A Cathedral ot Text and Gesture
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.
– from the so-called Agatha Christie Letter sent to Pope Paul VI in 1971
That letter, to which 57 notable English names were appended (the mystery novelist’s name being just one), bears Christie’s name because it is reported (reliably) that when the pope saw her name on the list he exclaimed, “Ah, Agatha Christie!”
The letter was a plea to the Holy Father not to “obliterate” the Latin Mass, as rumor had it, he intended to do. Some of the signatories were Catholic; most were not. But all of them admired the Tridentine Mass because “in its magnificent Latin text, [it] has. . .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.”
Among the notable Catholics who signed the letter were Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the non-Catholics included Christie, musicians Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yehudi Menuhin, and Joan Sutherland, art historian Kenneth Clark, writers Robert Graves and Iris Murdoch, poet Cecil Day-Lewis, and included two Anglican bishops to boot. It was a distinguished list. No punches were pulled: “[We] 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.”
