What do Evelyn Waugh, Lanzo Del Vasto, Nancy Mitford, F.R. Leavis, Agatha Christi, Yehudi Menuhin, René Girard, and Franco Zefferelli have in common? Along with scores of others-artists, musicians, scholars, writers, actors, politicians, and business people-they signed petitions to save the Catholic Church's ancient Latin liturgy, between 1966 and 2007.

This is the story of how so many men and women of culture, Catholic or not, came to the defence of the world's greatest monument of the human spirit-the immemorial Latin Mass-and of the music, art, and spiritual tradition which it comprises and inspires.

As the 1971 petition stated, "Educated people are in the vanguard where recognition of the value of tradition is concerned, and are the first to raise the alarm when it is threatened.... They 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." Numerous petitions signers were not Catholics, "which only makes their testimony more impressive," as Martin Mosebach notes in the foreword. "For their participation in this great action proved how deeply the ritual of the Mass of the Roman Church had become rooted in the general consciousness."

Drawing on rarely-seen historical documents and new research, editor Joseph Shaw weaves together a compelling account of the petitions' genesis, and the formation of the movement to preserve the Traditional Mass.