UK Catholic priests: "are careful to avoid talk of civil war in the region"


Adapted from this source: "Let us pray in Latin: priests take on Catholics' magic circle" www.timesonline.co.uk ; in turn, from The Sunday Times, August 10, 2008...


" Damian Thompson sniffs the incense of a revolution among Britain's parish priests."


We take up the story here:


"We are witnessing an unusual sight: a Roman Catholic solemn mass, celebrated according to an ancient Latin rite effectively outlawed 40 years ago.


"And it's taking place in the 13th - century chapel of Merton college, Oxford, which has been Anglican for 400 years.


"Just for a week, however, it has gone back to being Catholic -- but this is not Catholicism as most people know it.


"I'm at the summer school of the Latin Mass Society which -- to the delight of the conservative Pope Benedict XVI and the dismay of trendy British bishops -- is teaching priests how to say the Tridentine mass.


"The last time Merton chapel regularly witnessed this sort of complex liturgy was in the 1540s, before the Protestant reformers pulled out much of the stained glass and toppled the statues of saints.


"The organizers of the summer school are reformers, too, but their aim is precisely the opposite: to restore Latin services and rich furnishings to their own Catholic parish churches, many of which were stripped bare by modernizers after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.


"What makes this summer school rather controversial is that most of the bishops of England and Wales disapprove of the return of the Latin mass, regarding the sonorous Latin prayers and intricate gestures as a relic of the Middle Ages.


"Until recently, the Tridentine mass could be celebrated only with a bishop's permission, usually granted grudgingly for special occasions.


"Then, in July of last year, Pope Benedict XVI swept away the right of bishops to ban the old services.


"Most of them were horrified.


"So these are tense times.


"But the 60 priests who have gathered at Merton college -- to brush up their skills or to learn the Tridentine Mass from scratch -- are careful to avoid talk of civil war in the church..."


A good read!

Check out, too:

UK Father Tim Finigan: the Hermeneutic of Continuity blog.