MASSES AT HOLYWELL IN MAY AND JUNE. Fourth Sunday Masses in May and June, originally to be hosted at St Winefride's,Holywell, Flintshire will now be celebrated at Our Lady of the Rosary Church, Jubilee Road, Buckley, CH7 2AF – Time remains at 11.30am.
FEASTS OF CORPUS CHRISTI, SACRED HEART AND SS PETER & PAUL. Mass Listings for Corpus Christi, Sacred Heart and SS Peter & Paul are now available online.
HIGH MASS IN CHELMSFORD. There will be Solemn High Mass on Saturday, 1 June, at 12.00pm, at Our Lady Immaculate Church, New London Road, Chelmsford CM2 0AR on the occasion of John and Carol Smith's golden wedding anniversary.
SOLEMN NUPTIAL MASSES. We are delighted to announce two upcoming Solemn Nuptial Masses; Miss Felicity Steven will be wed to Mr Thomas Howard at St Catherine's Church, Penrith, Cumbria on Saturday, 22 June at 2.00pm and Miss Patricia Douglas will be wed to Mr George Steven at Our Lady of Victories Church, Market Harborough, Leicestershire on Saturday, 27 July at 3.00pm. We have been notified that both Masses will be public.
SECOND HAND BOOK CATALOGUE AVAILABLE ONLINE. The Second-hand book catalogue has now been posted online. In addition, we have posted guidelines for donating second-hand books, Missals and other items to the LMS. Follow this link for Second-hand books and Missals for the Traditional Mass.
TRADITIONAL CONFIRMATIONS 2013. Confirmations in the Traditional Rite will take place at St James's, Spanish Place, London on Saturday, 14 December 2013. For more details and registration forms, click on the right-hand tab immediately above this posting. Or phone the LMS office on 020 7404 7284
SPIRITUAL BOUQUET FOR POPE FRANCIS. The LMS is gathering a spiritual bouquet for the new Pontiff. Please let us know of Masses (EF) that you have had offered for him, or rosaries that you have prayed, or indeed, any other prayers and devotions that you have made, or intend to make, for the Holy Father. More details here.
CHARTRES PILGRIMAGE 2013. There are no more LMS bursaries available for this years Chartres Pilgrimage, however there are still places on the bus. Click the following link if you would like to attend or for more information on the Chartres Pilgrimage 2013
NEW SODALITY FOR THE CONVERSION OF LAPSED CATHOLICS. The Sodality of St Augustine of Hippo has been launched by the LMS as a means of uniting our prayers with others for the conversion of our loved ones. Full details here.
FSSP NEWSLETTER DOWRY NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE. The new edition of Dowry is available online. There are very interesting articles on Motherhood, Pro-Life work, philosophy and the martyrology of Blessed Francis Bell OFM.
INSTITUTE OF CHRIST THE KING NEWSLETTER AVAILABLE. The newsletter for the Shrine of SS Peter, Paul and Philomena is now available online, with Mass times and upcoming events.
PRAYERS FOR THE LMS NOW ONLINE can be found under Resources. Prayer for the intentions of the Latin Mass Society in English and Latin.
The St Catherine’s Trust Summer School is back this Summer, at a new venue: the Franciscan Retreat Centre at Pantasaph CH8 8PE, in North Wales, for the week 21-28 July 2013.
Pantasaph is very well-connected by road and rail, being a few minutes away from the railway station at Flint, and close to the motorway network. It is near Holywell, which many will know as the only Medieval Shrine to survive the Reformation, and for many years one of the Latin Mass Society’s biggest annual Pilgrimages.
Alongside the Summer School the Latin Mass Society Latin Course for adults will be taking place (see below for more details). Accommodation at the Retreat Centre is limited, so the Latin Course participants will be staying at the Pilgrims’ Guest House in Holywell.
The Retreat Centre has a Pugin Chapel, flexible facilities, and lovely grounds. It is a delight that St Catherines Trust was able to secure the venue for their Summer School, and we all hope it will be a long-term home for this important event.
The Summer School makes it possible for Catholic children to experience a week of Catholic teaching, in a wide range of subjects, from our enthusiastic volunteer staff, in the context of the Traditional Liturgy. This is an experience which is wholly unique, and is an invaluable supplement to both homeschooling and conventional schooling.
There will be daily sung Mass, with singing of the highest standard, and sung Compline each evening. There will be an outing to a local place of interest, and visiting speakers, outside activities, the perennially popular sewing group and a staged reading of a play.
St Catherines Trust is a beneficiary of the Latin Mass Society. Under normal circumstances the school would cost about £250 per pupil to run, but as the Latin Mass Society sponsors the event, there are no fixed fees. Parents and guardians are invited to pay what they can afford. Please take advantage of this tremendous opportunity!
For more information please contact the St Catherine's Trust.
Confirmations take place in the Traditional Rite this year on Saturday, 14 December 2013 at St James's Spanish Place, London W1U 3QY, at 11.30am.
The Sacrament will be conferred by Rt Rev Alan Hopes, auxiliary bishop in Westminster. If you would like more information about Confirmations in the Extraordinary Form, or would like your child, or yourself, confirmed in 2013, please contact the LMS Office on 020 7404 7284 or email us.
To register your child or yourself for 2013's Confirmations, please read the Explanatory Notes and then complete the appropriate registration form below:
Registration Form for an Additional Child
Registration Form for an Adult
LATEST NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS ARE NOW ON THE NEWS BLOG. You can click on the newspaper icon above.
Download the spreadsheet of the full figures in tabular and graphic formats
Research by the Latin Mass Society has demonstrated the striking decline of a range of statistical indications of the health of the Catholic Church in England and Wales in the 1960s and 1970s. To our knowledge this data has never been made available in collated form before: the number of ordinations year by year since 1860, the number of priests since 1890, and baptisms, marriages, and receptions, and estimates of the Catholic population, since 1913.
Among the findings are:
Marriages: The number of marriages collapsed by a third between 1968 and 1978 (from 47,417 to 31,534), and has continued a rapid decline since then, now standing at less than 10,000 a year, a quarter of the 1968 level in absolute terms, and even less in relation to the estimated Catholic population (from 12 per thousand in 1968) to 2½ per thousand in 2010). Conversions fell off a cliff in the 1960s. From a peak of 15,794 in 1959, it fell to 5,117 in 1972; in relation the Catholic population, it fell by more than 70% between those two years. It has not recovered.
Baptisms halved between 1964 and 1977 (137,673 in 1964 to 68,351 in 1977), and are even lower today (oscillating around the 60,000 mark). This is not just the effect of the end of the ‘baby boom’: considered in relation to total live births for England and Wales (using data from the Office for National Statistics), the first half of the 20th century saw steady growth, with Catholic baptisms peaking at nearly 16% of all live births in 1963. This was followed by a decline of a third between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. A more gentle decline has continued to the present: today fewer than 10% of babies born alive in England and Wales are being baptised in the Catholic Church.
Ordinations fell by more than 56% between 1965 and 1977 (from 233 to 101), and the decline has continued. Even on the more optimistic figures supplied by the National Office of Vocations (compared to the Catholic Directory) for the current year, showing an increase on recent years, numbers are at scarcely 30% of their 1964 level. (Counting only ordinations to the diocesan clergy, there were 134 in 1964; the NOV predicts 41 this year.)
Dr Joseph Shaw, the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society, who led the research, comments:
‘Anyone with an interest in the future of the Catholic Church in England and Wales will find these figures illuminating. They show unambiguously that something went seriously wrong in the Church in England and Wales in the 1960s and 1970s. Catholics ceased quite suddenly to see the value of getting married, having large families, and having their children baptised. Non-Catholics no longer perceived the Church as the ark of salvation, and ceased to seek admission. Young men no longer offered themselves for the priesthood in the same numbers as before.
‘It is not fanciful to connect this catastrophe to the wrenching changes which were taking place in the Church at that time, when the Second Vatican Council was being prepared, discussed, and, often erronesouly, applied. As Pope Benedict wrote in the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum (2007):
in many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion. And I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church.
‘The theological and liturgical fashions of that era were invariably justified by the hope of positive pastoral results, and these results manifestly failed to materialise.
‘The effect of dissent from the Church’s teaching is particularly manifest in relation to contraception, which has had a direct consequence on the Catholic birth rate, as reflected in the number of baptisms, compared to the national birth rate.
‘The Church in England and Wales today has fewer than half the ordinations each year than it had in the 1860s, but more than double the number of priests. A large proportion of those priests, however, will die or have to stop work over the next decade. In this respect we are still living on our capital, and this capital is about to run out.
‘The Extraordinary Form has not lost its power to attract young men to the priesthood, and the communities which have grown up around it today provide disproportionate numbers of vocations, marriages, and baptisms. Thirteen young men from England and Wales are currently studying for the priesthood in the different religious orders committed to the Extraordinary Form; three more should join them in September; these are numbers which many dioceses would envy.
‘We believe that the Extraordinary Form (the Traditional Mass) has an important role to play in resolving the crisis in the Church.’
Notes on the statistics
Unless otherwise indicated, the statistics are taken from the Catholic Directory.
Statistics for ordinations can be recovered only by manually counting the lists of men ordained each year; some of this work was done by the Rev. Stephen Morgan and a team at the Diocese of Portsmouth. The Latin Mass Society has filled in the gaps in Rev. Morgan’s figures and extended the range of dates covered in both directions.
In addition, the LMS has added the total number of clergy, and the numbers given in the Directory’s ‘Recapitulation of Statistics’ since 1913, which include Baptisms, Marriages, Adult Conversions (renamed ‘Receptions’ in 1976), and estimates of the Catholic population. We are very grateful to the Rev. Stephen Morgan for letting us use the fruits of his research, to the Fathers of the London Oratory for giving us access to their library, and to a number of Latin Mass Society volunteers for their time.
For further information contact: Mike Lord, General Manager, on 020 7404 7284 or michael@lms.org.uk.