“If some senseless decree were to order the total or partial destruction of basilicas or cathedrals, then
obviously, it would be the educated -- whatever their personal beliefs -- who would rise up in horror to oppose such a possibility.
Now the fact is that basilicas and cathedrals were built so as to celebrate a rite which, until a few months ago, constituted a living tradition. We are referring to the Roman Catholic Mass. Yet, according to the latest information in Rome, there is a plan to obliterate that Mass by the end of the current year.
One of the axioms of contemporary publicity, religious as well as secular, is that modern man in general, and intellectuals in particular, have become intolerant of all forms of tradition and are anxious to suppress them and put something else in their place.
But, like many other affirmations of our publicity machines, this axiom is false. Today, as in times gone by, educated people are in the vanguard where recognition of the value of tradition is concerned, and are the first to raise the alarm when it is threatened.
We are not at this moment considering the religious or spiritual experience of millions of
individuals. The rite in question, in its magnificent Latin text, has also inspired a host of priceless
achievements in the arts -- not only mystical works, but works by poets, philosophers, musicians, architects, painters and sculptors in all countries and epochs. Thus, it belongs to universal culture as well as to churchmen and formal Christians. In the materialistic and technocratic civilisation that is increasingly threatening the life of mind and spirit in its original creative expression -- the word -- it seems particularly inhuman to deprive man of word-forms in one of their most grandiose manifestations.
The signatories of this appeal, which is entirely ecumenical and nonpolitical, have been drawn from every branch of modern culture in Europe and elsewhere. They wish to call 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, even though this survival took place side by side with other liturgical forms.”
Signed,
Harold Acton
Vladimir Ashkenazy
John Bayler
Lennox Berkeley
Maurice Bowra
Agatha Christie
Kenneth Clark
Nevill Coghill
Cyril Connolly
Colin Davis
Hugh Delargy
Robert Exeter
Miles Fitzalen-Howard
Constantine Fitzgibbon
William Glock
Magdalen Gofflin
Robert Graves
Graham Greene
Ian Greenless
Joseph Grimond
Harman Grisewood
Colin Hardie
Rupert Hart-Davis
Barbara Hepworth
Auberon Herbert
John Jolliffe
David Jones
Osbert Lancaster
Cecil Day Lewis
Compton Mackenzie
George Malcolm
Max Mallowan
Alfred Marnau
Yehudi Menuhin
Nancy Mitford
Raymond Mortimer
Malcolm Muggeridge
Iris Murdoch
John Murray
Sean O'Faolain
E.J. Oliver
Oxford and Asquith
F.R. Leavis
William Plomer
Kathleen Raine
William Rees-Mogg
Ralph Richardson
John Ripon
Charles Russell
Rivers Scott
Joan Sutherland
Philip Toynbee
Martin Turnell
Bernard Wall
Patrick Wall
E.I. Watkin
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