The Wodehouse Apostolate

What ho! A campaign has been launched to rally support not only for the Latin Mass but for Jeeves & Wooster:

We have tried our best to steer clear of any opinions here, whether on the Magisterium of the Catholic Church or on the place of spats in the world of tomorrow. However, on one matter we cannot keep our silence while a wayward world steps deeper and deeper into darkness. That is why we have created the Wodehouse Apostolate. If we manage to bring one soul to the love of Wodehouse, then the creation of this website certainly will have been worthwhile.

It is rare that one finds a good collection of P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) in any English-speaking home nowadays. But in Catholic homes his works ought to be right below the missals, the Latin primers, the Douay-Rheims Bible and the Imitation of Christ. For we cannot always be reading religious books, not even the holiest of us. Our leisure ought therefore to be such that it strengthens and reinforces the spiritual progress we make each day by prayer and by penance. And there is probably no writer more appropriate for Catholic leisure than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (pronounced 'Woodhouse'), in whose shadow even Dante would tremble for his unworthiness.

Hear, hear. As I found last week while recuperating from having a wisdom tooth pulled, a bit of Wodehouse is good for what ails you.

Indeed, according to this essay on the Jeeves & Wooster TV series:

It has been reported that the Queen Mother said she reads the Jeeves and Wooster stories every night so she can go to bed "with a smile on my face despite the strains of the day."

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A selection of Wodehousian music performed by Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster is available at the Hat Sharpening Society. Available for download as zip files are such classics as "Sunny Disposish," "Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors" and "You Do Something to Cock-a-Leekie."

Interesting: Hugh Laurie was a champion rower at Eton and Cambridge. I didn't know that.

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The Wodehouse Apostolate has been launched by the pseudonymous Cyril Fotheringay-Smith and friends as a sideline to their Quo Primum campaign to encourage wider application of the traditional Latin Mass.

We think it quite clear by now that the most divisive change handed down by the Second Vatican Council was its unprecedented and sweeping reworking of the liturgy. What made this change more divisive still was that the new liturgy put into wide practice after the Council was accompanied by an unwritten and unexplained prohibition of the traditional Latin Mass and sacraments. We believe that this unexplained, unprecedented and groundless prohibition of the traditional Latin Mass and sacraments has been at the root of almost all subsequent divisions among the Catholic faithful, and when it stops we believe that most of the needless and ruinous divisions among fundamentally orthodox Catholics will come to an end.

Therefore, we believe that the key to bringing unity to orthodox Catholics today lies in a widespread restoration of the traditional Latin mass and sacraments. All of the creators of QVO PRIMVM are under the age of twenty-five. For us, the restoration of the traditional Latin Mass and sacraments has no 'political' implications. We simply cannot understand why any Catholic should not be able lawfully and readily to know of, to learn about, to participate in and to love all the ancient traditions of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.

They propose writing letters to bishops and the Vatican. I am tempted to print out some of their flyers and post them about the local campus ministry office.