What do Auden, Borges, Greene, Mauriac, Muggeridge, Murdoch, von Le Fort, Waugh, Ashkenazy, Britten, Casals, Menuhin, Segovia, Marcel, Maritain, Del Noce, and Watkin have in common?

All of them, together with hundreds of other representatives of culture, signed highly-publicized petitions in defense of the preservation of the Tridentine Mass

I have wanted to write about a certain book for so long, and there is so much in it to write about, that I have been nearly paralyzed into inactivity: the task is overwhelming. But I realize that if I let these thoughts intimidate me, I will simply never mention it at all—and that would be a vastly worse fate.

While adjectives and adverbs bring me joy, I’m not given to senseless exaggeration. Thus, when I say that this book is the single most important traditionalist book to have appeared last year (2023), I mean just what I say—no ifs, ands, or buts.

“What is this momentous publication?,” you ask.

The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals: Petitions to Save the Ancient Mass from 1966 to 2007, edited by Joseph Shaw, with a Foreword by Martin Mosebach. Waterloo, ON: Arouca Press, 2023. 416 pp.

The primary purpose of The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals is to provide a detailed history of the major petitions devised and publicized by major cultural, intellectual, and political figures on behalf of the TLM from 1966 (by which time it was already clear that the liturgical reform was poised to bury tradition utterly beneath the rubble) down to 2006-2007, when prominent French and English signatories defended the forthcoming Summorum Pontificum from the attacks of its enemies, who were trying to persuade Benedict to tear it up. The history involves many twists and turns that might even remind a person of the novels of one of the more famous signatories, Agatha Christie!