(LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic priest from the United Kingdom has joined his voice to those of prominent clerics across the West in expressing his dismay and strong disapproval of Pope Francis’ heavy restrictions upon the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).
“The suppression of the Latin Mass is the most bonkers thing I have seen in the Church so far,” tweeted Fr. David Palmer, a priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham serving in the Diocese of Nottingham, England.
“I have never offered it, so don’t have a personal stake, but some of the best priests and lay people I know in the diocese where I work (and further afield) are absolutely devastated,” he lamented.
In a follow-up comment the priest added, “to be honest, [it is] shameful.”
It’s a total and complete own goal… and, to be honest, shameful.
— Fr David Palmer (@FrDavidPalmer) May 15, 2023
Fr. Palmer, whose Twitter account currently shows 7,389 followers, has made headlines in the past for his candor on social media.
In the summer of 2021, the University of Nottingham refused to officially recognize the Catholic priest as its campus chaplain because of his pro-life views.
As reported by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), Fr. Palmer referred to an assisted suicide bill being introduced into the House of Lords as an attempt to “kill the vulnerable.” He also defied the tendency to sanitize the grizzly reality of abortion by referring to it as “the slaughter of babies.”
When university officials demanded he amend the wording of his tweets, the priest refused. “I was told it was fine for me to have this opinion, but they were concerned with how I expressed it,” he said. “When I asked how they would suggest I express it, quite remarkably, they suggested I should call it ‘end of life care,’ which is a completely unacceptable policing of religious belief.”
In October 2021, on the cusp of a second lockdown in the U.K., Fr. Palmer vowed to be arrested rather than to stop offering Mass for the faithful. He also expressed regret over having stopped public Masses during the earlier shutdown of churches.
However, just before the lockdowns took place, his bishop, who was empathetic to Palmer’s position, asked him nonetheless to desist for offering a Mass accessible to the faithful during that time, to which the priest obediently complied.
In reproaching the suppression of the TLM, Fr. Palmer joins a chorus of prominent voices also defending the Church’s liturgical tradition, including German Cardinal Gerhard Müller who classified further restrictions issued by the Vatican as “brutal intolerance” against those who prefer the ancient use.
READ: ‘Brutal intolerance’: Cdl. Müller condemns Pope Francis’ latest attack on Traditional Latin Mass
The former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith further commented that Pope Francis’ February rescript “degrades bishops or local ordinaries of secondary rank to petitioners to the highest authority (that is, the bureaucracy of the Department of Worship),” adding that the ruling “harms the pastoral responsibility of the episcopate” while obscuring “the true meaning of the papacy, which is to represent and realize the unity of the Church in the truth of faith and sacramental communion.”
Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, condemned the fresh restrictions as not the “style of God.” “Pope Francis himself has emphasized that those who are attached to the TLM should be ‘accompanied, listened to, and given time,’” Tobin noted at the time.
Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, also spoke out in defense of adherents to the Church’s long liturgical tradition, describing them as “very docile to the teachings of the Church, very eager to follow the teachings of the Church… They’re very faithful Catholics.”
And Fr. Gerald Murray, a regular commentator on EWTN’s The World Over, called such suppression “a basic violation of Church order” which “makes absolutely no sense” and is “a persecution of Latin Mass Catholics, plain and simple.”
READ: Fr. Murray: The Vatican’s ‘persecution’ of Latin Mass Catholics is ‘damaging the Church’
“This is the paradox of the papacy of Pope Francis,” the New York based canonist reflected. “It’s a paradox because he came into the office saying he wanted a decentralized Church, he wanted collegiality, then he started speaking about ‘synodality,’ which means we walk together, and we talk together, and we listen to each other. The exact opposite is happening as regards to the Latin Mass.”
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