"Change Your Life!" Michael Voris in London

I'm really glad that I went to the Michael Voris talk last night: it exceeded expectations. Beforehand, as we waited, one of our group joked that he might run onto the stage to some rousing music; I suggested the "Rocky" theme. We all snickered. I felt somewhat ashamed when he did come on and had a real spirit of humility about him: sure he's a practised orator, albeit in a very casual style. So much for the better -- it's hard to hold an audience in thrall for an hour unless you're a skilled speaker -- but he came across as sincere, authentic and profoundly Catholic. You got the sense that you were listening to a man with an genuine love for Christ, who is profoundly grateful for his re-conversion and the shot at eternity it gives him. A man who has discovered the pearl of great price, and wants to share it with as many people as possible.

He started and ended with prayer, and constantly redirected our focus to the Holy Trinity. This was not the "Michael Voris" show, he was the medium not the message. Some highlights included Voris's memory of Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen's response to a hippy who wanted him to read a book combining Catholicism and Eastern mysticism: "Get out! Get out! The Catholic Faith is a gift from Almightly God and I won't have you polluting it!" (a Vortex with the same incident is linked to below) and his question to the audience: how will you measure up in heaven against the martyrs of the early centuries of the Church?

That last question underlined much of the talk: it is not enough, argued Voris to be "a Catholic", to fully embrace the Faith one needs to be "Catholic", no indefinite article, no qualification, no secondary identity. To be Catholic is to embrace Our Lord fully and to be prepared to accept His cross. You might be made fun of, you might lose a few friends or compromise your career, but, argued Voris, none of these measure up to the sacrifices made by early Christians so that we could have the Faith handed down to us.

Voris pointed out that God's word through the Catholic Church is Truth: when faced with Truth you can either reject it or embrace it. Embracing Truth means changing your life. Taking up your cross to follow Christ. Keeping one eye on eternity while trying to live the Truth here on earth. God didn't intend us to pick and choose the bits we like, to water down Truths to suit fashion and cultural climate, or to accommodate those who oppose the Truth. This is where Michael Voris comes most into conflict with those who disagree with him: those who feel that he promotes a Catholicism that is too rigid, too unyielding, not gentle or accommodating or palatable enough for those who disagree with parts of the Magesterium or who believe that all religions are essentially aiming for the same place.  Voris would argue that these people misunderstand the meaning of the word charity -> caritas -> love. He argued, persuasively, that to elide the Truth in order to prevent hurt feelings or offended sensibilities is the direct opposite of charity. Charity - love for the other - involves biting the bullet and telling the Truth in those matters that affect the salvation of souls. Hurt feelings are nothing compared to an eternity in Hell. Having been given a wake-up call by his dying mother, Voris is profoundly grateful for her lack of tact in addressing his dissolute lifestyle and the slippery slope to Hell it was leading him down. He she been tactful, he'd probably not be standing in front a a full house at the Regent Hall in London, exhorting his listeners to save souls, embrace the Faith and live radically.

Based on last night's talk, I'd say that none of the criticisms I've heard leveled at Michael Voris would stick. He was humble, charitable, amusing, self-effacing, meticulously faithful to the Magesterium, Catholic down to his very essence. Oh, and to knock another myth on the head: his hair was clearly all his own.


Among the people I went with there was (at least) one skeptic who, by the end of the talk was utterly convinced of Voris's sincerity and orthodoxy. The general consensus was "What's not to like"? followed by "Why are our shepherds not speaking as clearly and plainly as Michael Voris?"


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Another reason that last night was good fun was because it was a sort of accidental blognic -- and I got to go to the pub(!) which is a rare occurrence.  It was great to meet fellow Guild of Blessed Titus Brandsma bloggers Lawrence "Bones" England (even if he didn't have a clue who I was! See if I scribble in your combox again! :-P), Paul "OTSOTA" Priest, and Dylan "Reluctant Sinner" Perry, as well as seeing pals Mac "Mulier Fortis" McLernon and Bara Brith. There were lots of familiar faces in the audience (which was packed to capacity on the ground floor) including some new friends from the recent NACF  pilgrimage to Walsingham. I also discovered that a fellow parishioner is, like me, a former rat fancier: now there's an essay topic - "Connections between Extraordinary Form Mass-goers and small livestock fancying". The mind boggles. It was good to see such a strong turnout from faithful Catholics, many of whom had traveled a considerable distance to get to the talk. Having an opportunity to socialise afterwards was a bonus, and made me wonder whether or not some "Juventutem" style evenings could be arranged for oldies like "Mr.Annie Elizabeth" & me  who are well beyond Juventutem age but who enjoy good conversation and socialising with faithful Catholics?

As a last aside, I'll leave you with a rare sighting of the Lesser Spotted Mulier Fortis left (literally) holding the baby!

The real spirit of Vatican II and a parking ticket

Chapel of Our Lady of the Apocalypse

Photo credit: Jean-Louis Zimmerman

Our Parish Priest says that that there is no such thing as coincidence. This makes me even more delighted to report that apparently random and negative events on our journey to our French home (eldest child having massive projectile vomit while we were driving at 130km/h down the motorway) delayed our journey (serious hour spent cleaning car, siblings, and so forth) which motivated us to drive for a further three hours to Clermont Ferrand which meant that we didn't have to worry about "Pottery Masses" at Orleans Cathedral. We did however have to worry about finding another Mass, and a quick Google on my smartphone pulled up a 10am Mass at the Cathédrale de Notre Dame de l'Assomption in Clermont Ferrand.

The Cathedral is a Gothic masterpiece in black volcanic stone. The interior has had a few concessions made to modernity (a "table" altar on the sanctuary in front of the high altar), a few bits of contemporary (or 70s folksy - as you will) religious "art" added here or there, but essentially the place is as it would have been several hundred years ago: it hasn't been vandalised.

The Mass was a revelation as well. I've been to all sorts of Masses in France, and I never know what to expect. One Sunday in Paris, while staying with friends, we wandered to the nearest church and found ourselves to be the only Europeans amidst a fervent congregation from Haiti: the Mass was said passionately (entirely in Creole) by a Haitian priest whose homily alone clocked in at almost an hour. I think it might still be the longest Mass we've ever been to: almost three hours later we met the bemused priest who was wondering what we'd made of his lovely parish community and where we'd come from. We've also seen Masses creatively intoned by barefoot priests in sandals in the round in vandalised churches denuded of their sacred art and hung with macrame banners. So we never know what to expect.

At Clermont Ferrand we were more than pleasantly surprised. The Mass was a crowd pleaser - there's no doubt. The Cathedral was certainly full, and it was difficult to find parking anywhere nearby. But it wasn't tambourines and guitars pulling in this crowd: it was Gregorian chant, rubrics that anybody familiar with the Extraordinary Form would instantly recognise, and a sense of reverence that's all too often missing. Here though, was a sacred liturgy, the sacrifice on Calvary reinacted with reverence, yet it was still both popular and populist. Wonderful!

We started off with the Asperges, in Latin. Much of the ordinary of the Mass was in Latin - mainly Mass I, although the Gloria was from Mass 8 (always a crowd pleaser). The congregation clearly knew their chant, and the phrases alternated between the choir and the people. The alter servers were arranged as in the EF: and followed many of the same rubrics which was refreshing in an Novo Ordus Mass where it's far more common to see a plethora of servers hanging around looking bored, sometimes literally twiddling their thumbs (or waving at their parents as used to happen in a parish we used to go to!).



Nothing in life is perfect, and there were some things that I wasn't happy with -- the choir stood between the "new" altar and the high altar, which meant that they had their backs to the Blessed Sacrament (and blocked the Tabernacle from view) which I found odd. Also, as is common in France, very few people knelt at the consecration: rows of chairs very close together with no kneelers send out a very clear "no kneeling" signal. On the other hand, I noticed a bit of a "kneeling wave": wherever small groups of people knelt, many of those around them also started to kneel, so that many more people were kneeling at the end of the consecration than at the beginning; ditto after the Agnus Dei. Perhaps peer-pressure is what's needed to reinstate reverence: kneeling - Just Do It!

Kneeling to receive the Blessed Sacrament, on the other hand, was clearly not an option, and I have to admit to being too cowardly to try given how quickly the communion lines were moving. However receiving Our Lord on the tongue was clearly not uncommon, even if not the norm, and many people genuflected (as we did) before receiving communion. Somehow seeing people making a deep genuflection (rather than a duck-bob) before receiving Our Lord redeems the standing bit, for me at least. The cloud around the silver lining was that we had to choose our communion queue carefully in order to dodge the crowd of extraordinary ministers of self importance Holy Communion.

The Mass was a real blend of old and new, but with much more old than new. The readings and Eucharistic prayers were in French, but the rest of it was far closer to the EF in many ways than most Novus Ordo Masses that I've been to. This is what I think is the real "spirit" of Vatican II - a genuine hermeneutic of continuity, where the Mass has not been changed beyond recognition, but simply has some bits added in the vernacular. There were "bidding prayers" and the ghastly sign-of-peace (which I have to admit my husband likes and I have always found annoying and cringe worthy in equal measure, but then he's far less of a misanthrope). As I've already said, nothing is perfect, but - oh! - if only every N.O. Mass could be said in this way, how pleased Our Lord would be!

We had a little time to look around the cathedral after Mass - it is beautiful. I took many photos but only a few came out satisfactorily. If you have the chance to visit keep an eye out for the guardian angels on either side of the high altar, and the chapel of Our Lady of the Apocalypse which is really beautiful. I've used a photo I found on Flickr rather than my own, as the photographer  (Jean-Louis Zimmermann) has managed to get a much better image than I did.

We returned to our car to find that we had a parking ticket. As we had a roof box on the car, we'd not been able to fit into the municipal underground parking, and had driven around fruitlessly looking for a space on the roads around the Cathedral. We'd found one space on a long stretch of road running up to the Cathedral where more than a dozen cars were already parked with two wheels up on the pavement. "When in Rome..." (and almost late for Mass) and all that... so we too pulled up and parked "avec deux roues sur la trottoire". Zut alors! Our parking ticket was timed at 10:09am  - and we were more than halfway down the row, every single car of which had a ticket on it. I reckon that every week the Clermont Ferrand police start their ticketing at, oh, about three minutes after Mass. Nice little earner. Don't assume that just because every car with a local licence plate does something that it's OK. Personally, I was happy to pay the 38EU to get a decent Mass with proper plate and good music rather than the pottery Mass that we'd dreaded. So we recommend the Mass at Clermont Ferrand, but you have been warned about the parking.

It makes me feel ill...

OK, so I'm probably feeling a bit queasy because I'm up far too late, but seriously - WHAT is it with the pottery in this picture? Maybe this is not a photo of a Mass, perhaps the priest is in the parish hall (that would explain the flowers in the wicker basket) just about to have a cup of coffee and what he's actually saying is "I really enjoyed my pottery workshop - look at the lovely fruit bowl I made last week". 

http://www.orleans.catholique.fr/cathedrale/index.php?Messes-et-permanences

Seriously though, if this is a photograph of a Mass, what on earth are they using those things to hold the sacred species? It's not just against the rules, it's simply wrong. This isn't just me being picky, the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

According to the existing law of the Church the chalice, or at least the cup of it, must be made either of gold or of silver, and in the latter case the bowl must be gilt on the inside. In circumstances of great poverty or in time of persecution a calix stanneus(pewter) may be permitted, but the bowl of this also, like the upper surface of the paten, must be gilt. 

So that's clear then - the sacred vessels must be made of materials befitting their use:  precious materials. Pottery, earthenware, plastic, even fine bone china is not permitted. So what's going on in this picture then?

Ah - I forgot to mention that the photo comes from the website of the main Cathedral in Orleans. I was looking up Mass times as we're going to be there tomorrow. Argh!