Happy Anniversary! Joseph Shaw celebrates sixty years of the Latin Mass Society

Welcome to the first Mass of Ages of the Society’s 60th Anniversary year, which happily coincides with a Jubilee Year proclaimed by the Holy Father.

The Society was founded in early 1965, the year that Winston Churchill died, and the year after permission was first given for Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular – although this permission had been widely anticipated. A ‘mere permission’ was given, as Fr Geoffrey Houghton-Brown wrote in his autobiographical Unwanted Priest, and many priests took to it, ‘like Gadarene swine’: so much so that Mass in Latin became difficult to find.

A national organisation was needed to express the feelings of the many lay Catholics who loved the Latin Mass – preferably without the changes to the rubrics that were coming in at the same time. Our predecessors continued their battle for this same, ancient Mass, after the Novus Ordo Missae was promulgated in Advent 1969.

The Latin Mass Society has always had many friends among priests and bishops, and indeed among lay intellectuals, but its raison d’etre was and remains to be a mouthpiece, a campaigner, and an organiser, of and for the forgotten, ordinary Catholic, who simply loves the Church’s liturgical tradition. Over the decades our movement has surprised some people merely by surviving, and then by attracting new generations of Catholics, but it is not really surprising that the Mass loved by the saints and martyrs over so many centuries should come to be loved by modern people as well.

Our movement has attracted some hostility too, sometimes of a kind which seems disproportionate to our numbers and influence. This can reflect, I think, an uneasy conscience. As a Dostoyevsky character remarks: ‘I did him a bad turn once, and I’ve had a grudge against him ever since.’

On this 60th anniversary, nevertheless, we have much to celebrate. The success of petitions of public figures, from 1966 to 2024, in staving off the comprehensive prohibition of the ancient Latin Mass; the widening availability of the Mass, particularly since Pope Benedict’s Summorum Pontificum in 2007; the development of all kinds of resources for the Mass, of a kind our predecessors could only have dreamed of, including reprinted books, newly formed choirs and scholas, training opportunities, and volunteers with all sorts of expertise.

Some observers might assume our movement must be at a low ebb, four years after Pope Francis apparently (though not entirely unambiguously) suggested that he wanted the celebration of the Traditional Mass to cease, at some unspecified point in the future. This is not the case at all. This has made our work more difficult, but we are also benefitting from the renewed attention – the ‘Streisand effect’ – and from a longerterm development, the culmination of a debate on the liturgy that started a century ago.

Today tradition presents itself as a rebellion against what Martin Mosebach called ‘senile avant- guardism’: the new ideas of the 1960s may look passé, but the tradition remains fresh, exciting, and offers vast and enticing intellectual, artistic, and spiritual landscapes to explore.

To celebrate our anniversary, we have arranged many special events. Chief among them are short tours by two bishops, Bishop Athanasius Schneider in June and Bishop Marian Eleganti in November, who between them will be celebrating Masses in at least five dioceses with the permission of the Ordinary.

We are organising another kind of tour, of a relic of the True Cross, which will criss-cross the country with Masses and devotions: a special devotional offering by the Society in thanksgiving for the graces we have received over our six decades (and see page 9).

A third element is the Masses for ‘cultural groups’, to mark the international friendships of the Traditional movement and underline the extraordinary diversity of Traditional Mass congregations. The first of these, in honour of Blessed Michael Tansi, at the request of our friends in Una Voce Nigeria, has already taken place; to come are Masses for traditional Catholics of Maltese, Polish, and Chinese heritage, and also one, to be advertised only to those for whom it is offered, for Muslim converts.

We also hope to have some special publications out this year, and to make all of our events as splendid as possible.

To all our readers, happy anniversary!