The global Latin Mass movement, as the <em>Herald</em> has covered in plenty of articles, is one of the most vital, quickly growing and dynamic phenomena in the Catholic Church today.
It’s not the <em>only</em> sign of hope and promise – for we have seen Eucharistic Congresses (recently in the United States), World Youth Day (something which helped convert Matt Fradd, perhaps the most globally popular Catholic <em>Youtube</em> and podcast host) and even some successful initiatives of a more Charismatic (and aesthetically Protestant-inspired) flavour such as “Youth 2000” which took place at Ampleforth Abbey recently.
Having attended this year’s Latin Mass Society Pilgrimage to Walsingham, I can once again vouch for all it strives to do and represent, having again come away with much the same that I experienced last year on it: the hand of grace felt strongly throughout the whole weekend courtesy the ancient Mass, Our Lady, the rosary, the bucolic and medieval Norfolk landscape and – not least – the conversations had and friendships either established or renewed. As ever, one’s was faith deeply strengthened.
But this year there was something else that I came away with – a deep awareness that I had been privileged to be part of a movement <em>disproportionately</em> influential and significant to its size. Let me explain.
Sometimes we in the Church are liable to carry into our Catholicism ideas we have picked up from the outside world which are not necessarily concordant with Christian thinking. One such way we may do this is by being prone to seeing the Church as a democracy. As if numbers and popular support are always reliable indicators of goodness and truth in this world.
There’s a quiet, and frankly lazy, underlying assumption out there that the crowd must be sensible and wise. (It can be – about very basic and uncontroversial issues, certainly.)
In a similar and related vein, there’s a lazy supposition that newer is always better. Mostly true for medicines, but I’d encourage anyone to look at modern buildings or the frightening list of toxic artificial chemical ingredients in supermarket-industrial “white loaf bread” to destroy that superstition.
This trend is exacerbated by the fact our democratic political systems are predicated upon the assumption that majoritarian opinion must be legitimate and indicative of a degree of prescriptive moral truth.
Things are a bit different, though, for Christians, and particularly for Catholics. The crowd, the Barabbaean multitude, crucified Jesus Christ. GK Chesterton warns carefully of the “soul of the hive”, which could cry in its fickle frenzy and excitement “It is well that one man die for the people” – and about a man whom only a week prior they had hailed as “the one who comes in the name of the Lord”, throwing palm branches before him to laud his entry into their holy city.
Saint Augustine, moreover, in his <em>Confessions</em>, ruminates on the fact that he stole pears from a neighbour’s tree whilst rampaging with his friends during his time growing up in Thagaste, North Africa. Something he never would have been likely to do, had the influence of his friends not been there.
At an ecclesiological level, we Catholics recognise deeply that the crowd is not only often wrong but sometimes insane.
While the world praises multilateralism and compromise and conciliarism – where all groups and individuals meet to find a consensus agreeable to the majority – Catholics understand that there are times and matters when this cannot be appropriate.
The <em>Synodaler Weg</em> in Germany seems to place great importance on the fact that hordes of people who identify in some form or other as Catholic have liberal views on things like abortion, women’s “ordination”, and sexual practice – without, apparently, acknowledging the possibility that despite their prevalence they might be wrong.
Perhaps they ought to remember that once, all but two bishops in the world had embraced the Arian heresy which denied the divinity of Jesus Christ. Had the Church consulted these democratic sentiments, the truth would have been quashed. It took the Pope and Saint Athanasius to cling to and defend the truth regardless and to resist the mob.
As did twelve meagre Galilean fishermen, the Apostles. When Jesus Christ asserted that those who wished to gain life must gnaw on and devour his flesh – which was to be “real food” – and drink his blood – “real drink” – hitherto enthusiastic mobs abandoned their rabbi. Only the chosen twelve remained and accepted the teaching.
But in the end the Apostles, the Pope, Athanasius and Jesus Christ himself were victorious. The Eucharist has been hailed for generations as the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus by Christians around the world. Arianism, once almost completely dominant, is all but dead. And the crucified lamb has become the risen king.
All of this is to say: the world puts too much stock in numbers. And the same dynamic is playing out, though its inverse, I believe, in the faithful minority of Latin Mass Catholics – particularly those who are becoming part of England’s mysteriously prophesied return to Walsingham.
Numbers are important, but the history of the world (not least the Christian Faith) shows us a handful of the devoted can surpass leagues of the half-hearted or partially committed.
So when emphasis is placed (as it so often is) on the <em>popularity</em> or the <em>pleasing aesthetics</em> of the Latin Mass movement, perhaps stress is put in the wrong place.
The Walsingham pilgrimage, like Chartres over in France, is indeed growing quickly – and that’s not insignificant. But Brighton and Hove Albion football club is also fast on the rise in terms of its own popularity. The two are not the same. The mob frequently is inconsistent, vacillating and erratic.
So, if not for the popularity of the LMS’ enchanted pilgrimage to England’s ancient Marian and spiritual capital, why ought Catholics be encouraged by it?
In a word: <em>fidelity</em>. What one finds among the fellow pilgrims who undertake the 57-mile journey from Ely to Little Walsingham is <em>zeal</em>.
Many grew up with an apologetic, unconfident Christianity which did nothing but demoralise its flock in the face of ridicule from its enemies. You don’t find that here. You find certainty of a natural kind that can’t be readily faked.
Many present – with desirable marital and career options – seriously consider surrendering and giving their entire life to the Church, entering holy orders or religious life, forsaking marriage and choosing penance and the Cross. Many who walk the pilgrimage already have done so.
There were few on the pilgrimage for whom the Faith was not their life. It was replete with converts of all ages and from all walks of life, nationalities and professional backgrounds, along with sizeable home-schooled families who decided that raising their children in the Faith was a top priority of their parental duties – joining all them on the pilgrimage immerses you among the faithful who <em>really believe</em>.
Not on their own terms either, but with complete surrender to the law of God and His Church.
Having said that, the unsettling <em>normality</em> of the pilgrims despite their fervour is likely to surprise any who hasn’t already been immersed in such circles.
They dress a degree or two more smartly than the general population, for certain. The men do not get out of control and act with a degree of honour. The women dress modestly, tastefully and with elegant dignity (donning mantillas in Church and wearing little if any makeup).
They likely are more averse to the latest Hollywood blockbusters and the vanities of popular culture. They won’t do drugs, and if they drink, they won’t binge. Virginity, chastity, monogamy and motherhood are unpopular in the contemporary world, but they are held the highest regard here. But despite all this, the pilgrims manage to never really appear in any way absurd.
Other than their virtues, they remain entirely well-rounded and normal human beings.
There are strong and eligible men and women who strain to be delicate and charitable in their words about others, to forgive and bless their enemies, to use the confessional regularly, who regulate themselves and refrain from things like fornicating before marriage, from engaging in contraception, or contradicting any historical and present magisterial teaching of the Church.
These are not mere weirdos captured by a fanatical attachment to some extreme ideology which gives them meaning and purpose – like those fundamentalistic (and rather pitiable) student communistas of the latter half of the 20th century. They are only otherwise entirely normal people who appear to have come, by grace, to firmly believe in the truth of Jesus Christ and his holy Catholic Faith.
As they progress along the lanes of Norfolk, they jovially sing <em>Waltzing Matilda</em> and <em>Country Roads, Take Me Home, </em>alongside Gregorian chant and patriotic anthems.
In between praying the rosary, they bond over conversations about the sports and activities they engage in, about their love of cultures or their homes or other places in the world; they discuss food, art, literature, music, history, society and science – but always with an ability to see the topic through the philosophical and theological lens of the divine creator.
Speaking to two fellow pilgrims over breakfast during the pilgrimage, we discussed a curious line from the TV series <em>The Young Pope</em>. Jude Law’s supposedly uber-traditionalist “Pope Pius XIII” declares in a speech to cardinals in the Sistine Chapel that “you can’t measure love with numbers, you can only measure it in terms of intensity”. This, we agreed, was wiser than the show likely realised.
What takes place, and gathers momentum each year, at Walsingham and through the Latin Mass Society<em> </em>has a far, far greater significance than may be initially apparent. It is not one among many groups or religious cliques meeting for a summer camp or gathering out of obligations or pleasantries.
To outsiders from afar it may appear so. But the Catholic Church is not merely one Church among many – and Walsingham is not merely one among many locations.
Richard II, the “Dowry of Mary”, St John Vianney, Bl Bartholomew Holzhauser, St Dominic Savio, St Edward the Confessor, the secrets of La Salette – all suggest or prophesy that through the Blessed Virgin Mary, England would return to the Faith and bring the world with it. Pope Leo XIII insisted this would be via the Walsingham way.
At the LMS pilgrimage to Walsingham one finds things once consigned to the dustbin of history — the ancient Mass, certitude in Faith, mantillas, regular and proper use of the sacraments, traditional attitudes towards sex and marriage — alive and well, among a joyful and enthusiastic people full of hope.
Come and see. This is not one little religious initiative among many, it could well be much more serious that: the beginning of a rebirth.<br><br><a href="RELATED: Seeking the conversion of England on the Road to Walsingham with the LMS"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><strong><em>RELATED: Seeking the conversion of England on the Road to Walsingham with the LMS</em></strong></mark></a><br><br><a href="RELATED: Why all the fuss about Latin? Because it is fruitful not just for Catholics but for civilisation too"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><em><strong>RELATED: Why all the fuss about Latin? Because it is fruitful not just for Catholics but for civilisation too</strong></em></mark></a>
<em>Photo: The Latin Mass Society Pilgrimage to Walsingham arrives at the shrine, Walsingham, England, 25 August 2024. </em>
