A report on the decline of the New Mass in Latin in the United States,
by Peter Karl T. Perkins:
Since 2005, the number of every-Sunday New Masses in Latin in the U.S.A. has fallen from 58 to 39. The number of dioceses in the U.S.A. offering this Mass every Sunday has fallen from 36 to 28.At present, the ratio of T.L.M.s to N.O.M.s in Latin is 9:1. The ratio of dioceses offering the two Masses is 5:1. My conclusion is that the N.O.M. in Latin is a dead duck. It is dying fast (but quietly). Bad news for the Adoremus movement, Frs. Harrison and Fessio, and the Hitchcocks. They hitched themselves to the wrong waggon. Fessio displeased the Pizza king in Florida (Ave Maria U.) and is now more or less nowhere. Harrison has been busy trying to square the circle by explaning how Dignitatis Humanæ is compatible with Quanta Cura and the Syllabus of Errors of 1864. Good luck to him on that. I'm planning on climbing Mt. Everest next year.If we examine more closely where the Latin N.O.M. is offered, we can see that this fake substitute that has no place in the ancient patrimoney of Holy Church was and is being used to 'shut out' the real thing. For example, Cardinal Baloney of Los Angeles tried to arrange Latin N.O.s to lure people away from the real thing. But while some of these persist, there are now more T.L.M.s in his Archdiocese than N.O.M.s in Latin. Come February of next year, this bad man will be gone (and preferably in prison). He has failed in his endeavour to stamp out tradition, just as he's failed to stamp out truth.Another place where Latin N.O.s abound is the Archdiocese of Detroit. The former Archbishop, Adam Cardinal Maida, pulled out all the stops in the 1990s to prevent celebration of the T.L.M. One method was to offer the N.O.M. in Latin as a sung Mass with beautiful music and a traditional setting. It didn't work. Local traditionalists drove to the Diocese of Lansing to refuse him, some went to the many Eastern Divine Liturgies in Detroit, and some crossed the Canadian border, where a traditionalist priest of the Diocese of London put a Sunday T.L.M. right on the other side of the bridge in Windsor! Of course, there were those who were fooled by Maida. Happily, he has now passed the age of 80 and will therefore not be able to poison the next conclave. Meanwhile, his every-Sunday Latin N.O. Masses are now down to 3. Meanwhile, the T.L.M. has arrived in force under the new Archbishop. Under Maida, there were 0 and finally 1 of these every Sunday. Now there are five.The problem persists in Las Vegas, where Bishop Pepe uses every trick in the book to keep our Mass out of his diocese, at least on Sundays. But he has THREE every-Sunday N.O.M.s in Latin. This is a man who cannot see the writing on the wall, or who just doesn't care what it says. No one can force him to read it.There were once many N.O.s in Latin in the A. of San Francisco. Now there is only one, and the T.L.M. is also available every Sunday--now that Levada is gone. Levada was not so bad in terms of his views. The problem was that he was too chicken to stand up to the apparatchiks in his diocesan curia.There were once numerous every-Sunday T.L.M.s in the Diocese of Arlington, in Virginia, under that Bishop who died of a heart attack while waiting to see the Pope in Rome (forgotten his name now). Under his successor we see a reversal: the Latin N.O.M.s are down to one per Sunday and the T.L.M.s have essentially replaced their rivals. It's all over.The present Bishop of Orange continues to have two every-Sunday N.O.M.s in Latin but has not forbidden our Mass and we now have four of them every Sunday--twice as many.The A. of St. Paul & Minneapolis still has two every-Su. N.O.M.s in Latin, a hold-over from the endless years in which the State fo Minnesota was a black hole for tradition.Las Vegas is the only Diocese in the U.S.A. that has the Latin N.O.M. every Sunday but not one T.L.M. approved by the diocese. The S.S.P.X is present there; so is an independent priest. Las Vegas also has the distinction of being BY FAR the most populous U.S. see not having our Mass on the every-Sunday basis. Really, someone from Rome needs to have a little talk with Bishop Pepe.
