Holy Mass again in Latin

by Ephram Fernando

For four decades the hearts of a stable group of Catholics who struggled to redress an injustice through the return of the Latin Mass were little mechanisms of power revolving regularly like a watch ticking on the wrist of a dead man.

The liturgical mutilators who consigned then to the dustbin of history as a superstitious remnant, fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds, received a jar, when Pope Benedict XVI issued the Motu Proprio (binding order) Summorum Pontificum returning the Latin Mass to be observed from September 14, 2007 the day Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross to commemorate an event that took place in AD 629 when King Heraclius of Judea carried the holy Cross to the Basilica on Calvary.

The task facing the stable group is to claw back inch by inch everything that was lost in the 1960s until the Catholic Church is restored to its full integrity.

Pope Benedict with his bold Order has rescued the Church from a graceless group whose eccentricities have ossified with age becoming caricatures of themselves. This group never advertised, nor openly recruited, nor even proclaimed their existence, and reached full flower in the 1960s during Vatican II.

Catholics who wonder how they have come to be in the presence of priests who do not believe in the sacraments or obey the rules of their Orders are likely to get some answers if they examine the behaviour of those known as The Bloomsbury Group which included Leonard Woolf and his wife Virginia Woolf, Tennyson the poet, Whitehead the Philosopher, Maxwell the physicist, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Lylton Strachey who wrote the sarcastic "Eminent Victorians debunking Cardinal Manning, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, Florence Nightingale and other great people" whose hem of their garments he was not fit to touch.

On the fringes of Bloomsbury were such figures as Hardy the mathematician, the novelist E. M. Forster and the economist Maynard Keynes.

Only these three have achieved anything like great works although Forster's novels look increasingly dated and Keynes economics are discredited.

Suicides were frequently attempted and successful in the cases of Virginia Woolf and Dora Carrington and to give a list of their sexual perversions would be too long and vulgar for this essay.

They had complicated sexual relationships with each other male to female alike almost at will. This disregard for any restraint was an obvious feature of all they did or wrote. So was their arrogance.

The great 18th century satirist, author of Gulliver, Dean Swift wrote I wonder not to see men wicked, but I do wonder to see them not ashamed.

The Bloomsbury Group hardly knew the meaning of shame but were influential in England in the early years of the nineteenth century.

They were rich, leisured and enjoyed access to publications. They promoted each other and anyone who was against Christian values. Their own ancestors were almost always puritan which they rejected.

Take Margery Fry. She was a child of the famous Quaker and Chocolate family and wrote about her own upbringing that "among other constraints they were forbidden to laugh at a joke made by a man lest they be thought fast".

The men were mostly conscientious objectors in both World Wars relying upon the bravery of others to save them from the concentration camps since they would have been obvious targets for Hitler, as most of them were homosexuals.

But these disturbed deranged, anti-tradition through their writings, printing houses, university chairs and governorships of the BBC. In fact if you want to hear of Bloomsbury values switch on to the BBC. You will hear them everyday as the norm of our secular society.

The Bloomsbury Group considered themselves so clever and wise none less so than Bertrand Russell. In his 96th year he said "when the time comes to die I shall have to inform Death that I am too busy just now". But Death laughed and carried him anyway.

It is ironic that people who prided themselves on their honesty and candour in contrast as they thought to Victorian hypocrisy and duplicity should have succeeded for so long in concealing the truth about their personal affections. Even so perceptive and psycho-analytic minded a critic as Lionel Trilling was able to write a full-length study of Forester in 1943 without realising that he was a homosexual.

Nor did Roy Harrod in his biography of keynes published in 1951 see fit to mention Keynes' homosexuality. a deliberate suppression since Harrod was a friend of keynes and perfectly aware of Keynes' sexual activities. Nor did Leonard Woolf in a five volume autobiography that was entirely can did about his wife's mental breakdowns give any indication of the frenetic sexual affairs of everyone around him.

Like after Vatican II, what stunned was the indifference of the intellectual class. None seemed to care while they were being deprived of their heritage, provoking a learned man telling the writer "Except for a few the rest have fled".

In AD 312 an order was issued by the pagan Emperor Constantine known as the "Edict of Milan". It permitted the people of the empire to follow the beliefs and practices of their chosen creeds without let or hindrance.

It was motivated by a desire to establish peace and an acknowledgement that Christians had grown too numerous and claimed too many prominent men in their ranks to be suppressed. The temples were not torn down but many continued to pay homage to the old gods.

Within a few generations however the names of the Olympians began to disappear and the heavens emptied of capricious rulers. The last thunderbolt had been taken from the hands of Jupiter.

Pope Benedict, raised a Catholic, in Nazi Germany, once a reformer but shaken by the events after Vatican II and the revolution that followed seems to have concluded that the Catholic Church's opening to Modernism has run its course and failed.

Summorum Pontificum offers hope for the revival of a faith that is in its deepest crisis since the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

We lose Stephen (1st martyr) to gain Paul (1st convert) and Mathias replaces Judas and now we have Benedict.

And for reforms? Well, at best they have become red meat to comedians and worst turned toxic, like Gatsby, title character of "The Great Gatsby," a 1926 American literary classic.