GOVERNMENT DECREE: "THE NEW NORMAL"

The politicians are already indoctrinating us to accept that, post-pandemic, we shall have a "New Normal". I'm pretty sure what they have in mind is that so many clergy will have been celebrating, privately in their studies, the Extraordinary Form of the Holy Eucharist, that they will find it hard to drag themselves back to ... er ...

You are all going to have to prepare for this. But help is at hand. Very cheap help.

You would need to dive in the deepest seas, or traffick for the strangest webs with the most Eastern of merchants, before you found better value for your £3.50 than you will get by buying a little book, written by Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society and published by the dear old Catholic Truth Society (mind you, their pamphlets used to cost 4d at the back of any Catholic Church when I was a boy).

The book is called:

"HOW TO ATTEND THE EXTRAORDINARY FORM"

It is full of information, it covers a vast field, and, unusually in this age, does not condescend to the reader. You are treated as an adult, and given footnotes!

Joseph Shaw is, as many readers will be aware, a man of exemplary energy and drive. His activism has been the main impulse behind the publication of the very fine FIUV Position Papers. This is an age when many ordinary Catholics seem to have a faintly bewildered manner. Not so the laymen and laywomen and laychildren attached to the Traditionalist movement. Do you want passive laypeople who simper submissively in the presence of domineering clerical bullies? Steer clear of the Latin Mass Society.

Of course, not everybody would write any book in exactly the same way. I would have welcomed a clear statement that the rules of the Old Rite allow celebration facing the people or facing the same way as the people ... and that the rules of the New Rite ...  have precisely the same two options!!! And that Benedict XVI allowed the Readings in the Old Rite to be in  the vernacular. I myself would not do disturbing things in the presence of a congregation likely to be irritated by my eccentric personal choices, but ... for example ... when offering Mass at an open air Altar a few years ago on August 15, at a recusant House not far from Oxford, I said the Old Mass facing the people (literally, I think, versus australia) and with vernacular readings. They were a congregation mostly, I think, not familiar with the Old Mass. They seemed perfectly happy.

My stuff about seas, webs, and merchants ... I can't remember whether I'm alluding to Walter Pater on La Gioconda, or Evelyn Waugh on Mr Scott-King, or Boris Johnson on Winston Churchill. Amazing how vague one gets in old age.