Today is the second anniversary of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificem coming into effect. If anyone should think that it has made little difference in many places, we must bear in mind that two years in the life of the church is a very short time. And yet in those two short years, great deal has already happened.
For us folks in the Birmingham Oratory Summorum Pontificem has made quite a difference, independent of the fact the Oratory fathers have always been very supportive of the extraordinary form. Before SP we had low mass every Sunday in the cloister chapel at 12.45pm. After SP the mass was moved into the main church at 9.30am as part of the usual run of Sunday masses, and it’s numbers have almost trebled.
Not only that, since the holydays in England and Wales were transferred to the nearest Sundays, we have kept the old days in the EF, and we now have high mass on many of them. Also a weekly Saturday mass has started at 9.30am, has been quite well attended. Regular masses at celebrated nearby in Halesowen every Wednesday and also occasional high masses are celebrated in St. John Fisher, West Heath, Birmingham. The next one will be tomorrow for the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows at 7.00pm, which I and some of the Birmingham Oratory choir will be singing at.
The deeply ingrained prejudice against traditional Catholicism among so many of the clergy will take many, many years to overcome, if not decades. Such indeed has been the trauma of the church's Babylonian captivity of the last 40 years, that we cannot expect all to be put right in a year or so! Nevertheless like the bronze serpent in the wilderness, the standard of the cross has been by our Holy Father by the liberation of the 1962 missal. Whoever in the church has been bitten by the poisonous serpent of secularism shall gaze upon it and live. Patience is a virtue!
For us folks in the Birmingham Oratory Summorum Pontificem has made quite a difference, independent of the fact the Oratory fathers have always been very supportive of the extraordinary form. Before SP we had low mass every Sunday in the cloister chapel at 12.45pm. After SP the mass was moved into the main church at 9.30am as part of the usual run of Sunday masses, and it’s numbers have almost trebled.
Not only that, since the holydays in England and Wales were transferred to the nearest Sundays, we have kept the old days in the EF, and we now have high mass on many of them. Also a weekly Saturday mass has started at 9.30am, has been quite well attended. Regular masses at celebrated nearby in Halesowen every Wednesday and also occasional high masses are celebrated in St. John Fisher, West Heath, Birmingham. The next one will be tomorrow for the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows at 7.00pm, which I and some of the Birmingham Oratory choir will be singing at.
The deeply ingrained prejudice against traditional Catholicism among so many of the clergy will take many, many years to overcome, if not decades. Such indeed has been the trauma of the church's Babylonian captivity of the last 40 years, that we cannot expect all to be put right in a year or so! Nevertheless like the bronze serpent in the wilderness, the standard of the cross has been by our Holy Father by the liberation of the 1962 missal. Whoever in the church has been bitten by the poisonous serpent of secularism shall gaze upon it and live. Patience is a virtue!
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