrast, Aquinas is also aware of the perfect, superhuman, angel-like happiness that is available to man, provided he does not reject God’s offer of grace.

By understanding human earthly life as a being-on-the-way, our creatureliness is likewise emphasized. Creation is not a one-time event but a continuous happening: God sustains His creation from timeless eternity in every moment of existence. This means: Without God, man has no self-subsistence; without his Creator, the creature would fall back into nothingness.

God is not only the origin of man and the cause that continuously sustains his

existence: God is also the true and ultimate goal of man; man is created towards God. The purpose for which he has been called into existence is nothing less than the vision of the Almighty Himself, a vision that ultimately signifies the spiritually loving communion between creature and Creator.

The being-on-the-way of the human creature is, as Pieper states, an ontological ‘Not-Yet’ – and this ‘Not-Yet’ has both a negative and a positive aspect. On its negative side, it signifies the possibility of approaching the nothingness from which humanity was created. This occurs through the turning away from God, which simultaneously is a voluntary turning towards the utter insignificance of one’s own existence. In this orientation towards the nothingness, which is most likely to occur unconsciously, lives the hopeless human. In the worst case, he is not even aware of his hopelessness.

What becomes of the man who has lived from hope and thus receives salvation? For him, hope comes to an end as soon as he has been definitively ushered into the timeless presence of God. Although hope is thus suspended, it is in a different sense from that of condemnation: hope becomes obsolete in heaven because it has been fully realized. In its place arises the beatific certainty of the vision of God. This is the longed-for transition from the status viatoris to the status comprehensoris, as anticipated by those who hope.

A final objection

However, the Not-Yet of humanity also has a positive side, as mentioned: it consists in the orientation towards future fulfilment, the ultimate overcoming of nothingness through eternal communion with God. The theological virtue of hope is nothing other than the firm orientation towards this future salvation. At the same time, hope already contains a present anticipation of the hoped-for state for the future. A person who lives in and from hope lives differently in the here and now from one who exists without hope. The person filled with hope may lead his life with an awareness of his potential nothingness, but simultaneously with the trust that he will escape this nothingness and instead will ultimately enter into the fullness of God’s being.

According to these two aspects of the Not-Yet, there are two definitive states of human existence that mutually exclude each other: damnation and salvation. In one of these, the earthly pilgrimage of man comes to its end. Damnation consists of an endless continuation of existence apart from the fullness of God. Although even the damned, insofar as they exist at all, still have a share in God, their existence is now entirely characterized by sinful futility, by nothingness. Therefore, it can only be a correspondingly dark, shadowy existence – precisely a state of definitive hopelessness.

In conclusion, I would like to briefly address a pertinent objection to living in and from hope. Does theological hope not lead to a devaluation of earthly life? Do we not reduce our existence in this life to a mere means to an end when we understand it as a pilgrimage, the ultimate goal of which lies beyond this life? Does this not amount to an instrumentalisation and thus a devaluation of earthly existence?

This objection is based on a misunderstanding. It is indeed true that every desirable good ultimately receives its goodness from God. Therefore, being with God – the beatifying vision of God – is the ultimate goal of human striving. However, this does not imply that there are no other subordinate goods that we should not also value for their own sake. Honour and pleasure, for instance, are desired for their own sake – but at the same time also in order to achieve happiness in the broader sense. A similar relationship holds for certain activities: art, music, play, or philosophical contemplation, for example, are pursuits that can be meaningful and fulfilling in themselves, which we nevertheless also engage in because they contribute to a fulfilled life.

Thus, the earthly life also possesses an intrinsic value: God has given us this life because it is inherently good, just as the entire order of creation is good. This is already attested to in the creation account of Genesis: ‘God saw that it was good’. However, this intrinsic value of earthly life does not preclude the fact that we have not yet reached our ultimate goal on earth. The best that God has planned for us still awaits us – and the confident expectation that we can attain this best, despite our creaturely proximity to nothingness, is hope.

13. Ibid., 13. 14. Ibid., 11f.

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Josef Pieper (1904-1997)

The Little Flower, magazine of Una Voce Nigeria

This is also the magazine of St Therese of the Child Jesus School, established with assistance from Una Voce Nigeria.

Interview with Fr Angelo Van der Putten, FSSP

by Uchenna Okezie

Little Flower: Good morning, Father. We’re interviewing you for the Little Flower Magazine. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Since the last time we spoke with you, how have things been going at the school?

Fr Angelo Van der Putten: Wonderful. I think we can say that this past year especially has been very successful. We’ve had wonderful results. The children have been obviously very influenced by what they’ve learned in school. The Sisters have been tremendous. We can’t really complain, I think, in any way. I mean, the Sisters have been full-time. They’re committed to continuing that. And the teachers are all wonderful and they’re getting better at doing their job, so they’re learning and experiencing, so experiential knowledge. They’re gaining wisdom. They’re getting to know the children better. The children are getting to understand what we want. So I think it’s really wonderful. Things are going very well. We can’t complain. And I think this year is going to be even better in the sense that we have nine more children. And since the teachers and the children already in the school know what to expect and what’s expected of them, then bringing these other children into the school is not going to be an issue. The first year, we had trouble because we didn’t know where to set the children. There’s all kinds of ages and grades and everything. But that’s all been streamlined now. So I think it’ll be a great year.

LF: Wonderful. Would you say there has been an improvement in the cooperation of the parents?

Father: I think so, yes. Like I say, with the teachers and the students, they’re both understanding better, as time goes on, what is expected of them and what to expect from each other. And I think the parents as well. Clearly, the parents are seeing the consequences, the evidence of what is being done in the school. And they come to the parents’ conferences three times a year and they’re reminded of what is expected of them. And I think to a large extent, they’re more cooperative. They’re seeing the tangible results of the education. So I think it’s good. I don’t think we have too much to be concerned about.

LF: All right, great. That’s good to hear. How do you measure the success of the school?

Father: Well, I think it’s very simple. You just walk into the compound and the children are all happy and they’re running around joyfully. They’re smiling, they’re open, obviously very happy. So I think that’s the number one indicator, the happiness of the children. The teachers are happy. And when the parents come to pick up the children, the children are still happy. And then you hear the stories from the parents about the children correcting the parents at home with things that the Sisters and the teachers have told them. So clearly, the education is having a huge influence on the children. And then the children go home and correct their parents. So I think it’s absolutely wonderful.

LF: Great. So how are you doing with finances?

Father: Well, that’s always a tough one, of course. We just had to spend another million naira on booklets. So that’s always a challenge. We have benefactors from Nigeria who graciously help to support the church. But of course, the school fees are simply not equitable with regard to the expenses that we put in the school. The secretary of the school was expressing to me his amazement just the other day about what we have in the school; not only do we have running water constantly in all the toilets and sinks on a regular, constant basis, but we also have toilet tissue, which he said is just simply not existent in any other school. So everything is going well. I don’t think we can complain.

LF: Awesome. So is there anything else you’d like our readers to hear from you?

Father: Well, I think if they come, if people come to see what we’re doing, they will be deeply impressed. And of course, obviously we thank the benefactors, because without them we wouldn’t have a school. But I think if they continue to pray and then if they ever get a chance to come in to walk through the classrooms and see the children and the joy that permeates the school, I think they would be deeply impressed and very appreciative of what we’re doing. So, continue to pray, continue to financially support us, and we’ll see the fruits. We’re seeing the fruits already, so it’s beautiful.

LF: Thank you, Father, and God bless. God bless you.

How Should We Educate Our Children?

Extracted from “50 Days with Fr VdP”

by Uchenna Okezie

The education of children is the responsibility God Himself has given to parents. It is not a duty that can be outsourced to anyone else. Just as you cannot have someone else take your place in the marital act, you cannot have your children be educated by a hireling. A good school is supposed to be only an extension of the Catholic home. This is because Mummy has already started teaching her little child the ABCs, and the catechism and simple prayers, and how to walk and talk and smile and converse and do chores. Then, when the child is about five years old, he is sent to a good Catholic school to see that what Mummy and Daddy have taught them is the right way to live. In school, he is trained in discipline, and taught how to think, how to study, and how to love God. He is taught to know the truth, to always do good, and to notice, appreciate, and love the beautiful. God has created us to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him forever in the next. Any education that does not purposefully help the child achieve these goals is not true education. There is no reason for an education other than to make a person more pleasing to God.

You must recognise and acknowledge that the world is waging a heavy battle against the soul of your children. It is your duty to protect them and keep them in God. The smartphone is probably the most dangerous weapon the devil uses to indoctrinate your child. I do not see how any parent who allows his child unsupervised access to the Internet can be exempt from mortal sin.

You cannot send your child to any school that does not make the impacting of Catholic culture its priority. You must see to it that your child is immersed in a Catholic atmosphere and indoctrinated from the earliest age in truth, goodness, and beauty. Otherwise, you risk losing that child to the suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

There was a family we visited where one of the boys was arguing with Father about the existence of extra-terrestrial life. He could not see how stupid he was sounding and he insisted on his erroneous position because he has been taught in school to think this way. To change a mind like that is very difficult.

Homeschooling is the next best thing, where there is no good Catholic school available. Getting your children to attend a fine Catholic school is a worthwhile

reason to move. Why else would you choose to live in a certain place? Money?

Follow a schedule in your home. There should be a set time for rising and one for going to bed. There should be fixed meal times, rosary time, study time, and so on. The clock should guide our lives, and it pays to give your children the good example of obeying the clock yourselves. If one is able to order his life on external prompts as a schedule makes you do, it becomes easier to obey the commandments of God and His Church. Do not let your children know that you as a father do whatever you want, when you want to. There should be a good degree of predictability in your life. This helps to increase the trust your children have in you, and they learn discipline. The saints have said that if you succeed in getting out of bed at the same time every day, you have already accomplished half of the spiritual life.

There are four major elements that form the education of a child: good work, good play, study, and prayer.

Make your child work. Give him responsibility as soon as he can crawl. Constantly challenge your child. Do not do for him what he should be able to do by himself. Make the toddler discard

her diapers by herself. Make her pick up things for you and make her run simple chores. By the time the child is two years old, she is ready to water the plants. Teach her to perform these simple tasks and insist on her doing them by herself. Make the boys work with you on the farm, in the garage, in your workshop. Make them love work and work well. Teach them the discipline of producing excellent work always. No compromises. This way, the child grows up knowing that laziness is not an acceptable way of life. He matures quickly and is not afraid of responsibility. The second element is play. Invest in play. And by play I do not mean video games. Never encourage your children to play video or computer games. Do not allow those things in your home. They are horrible. Also, throw out the TV. It is the voice of the devil in the home. Instead, make the children explore and play with

nature. Buy land and have lots of space for the boys to run around and get lost. Encourage them to play outdoors and to do exciting things. Get a trampoline and have them jump on it and exercise their muscles. And when you spend time indoors, play board games that task the mind. Teach your kids to strive to win, but also to accept losses well. They should play fairly, lovingly, and diligently. You can accomplish more character formation on the playing field than you can by praying 15 decades of the rosary in the chapel every day.

The next element is study. Your child should have a curiosity for the things God has created. She should want to know the names of the flowers, the names of the different kinds of animals, how our body systems work, and how God has designed this orderly world. It is your duty as her parents to nurture this curiosity. It is a sign of gratitude to God, Who has created all things well, that we seek to learn about them to better appreciate them. Your child needs to polish his natural gifts so he can better use them for the glory of God. This is where reading comes in. (John Senior’s list of the thousand great books is a wonderful guide to good reading. You can find it in the last chapter of his book The Death of Christian Culture.) Reading exfoliates the mind and sharpens it for the appreciation of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Teach your child to enjoy spiritual reading. He should also read the lives of the saints. The saints are the real heroes, not these silly Marvel characters that are being socially engineered into

your children’s imaginations. Every child wants to be Superman and Spiderman. Who wants to be St Benedict Labre or St Therese of the Child Jesus?

The last major element in your child’s education is prayer. Prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God. ‘Raising up’ means that, due to our fallen human nature, it requires some effort to lift our minds from mundane things and focus them on the good God. To make a habit of prayer requires constant practice from the earliest age. So the parent should often speak of God to the children, and remind them to offer up their pains and frustrations. For example, you can teach your little toddler to say ‘Deo gratias’ whenever he cries from pain. This way, the child begins to realise, little by little, that we have been created for another world and are only sojourners in this temporary world. Place many holy images and statues around the home and teach your kids to venerate some of these images, perhaps with a simple bow, when they pass them. This helps to keep the presence of God in their consciousness. Teach them the catechism and have them memorize as much of it as they can. Pray the rosary as a family every single day, without fail. Only 5 decades a day, not 15. Do not make family prayers too long. Short morning prayers, short night prayers, grace before and after meals, and the family rosary at the same time every evening.

Take the kids to daily Mass and insist they behave themselves. No crying in the church, no chatting, no slouching. They

Confirmations conferred by Bishop Thomas Obiatuegwu, an auxiliary bishop.

must kneel when you kneel and stand when you stand. Teach them to reverence the Divine Presence even when they do not yet know what It means. Take your family with you as much as possible to parish communal devotions: Stations of the Cross, parish rosary, Benediction, potlucks. Go with your children to devotions. Don’t just send them off to Block Rosary to go and pray while you sit in the shop and make money. They would grow up to be like you, chasing money and not having time to pray. Your kids must not learn from your example that church devotions are for kids and that adults have more important things to worry about. If you need to adjust your lifestyle to allow you to go with your children to church, trust me, it is totally worth it. I know the logistics of carrying little children around all the time can be a huge inconvenience but this is what you signed up for when you answered God’s call to get married. The kids need all the good influence they can get, so do not hesitate to take them with you to visit priests, attend ordinations, or things of the sort.

The most important education to give your child is to make him to never do his own will. Never let your child do his will. He must do your will. This is difficult to achieve because crushing anyone’s will involves a lot of pain. So insist that the baby sleeps when you say she must sleep (I recommend 7 p.m. every evening, so that the husband and wife can get to spend plenty of time

alone before they sleep). Train your child to keep quiet when you say so and to obey all simple instructions you issue. Come, sit down, stand up, kneel down, eat your food, keep quiet, go to Mummy, and so on. Your child should never disobey you from the time he is seven months old. Each time he disobeys you, or anyone else for that matter, he should immediately receive a painful punishment.

Finally, allow your children to spend plenty of time around you. Let them be there with you when your friends visit. They should listen to your conversations. If there are discussions you are not proud to have in the presence of your kids, you probably should not be having those discussions. Take your child with you when you go grocery shopping,

when you go to make your visit to the Blessed Sacrament, when you go to have a drink with the priest. When you are reading a book, have your child sit near you with her own book and read silently. Children learn more from what they see than from what we tell them. Every parent should desire that his children become like him. You will succeed if you consciously work hard at it. And the beautiful thing is, the more you take this job seriously, the more you will see an advancement in your own soul, for charity increases the more it is spent. Never worry about trying to make your child know that you love him. You have nothing to prove. Simply love your kids by educating them right, and that is all that matters. They know you love them.

Photos above and below: Children and staff of the school

The Joy of Gardening

God’s orderly world ... what a beautiful creation made by His majesty. Everything made is precise and proportional. God spoke, and all was made in six days. Man, the pinnacle of creation, was formed from the slime of the earth, and God breathed life into man and placed man in the Garden of Eden.

Man was given dominion over all creatures. He was given the task to tend the Garden of Eden with its beauty and splendour. The garden was endowed with an array of flowers and fruit-bearing trees. Man had everything needed for his self-sustenance. One can only imagine how awesome was the garden fashioned by God. It is safe to say that man’s first occupation was farming.

When man fell, the whole of creation was also affected. And part of the consequence was that man was kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Man did not forget his first occupation – farming/ gardening. Adam taught his children the art of gardening. Cain and Abel were predominantly farmers. Cain tended towards planting crops, while Abel shepherded the animals.

An aspect of gardening is the cultivation of flowers. Each and every flower reminds us of the grandeur of Eden. Flowers not only add colour, texture, and biodiversity to the environment but are also a reminder of the profoundness of the creation of God.

Gardening in the home provides the necessary support every family needs. In an ideal family, there sits a garden with its crops, flowers, and domestic animals. The children are introduced to the art of gardening right from a tender age. Each child is assigned a task to perform routinely. There is the father with his boys, whom he trains to be men, tilling the soil, dressing the piece of land for the next planting season. The boys, led by their father, sweat with joy and show no sign of boredom.

The mother and her pretty girls look after the poultry and ensure that the chickens are fed properly and the poultry is cleaned regularly. She works with her girls to ensure the viability of the seeds for the next planting season. Not forgetting there are flowers planted in

the garden, the mother teaches her girls to daily beautify the altar with flowers and not forget the grotto of Our Lady outside the house. The girls are taught how to make the home admirable.

Throughout the planting season till harvest, routine work is done in the garden by the children. Each child is given a task, and it is done joyfully. No one is bored. Gardening is not only a daily schedule but also a delightful chore.

Parents must have a garden at home, or at least plant flowers and vegetables in small pots to keep the children busy and make the home beautiful.

Train up a child in the way he should, and even when he is old he will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6).

Mass of Ages is the magazine of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales

In this edition of Gregorius Magnus we reprint three articles from Mass of Ages.

Ad multos annos to the Latin Mass Society!

by Name

Bishop Athanasius Schneider visited England in June to take part in the Latin Mass Society’s Faith and Culture Conference and Holy Cross Pilgrimage, both held as part of the Society’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations.

During a six-day visit coinciding with the Octave of Pentecost, His Excellency celebrated Solemn Pontifical Masses at Northampton Cathedral, St William of York in Reading, and the Shrine of St Augustine in Ramsgate. He also presided at Solemn Pontifical Vespers at the London Oratory, a service held in connection with the Faith and Culture Conference at which he spoke on The Joy of our Catholic Faith. Each liturgical celebration concluded with singing of the Vexilla Regis and Benediction with the relic of the True Cross which is touring England and Wales in the Holy Cross Pilgrimage.

At a dinner held in Bishop Schneider’s honour at the Rembrandt Hotel—the very place where the Latin Mass Society was founded in 1965—he praised the

Society’s work in safeguarding the Church’s liturgical tradition and offered his heartfelt wishes for its continued flourishing over the next sixty years.

Bishop Schneider celebrating Mass in Northampton Cathedral (top and bottom right) and Ramsgate (left).

The Importance of Tradition A report from the LMS Faith and Culture Conference

The atmosphere was buoyant as the Latin Mass Society’s sixtieth anniversary Faith and Culture Conference heard from a range of prominent speakers about the importance of tradition in shaping the Church’s mission for the future. All talks are now available to watch on the LMS YouTube channel.

The sold out conference at the London Oratory was joined by a global livestream audience, first hearing from Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who was visiting England to participate in the conference and a programme of other LMS anniversary celebrations. Next came the philosopher and LMS Patron Prof Thomas Pink, who gave an engaging paper on ‘Tradition, Secular and Religious’ and the historian and journalist Dr Tim Stanley, who captivated the audience with his incisive ‘Reflections on 20 Years as a Catholic’.

After lunch, LMS Chairman Dr Joseph Shaw rallied the troops, with his address, ‘Evangelising after the Cultural Revolution’, in which he highlighted the Church’s opportunity to respond to contemporary cultural challenges. The acclaimed contemporary painter, James Gillick, then offered an impactful exposition on how sacred art can engage and transform believers.

Speakers (clockwise) Dr Joseph Shaw, painter James Gillick; Bishop Athanasius Schneider; journalist and historian Timothy Stanley.

Bishop Schneider celebrates Vespers in the Little Oratory, at the London Oratory, following the conference.

The conference concluded with a keynote address by Cardinal Raymond  Burke, appearing via video link from America. The Cardinal used the occasion to give a theological commentary on the relationship between the Sacred Liturgy and the Divine Law, the Jus Divinum.

The day concluded with a magnificent celebration of Solemn Pontifical Vespers – the First Vespers of Trinity Sunday –at which Bishop Schneider presided. The visceral beauty of the liturgy—in its sacred music, ceremonial richness, and reverent atmosphere—offered a fitting culmination to the conference. It served as a living expression of the themes explored throughout the day: the power of tradition, the role of beauty in worship, and the enduring vitality of the Church’s liturgical heritage.

Sacred Light

Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs was commissioned to paint the special patrons of the LMS. Here she explains her love for the martyrs of England and Wales

After many years admiring the work of the Latin Mass Society from the far side of the Atlantic, I recently had the opportunity to complete watercolours of the Society’s patrons, St Margaret Clitherow and St Richard Gwyn, and of the patron of the altar serving guild, St Tarcisius. All three were completed with Holbein watercolours on Arches 300 lb hot press watercolour paper, and designed for reproduction on holy cards and other media.

Painting with watercolours is a bit like cooking an omelette—both come together quickly out of the simplest of ingredients, but success requires a good deal of practice, and not a little luck. Seconds differentiate a light and living mass from an overworked, stale one, and there’s really no way back from a mistake; one can only throw the failure out and try again.

Watercolours translate the shifting effects of light and shade especially well, which is why they are so often used for landscapes, but I think they are also well-suited to sacred portraits. There tends to be something sun-drenched and glorious about watercolours that conveys holiness and apotheosis. They also lend themselves to the exploitation of negative space—the parts of an image that are either not highly developed or left entirely blank. In a sacred portrait, this can serve to emphasise the subject’s otherworldliness, while also highlighting symbols that serve to identify the saint and situate him in the living history of art and devotion. I also find that watercolours generally, and the use of negative space in particular, reproduce well on holy cards.

Like most American Catholics, I’ve always been drawn to the English martyrs. Our own martyrs are mostly French and Spanish-born, so we sometimes feel closer to those who died for the Faith in England. At eighteen, I was fortunate enough to go on

pilgrimage to London and Glastonbury. I still remember standing in St Thomas More’s cell in the Tower, hearing Mass in the ruins of the cathedral, and praying at the traffic circle where Tyburn tree once stood. Over the years I’ve had the chance to paint Saints John Fisher, Thomas More, Edmund Campion, and Robert Southwell. Now as a wife and mother I feel a special kinship with St Margaret Clitherow. I was grateful that an English mother of five from my parish agreed to model for the watercolour.

During my pilgrimage in England, the great Michael Davies was one of our tour guides. His strength and magnetic joy have always epitomized for me the Welsh soul. I thought of him especially while painting my not-quite-namesake St Richard Gwyn. Though I couldn’t

find a Welshman, I did find a Richard to model—and one who had fond memories of growing up hearing Masses organised by the Latin Mass Society.

My model for St Tarcisius was an altar boy from my local ICKSP parish with a good Roman pedigree. The new image of St Tarcisius will be revealed in due course.

I hope these watercolours of your heavenly patrons will remind you to seek their intercession and help you to imitate them in raising your minds and hearts to God.

Gwyneth (née Holston) Thompson-Briggs is a painter, mostly of sacred subjects, who lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and four small children. More of her paintings may be viewed at GwynethThompsonBriggs.com

Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs’ Margaret Clitherow study and Richard Gwyn holy card

The Deep ‘Romanitas’ and Catholicism behind England’s Christian Foundation by the Anglo-Saxons

by Thomas Colsey

In the past six months, a politician rising in prominence in Britain has made repeated headlines. Danny Kruger, MP, son of a well-known journalist in perhaps the foremost of our conservative magazines, turned heads when he made a parliamentary speech calling for a ‘Christian restoration’. It was strongly worded, articulate, rich in anecdotes, reaching deeply into the English past and weaving politics and theology together. It was the first speech of its kind made on that stage in recent memory.

Yet Kruger’s words were partisan in their Anglicanism. They left Catholics listening with a critical ear in a strange place. Eye-rollingly tone-deaf to the fact that the Church of England is no longer the country’s favoured instantiation of the Christian Faith, the MP’s words were questionably triumphalist in Protestantism – with not-so-subtle digs at the Catholic presence in our country (before his co-religionists supposedly brought us from ‘idolatry’ and ‘error’).

While lauding the foundation of the country’s legal system being based upon the Christian Faith, he anachronistically shoehorns in liberal creeds such as freedom of religion (something alien not only to the AngloSaxons but also to the Anglicans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). But one thing that grated on me in particular was the attempt to claim King Alfred the Great for Kruger’s own brand of politically liberal, Anglican Christianity.

Stained glass window at Belmont Abbey, England. It shows three heroes of resistance to the Protestant Reformation in England (left to right): Bl Thomas Percy; Bl John Beche, last Abbot of Gloucester Abbey; Bl Adrian Fortescue.

This is absurd. Alfred and the AngloSaxons were plainly Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman.

As early as 853, Alfred’s father, King Æthelwulf, took him on pilgrimage to Rome. After their arduous thousandmile journey, Pope Leo IV received them. The young Alfred was both blessed as king and sacramentally confirmed by the Pope, who also became his godfather. What more striking image than England’s most venerated king sacramentally bound to the papacy?

Alfred’s reign confirms it. He founded monasteries at Athelney and Shaftesbury, venerated relics, credited St Cuthbert’s intercession for his victory at Edington, and personally translated and promulgated Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. He worshipped at liturgy in Latin regularly with his ‘Masspriests’.

In his preface to Pastoral Care, Alfred lauds Pope Gregory as ‘wise minded ... the Lord’s champion ... the Guardian of the heavens, best of Romans, most prosperous of men in spirit’. He shows keen appreciation and reverence for the fact that England owed its conversion, through St Augustine of Canterbury, to Rome.

Alfred also began the royal tradition of voluntarily sending alms to the papacy – later formalised as Peter’s Pence. His fidelity to Pope Marinus was rewarded with a relic of the True Cross, which he carried for devotion. This is all a long way from the later anti-popery of Kruger’s co-religionists.

Kruger’s attempt to paper over the rupture of the English Reformation is not new. The CofE and its defenders have long tried to blur it. But this is more than pedantry: it distorts our national memory.

In schools, history jumps from Roman Britain to 1066, then straight to Henry VIII, with only Magna Carta as a stop. The whole Anglo-Saxon foundation of England, Catholic to the core, is sidelined.

England, initially, was an idea: to unite related but disparate tribes under the cross of Christ and the sceptre of the king. Their languages differed, but their Church and sacramental life were one. When violent pagans arrived from Scandinavia to pillage and settle, the nation was born in religious war – to defend monasteries and the Faith as much as wealth and family.

Indeed, historians tell us the Viking Age began with the 793 raid on Lindisfarne, one of the holiest places in England. The raid sent shockwaves across the land.

Fearing the most prized relic (understood as possessing deep spiritual power) might be stolen or destroyed, the monks carried not gold or costly treasures but the prized, incorrupt body of St Cuthbert from Lindisfarne to the mainland and wandered for years to find a place suitable to settle him.

So many pilgrims and miracles followed the body that working communities of lay Catholic families settled beside the monks wherever they travelled. The monks eventually founded Durham, which became the most important pilgrimage site in the North.

Relics and the invocation of saints are condemned by the 39 Articles, the founding principles of the Church of England, Kruger’s religion, but they are woven into England’s very fabric. The Anglo-Saxon period overflows with saints: Cuthbert, Bede, Hilda, Wulfstan, Oswald, Aidan, Ætheldreda, Chad – each shaping England’s spiritual character.

At one of the most pivotal (and criminally under-taught) moments in our nation’s history, the Roman rules and customs of the Christian religion were definitively defined as authoritative and binding at the Synod of Whitby. There, the Pope’s authority as the holder of the keys and the figure chosen as the rock by Christ, was definitive in settling disputes between Celtic and continental practices. The English Church bound itself to the rock chosen by Christ. A far cry from later proclamations that ‘the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm’.

Reformers later destroyed Cuthbert’s shrine (despite unexpectedly finding his body miraculously incorrupt) and suppressed monasticism for centuries – though it was monks who first evangelised our land, both from Rome and from Iona in Scotland, which had been planted by missionaries from Ireland.

For a striking reminder of how Roman England’s origins were, visit the monastery of San Gregorio al Celio in Rome. There you will find a plaque: St Gregory the Great, St Augustine, and the first five Archbishops of Canterbury (alongside the first Archbishop of York) all came from this house. England is a spiritual child of Rome.

Kruger suggests England is unique in its Christian foundations, but this is false. Spain too was forged in resistance to heathen conquest; Poland was founded in the baptism of its first king. Our historiography too often invents a fictional exceptionalism. Even Magna Carta, hailed as a liberal beacon, was drafted by an English bishop who studied at the University of Paris, where he became close friends with a future Pope, and who wrote Gregorian chant.

As England faces the crises of the twenty-first century, figures like Kruger must be corrected. He is right to defend Christ and attack secularism in the public forum, but wrong to exclude Holy Mother Church. England’s birth was not amid liberal constitutionalism or a uniquely English faith. It was Roman, Apostolic, and shared with our continental kin.

Kruger is right to attack secularism and to call Christ back into politics. But he is wrong to write Catholicism out of our past. Far from being born in accommodation with false religions, England emerged in resisting them –its foundations deeply, unmistakably Catholic. And far from being the seedbed of liberal or Protestant creeds, its Christian foundations were those of Rome.

Thomas Colsey is a freelance journalist based in England.

Stained glass window at St Edmund’s College, Ware, England, showing St Andrew the Apostle, Our Lady, and St George.

Tradition on Display: Rome’s Jubilee Doors Open to the Latin Mass

by Michael Haynes

In terms of ironic juxtapositions, it is hard not to be quietly amused at scenes that took place at the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome in mid-May.

On the afternoon of 8th May, the late Pope Francis had only recently been laid to rest in the recently carved out burial spot on the Gospel side of the basilica. His notably lowkey tombstone was already drawing fascinated tourists eager to snap one of the earliest pictures of the now famous grave. Cardinals enclosed in the Sistine Chapel were voting to elect the next successor of St Peter. Tourists and pilgrims outside braved the afternoon sun to secure spots in St Peter’s Square awaiting the next signal after the black smoke of the morning.

Meanwhile, next to Francis’ tomb, a Solemn High Mass was being offered by a Traditional Mass group of priests, attended by international pilgrims and with a cardinal in choir. The Jubilee pilgrimage of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest (ICKSP) had drawn pilgrims from across the continents to Rome, giving a public witness to the beauty of the Traditional liturgy.

Had it been scripted, it would likely have been deemed unbelievable. To one side of the Marian basilica were the mortal remains of Pope Francis, who famously restricted the Traditional Mass and went so far as to accuse Catholics who attend the Traditional liturgy of having a ‘mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioural difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited’.

In the centre of that same basilica were thousands of pilgrims, seminarians, and priests, as Mgr Giles Wach, Prior General of the ICKSP, offered that same Traditional liturgy at the high altar of the basilica, directly above the relics of Christ’s

crib. He included – as all priests of the Institute always do at Mass – the optional collect, secret, and postcommunion prayer for the Pope.

The scene was a testament to the unifying nature of the Catholic Church: Catholics from across the globe, divided by age and native tongue but united in spirit and liturgical language, simply gathered to pray for the Pope and the Church by using the rite of the Mass that they find draws them closest to Christ.

There have been many momentous events in Rome so far during this Jubilee year, and this was without doubt one of them. Even aside from the happy coincidence of a Traditional Mass pilgrimage with the conclave, the very public highlighting of the beauty of the Church’s ancient liturgy at the papal basilicas of Rome could not fail to impress.

As a journalist in Rome, I have had occasion to witness a great number of Jubilee pilgrimages making their way up through the Holy Doors this year, chiefly at the Vatican. An army of volunteers clad in high-visibility jackets dutifully perform their role of pausing the tourist throng to let the procession make its way through the centre of St Peter’s Square. One pilgrim group tends to merge into another, with little to distinguish them except language, denoting how far they have travelled to earn their Jubilee indulgence.

The next day, however, 9th May, it was different, and everyone knew it. Young priests, scores of seminarians, and hundreds of faithful made their way up that same pilgrimage route towards St Peter’s, turning heads the entire way. To see so many young clergy in one spot was a remarkable sight, even for those locals used to espying clergy walking the cobbled streets of the Eternal City.

Suitably attired in cassocks, surplices, and choir dress, carrying ornate banners, singing Gregorian chant, the Traditional Mass pilgrims that day gave onlookers a true taste of what a Catholic pilgrimage really is.

The narrow pathway designated for the Holy Door pilgrims was packed, and as the procession inched closer to the doors of St Peter’s the songs grew louder, the birettas seemingly more noticeable and the beauty of traditional clerical attire ever more fitting.

There is no doubt that the Traditional liturgy is an impressive and most beautiful act; when combined with settings such as the Vatican, an extra level of awe is palpable. Running up and down the length of the Via della Conciliazione for my photographic duties enabled me to overhear the brief remarks of astonished passers-by. Most notable was the reaction of the volunteers who have guided pilgrims through the Holy Doors since Christmas 2024. To say they were overawed would be an understatement.

A key element of the Catholic idea of pilgrimage is the fact that it provides one with the opportunity to make a public witness of the faith. The rubrics and format of the Traditional liturgy accentuate that aspect, and it is surely due in part to the Old Rite’s unashamed demonstration of the faith that onlookers find it so striking.

Secular society, and even much of the ecclesial sphere, discourages Catholics from making such bold public witness to the truth or from involvement in the Traditional liturgy. But good fruit comes for all when Catholics decide not to fear the naysayers and instead march forward filled with love of God and of the Church’s timeless teaching and liturgy. This is why – as participants of

the annual Ad Petri Sedem pilgrimage will know – joining fellow Catholics of whatever race in such a pilgrimage is such a powerful witness. In such a setting, one can understand the universality and the unity of the Church, the ever ancient but ever new aspect of her liturgy, and – through liturgical reverence – appreciate ever more the unchanging reality of Christ’s presence in the Sacred Species.

Indeed, this is why deliberately, publicly, and precisely practising one’s Catholic faith matters, just as does participating in the ancient rites that the Church proposes for Her members to unite themselves ever more closely to God.

When one appreciates these aspects, then the travesty of the rainbow crosses and the expletivefilled slogans of the ‘LGBT pilgrimage’ at St Peter’s in early September becomes even clearer. We must practise what we preach and our actions testify to our beliefs. Activists for the plethora of modern ideologies within the Church advance their propaganda unashamedly; hence it is increasingly important for traditional Catholics to utilize opportunities to celebrate faithfully and respectfully the glories of the Church’s ancient liturgy for all to witness.

Another notable opportunity for this witness is the Ad Petri Sedem pilgrimage, which, at the time of writing, is almost upon us. Having attended the past three events – and thus witnessing the Mass in the Vatican as well as the subsequent prohibition of this liturgy – I can give personal testament to the sense of timeless wonder that comes from participating in the Traditional Mass in St Peter’s. And coming, as it does, in the early days of Pope Leo’s reign – so soon after he professed his keenness to meet with devotees of the ancient Mass – this year’s event possesses particular significance.

Just as it was earlier in the summer for the ICKSP and the Society of St Pius X, the Via della Conciliazione will once again resound with the strains of Gregorian chant and witness the lengthy files of clergy in traditional attire, wending their way towards the relics of St Peter. Through unwavering commitment to both truth and charity (Eph 4:15) in every aspect of the

Church’s teaching and liturgy, Latin Mass Catholics have an opportunity to witness to this timeless faith at the very doors of the Pope.

At a time when the Traditional Mass has been banned from even being advertised in parish bulletins, it is these public pilgrimages that give hope and joy to traditional Catholics throughout the world.

Michael Haynes is a self-employed English journalist, part of Holy See Press Corps, writing also on his site, PerMariam.

The Fall of Adam and Eve: The Ultimate Metaphor of St Francis de Sales

by Robert Lazu Kmita

Although poets and writers have always been the most tenacious hunters of metaphors, theologians and philosophers have also been diligent. The need to provide images with explanatory power has compelled them to become creative in a territory that belongs to aesthetics rather than rational speculation. For metaphor appeals to the intuitive intellect (νοῦς), whereas explanation and argumentation address discursive thought (διάνοια). The purpose of metaphor is to offer us a kind of spontaneous intuition meant to illuminate our understanding. This is accomplished through an expressive image that, as Aristotle states in the Poetics (XXI, 1457b), stands in an analogical relationship to the idea or doctrine represented.

Every major theological subject is accompanied by at least one image of a metaphorical nature. Metaphor accompanies and perfects that other essential instrument of theological and mystical knowledge: the symbol (σύμβολον). Sometimes the two can hardly be distinguished: while the symbol is more precisely defined (such as the Holy Altar, which symbolises our Lord, Jesus Christ), the metaphor is broader. For example, the relationship between the two natures of our Lord Jesus Christ has been compared to iron (~ the human nature) heated in fire (~ the divine nature). Or, the relationship between the three consubstantial persons of the Holy Trinity has been compared to the unity of the light radiated by three candles: though it proceeds from three distinct sources, it is nevertheless one. My favorite metaphor, however, is the one that accompanies the miraculous birth of the Saviour from the Holy Virgin Mary. This supernatural event has been likened to sunlight (representing God) passing through a diamond (representing the virginal body of the Holy Mary).

The most important metaphors, like sacred symbols, are drawn from the inspired texts of Holy Scripture. Others are the fruit of meditations on beings and things in nature. They have always

accompanied the speculative reflections of the great Catholic theologians and philosophers. By way of example, I will present a single metaphor used by the Doctor Caritatis – St Francis de Sales (1567–1622). The exceptionally refined image he proposed seeks to shed light on the most terrifying mystery in human history: the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve. More precisely, he ‘explains’ –as far as it is possible – what happened during the ‘fall’.

Among all the Doctors of the Church, St Francis devoted the most space to metaphors intended to illuminate the truths of faith taught by the sacred doctrines. But no subject interested him more than the mystery of the loss of divine love. For only if one truly understands the disease and its causes can one prescribe the right remedy. This is the question he confronted with theological and literary genius: ‘How is it possible for any soul that possesses the love of God to lose it, since where love is, surely there sin will be resisted?’

The answer he proposed contains a metaphor unique and original –one that surely would have delighted G. K. Chesterton:1

Did you ever watch a certain little mystery in common things, which to many is incomprehensible? I mean how, when a full cask is opened, the wine will not flow until some air is let in from above; which is not the case with a cask not perfectly full, out of which the wine flows directly that it is opened. Now verily in this mortal life, although our souls may be well filled with heavenly love, they are never so full but that it may escape through temptation.2

I myself have shown my seven children how water in a pierced bottle does not flow until the cap is removed. I assure you, apart from those who have done extensive studies in atmospheric physics and fluid dynamics, there are very few who can

explain (in ‘scientific’ terms) why water does not flow from a pierced bottle until the cap is lifted or opened. But this matters not at all to the ‘hunters of metaphors’. It was enough for St Francis to observe a phenomenon that could easily pass as ‘magical’. He proposed it as a metaphor for us all to ponder, so that we might understand what happened in Eden.

The content of the cask is, then, divine love. What does the hole represent? And who made it? What is the cap? And what about the air that enters once the cap is lifted? The mere act of posing such questions and trying to answer them carries us from the realm of intuition (νοῦς) into that of discursive thought (διάνοια) –a path that presents certain dangers. Still, leaving the discussion open (as befits a true metaphor), I will say this much:

The hole in the cask is any sinful ‘image’ that obsessively becomes fixed in our imagination (what St Thomas called ‘phantasia’). It may have been planted there by the devil, may come from outside (for example, through an acquaintance who invites us to excessive drinking), or may simply arise from a passionate stirring of our own soul, drawn to some illicit and immoral pleasure. Such images, if welcomed through sinful curiosity or consent, can encourage the performance of an illicit or immoral act. In the language of the Desert Fathers, such images were ‘the head of the serpent’. Of course, they did not necessarily lead to sin. What prevented this was the strict ‘cap’ of the rule of life (such as the Rule of Saint Benedict, inspired by the Rule of St Basil the Great). The prerequisite condition was fuga mundi – the flight from the world. Once this rule was broken and the monk left the protective community, the fall followed immediately. In other words, expulsion from Eden is always preceded by the fact that, in his heart, the sinner has already left Paradise in search of the world and its sinful pleasures.

1 Of the Love of God, translated by H. L. Sidney Lear (London, 1888), 122. 2. Ibid.

Making Our Appeal to Pope Leo

by Joseph Shaw

The FIUV exists to campaign for the Traditional Latin Mass, and over the decades its officers have taken to the Holy See the aspirations, the suffering, and the loyalty of Catholics attached to the ancient Mass. My predecessors and I have met many officials, cardinals, and even the Holy Father himself: as the photographs indicate, my predecessor Leo Darroch was able to speak to Pope Benedict, and, in the early days of Pope Francis, the officers were able, at least, to shake his hand. With a new pope, we renew our devotion and submission to the man who holds this august office, the Successor of St Peter, who has the munus – the function and the ability, the right and the duty – to confirm his brethren in the Faith, and to feed Christ’s sheep, with what these things imply: supreme, universal, and immediate authority to govern, and infallible authority to teach.

We today, and our predecessors since 1965, have to make the case for the preservation of the Traditional Mass, not just for the private convenience of aged priests (as was permitted in the early days) but for the good of the lay faithful: people who would, as time went on, not only attend the occasional Old Mass to remember the old days but also discover it as adults, introduce their children to it, and build their spiritual lives around it.

It must be admitted that our movement represented an inconvenience: we appeared to priests and to the hierarchy as a group of people demanding special consideration and wanting exemptions from the universal laws of the Church. And yet, on the other hand, it was never possible to dismiss us as entirely wrong. As Archbishop Annibale Bugnini noted, when his attempts to have the older Missal explicitly abrogated in 1974 failed, the attitude of the Holy See was that such a step would look like ‘casting odium on the liturgical tradition’.1 It was a logical next step for Pope John Paul II to describe our desire for the Traditional Mass as a ‘rightful aspiration’ in 1988,2 and for Pope Benedict XVI to point out in 2007 that

‘what earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behoves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place’.3

It is ridiculous, and worse than that, it is harmful, to allow the idea to take root that the practice of the Church up to 1969 was actually bad: no doubt there was room for improvement in liturgical practice,

but to suggest that the Church, with her officially approved texts and ceremonies, was feeding her children with something actually deleterious to their spiritual growth, undermines the whole doctrine of the Church. If the Council of Trent was wrong to defend this liturgy, why would anyone take notice of what the Second

1. Annibale Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975, 300.

2. Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Ecclesia Dei, 1988.

3. Pope Benedict XVI, Letter to Bishops, 2007.

Pope Leo XIV

© Edgar Beltrán, The Pillar

Vatican Council had to say about it? If the Church was wrong to maintain these liturgical practices for a dozen centuries, why would anyone take any notice of what the Church has to say about spirituality, or indeed anything else?

The movement to preserve the Traditional Mass, then, has existed in the balance between these two ideas: first, that we are an inconvenience, and perhaps an embarrassment, in not simply attending the reformed rites; and second, that our campaign is based on something that cannot be denied: that the Vetus Ordo has value, and that if it has value, it is not entirely absurd to want it.

We come again and again, then, to seek from priests, bishops, curial officials, and successive popes the greatness of soul to overlook the inconvenience, to accept the rational basis of our requests, and to grant us some limited right to exist. Frustrating though the limitations may be, we know that, even within them, we have won a vital issue of principle. In the words of our founding president, Erich de Saventhem: ‘It is vitally important that ... new priests and religious, these new young people

with ardent hearts, should find – if only in a corner of the rambling mansion of the Church – the treasure of a truly sacred liturgy still glowing softly in the night’.

Our opponents know this as well, and this explains the ferocity of their opposition to even the most tenuous continued existence of the ancient Mass as a legitimate part of the life of the Church. For them, it is not enough for their own liturgical vision to be realised in 999 out of every 1,000 celebrations: every vestige of an alternative must be crushed and swept away.

This anti-traditional fanaticism was rejected by Pope Paul VI when he granted the English Indult as early as 1971; by Pope John Paul II, with his indults and the establishment or reconciliation of Priestly Institutes and religious communities devoted to the Traditional Mass; and most emphatically by Pope Benedict XVI in his Apostolic Letter Summorum

FIUV with Pope Francis: Joseph Shaw shakes Pope Francis’ hand in 2013, with James Bogle, President (right), and Leo Darroch, President Emeritus (centre)

FIUV with Pope Benedict: Leo Darroch, President, with Pope Benedict XVI

Pontificum. It was rejected, too, by Pope Francis, who continued the policy of Pope Benedict from 2013 to 2021, and even in his later years never moved against the Traditional Priestly Institutes in the way opponents of the ancient Mass wanted; on the contrary, with his decree in favour of the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, he actually protected them.

I never thought there was any real possibility that a new pope would adopt the position of the extreme antitraditionalists. Though they include prominent people – Professor Andrea Grillo, Austen Ivereigh, Robert Mickens, and a few others – theirs is in truth a fringe view. It is too obviously devoid of historical logic and pastoral charity to have wide appeal. And so it has come to pass.

At the time of writing, Pope Leo has given two indications of his attitude to the Traditional Mass. The first of these in time was contained in his interview for Crux, but this was not made public

until after the second was announced, his permission for Cardinal Raymond Burke to celebrate the Traditional Mass in St Peter’s for the annual Ad Petri Sedem pilgrimage on 25th October. It should be kept in mind, then, when reading Pope Leo’s words, that he subsequently gave this permission.

John Allen of Crux conducted interviews with a view to publishing a book, which will come out early in 2026. What has been published so far is brief and impressionistic. Perhaps the book will reveal more, but it would not be appropriate for the holder of any high office to announce an important new policy in an interview with a journalist. The function of an interview is to explain and contextualise, not to legislate.

Crux has published three paragraphs from Pope Leo on the subject of the Traditional Mass. The middle one seems to me the most helpful:

I do know that part of that issue, unfortunately, has become – again, part of a process of polarization –people have used the liturgy as an excuse for advancing other topics. It’s become a political tool, and that’s very unfortunate. I think sometimes the, say, ‘abuse’ of the liturgy from what we call the Vatican II Mass, was not helpful for people who were looking for a deeper experience of prayer, of contact with the mystery of faith that they seemed to find in the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. Again, we’ve become polarized, so that instead of being able to say, well, if we celebrate the Vatican II liturgy in a proper way, do you really find that much difference between this experience and that experience?

At this stage of his consideration of the issue, Pope Leo presents us with two sides of the issue.

A baptism using the Traditional rite

Blessing

On the one hand, he appreciates that support for the Traditional Mass is motivated by a desire for a ‘deeper experience of prayer, of contact with the mystery of faith’. This is correct, and it is of great importance that Pope Leo grasps this, and expresses it unprompted and in his own words.

On the other hand, he wonders aloud whether the Traditional Mass is really necessary to satisfy this desire. The whole issue has arisen, he suggests, from liturgical abuses in the Novus Ordo: not, as some have interpreted his words, from the political instrumentalisation of the Traditional Mass, which would not

make sense here. This being so (he goes on), perhaps a more reverent celebration of the reformed Mass would be enough: ‘if we celebrate the Vatican II liturgy in a proper way, do you really find that much difference between this experience and that experience?’ This links up with his earlier reminder that the Novus Ordo can be celebrated in Latin.

Pope Leo’s conclusion here feels a little disappointing. Can he really not see the difference between the experience of a ‘proper’ celebration of the Novus Ordo and what he calls the Tridentine Mass? However, his remarks are reminiscent of the words of Pope Benedict XVI in his Letter to Bishops that accompanied Summorum Pontificum in 2007:

The celebration of the Mass according to the Missal of Paul VI will be able to demonstrate, more powerfully than has been the case hitherto, the sacrality which attracts many people to the former usage. The most sure guarantee that the Missal of Paul VI can unite parish communities and be loved by them consists in its being celebrated with great reverence in harmony with the liturgical directives. This will bring out the spiritual richness and the theological depth of this Missal.

Cardinal Burke celebrating the sacrament of Confirmation, Spanish Place, London, England, in 2015

The

of Throats on the feast of St Blaise, Oxford, England

Here, Pope Benedict is challenging bishops – the addressees of this letter – to encourage the better celebration of the Novus Ordo in their dioceses. Such a development would have done much good and would have pleased him very much, but it is interesting to note that he did not devote a great deal of energy to condemning liturgical abuses, in contrast to Pope John Paul II, who issued several documents on the subject. Heating up the liturgical conflict was not Pope Benedict’s strategy; he wished, rather, to lead by example, and at the same time to allow the celebration of the Traditional Mass more widely, which would also, he hoped, have a positive influence on the celebration of the reformed Mass.

In echoing Pope Benedict, Pope Leo may be thinking along the same lines. He must know very well that the kind of supertraditional celebration of the Novus Ordo that would allow some comparison with the Traditional Mass – in Latin, celebrated ad orientem, and accompanied with Gregorian chant or sacred polyphony –is extremely rare, and that the barriers to its becoming more widespread are varied and stubborn. The suggestion that the lack of such celebrations is the driving force behind demand for the Traditional Mass, however, leaves the blame for the situation with the liturgical progressives. That is actually quite a convenient resting place for it.

It is an interesting question whether it is actually true that people wouldn’t have sought out the Traditional Mass if it had not been for poor ars celebrandi in the Novus Ordo. Liturgical abuses are certainly a factor in stimulating people to try out the Traditional Mass, as also was the ban on the reception of Holy Communion on the tongue during the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the other hand, I myself attended Latin Novus Ordo Masses for many years before discovering the Traditional Mass, and I found the difference in the experience a profound, though positive, shock: a eucatastrophe that changed my life.

For practical purposes, it may not matter very much what factors first impelled individuals to the Traditional Mass. I have not been given the gift of prophecy, but there are some things that are certainly not going to happen, for the simple reason that they would make too many people too upset. One is the total suppression of the Traditional Mass: this would upset the traditionalists. Another is the suppression of widespread liturgical abuses in the Novus Ordo: this would

upset the progressives. A third, and the least likely of all, because it would upset both groups and everyone in between as well, is the universal imposition of a compromise Missal incorporating elements of the old and new. What will happen instead will be within the limitations set by practical, psychological, and political possibilities, and it will therefore look quite like what has happened up to now, with the Traditional Mass allowed to continue its slow growth – for what looks like rapid growth from inside the movement is pretty slow in relation to the Church as a whole.

In the meantime I look forward to Pope Leo engaging in further discussion on the issue, and even in engaging in some synodal dialogue, as he suggests in the final paragraph of the published interview. The first fruits of such dialogue are, in fact, already before us. The Crux interviews took place in July. On 22nd August, Pope Leo received Cardinal Burke in private audience, and in early September it was announced that His Eminence would celebrate the Traditional Mass in St Peter’s.

May the Lord grant us more dialogue, with like results.

A funeral in the Traditional rite, Oxford, England

News From Scotland: Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party

by Dorothy McLean

Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party is a club chiefly composed of people who attend the FSSP’s Traditional Latin Mass in Edinburgh. It sponsors free dancing lessons, and organises formal dances with live music twice a year. The dances are usually waltz, ceilidh, and Lindy Hop. The formal dances take place on Easter Friday and the Saturday nearest Michaelmas.

‘My hope is to foster and strengthen social ties among Catholics who love the Traditional Latin Mass’, said Dorothy

McLean, the foundress. ‘In a way, it’s a restoration of the old parish dance – only definitely pre-’55, as we don’t feature rock-and-roll’.

Mrs McLean added that playing for the semi-annual dances has given Scottish Catholic amateur musicians the opportunity to form duos or bands and expand their repertoire.

You can read more about the endeavour on its website: https://tradcathsocialdancing.co.uk/

Last year’s dance

A Holiday Experience of the Tridentine Mass in the Diocese of Prato, Italy

by Anthony Bailey

Recently I spent a month’s holiday in the Italian city of Prato in Tuscany, 25 kilometres west of Florence. Prato, like other small cities such as Pistoia and Lucca, has a well-preserved medieval centre with notable churches and historic buildings. A treasure of the Duomo is the Sacra Cintola (Holy Girdle), which, it is said, Our Lady handed to St Matthew prior to her Assumption. The girdle is housed in an elaborate chapel in the cathedral decorated with trecento frescoes by Agnolo Gaddi, and is displayed five times a year, with great fanfare and devotion, from an external pulpit designed by Donatello.

Prato has a long history of textile manufacturing and recycling. The Museo del Tessuto currently has an exhibition, Cloth of Light, that features an exact replica of the cope worn by St John Paul II at the opening of the Holy Door for the Great Jubilee of 2000. The 16,000 metres of fabric for the cope and the 4,000 liturgical vestments worn by the cardinals, bishops, and priests at that celebration were woven in Prato.

Prior to my visit, I was interested to know where I could attend a Tridentine Mass in the diocese. The Latin Mass Directory lists three churches in Prato offering the Old Mass. One of these is Santo Spirito, where I contacted the parish priest, Don Enrico Bini, to ask if I could serve at the Low Mass. His response was prompt and positive. For a small diocese in Italy, it is very encouraging to see the Tridentine Mass offered in three different locations.

Don Enrico is a scholar and historian and was one time librarian of the celebrated Biblioteca Roncioniana in Prato. He has published extensive works on church history with a particular interest in the late 17th-18th century. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Cesare Guasti Cultural Association. Cesare Guasti was a Pratese writer and philologist born in 1822, who died in Florence in 1889. Don Enrico has been closely involved in the promotion of Guasti’s beatification, for which he co-authored the Positio super virtutibus in 1987.

Don Enrico was the first parish priest in Prato to celebrate the Tridentine Mass after the publication of Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio Summorum Pontificum in July 2007. The Mass was first celebrated on 14th September 2007 and stands as a groundbreaking moment for the revival of the Old Mass in Tuscany and Italy. I served the Low Mass with Don Enrico on two Sunday afternoons during my stay in Prato. He was very welcoming and informed the congregation that my presence in the choir, as someone from the other side of the world, was an indication of the universality of the Roman Catholic Church. After Mass, we retired to a local bar, a tradition at Santo Spirito, where Don Enrico was keen to hear about the state of the Catholic Church in Australia and the case of Cardinal Pell.

Interior view of the Church of Santo Spirito, Prato. The church houses a fine wooden baroque choir with an organ and a chapel with a relic of St Carlo Acutis.

Church of San Martino a Paperino, Prato

Interior view of San Martino a Paperino. The decoration in the sanctuary was for the Feast of Our Lady of Dolours.

Another Prato parish that has a regular celebration of the Latin Mass is San Martino a Paperino, overseen by Don Carlo Gesti, who has been parish priest there since 1998 and who studied for the priesthood at the Roman College. Don Carlo is a priest reminiscent of ‘Don Camillo’, balancing his deep knowledge of scripture and theology with a downto-earth approach to serving the people of his parish. Evidence of his erudition is seen in the quality of the fervorini – short homilies – at Mass, and he is clearly much loved by his parishioners. Don Carlo has been celebrating the Missa Tridentina for over 15 years. I served Mass at San Martino twice on Thursday mornings. There were about 30 worshippers at each Mass, which is more than my local parish church in country Victoria attracts on a Sunday. After Mass, the parishioners

made me most welcome in the parish club, where we had breakfast. We talked about matters including the lack of active support for the Missa Tridentina by the Italian bishops, tips on rearing chickens, and the dangers of the native wildlife in Australia. The parishioners thought, correctly, that Australia is teeming with venomous snakes!

On my last Sunday in Prato, I attended a Sung Mass at the tiny church of Santa Cristina a Pimonte. The parish is in the care of the Oratorian Fathers, who came to Prato in 2003, making this one of the first Oratories to be established in the current millennium. The parish priest, Don Stefano Bertolini, exudes the spirituality of St Philip Neri and the Oratorian tradition, and celebrates a Solemn or Sung Mass at Santa Cristina every Sunday, attracting a decent-sized congregation from all over Prato and the wider district. The congregation was mixed in age, with couples and families. Don Stefano delivered a homily (or pensiero, as he referred to it) on the life of Santa Cristina; the parish was about to begin a novena in her honour leading up to her feast day. He has a great sense of humour. With my limited Italian, I was able to follow an amusing anecdote he told about Santa Cristina and her stubbornness in refusing

to worship the Roman gods. A small scuola sang the Missa di Angelis and the propers using a variety of chant forms. It was interesting to me to hear the congregation sing the Ordinary of the Mass as this is not something one commonly encounters in Australia.

Two things I noticed at all three Masses in Prato were the participation of the faithful through the recitation or singing of the responses, and the genuine piety of the worshippers. I came away with a deep sense of the Church’s universality articulated through the Old Mass. There are no indications that the Bishop of Prato is planning to restrict further the Missa Tridentina, and he deserves the gratitude of Latin Mass Catholics for leaving current arrangements in place despite the restrictions of Traditionis Custodes. My sincere thanks and gratitude to the priests and faithful of the Latin Mass communities in Prato.

For more information about Latin Mass celebrations around the world, visit the Latin Mass Directory at https://www. latinmassdir.org. The directory relies on donations for its work. Please note that the Mass times and locations listed may change, so call beforehand to confirm.

The Bishop of Prato, Monsignor Giovanni Nerbini, displays the Sacra Cintola from the external pulpit of Prato Cathedral on Easter Sunday 2023. Note the thurifers with the swinging thuribles.

Don Enrico Bini and the author in the sacristy of the Church of Santo Spirito.

Tiny Church of Santa Cristina a Pimonte, Prato.

Book Review: The Anxious Generation,

by Joseph Shaw

Jonathan Haidt is an academic social psychologist and the author of many successful books. The Anxious Generation may turn out to be what he is remembered for: a closely argued, carefully evidenced denunciation of the outsourcing of childhood to smartphones.

The argument of the book is quite easy to summarise. First, it is extremely well established that the mental health of girls in their early teens took a dramatic turn for the worse in the decade after 2010 (boys and other age groups are slightly more complicated). The evidence comes most conveniently from the USA and Great Britain, but the phenomenon is not limited to those countries.

Second, this is the decade in which smartphones, front-facing cameras, and social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter became ubiquitous among young people in the rich world. There is plenty of evidence that constant and instant exposure to social media is the cause of the mental health problems, and not merely correlated with them for some reason, because the uptick in depression, anxiety, and other issues tracks the availability of the technology, for example, in Spain, where one region after another was equipped with the necessary phone networks. Furthermore, numerous studies have demonstrated improvements to mental health when smartphone use is discontinued for a period of time, compared with a control group that is not deprived of access to social media. Third, the mechanisms by which total immersion in social media affects young people are not difficult to discover. Haidt calls it the replacement of a ‘playbased childhood’ with a ‘phone-based childhood’. Several factors are at work. One is the simple fact that the hours spent on social media inevitably take away from the time available for play outside and/or face to face with other

people; they also take away time for sleep and school work. Another is the dynamic of social media relationships and group identities: these are very shallow and fragile compared with realworld relationships and identities, and are inadequate to stave off loneliness, isolation, and feelings of inadequacy. Another factor is social media’s facilitation of social contagions, which particularly affect young women: the tendency of people to convince themselves of fashionable ideas, or to think they are subject to fashionable maladies. This age-old phenomenon has been provided with rocket fuel not only by the speed of social media fads but also by the way the algorithms that suggest content for users to view seek out things that are maximally absorbing, often more extreme versions of what a user has looked at

before. Thus, as has happened many times with tragic consequences, people who search for content on healthy eating are guided to content promoting anorexia, and users who feel depressed are sent information about how to kill themselves.

The problems experienced by boys and young men overlap but are distinct. There is a phenomenon of their being drawn in to computer games to the detriment of sleep and work, though this is more limited. A bigger problem is pornography, which is accessible with extraordinary ease, and causes serious problems for their real-world relationships with women.

An unexpected result of social media on boys is a kind of feminisation In the past, boys’ problems tended to be ‘externalising’: they would have accidents and get into fights and petty crime. By contrast, girls’ problems were more ‘internalising’: depression, eating disorders, and so on. Since 2010, however, boys’ externalising problems have been reduced to a startling extent, and they have taken to exhibiting more internalising problems. Boys today have a similar proportion of internalising versus externalising problems that girls showed twenty years ago: in the meantime, girls’ externalising problems have fallen even lower than the historical norm, and their internalising problems have shot upwards.

Haidt suggests, interestingly, that the impact of social media on children has been particularly bad because of the tendency in the 1980s and 1990s to overprotect children, protecting them from the harms of injury in playgrounds, for example, which makes independent play and the development of risk awareness much more difficult. He connects this with a long-running concern about kidnapping and child abuse by strangers, which appeared to be detached from the actual risks measured by crime statistics. What we

by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, 2024)

have now is an extraordinary exposure of children to harm online, at the same time as a stifling risk aversion in relation to children playing outside.

If you know of boys and young men who injure themselves climbing trees or falling off skateboards, congratulate them. Perhaps you should even buy them a beer and a packet of cigarettes: the vices of yesterday almost seem the virtues of today. I don’t advocate that anyone commit a mortal sin, but a society with yesterday’s problems, such as a high rate of births outside marriage, has at least some kind of future; a society where young people don’t form any kind of relationship with people of the opposite sex has no future at all – and that is where we seem to be heading.

Haidt is an atheist, and it is amusing to see him qualify his opposition to pornography (well, there is at least a problem with the really bad stuff, he tells us cautiously), and justify his advocacy of religious practices such as meditation, for the sake of his liberal readership. He is very much a member of America’s liberal elite. He recounts a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, who also runs Instagram, in which he asked him about the problem of very young people opening Instagram accounts. ‘But we don’t allow anyone under 13 to open an account’, Zuckerberg replied, before admitting that there is absolutely no attempt to verify the age of people trying to open an account. The problem, as Haidt points out, is that if one platform were to lock out under-aged users, these children would migrate permanently to a less scrupulous one: the solution, as he suggests, has to be legislation. (Thirteen is also far too young to open social media accounts; Haidt suggests sixteen.)

There remain many things that can be done by schools and families. In Britain, some schools are beginning to ban smartphones during the school day, and this policy often has the

support of the children as well as of parents. It is difficult for a single family to prohibit smartphone use for their children if no one else is doing so, but an organisation called ‘Smartphone Free Childhood’ encourages parents to sign a pledge to keep their children off these devices until they are 14; another, Us For Them, campaigns against the growing tendency of schools to use devices to set homework.

Perhaps the wretched ‘Generation Z’ (born 1997-2012), in their teens now, will be the last as well as the first to come under this curse in its full strength, like the generation in the 18th century who were swallowed up by cheap, mass-produced distilled spirits, before licensing, taxation, and social norms caught up with the problem and brought it under control. At the moment, however, this seems optimistic.

A closer parallel might be television: many sounded the alarm about the effects of television, particularly on

children, and in the year 2000 another bestselling book, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, presented a great deal of evidence to show that television was a major factor in the collapse of social solidarity and real-world relationships that took place in the later 1960s and the 1970s. Despite this, the problems were ignored by all but an eccentric minority, and a common reason given is echoed today: that to stop children from watching would be to cut them off from the topics of conversation dominating the playground. Today, television is fading as a threat, but only because it is being replaced by something similar, but far, far, worse.

One straw in the wind is the cult of St Carlo Acutis. Without disrespect to St Carlo, many of those promoting his cult are members of an older generation with no understanding of social media but a strong desire to showcase how young and ‘with-it’ the Church can be. Then again, St Carlo’s attempt to harness the Internet for evangelisation, and his doing so by collating information about Eucharistic miracles, is very commendable, and I have no doubt that many readers of these words will have engaged with the Internet in a similar spirit. What would clearly be wrong is to imagine that, because St Carlo wandered into that arena, it is therefore safe – any more than leprosy became safe following the heroic apostolate of St Damien of Molokai. I include here an image of St Carlo found in a London church, where a ciborium seems to emerge out of his computer screen. I am not sure what to make of this image. What is certainly an unfortunate anachronism is the lifesized statue readers will find outside a shop in Rome’s Borgo Pio, of St Carlo holding what is clearly supposed to be an iPhone. He died in 2006, before these devices were introduced: it was God’s will that he not be tested in the furnace of social media as we know it today. His example cannot help us here: let us hope that his intercession will.

St Carlo Acutis icon

Position Paper on Liturgical Orientation

Originally published in April 2012, this position paper remains relevant not only to discussions of the Traditional Mass but to the debate about the Reformed Mass, which shows no sign of abating. While in some places the historical layout of churches has been restored in recent years, in other places bishops and priests continue to insist on worship versus populum. A recent example is Bishop Michael Martin of Charlotte, North Carolina (USA), who, in a document leaked to the public in May 2025, insisted that (among other things) ‘the altar is to be freestanding, and Mass must be celebrated facing the people (GIRM, 299)’. It is sadly typical of the debate on this subject that the force of Bishop Martin’s injunction relies on recipients not looking up GIRM 299 for themselves, as this paragraph does not support his position (see the Postscript at the end of this article).

With the FIUV’s other position papers, this is reproduced in The Case for Liturgical Restoration (Angelico Press, 2019), edited by Joseph Shaw.

For the casual observer, one of the most striking differences between the Extraordinary Form and the Ordinary Form is the celebration of the latter, in almost all cases, with the priest ‘facing the people’ ( versus populum ), whereas the former is celebrated with the priest facing the same direction as the people ( ad orientem, versus apsidem ). It surprises many to learn that the celebration of the Ordinary Form can legitimately take place ad orientem , and, further, that this change, which has had such a profound effect on Catholic church buildings and architecture, is not mentioned in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. The purpose of this position paper is to give an account of the value of the traditional practice.

It is worth noting, briefly, the current position in the Church’s law on this topic, with regard to the Ordinary Form. Successive editions of the reformed Roman missal presuppose ad orientem celebration, instructing the priest to turn to face the people when necessary, but also say that an altar separate from the wall ‘is desirable whenever possible’.1 Where it is not possible, because of the need to preserve existing altars of historic or artistic value, or constraints of space,

celebration ad orientem is unavoidable; where it is possible, celebration in either direction would be possible. There is thus no justification for the

destruction of historic altars or for the creation of secondary altars. As an editorial in the official journal of the Congregation for Divine Worship noted:

Cases must be considered in which the sanctuary does not allow for the placing of an altar facing the people or in which it would not be possible to maintain the existing altar with its ornamentation intact and at the same time install a forwardfacing altar that could be seen as the principal altar. In such cases it is more faithful to the nature of the liturgy to celebrate at the existing altar, back to the people, than to maintain two altars at the same sanctuary. The principle of there being only one altar is theologically more important than the practice of celebrating facing the people.2

Altars constructed in such a way as to preclude celebration ad orientem, which sometimes have to be adapted by the addition of temporary steps for the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, have no justification in the Church’s liturgical law.

1. See Postscript, below.

2. Editorial in Notitiae 29 (1993): 249.

Mass in Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane, London (Fr Alan Robinson). In 2018 a freestanding altar, which had been installed in the middle of the sanctuary, was removed in the context of a restoration of the church.

The historical question

The question of liturgical orientation needs to be considered from both a historical and a theological point of view.

Otto Nussbaum’s influential study, which claimed to show that versus populum celebration was the norm in the first four Christian centuries, in practice set the burden of proof in favour of versus populum celebrations where archaeology did not rule it out, on the grounds that celebration ad orientem emphasizes the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, and that this emphasis is a later development. 3 Against this, it can be observed that the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist is emphasized by some very early witnesses, including the Didache and the First Letter of Clement, not to mention the Letter to the Hebrews. Furthermore, thinking of the Eucharist as a shared meal would not, in fact, have suggested to Christians in the early centuries the picture of people sitting on opposite sides of a

table, but rather of people reclining on the same side,4 as shown in early Christian art. 5

Certainly, some churches were built, in the first four Christian centuries, in such a way that the celebrant had to face the nave across the altar, and others were oriented with the main doors at the east end and the apse at the west. It is less clear how this worked in practice. Bearing in mind the powerful tradition of prayer towards the east, one possibility is that the faithful turned to face east, away from the altar, for the anaphora.6 Another is that the faithful did not occupy the central nave, but principally the side naves, from which they could easily turn from the direction of the altar to the east.7 A third is that, in churches with doors facing the east, the celebrant could still in many cases have celebrated ad apsidem, towards a ‘liturgical east’, indicated by the splendid mosaics of the apse.8 Archaeology offers little guidance here.

Again, the example of St Peter’s in Rome is clearly at work in the way many other churches, particularly the stational churches of Rome, were designed,9 but the design of St Peter’s was itself determined, at each stage of its development, by the relationship between the altar and the confessio, the tomb of St Peter. This very particular design problem was solved by the orientation of the basilica with the doors to the east, and celebration towards the nave. A similar situation

3. Otto Nussbaum, Der Standort des Liturgen am christlichen Altar vor dem Jahre 1000 (Bonn: Hanstein, 1965), discussed by Fr Uwe Michael Lang, Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 56–64.

4. Joseph Ratzinger , Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 78.

5. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord, 61.

6. This hypothesis is put forward by Louis Bouyer, Liturgy and Architecture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 55–56.

7. The hypothesis of Klaus Gamber, Liturgie und Kirchenbau (Regensburg: Pustet, 1976), 23–25.

8. The hypothesis of Lang, Turning Towards the Lord, 84–85.

9. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 77.

existed with other important shrine churches, notably St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.10 This being so, these venerable examples of church design cannot be expected to tell us anything about earlier Christian practice or about contemporary attitudes to liturgical participation.

Finally, it should be remembered that celebration versus populum in the setting of the great Roman basilicas of the early centuries does not have the pastoral or liturgical implications sometimes desired by proponents of versus populum celebration. The distance between the altar and most of the assisting faithful, and the ancient practice of praying looking upwards, precludes a feeling of domestic intimacy, eye contact, or a clear view of the ceremonies. Indeed, in the early centuries the anaphora does not seem to have had ritual elements like the elevations and the signs of the cross; the priest simply stood at the altar and prayed.11

Celebration versus populum in early times, then, while real, was a minority practice, and there is no reason to regard it as normative.12 Pope Pius XII in any case puts us on our guard against privileging ancient practice against later development.13 The theological rationale for the developed traditional practice is the key to the question.

The theological question

Worship towards the east is worship towards the Lord, for according to ancient tradition the Lord departed towards the east, and will return again from the east: the key text for this idea being Mt 24:27: ‘For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be’.14 The rising sun is for this reason a profound symbol.

Orientation, therefore, brings into the liturgy an important eschatological element – the expectation of the return of the Lord – and also expresses the direction of the journey the people are themselves undertaking, towards the Lord.15 As Christoph Cardinal Schönborn has expressed it, celebration ad orientem manifests the attitude of worshipping obviam Sponso, ‘facing the Bridegroom’, and thus ‘a meeting with the Bridegroom, and an anticipation of Christ’s final coming’.16

In addition to the symbolism of the east is the question of the priest and faithful praying in the same direction: of their unity in prayer. Putting the two ideas together, Pope Benedict has written:

A common turning to the East during the Eucharistic Prayer remains essential. This is not a case of accidentals, but of essentials. Looking

at the priest has no importance. What matters is looking together at the Lord. It is not now a question of dialogue, but of common worship, of setting off towards the One who is to come. What corresponds with the reality of what is happening is not the closed circle, but the common movement forward expressed in a common direction for prayer.17

Another consideration is the symbolism of sacrifice: the gathered community, which is not a closed circle, opens out to offer sacrifice to God.18 As is particularly emphasized in the usus antiquior, the priest offers the sacrifice of the Mass to the Father, while the faithful unite themselves to that sacrifice. As Klaus Gamber has observed: ‘The person who is doing the offering is facing the One who is receiving the offering; thus he stands before the altar, positioned ad Dominum, facing the Lord’.19 The rejection of celebration ad orientem by the more ‘Low Church’ Protestant Reformers, and its recovery by ‘Catholicising’ movements within Anglicanism, serves to underline its symbolic importance.20

In this regard it is essential to distinguish between the priest’s offering this sacrifice to God while facing east, and the priest’s showing the consecrated host to the faithful when he proclaims ‘Ecce Agnus Dei’, between the priestly prayers to God

10. See Aidan Nichols, O.P., Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of Its Contemporary Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 94. 11. Bouyer, Liturgy and Architecture, 60–70.

12. For a survey of the evidence, see M.J. Moreton, ‘Eis anatolas blepsete: Orientation as a Liturgical Principle’, in Studia Patristica 18, ed. E.A. Livingstone (Oxford, 1982), 575–90.

13. Pius XII, Mediator Dei , n. 61.

14. See Germanus of Constantinople, Historia ecclesiastica et mystica contemplatio , PG 98:384B; cf. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord, 37.

15. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord, 97.

16. Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Loving the Church: Spiritual Exercises Preached in the Presence of Pope John Paul II (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 205.

17. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 81. He cites Josef Jungmann, ‘one of the fathers of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Liturgy’, on the importance of a common direction of prayer: ibid., 80.

18. Cf. Nichols, Looking at the Liturgy, 97.

19. Klaus Gamber, The Reform of the Roman Liturgy (San Juan Capistrano: Una Voce Press, 1993), 178.

20. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord, 110; cf. Josef Jungmann, ‘Review of Nussbaum “Der Standort des Liturgen”,’ Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 88 (1966): 445–50, 448.

Priestly ordinations celebrated by Archbishop Joseph Haas, in the Church of the Assumption, Turkheim, Bavaria. Not only has a freestanding altar been installed here, but a baptismal font has been placed behind it.

while facing east, and his periodically addressing the faithful (‘Dominus vobiscum’). In the latter cases, the priest very visibly turns to face the people, a gesture that is possible only if he is otherwise facing ad apsidem. This contrast is emphasized by Max Thurian, in an article published in Notitiae:

Regardless of the church’s architectural structure, these two complementary attitudes of the liturgy must be respected ... The whole celebration is often conducted as if it were a conversation and dialogue in which there is no longer room for adoration, contemplation and silence. The fact that the celebrants and faithful constantly face each other closes the liturgy in on itself.21

The danger of versus populum celebration being a ‘conversation’, of an excessive engagement and eye-contact between the celebrant and the faithful, is also emphasized by Joseph Ratzinger.

In reality what happened was that an unprecedented clericalization

came on the scene. Now the priest – the ‘presider’, as they now prefer to call him – becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. Everything depends on him. We have to see him, to respond to him, to be involved in what he is doing. His creativity sustains the whole thing ... Less and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by the human beings who meet here and do not like to subject themselves to a ‘predetermined pattern’.22

Celebration ad orientem avoids emphasizing the personality of the priest, maintaining an essential characteristic of the classical Roman rite.

Conclusion

The use in the usus antiquior of celebration ad orientem is a precious preservation of a venerable practice with great symbolic resonance. As the Instruction Il Padre incomprensibile emphasizes, with the Eastern tradition in view:

It is not a question, as is often claimed, of presiding the celebration with the back

turned towards the people, but rather of guiding the people in pilgrimage toward the Kingdom, invoked in prayer until the return of the Lord. Such practice ... is thus of profound value and should be safeguarded.23

We may leave the last word to Cardinal Schönborn: ‘Yet how important such signs are for “incarnating” the faith. The common prayer of priest and faithful ad orientem connected this cosmic “orientation” with faith in the Resurrection of Christ, the sol invictus, and with his Parousia in glory’.24

Postscript: The altar in post-conciliar liturgical law

In the Missale Romanum (2002), Institutio Generalis, we find at n. 299: ‘Altare exstruatur a pariete seiunctum, ut facile circumiri et in eo celebratio versus populum peragi possit, quod expedit ubicumque possibile sit’ (‘Let the main altar be constructed separate from the wall so that one can easily walk around the altar and celebrate facing the people – which is desirable wherever possible’). ‘Quod’ (‘which is’) naturally refers to the first clause of the sentence, not the second, which is subordinate to it. See C.M. Cullen and J.W. Koterski, ‘The New IGMR and Mass versus populum’, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, June 2001, 51–54. Cf. Instruction Inter Oecumenici (26th September 1964): ‘Praestat ut altare maius exstuatur a pariete seiunctum, ut facile circumiri et in eo celebratio versus populum peragi possit’ (‘It is better for the main altar to be constructed away from the wall so that one can easily walk around the altar and celebrate facing the people’). By contrast, see the Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites Sanctissimam Eucharistiam (1957), n. 4: ‘In ecclesiis, ubi unicum extat altare, hoc nequit ita aedificari, ut Sacerdos celebret populum versus’ (‘In churches, where there is only one altar, this cannot be built in such a way that the priest should celebrate facing the people’). The decree is concerned with the position of the tabernacle in relation to the altar.

21. Max Thurian, ‘La Liturgie, contemplation du mystere’, Notitiae 32 (1996):692 (reprinted in English in L’Osservatore Romano, 24th June 1996, 2).

22. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy , 80–81.

23. Il Padre incomprensibile, n. 107.

24. Schonbörn, Loving the Church, 205.

A High Mass of Requiem in the chapel of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, England. There was so little space in front of the altar, following its re-ordering, that it was necessary to use a speciallymade wooden platform for this annual Mass.

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