Historic historian at that, his work on the Mass a classic, here in general terms about change/reform early in his Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development:

The liturgy of the Mass has become quite a complicated structure, wherein some details do not seem to fit very well, like some venerable, thousand-year-old castle whose crooked corridors and narrow stairways, high towers and large halls appear at first sight strange and queer.

How much more comfortable a modern villa! But in the old building there is really something noble. It treasures the heirloom of bygone years; the architectures of many successive generations have been built into its walls. Now these must be recovered by the latest generation.

So, too, in the Mass-liturgy, only a historical consideration of the evolutionary work of the centuries can make possible a proper appreciation.

One of a series of references to this work…

Fr. Humwicke tells about it.

A correspondent . . . asks for more information about my statement that the Jesuits burned the relics in the Reliquary Chapel in Oxford’s Catholic Parish Church, Alyoggers. Information is provided in an excellent, erudite, and readable little book called St Aloysius Parish Oxford The Third English Oratory A Brief History and Guide 1793-2000 New Edition by Fr Jerome Bertram, MA, FSA, of the Oratory.

I will lift some bits from Father’s narrative.

Caught up in the thing, these Jesuits went beyond the call of sacred duty:

“In 1954 the Jesuits decided to ‘modernise’ the church. Nearly all the statues and pictures disappeared, as did several memorial brasses to priests and parishioners, and the whole building was painted battleship grey, obliterating all the brilliant colouring of the internal decorations …

In the 1960s came the major changes in the Catholic Church following the second Vatican…