One of the main reasons that the British Government helped the RCC build Maynooth seminary was to stop RC priests being trained in France- where they were imbued with revolutionary and anti-stablishment ideas and politics.

The Brits called this indoctrination of Irish priests in France, The French Disease.

Currently, the RCC is suffering from another plague – The Latin Disease.

The Novus Ordo – or New Mass – in the vernacular – people’s everyday language – is absolutely more akin to Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper and indeed what happened in people’s houses when the early Church met for the Breaking of the Bread.

There was no altar, no vestments, no silver and gold Chalice, no insense, no set Eucharistic prayer, no lectionary, no Gregorian chant, no altar servers, no deacons or subdeacons, etc.

AND, the emphasis was not on sacrifice – but on doing what Jesus did in memory of Him – as He Himself had requested.

There is the strongest of arguments to be made that the the Mass of Vatican II most resembles what Jesus did and what the early Church did.

Things changed when the Church became the state Church of Constantine.

The Church began to take on some of the culture, language and structures of the state.

And, the Church, in responding to increased numbers and indeed the threats of various heresies, needed to develop a system of authority – if you like – basic hierarchy and a basic set of rules and norms.

But, like in all human societies, structure and laws have a propensity to creep onwards and upwards.

And there are always those individuals and groups who see these things as an opportunity for gaining power, wealth etc.

And that happened, continued to happen and continues to happen in the RCC.

All of this came together in the middle ages – in medieval times, when the RCC, as a world power, was in full flight.

And the Latin language was absolutely central to it all.

Catholic Christianity is an organic, living creature.

By its very essence it cannot be considered to be static.

Many of the LMB want to freeze the church in medievalism.

In fact. In their extreme insistence on the Latin Mass alone, and by weaponising it for their anti Vatican II agenda, hey are worshipping, not the real God, but the GOLDEN CALF OF MEDIEVALIISM.

This is not unconnected to the big battle between MODERNISM and MEDIEVALISM that took place at the beginning of the 20 th century.

Father George Tyrrell SJ is one of my all time heroes.

George Tyrrell was excommunicated, denied a funeral Mass and buried in unconsecrated ground.

THE IRISH TIMES 14.7.2003

I went in 2003 and celebrated a Requiem Mass for him on his grave.

Past can inspire those who seek changes

Less than a century ago, a dissident Dublin priest was refused a funeral Mass and not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground…

Mon Jul 14 2003 – 0

Less than a century ago, a dissident Dublin priest was refused a funeral Mass and not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground, writes Bishop Pat Buckley

Tomorrow is the 94th anniversary of the death of the Dublin-born Jesuit priest George Tyrrell. He had been expelled from the Jesuit Order, suspended from the priesthood and excommunicated by Rome at the time of his death.

Father Tyrrell was born into a Church of Ireland family at 91 Dorset Street, in February 1861. He was drawn to the Anglican “high church” tradition and worshipped at All Saints, Grangegorman. In 1879 he converted to Roman Catholicism and spent a probationary year at the Jesuit College, Malta.

In 1891 he was ordained a priest. He joined the staff at Farm Street, London but, in 1899, he was forced to retire. He had become identified with the “modernist” movement, which was later condemned by Pope Pius X in his 1907 encyclical Pascendi.

In his 1908 Lenten pastoral, Cardinal Joseph Mercier, Archbishop Primate of Belgium, took the highly unusual step of naming Tyrrell as “the most penetrating observer of the present Modernist movement – the one most alive to its tendencies, who has best defined its spirit and is perhaps more deeply imbued with it than any other. Little wonder, for Tyrrell is a convert whose early education was Protestant.”

Cardinal Mercier said modernism was the child of Protestantism with its emphasis on individualism while Catholicism was based upon the acceptance of the authority of the Catholic episcopate through whom the Christian faith is communicated to the faithful.

Tyrrell replied to Cardinal Mercier with a masterful treatise entitled Medievalism, in which he reprimanded Mercier for naming him, reminding him that the Pope had named no one in Pascendi.

He accused Mercier and Rome of promoting a “sterilising uniformity” which, to Tyrrell, was far worse that the “divisions of Protestantism”. He berated Mercier for confusing “faith with theology, unity of faith with theological uniformity”.

Then Tyrrell tackled Mercier about the gradual evolution of the thinking that “the Pope is the Church”! Tyrrell said that the true tradition of the Church was of the Pope teaching the deposit of faith with and from within the college of bishops. He rejected Mercier’s term for the Pope as “the bishop of bishops”.

Now, said Tyrrell, the bishops have begun to refer to the Pope as “Father”, for “they are no longer his brethren but his sons or, rather, his servants”. And Tyrrell spelled out the consequences for the whole Church. “We have a sort of a double episcopate in each diocese, the Bishop of Rome and the local bishop, the latter being merely the delegate or vicar-general of the former.”

Tyrrell told Mercier that he was once shocked to see crosses being sold in Rome on which the figure of Christ was replaced by that of the Pope. “Have we yet to hear of the immaculate conception of the Pope or of his real presence in the Sacrament of the Altar.”

Tyrrell ended up living at Storrington in west Sussex. For years he had suffered severe migraine but he was then afflicted with Bright’s Disease and died in 1909, aged 48.

A non-judgemental priest friend heard his last Confession, for Tyrrell had said “if I decline the ministrations of a Roman Catholic priest at my death-bed, it is solely because I wish to give no basis for the rumour that I made any sort of retraction of those Catholic principles which I have defended against the Vatican heresies”.

Bishop Amigo of Southwark declared that Tyrrell was not to be given a funeral Mass or be buried in consecrated ground. So he was buried in the Protestant graveyard and his grave lies, rather prophetically, half way between the Catholic and Anglican churches at Storrington. Tyrrell’s great friend Abbé Brémond was later suspended from the priesthood for praying over the deceased priest.

Tomorrow I will be in Storrington and, alone, I am going to celebrate Mass at his graveside as a gesture of regret for the vicious persecution he suffered at the hands of Rome, the Jesuits and the Catholic hierarchy. I have written to the Father General of the Jesuits at Rome asking him and his Order to engage in a posthumous reconciliation with a man they “martyred” because he wanted to reform the misguided Church.

The Tyrrell story is a great inspiration to all Catholics today – clerical and lay – who long for Church renewal. Tyrrell also stands pointing the prophetic finger at today’s Vatican with its Emperor Pope, its ruthless Ratzinger Inquisition, and its world college of bishops who are simply the Pope’s curates.

(Bishop Pat Buckley is a dissident Catholic bishop, based at Larne, Co Antrim. He was removed from priestly ministry by Cardinal Cahal Daly in 1986 and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church following his consecration as a bishop in 1998. That consecration by Tridentine Bishop Michael Cox was described as “valid but unlawful” by a Catholic Church spokesman at the time.)