Dog lovers everywhere are waiting with baited breath to discover the fate of Shroom. Shroom is a 6 stone Carpathian Shepherd dog who, in a moment of moral weakness, gave way to a passing instinct to bite a policeman, PC Michael Obern, on the bottom.
Shroom is not alone in the temptation to respond inappropriately to the police. We’ve all been there, even if nipping the buttock was not the exact temptation we had to resist.
The CPS is seeking the destruction of Shroom, and the court has been presented with mitigating factors. At the top of the list is the claim that Shroom knows and responds to more than 300 Latin phrases and commands.
The fate of Shroom is as yet uncertain, but this plea of mitigation is a sign that knowing and responding to Latin is still taken to be a real virtue in our rapidly decaying culture.
There are an increasing number of Catholics who might hope that the Vatican could be persuaded to adopt the same values of a British Magistrates Court and recognise that knowing, loving and responding to Latin might be considered both a virtue and mitigating factor when considering how the faithful might be allowed access to the Mass.
Prejudice abounds however. An exchange of views on the importance of recognising the pastoral needs of those who attend the Traditional Latin Mass took place on Twitter a few days ago. Austin Ivereigh was disparaging about the kind of people he imagined attended (not that he has gone to make any first-hand observations of course). “What pastoral needs?” He wrote. “Here in the UK TLMgoers are mostly white educated and British people …hard to think of any concrete pastoral needs they may have”…
It’s a shame that when it becomes hard to think, Mr Ivereigh’s reaction is to give up. It does not take an inordinate amount of intelligence or imagination to recognise that money does not insulate people from stress, anxiety, self-doubt, crises of faith, ill health or the threat of mortality.
Nor, despite his immersion in reverse racism, and inverted snobbery, does being white or middle class. Mr Ivereigh may not have seen as much Shakespeare as he would like, but the cry of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice speaks for all white middle class people, Jewish or Christian when he asks:
“If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?”
But if in Mr Ivereigh’s world the tears, anxieties, bereavements and stresses of non-Caucasians are worth more than others, this was not a prejudice that Jesus shared. He looked at the rich young ruler and loved him; and the Church has always prided itself on being colour, age and class blind.
And as it happens, this is also the case for TLM Goers.
In January this year Dr Joseph Shaw, the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society, wrote an article for the Homiletic and Pastoral Review magazine on the demographics of the Extraordinary Form.
“The Foederatio Internationalis Una Voce (FIUV, or Una Voce International) recently submitted to the Holy See a report on the availability of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite around the world (hereafter, “the FIUV Report”), in the preparation of which I, as Secretary of the FIUV, was closely involved,” he wrote.
“This included data from 362 dioceses and 52 countries, and gives a rare overview of the situation, not just in Europe and America, but across the world. Much of the information was of a qualitative rather than quantitative nature (for example, detailing the policies of dioceses towards the EF), aspects of it are amenable to statistical summary and presentation.”
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this report which Dr Joseph Shaw draws out is the fact that “these data support the often-heard characterisation of the Extraordinary Form as having a particular attraction for young people and families”.
Last week I found myself in a small reading group which the parish priest, at the behest of the bishop, had convened to read the documents of the Second Vatican Council as a Lenten exercise.
As the different members of the group talked about their own expectations they brought to this encounter of shared reading and talking, one man in his late sixties who had been helping with RCIA much of his adult life, could scarcely restrain his despair.
“We have to go much further in adopting the values of the society arounds us to make the Church more like society to bring back the young people,” he lamented passionately. I asked him if he was sure about that, and what his presuppositions were that led him to this interpretation of the Church’s state and task. That’s when the conversation got difficult. He only had one narrative, one perspective, and it seemed to me that he was unhelpfully under-informed.
I asked him if he was aware that in some places the Traditional Latin Mass had more young people than old attending? He looked at me as though I was either mad or deliberately being unpleasantly mischievous. In fact, unless I was mistaken, he had to try very hard to bite back the accusation that he believed I was actually lying. He really was outraged.
I wish I had had this report and Dr Shaw’s commentary to hand. It shows beyond any doubt that the TLM is providing an encounter with Christ in the Mass that draws the young in particular as the most wounded casualties of our reductive, barren sterile materialism.
In a culture which has suffocated our sense and experience of the sacred, the TLM pours a salve into arid hearts.
I’m not sure who would be more surprised by the facts as this paper describes them, my Lenten companion who cannot believe the young don’t just want more of the same, or Mr Ivereigh for whom the delight of the discovery that multi-ethnic non-white congregations enjoy meeting Jesus in the historic language of the Church, encountered in all places and at all times.
As with so many reports, a good conclusion can tell you swiftly and briefly what you need to know, so here is Dr Shaw’s conclusion:
“I have demonstrated that the association between the EF and young people and families is neither a myth nor something limited to certain countries. Most Catholics have never encountered the EF, but of those who do, mostly by chance, the ones who make it their preferred Form of Mass are disproportionately young, and include a disproportionate number of families with small children.
“The presence of numerous children at the typical EF celebration can be confirmed, indeed, by anyone willing to set foot in one, provided it is celebrated in a reasonably family-friendly time and place, and is reasonably well-established.
“The place of migrants, and in general of people of mixed cultural and linguistic backgrounds, at the EF, can be seen, naturally, only in places where the local population includes them. Nevertheless it is very evident in cities such as London, and as indicated in the statements quoted above, can be found in many countries.
“Easiest of all to confirm is the presence of men at the EF. With Ordinary Form congregations in many places being increasingly dominated by older women, the ability of the EF to retain at least equal numbers of men, as well as young people and those bringing up children, is of no small significance.”
(CNS)
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