Coetus?

Read this on the blog Holy Smoke from Britain:

Meanwhile, here’s something that their Lordships don’t want you to know. The latest Newsletter of the Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland carries an article by Mgr Gordon Read, a distinguished canon lawyer, which addresses the question of the new right of a “stable group” of Catholics to request a Latin Mass.

Here is Mgr Read’s interpretation, which flatly contradicts the nonsense being talked by English bishops who want to raise the bar for a “stable group” as high as possible in order to keep the number of traditional Masses as low as possible. Money quote, thanks to Fr Z:

"What is meant by ‘stable group’? the Latin reads ‘coetus fidelium traditioni liturgicae antecedenti adhaerentium continenter exsistit’. ‘Coetus’ means ‘group’ implying at least three people. The word order implies that ‘continenter’ qualifies ‘exsistit’ rather than ‘adhaerentium’. What does it mean? If the author had intended ‘stable’ in the canonical sense he would have used ‘stabilis’. The term does not, then, appear to mean a formal group with established membership. On the other hand it would go beyond the wording to require such a group to have existed continuously since 1970. What it specifies is an identifiable group with some kind of continuing existence, as distinct from a one-off request from an ad hoc group."

Would that these people worried this much about living the Gospel.