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 has published on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion and has edited The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press). He is the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales and President of Una Voce International. He teaches Philosophy at Oxford University and lives nearby with his wife and nine children.
Author: Joseph Shaw, PhD
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 …
50 Years Ago: Non-Catholics Petitioned the Pope for the Latin Mass
Vladimir Ashkenazy and the “Agatha Christie” Petitioners What do the writers W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Borges and Francois Mauriac, have in common with the composer Benjamin Britten, the guitarist Andrés Segovia, and the philosophers Augusto Del Noce and Jacques …
Ethnic Diversity and the Latin Mass
In a recent article in the Illinois Times, Massimo Faggioli, a theology professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia, is quoted as follows, of a specific Traditional Mass location: It’s not an accident that all of these Catholics at the old …
Defense of the Motu Proprio Collapsing in Contradictions
Pope Francis has offered two reasons for wishing to bring celebrations of the Traditional Mass to an end: attitudes of some of the faithful which have become associated with this form of the Mass, and the idea that the unity …
Is the Novus Ordo the Only Law of Prayer?
The practical fall-out from Traditionis Custodes will be making itself felt for some time to come. In some places it has already been devastating; in others, it appears it will be minimal. The theological fall-out, however, threatens a profound problem …
Ultramontanism’s Death Sentence
Image: Pope Pius XII” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by truerestoration In 1952 Pope Pius XII said the following, in a public address recorded among his official acts: Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of …
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