The profound crisis afflicting the Church is traced by many to the reign of Pope Francis, interpreted as a radical split with the pontificates before it. In reality, the very gravity of the crisis, which today pervades every ecclesiastical sphere, from the upper echelons to the smallest local realities, should make it clear to us that this process of self-demolition has remote origins. A reaction to it, however, manifested itself beginning in the 1960s, and knowing its protagonists is indispensable, out of a duty of justice towards those who, before us, fought the good fight.
An important contribution in this sense comes to us from the book, edited by Joseph Shaw, The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals: The Petitions to Save the Ancient Mass from 1966 to 2007 (Arouca Press, 2023). Joseph Shaw, an English philosopher and the current president of the International Una Voce Federation, has collected in this volume a series of essays dedicated to the petitions that followed, one after the other, from 1966 to 2007, to ask the Holy See to preserve the use of the old Roman Missal, the traditional Roman liturgy and Gregorian chant. The book, which has a beautiful preface by Martin Mosebach, focuses above all on the two main petitions presented in 1966 and 1971, the first in defence of the Latin language, the second for the preservation of the old Mass.
The first appeal, made public on 5 February 1966, bore the signatures of thirty-seven artists and intellectuals from every country, including W H Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Giorgio De Chirico, Augusto Del Noce, Julien Green, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Salvatore Quasimodo and Evelyn Waugh. Paul VI was troubled by this movement, and on 15 August, in the letter Sacrificium Laudis, he wrote that the Latin language, “far from being held in little regard, is certainly worthy of being vigorously defended”. What in fact happened was exactly the opposite. And so on 7 January 1967 in Paris the representatives of fourteen countries established the International Una Voce Federation for the safeguarding of the Latin-Gregorian liturgy, under the presidency of Erich Vermehren de Saventhem, Joseph Shaw’s first predecessor.
On 3 April 1969, the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum introduced the Novus Ordo Missae, which was opposed in October of the same year by the Short Critical Study of the Novus Ordo Missae of cardinals Antonio Bacci and Alfredo Ottaviani. On 16 July 1971, in a second international petition, over one hundred eminent personalities called “to the attention of the Holy See, the appalling responsibility it would incur in the history of the human spirit were it to refuse to allow the Traditional Mass to survive”. Many of the signatories were the same as those of the previous appeal, with new ones just as illustrious, like Romano Amerio, Agatha Christie, Henri de Montherlant, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Alfred Marnau, Yehudi Menuhin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Guido Piovene and Bernard Wall. The 1971 petition was able to get limited freedom for the survival of the old Mass in the United Kingdom, but above all it had a strong symbolic value.
The book by Joseph Shaw highlights, thanks above all to two essays by Father Gabriel Díaz Patri, an aspect that is not known to everyone. The soul of the Short Critical Study and of the two petitions of 1966 and 1971 was an Italian writer, feeble in appearance but with an incandescent spirit, Vittoria Guerrini, known by her pen name Cristina Campo. The cultural mainstream is rediscovering her poetic work today, but is downplaying the strong religious motivations of her life.
Vittoria Guerrini was born in Bologna on 28 April 1923, the daughter of the musician Guido Guerrini and granddaughter of the even more famous composer Ottorino Respighi. She did not have a serious religious upbringing but immersed herself in literature, moved by a love of beauty and devotion to perfection. Her getting to know the life and work of Simone Weil marked her deeply, but whereas the French Jewish philosopher stopped at the gates of conversion, Vittoria Guerini went through them. This happened around 1965, the year in which the first Masses in the vernacular were celebrated in Italy and the devastating scope of the liturgical reform of Paul VI, culminating in the Novus Ordo Missae, began to become clear. Vittoria Guerrini was rattled by this and developed a growing love for the traditional Mass. She wrote in 1966, “The spark of conversion can be struck by a single perfect liturgical gesture”.
After her conversion, the romantic relationship that since 1959 had bound her to the Anglo-Turinese intellectual Elémire Zolla, already married, grew rocky. Zolla was an esotericist, charming and glib; Cristina Campo, as she was now known, was an impetuous seeker of truth. He wanted to de-Catholicise her; she wanted to convert him. But nothing is more difficult than the conversion of a gnostic who rejects the faith not because he is in the grip of vice but out of pure intellectual pride.
I got the chance to meet both of them between 1969 and 1970, in my twenties. Cristina Campo and Elémire Zolla were living in the small oasis of Piazza Sant’Anselmo, in Rome, on the Aventine Hill. She on the mezzanine floor of a villa at number 3, he in the basement of a boarding house at number 2 of the same square. I recall that Cristina Campo was fascinated by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, in whom she saw — even in his face — the figure of St Pius X. Yet her life was not without contradictions. In the afternoon, in Cristina Campo’s apartment, Zolla’s esoteric cenacle met, frequented by occultists like the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz, Julius Evola’s doctor Placido Procesi, and professor of Sanskrit and anthroposophist Pio Filippani Ronconi. Through my occasional contacts with these figures, of brilliant but Luciferian intelligence, I soon realised how, behind an apparent respect for the Catholic Church, they actually deeply detested it, and I distanced myself from them.
The uneasy coexistence between Cristina Campo and Elémire Zolla cracked over the years, but did not crumble. The same living room that in the afternoon hosted the esotericists, without the presence of Cristina Campo, in the evening became instead the headquarters of the defenders of the traditional Mass, without the presence of Elémire Zolla. This villa on the Piazza Sant’Anselmo was the meeting place of the group of theologians and liturgists of different nationalities who developed the Short Critical Study.
To understand the complexity of the figure of Cristina Campo and the story of her conversion, it is helpful to consult the well-documented book Cristina Campo o l’ambiguità della Tradizione (Centro Librario Sodalitium, 2005), by Fr Francesco Ricossa, a priest from Turin whose sedevacantist positions I do not share, but whose qualities as a historian I appreciate. As Fr Ricossa rightly points out, examining the writer’s spiritual journey, for her it was as if one side of the scale held the weight of her fight for the Roman Mass, and the other a tendency towards gnosticism, fuelled by her association with Zolla. But, Ricossa concludes, “Cristina Campo contributed to saving the Mass: let us hope that this generous battle may have contributed to the salvation of her soul.”
Vittoria Guerrini, who had always been in fragile health, died in Rome on 10 January 1977, at the age of 54, from heart failure. The Benedictine archbishop Agostino Mayer, a future cardinal, administered the last sacraments to her. She is buried in the Monumental Cemetery of the Charterhouse of Bologna, in the shadow of the Madonna di San Luca, to whom she had been entrusted as a child and who we hope welcomed her into her arms.
