Dr Joseph Shaw has a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he also gained a first degree in Politics and Philosophy and a graduate Diploma in Theology. He is the editor of The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press), and the author of The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity (Os Justi). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Una Voce International. He was a member of the Philosophy Faculty in Oxford University for 18 years and is now an independent scholar and freelance writer. He lives outside Oxford with his wife and nine children.
Author: Joseph Shaw, PhD
Children at Mass: Practical Considerations
Even small children can unite themselves to the action of the Mass, in ways they could not articulate, when they glimpse the dignity of an activity clearly not directed to anything merely human.
How to Obey the Church
This idea is echoed by the Memoriale Domini, the 1969 Instruction forbidding (with the inevitable exceptions) the reception of Holy Communion in the Hand.
Cardinal Roche on the Vatican II Rupture
I find myself, here, and not for the first time, defending the words of the Second Vatican Council against an interpretation which would impute to them theological novelties incompatible with the perennial teaching of the Church.
The Schismatic Trads Were Right? Francis’ New Rescript on the TLM
We have now heard from the Holy See in unambiguous terms that the integration into parish life of Catholics attached to the older Missal is a thoroughly bad thing. The ones with a schismatic mentality, whatever that was supposed to …
International TLM Lay Group Appeals to All Catholics of Good Will
What we do know is that we are justly afflicted for our sins, in all the suffering which God permits to fall upon us, and that God is above all factionalism and ideology.
Why British and Commonwealth Catholics Venerate their Protestant Monarch
Above: then Prince Charles, now the ascended King Charles III, kisses the hand of his mother, her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Photo credit MSN. The spectacle is undeniably impressive, though predictable and in part long-planned. Even those whose own …
Pope Francis’ Liturgical Longing
Desiderio desideravi: “with desire have I desired,” Our Lord said to His Disciples before the Last Supper, “to eat this Pasch with you.” The quaint Latin phrase is a literal translation of the Greek of the Gospels (Luke 22:15; Matthew …
Obedience, Disobedience, and Rash Obedience: a Virtue in a time of Crisis
There has long been a strange asymmetry between conservatives and progressives in the Catholic Church. Theological conservatives—priests and bishops as well as lay people—have prided themselves on their obedience, and progressives have flaunted their disobedience. To give the most extreme …
The FSSP and Pope Francis’ Roller-Coaster
The Wild Ride It took some time for everyone to adjust to the violent overthrow of thirteen years’ pastoral arrangements, policies, and attitudes by Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter Traditionis Custodes (TC), not least because of the way it was promulgated, …
Why Our Forebears Defended Latin in the Liturgy
I have been reading the Traditionalist classic, Tito Cassini’s The Torn Tunic, first published (in Italian, La Tunica Stracciata) in 1967, reprinted by Angelico Press. It is an impassioned, indeed ferocious, statement of the case for liturgical traditionalism, written and …