"Father Oswald Baker - Roman Catholic parish priest who became a rebel because he insisted on celebrating only the Tridentine Mass"
Obituary Text:
Father Oswald Baker
Daily Telegraph, 12:03AM BST 15 Jul 2004
Father Oswald Baker, who has died aged 89, attracted national attention in 1975 when he insisted on using only the traditional Tridentine Latin Mass in his Roman Catholic parish of Downham Market, Norfolk, instead of the new liturgy imposed following the Second Vatican Council.
A significant number of priests was distinctly tepid about the pedestrian modern English substitute for the rite which had been introduced by Pope St Pius V in 1570; and some discreetly obtained permission to continue using the traditional Latin on the grounds that they were too old to change.
But the authorities in Northampton diocese felt that they had to act against Baker because he declined to offer the new Mass in a rural area where it was otherwise unavailable; they found themselves confronted by a steely rebel.
It quickly became clear that Baker enjoyed strong backing from the majority of his parishioners, who formed a "1570 Society" to support him. Catholics started coming from all over the country to hear his Sunday Masses; and lay people throughout the English-speaking world wrote in their hundreds to assure him of their wholehearted agreement with him.
At a time when toleration was supposed to be in vogue, the Catholic Church was particularly embarrassed to find itself looking both narrow and tyrannical.
As the situation developed Baker showed every sign of enjoying himself. He made barbed remarks about Masses which made use of pop music and "sensuous dancing girls". The Daily Telegraph, which often had a reporter in the congregation, recorded one sermon in which he pointedly referred to St John of the Cross, who was jailed by his superiors for his beliefs in the 16th century, then was released to become Vicar General of Andalusia.
To general laughter from his parishioners, Baker continued: "There is something about them, these priests who gain a misleading reputation for disobedience." He then added: "These bishops. They will have their little joke." Meanwhile, the new parish priest dispatched by Bishop Charles Grant was celebrating the new liturgy for a minority of Downham Market Catholics in the town hall.
After politely refusing twice to obey his bishop's orders to celebrate the new rite or to resign, Baker was formally suspended as parish priest of St Dominic's by a decree of removal. The couples he married from then on had to have a civil service before they came to his chapel, but there was no attempt to deprive him of his faculties to celebrate Mass.
Baker eventually gave up the church, too, though he was allowed to keep the presbytery; and benefactors bought, for £15,000, a house in the town to serve as his chapel. From there he continued his ministry, which intensified his fight against the Vatican II reforms.
Oswald Charles Baker was born on May 1 1915 in the Angel Hotel at Clowne, Derbyshire, where his father was the landlord. The family moved to Great Yarmouth, where he attended the grammar school.
Young Oswald soon lost his provincial accent. He went to the Jesuits' Campion House in Middlesex before going to the prestigious French seminary to become "a gentleman of St Sulpice"; but, in 1938, he was asked to leave after publishing an article suggesting that the Treaty of Versailles had been too severe on Germany to be the basis of a lasting peace. "I was always a rebel," he later recalled. On returning home Baker offered himself to the Jesuits, but this was in the days before the Society of Jesus looked kindly on rebels; and Baker was earning a living selling books in Glasgow when a Dominican he met suggested that he become a friar.
But that did not work out either, and he eventually met a secular priest at Hyde Park, who recommended he go to Oscott seminary at Birmingham. After being ordained priest in 1942, Baker served as a curate at Luton, High Wycombe and Wymondham, Norfolk, before going to Downham Market in 1949.
After the battle with his bishop, he initially rejoiced when Archbishop Lefebvre's Society of St Pius X sent young priests to England. Like Baker, these die-hards considered that in refusing the new Mass they were following in the footsteps of the Reformation martyrs who had refused to accept the introduction of Protestantism.
But when Lefebvre visited Baker, the latter thought that the nominal recognition granted the Frenchman by Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II was a sign of weakness. Firmly adhering to Cardinal St Robert Bellarmine's teaching that a heretical pope automatically loses his office, Baker found himself branded a "sedevacantist" (one who believes that the see of St Peter was vacant).
In 1984 he explained to an astonished reporter that the present Pope was "no more a Catholic than Ian Paisley - and no more a pope than Billy Graham". He added that "the new Mass is a sacrilegious parody of the true Mass: it is sinful to take part in it."
He maintained to the end that, despite what any bishop might say, he still occupied his office of parish priest.
As an assiduous reader of The Daily Telegraph, he would write letters to correct what he judged to be faulty grammar or faulty theology. He was convinced that the one led to the other. One letter, which attacked an article about the Pope and contraception, informed the editor that this had contained the paper's most erroneous statement since it had criticised Catholic objections to a visit to Britain by President Tito of Yugoslavia in 1953.
Gradually Baker's congregation dwindled to about 20, though it would swell when the film producer Mel Gibson, who bought a house nearby, appeared for Sunday Mass and stayed for coffee afterwards. Seven years ago, Baker vacated the presbytery; and though crippled by spinal trouble, he continued to stagger to the altar to mutter a rapid Mass.
A quiet, kindly man who had been a practitioner of martial arts in his younger days, on July 2 Father Oswald Baker declared: "I am ready to die" - which he then did.
