Joseph Shaw, President of the Latin Mass Society, has written an update on the status of the Latin Mass.
In his latest President’s Bulletin, Shaw states, correctly actually, that Leo has “not expressed a clear, favorable policy toward the ancient Mass, and the machinery established to suppress it has not been dismantled.”
This is a moment of candor from Shaw, who is actually a big proponent of the as-long-as-we-can-have-our-TLM-everything-else-can-go-to-hell school of thought. This was evident in the Latin Mass Society’s denunciation of the SSPX’s episcopal consecrations earlier this year.
Taking into consideration all of the currently available evidence, Catholics can only conclude that Leo has no intention on doing anything other than implementing the Bergoglian agenda regarding the Traditional Latin Mass.
His recently-concluded weekly audiences defending Sacrosanctum Concilium, his unwillingness to halt the aggressive closing down of diocesan TLMs, Cardinal Arthur Roche’s comment that Leo is not going to rescind Traditionis Custodes or reimplement Summorum Pontificum, and Leo’s excommunication of the SSPX and latest habit of even shunning Eucharistic Prayer I are all indicative of his feelings toward the TLM.
Despite this, Shaw insists that readers would do well to exercise yet more patience. Traditionalists, he says, can “continue to do the things that we have been doing up to now, but not anything new. At least, this is the case in many countries around the world, though every few weeks a bishop in the United States closes down a long-standing Sunday celebration. This has not been the pattern so much elsewhere, such as in England, France and Germany.”
The continued “wait and see” approach might have been an appropriate strategy if Rome’s intentions remained genuinely mysterious. In light of everything that has taken place before and since Leo’s election, however, it now seems like insanity, as the present restrictions and crackdowns are not disconnected abuses that a sympathetic Leo might eventually correct, but the very manifestations of a deeper ecclesiological and liturgical program.
To his credit, Shaw correctly identifies Traditionis Custodes as being “directed primarily against parish churches” and notes the strange exemptions enjoyed by chapels, shrines, personal parishes and traditional priestly institutes. He then asks the devastating question: “If the Traditional Mass is a danger to the unity of the Church, is it a danger only if it takes place in a parish church?”
The Dispatch
But it seems that Shaw doesn’t want to face the difficult reality that his own question implies. This incoherence proves that the dispute cannot really be about the supposed threat the Traditional Roman liturgy poses to “unity,” but that, in reality, it concerns the traditional faith and ecclesiology embodied in the Traditional Latin Mass itself. In other words, doctrine is the core of the matter, not liturgical practices.
This is an impossible conclusion for Shaw and the Latin Mass Society to draw, since they want to defend the liturgy while detaching it from the doctrinal rupture that occurred at Vatican II. Shaw comes closest to doing this when he says that Traditionis Custodes’ “public justification” is that Catholics should “return” to worship with the Novus Ordo, and then describes apparent proposals for the “re-education” of Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass.
Frustratingly, even when recognizing these chilling developments, he remains stuck in the old, counterproductive pattern: point out the contradictions, defend existing communities, preserve permissions, and await a better settlement.
What’s more, Shaw astonishingly praises Leo, at least indirectly, for granting permission for a Latin Mass to be celebrated in St. Mary Major in Rome for the annual Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage this year.
“This gesture is not compatible with the view that the Traditional Mass is some terrible thing that must be completely expunged from the life of the Church. On the other hand, it is also not the clear signal that is needed to resolve this debate,” he said, while failing to note that the Vatican actually denied the group’s request to say Mass at the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter, which it had approved last year.
The question that Indult and Ecclesia Dei Latin Mass attendees should be asking themselves is not how much territory they can retain within the present conciliar prisoner of war camp they exist in, but whether the principles responsible for the liturgical revolution should themselves be accepted. To quote Integrity Magazine co-founder Stephen Kokx: “Our battle is for the faith not the liturgy per se.” Practical coexistence with the apostate post-conciliar system will never provide a true solution.
The great irony in Shaw’s bulletin is that his factual observations resemble the diagnosis offered by harder-line traditionalists, but his prescription remains that of the institutional traditionalist establishment. He sees the suppression, recognizes the weakness of its arguments, acknowledges the continuing machinery behind it, and even questions the logic of the official justification — yet has no other solution for Catholics than to “wait.”
Shaw & Co. would do Catholicism a great favor if they stopped treating the survival of the Traditional Mass and negotiation over permissions as the Alpha and Omega of the war, and instead invested their energy in the life-and-death effort to delegitimize the post-conciliar machine that made these restrictions possible in the first place.
