Emails

I have no emails this morning. Either this is a miracle or there is something wrong with the computer or ... I suppose .... both.

More Rowan

Rowan's Rome lecture articulates an ecclesiology which is profoundly orthodox. Hoi polloi talk about "churches" when they mean denominations or 'national' churches: the "Methodist Church"; the "Church of Scotland". But Rowan knows that "the retheologising of ecclesiology, especially in dialogue with the Christian East, has meant that we are now better able to see the local community gathered round the bishop or his representative for eucharistic worship not as a portion of some greater whole but as itself the whole, the qualitative presence of the Catholic reality of filial holiness and Trinitarian mutuality here and now". This is profoundly in line with the ecclesiology set out by Joseph Ratzinger in two CDF documents Communionis notio and Dominus Iesus. Church means bishop, presbyterate, diaconate, laos. In this particular church, the Katholike is fully present. In practical terms, Rowan has spelt this out in his assurances that individual American dioceses which are "Windsor-compliant" would not be severed from full communion with the See of Canterbury because of their entanglement with the rest of PECUSA.

Unlike his dim colleagues on the English bench of bishops, Rowan knows that this is why "A code of practice will not do"; pastoral arrangements designed with the discriminatory intent of ensuring that Mrs Bloggs never actually has to see a woman priest in her own church are worse than useless. Whether he has the clout to cajole his colleagues into consenting, even at this late stage, to a Third Province for us seems more than doubtful.

It is on the basis of this ecclesiology that Rowan makes a deft criticism of the 'Ordinariates' which has eluded the journalists but is uncomfortably closer to home than we might care to admit. "It remains to be seen whether the flexibility suggested in the Constitution might ever lead to something less like a 'chaplaincy' and more like a church gathered around a bishop".

Indeed. Rowan does have a point. That was the attraction of a Third Province of discrete and coherent dioceses which, having consolidated themselves and established their corporate life, could make corporate submission to the Holy See. The problem was that no one seemed very keen to give us this. Nor do they now. Or have I missed something?

The answer to Rowan's point is in the question "Which is more like a church gathered round a bishop:
an Ordinariate
or a situation where the Parish of S Bibulus and six others are firmly clenched within the diocese of Barchester and are supposed to be happy because a Code of Practice will prevent them from being given priestly or episcopal ministrations by a woman ... until they have been softened up to the point where they no longer feel their 'difficulties'?"

Ordinaries will in the future, I suspect, normally be bishops - celibate bishops. The permission for them to be presbyters-who-were-married-bishops-in-the-C-of-E is manifestly intended as a transitional arrangement: and an extraordinarily gracious and sensitive one. It would be thoroughly nasty of us to demur.

Rowan's Lecture

I'm not going to give a long treatise on Rowan's Rome lecture; just to invite you to read the text of it. It raises many questions - one criticism might be that it is more than one lecture - on some of which I hope to publish elsewhere. I hope that others who are so sure that what he has said is risible will put into the public domain precise and argued exposes of his errors. But here is a little detail that intrigues me.

He distinguishes between 'second order' and 'first order' issues. I have a recollection that, in the early 1990s, some liberal bishops made just this distinction, adding that local churches could make their own decisions about second order issues like the ordination of women. They were then attacked by their angry lady-friends, who were quite certain that wymynprysts was a first order question ... and a few days later, much battered, they withdrew the distinction (incidentally, if you read Rowan's text you will see that, contrary to the assumptions of some who haver commented on it, he does very carefully state how he distinguishes between first and second order issues).

Just as in the 1990s, Rowan's comments on First and Second Order Issues can be read two ways. He goes on "When so very much agreement has been firmly established in first-order matters about the identity and mission of the Church, is it really justifiable to treat other issues as equally vital for its health and integrity?" OK ... everybody assumes that this is an ad hominem (or should I say ad Urbem?) argument addressed to the Roman Magisterium.

But couldn't you turn it round and address it to those who seek, whatever the cost, to force wymynprysts upon Anglicanism? "X is not important enough to make a great fuss about" cuts two ways? Yes?

Is there a 'fork'* here?

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The Tudor financier Cardinal Morton impaled you on one or the other of the two prongs of his fork by arguing that if you led a sumptuous life-style you could afford to pay a lot of tax; and that if you were a skinflint ...

More grumbles

You can't expect the journalists to do better than an oversimplification of Archbishop Rowan's lecture in Rome. Some of them, inevitably, fell short even of that. But intelligent people, in an internet age, should read a text before they pontificate. Sadly, among those who disappointed me is the great Fr Zed, whose blog gave only the text of the Grauniad* report with Father's rubricated comments. Needless to say, Rowan's lecture was very careful and nuanced.

Nor do I enjoy the glee with which some quarters report that the 'audience' was only twenty minutes long, and I dislike the disdainful politics of the caption Fr Zed put beneath the picture. Perhaps this is a good moment to be clear about how I see the future. I very much hope that the Holy Father's initiative is a rip-roaring success. But I also hope that the Anglican Entity will be a bridge with an exciting ecumenical function, not a sad, hostile and snide ghetto. We will have large amounts in common with those from whom we have separated, and we should cherish both the shared Patrimony and the personal relationships involved, for the good of all both now and in God's unknown future. I do not see a passion for rubbishing Rowan as part of this agenda. And when I see cheap jibes against him it makes me feel kinda (Americanism? Yeah?) protective of a fellow Anglican. Anglicani contra mundum.

But, you say, what about your own sharp comments on some Anglican prelates? Fair enough. I have been quite frank about some of these gentry. But I have done so when they have conducted or expressed themselves offensively towards my friends or those, like the Holy Father, whom I admire. And they find it quite easy to do this. Nor do I declare any moratorium in my comments on such people. Here's another such grumble. On November 16, I emailed the lady who chairs the diocesan ecumenical committee, expressing a hope that they would put in place policies to ensure the closest possible continuing relationships between those who part. She replied with a brush-off: "I don't think we need any extra policies on this matter".

Ecumenism apparently means being nice to 'vanilla' RCs, Methodists, Quakers ... you name it; nice in fact to pretty well everybody you can think of except Catholic Anglicans ... and, of course (remember the disgraceful behaviour of the Bishop of Manchester?) the SSPX.

I suppose, in a way, it's quite fun to be so far beyond the Pale (after all, my beloved Co Kerry is well beyond the Pale). It's the hang-ups of the malevolent that intrigue me.

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NOTE FOR READERS ULTRA MARE

The Manchester Guardian, Britain's Liberal broadsheet newspaper, now sometimes just called the Guardian, has a long history of hilarious misprints. It was, I believe, the satirical Magazine Private Eye which coined the dyslexis "Grauniad" to refer to it.

Grumbles

I read, even in Newspapers whose Religious Affairs Correspondents are, you might have thought, paid to know better, that the saintly Walter Kasper ... No: scrub the sarcasm. It's not him I'm getting at but the black-versus-white simplicities of the media who cast Kasper as the Good Guy and Ratzinger as the Bad Guy ...


To resume: Walter Kasper, they say or imply, knew nothing of the Apostolic Constitution and had nothing whatsoever to do with the iniquitous plot to keep it secret from poor Rowan. My problem with this is that Kasper is on the Board of Cardinals of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Presumably he was present at some of the meetings of that Dikastery as they discussed and redrafted versions of the Constitution? According to the rumour mill, the gestation had been going on for months; originally, the news had been expected as early as 'after Easter'. Do Roman dikasteries circulate papers?

The Constitution was announced on Tuesday October 20. This was fortunate, because Forward in Faith was due to meet the following Friday and Saturday for its regular annual autumn conference. The papers for which, sent out some weeks beforehand, had given an agenda in which we were told that the subject to be discussed would be announced later.

It was. We discussed it. The timing could hardly have been better. The Vatican apparatchiks deserve warm congratulation.

After the Williamson affair, Papa Ratzinger was admonished that he should employ people to watch the internet for him and prevent him from dropping bricks.

Perhaps Rowan should be given similar advice.

Mortally or venially sinful?

At the end of Mass the other day - I was just finishing the three invocations at the end of the Leonine Prayers - a bloke wandered into the church. "Hello Padre", he called. "Hi! But I'm English, not Italian", I replied. "But I was in the Army", he retorted. "The Italian Army!" I cried. "Eccellente! Buongiorno, Capitano! Un espresso, per favore!" "No, the British Army", he carefully explained. " We used to call our Godbotherers 'Padre'".

I felt a bit of a cad afterwards.

STIR UP SOME EXCITING COLLECTS

The collects we use at the beginning of Mass, and in the Divine Office, quite often have the pattern 'O God, who ...., mercifully grant that...' Thus, in the rather legalistic manner which is characteristic of the ancient Roman rite, some characteristic or deed of the Father is cited as an appropriate precedent for the grace which is now sought of him. Many of Cranmer's collects in the Prayer Book reproduce this style, either because they are translations from collects in the old Roman Sacramentaries (most of his Sunday collects are) or because he was so used to the pattern that he automatically reproduced it in his own compositions.

But the ancient liturgical books of trhe Roman Church often abandon this style during Advent. They replace the sonorous descriptive relative clause ('who......') with an almost breathless opening imperative, demanding of God immediate and decisive action. Many of them take off from a phrase in Psalm 80 (Vulgate 79) ‘Stir up [Excita in Latin] thy power, and come and help us'. (This suits Advent: that psalm calls in the name of oppressed Israel upon her Covenant with God for help against her enemies: why not read it as an Advent devotion!)

In the pre-Reformation service books, Cranmer found four of these Excita collects appointed for Sundays and some more on the weekdays of the Ember Week (Wednesday 16, Friday 18, Saturday 19 this year). He kept two of them.
(1) The collect for the last Sunday and week before Advent - that is, today. Sadly, this collect is rarely heard nowadays on Sundays because it is displaced by the proper collect for Christ the King. It used popularly to be associated by English tradition with the start of work upon the Christmass pudding. The references to stirring and fruit helped here!
(2) Advent 4. Unfortunately (there is evidence that when he did this work in 1548-9 he was working fast and not going back over texts with a revising hand) Cranmer obscured in translation the Biblical origin of the original by writing 'O Lord, raise up...' instead of retaining - as he did for Trinity 25 - the vivid 'Stir up...' And the end misses a point in the Latin, which could literally if nastily be translated ‘..that what our sins get in the way of, the forgiveness of thy mercy may accelerate.’ I suspect that this may go back to an early Christian and Pauline notion that whether the parousia comes later or earlier may to a degree depend upon the actions of Christians.

This collect survived into Common Worship for use on Advent 2. In the revised post-Vatican II Roman rite it is relegated to the relative obscurity of a weekday. Indeed, modern Roman liturgical tinkerers seem even more hostile than do Anglican ones to these superb and virile old collects. They replace them with other collects which may be taken from old Roman sacramentaries, but which are more pedestrian in their syntax and shy away from mention of Sin. The pre-Vatican II liturgy had a fair bit to say about human sinfulness and its disastrous consequences. Post-Vatican II, the ethos seems too often to be 'God, because of your grace, we are not really too bad; a bit more of your grace will make us even better’.

For Advent I, Cranmer composed a stately expression of the Advent themes - indeed, some of its phrases are reminiscent of parts of the post-Conciliar Roman Advent prefaces. When it used to be said at least twice daily all through Advent, it must have provided a superb catechesis of the meaning of the season. Nowadays it usually only gets a showing on the Sunday, and I rather wonder whether it says too much for one collect used once (in the Patrimony, we could use it throughout Advent to conclude the Intercession). The old Roman Sacramentaries, in my view, were right to be terse and thematically tight. Renaissance writers such as Cranmer tended to a greater verbosity, and later practitioners were worse: see, for example the collect for Epiphany 6, where the writer seems actually to forget, by the time he gets to the end of the collect, that he started off by addressing the Father.

Modern Anglican revisers are surely right to transfer Cranmer's (Non-'Excita') collect for Advent 2 to a 'Bible Sunday' outside Advent so that it does not interrupt specifically ‘Advent' themes. They retain his (non-'Excita') Advent 3 collect because it suits the 'John Baptist' themes which the Thee Year Lectionary retains on this Sunday. In my view, this collect, again, is too verbally prolix. Our Lady is the theme of Advent 4; Common Worship offers a Beta Minus composition to reflect this and misses the opportunity, seized by Rome, to use the familiar Angelus collect of which Cranmer provided a superb translation (March 25).

My views will be clear: few people have written better collects than popes Leo, Damasus, Gelasius or Gregory; and if Cranmer has provided an English Version, why look a gift-horse in the mouth. Christian people whose Latin is rusty, whether or not they originate in the Anglican Patrimony, can do worse than to get hold of an English Missal and pray - not only those collects , but also the other Excita collects which Cranmer failed to render.

ORATE FRATRES

This is footnote to my recent (second) series on Concelebration; unlike the earlier posts, in which I shared facts, in this one I now advance a hypothesis.

"Pray Brethren that my sacrifice and yours ..."

We find the roots of this formula, which precedes the Prayer Over The Offerings, in Carolingian Gaul, in a rubric which goes: "Then indeed the Priest to [or with?] right hand and left asks of the other priests that they pray for him".

I am suggesting that originally the Orate Fratres was a formula addressed to concelebrants; although, of course, through being used by celebrants who had no concelebrants around them, it soon came to be thought of as addressed to the assistant clergy in the sanctuary and to the congregation.

The strength of my new theory is that it makes sense of the concept of "my sacrifice and yours". I have long been puzzled by the assumption we have all made that a formula which entered the Mass in the Carolingian period should seem to want so explicitly to refer to the People as offerers of the Sacrifice. Yes, I know that in a sense they certainly are, but that was a period in which emphasis was laid more and more strongly on the idea that the Priest sacrifices for the people (so that the phrase "for whom we offer unto thee" entered the Memento).

Naming the Bishop

The 1984 Statement of the Jouint Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church which included such heavyweights as John Zizioulas and Joseph Ratzinger described mention in the Canon of the bishop by virtue of communion with whom one offers Mass as "essential". This may seem a trifle overstated - after all, there are extant Eucharistic Prayers which have failed to do this; are they therefore lacking an 'essential'? - but I believe it does express the ancient notion that the Bishop is the true primary celebrant and, as S Ignatius put it a long time ago, that Eucharist is to be accounted bebaios which is celebrated by the Bishop or by one to whom he commits it.

In the Te igitur of the Roman Canon, the mention of the Bishop is not a prayer for him but an expression of the fact that the presbyteral celbrant offers qua delegate of that bishop.

Together with the mention of the Roman Bishop, the Te igitur thus gives full expression to the synchronic unities which constitute a particular Eucharist as the Eucharist of Christ's entire Catholic Church, and not a ritual activity of a local gathered and autonomous group. The presbyter is at one - ideally! - with his Bishop; the bishops of the world are at one with each other through the ministry of Peter. Ideally!

Gathering in the Patrimony

These are early days - we don't even know that the Apostolic Constitution will deliver what the Holy Father desires. The Devil has many tricks. But if it does, it is only the beginning of the process of patriating our Tradition and Ethos and Spirituality to Catholic Unity.

Eventually, we shall have to face the question of saintly Anglicans who lived after the schism; and the Calendar - the Canon or List of those commemorated at the Altar.

There are, of course, precedents for regarding as Saints or Beati those who lived outside full communion with the Successor of Peter. There were Saints on each side in the Western Schism - yes, you don't need to remind me that they didn't deny papal authority and they didn't want to be outside the Unity of Peter and they didn't think they were. But IN FACT they were out of communion with the true pope. Whichever one he was: remember, the Magisterium has never definitively decided all the questions there are about which claimant was the pope and which the antipope*. (What is your view about the validity of the elections of Leo VIII and Benedict V?)

Orthodox saints who lived after the breach between East and West have been formally admitted to Calendars of communities in full communion with Rome. I have on my desk a Melkite Calendar which lists some quite recent Russian saints.

And, of course, if Rome is sincere (as I am sure she is) in wanting unity with the East, she can hardly expect Orientals to forget so many of their saints whose names are on the various Orthodox Lists and whose ikons in churches are darkened with centuries of candle smoke.

So this question - or one very much like it - will eventually have to be faced. After all, S Photius was not all bad.

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*I am reminded of the old Jacobite doggerel

God save the King; God save our Faith's Defender;
God bless - no harm in blessing - the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King -
God bless my soul! That's quite another thing!

VARIA

November 19 is the (earthly) birthday of Blessed King Charles the Martyr (not his heavenly natale). Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus ...

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You may have noticed that I don't have any links to other blogs. That is because, in my untechnological illiteracy, I don't know how to do it. But it does have the advantage of sparing me the obligation to attempt to exercise a charism of discernment. In addition, I have a profound suspicion of some areas of the American "Continuum".

But I am told of something called the ACA (correct me if I've got this wrong) which is with the TAC and is part of the TAC impetus towards submission to the Holy See. That being so, I suggest that all good chaps/chappesses and true should give a whirl to a new blog, the anglocatholic, which emanates from that stable. This is certainly a time for all right-thinking people to rally round and support each other, blogically as well as in other ways.

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A friend who recently crossed the Tiber recalls with 'guilt' that she helped to persuade Graham Leonard that Women Deacons are Kosher. I'm not sure that guilt isn't anachronistic. At that time we determined to be principled and not to deny something which could, we thought, be found in the Paradosis. Bishop 'Kallistos' Ware gave some impetus to this by, I was told, encouraging one very Catholic young woman to accept (permanently) diaconal orders - and she was publicly applauded as one of us by Bishop Graham. I know that the poor girl (a distinctly clever product of Girton College) was given a very rough time by the wymynprysts and their male running dogs (good Maoist expression, yes?) for declining to seek the presbyterate.

I won't soldier through the evidence on which such assumptions were based nor the reasons why current theological research doubts whether the 'female diaconate' was really such. Even now, however, I am not sure that the Magisterium has explicitly and definitively judged upon this question. If it hasn't, neither have I. If, on the other hand, it has, I support 100% what it has decided. You can't say fairer than that, guv.

I don't know if there are Permanent Women Deacons in our Integrity who might seek reconciliation with the Holy See. If there are, I hope that at some stage Authority can deal sensitively with them; not inconceivably by restoring the old Anglican "Order of Deaconesses", who were explicitly not in Holy Orders and whose functions closely paralleled those of 'women deacons' in the early centuries (would it be appropriate for them to wear stoles, and maniples on their right wrists?). While I'm on about it, may I raise the question also of Readers - men and women - who have given and do give our Church splendid service and deserve not to be discarded in 'Ordinariates'. These are all parts of our Patrimony, and must be items on an eventual list of agenda.

I expect there will be some who will conclude that, after all, Hunwicke is Unsound!

Baroque again

I have been interested by the response to my question about the Baroque.

One intelligent email suggests that the English have a particular problem with the Baroque, and links this with the emotional side of it and the Incarnational. I think this is dead right. The Reformation taught the English to be wary of the Flesh; "Spirituality" has to be etherial and other-worldly. A "spiritual" girl is one with an unhealthy washed-out complexion and vague watery eyes. Mind you, English medieval art was intensely emotional and Incarnational. You can find faded murals in medieval churches, revealed after the removals of layers of whitewash, showing in lurid (Oh dear! Would I have used that philologically inapposite adjective if I were not English?) detail the lacerations of Christ's flesh. It's all a bit like Guinness: we tend to think of stout porter as an Irish beverage, while until the first world war it was made all over the Atlantic archipelago: it's just that it is in Ireland, because of historical accidents, that it has mainly survived. Or bagpipes: they were common to most of Europe until the twentieth century, but in most places they have disappeared, leaving a popular impression that they are mainly Scotch. There's nothing inherently unEnglish about Emotion and Incarnation in ones spirituality; it's just that since the cultural schisms of the sixteenth century, they have been phased out of English religion: leaving them to appear foreign and alien. Yes? And since the Baroque is so superbly capable of expressing the emotional and the Incarnational - and is foreign and papist - the Baroque magnetically attracts to it all the suspicions generated by 450 years of religious and cultural heresy.

Remember Dr Dawkins' illuminating diatribe in the Washington Post: for heavens sake read it if you haven't already. I mean it; you'll learn more from that one interview than from volumes of history, sociology, or psychology. It is so revealing because it shows that it's not religion as such or belief in God as such that gets under his skin, but that horrible thing Catholicism. Dawkins is your typical ignorant English bigot. Honest: scratch nine English out of ten and you'll find Dawkins just under the surface.

Those of you who are within reach of London and have not yet done the excellent NG exhibition of Spanish religious art: can I ask you, after you go, to report back on the reactions of the viewers to the realism with which emotion and suffering are portrayed? I recall one arty historically gent peering down at an alarmingly realistic dead Christ and addressing his companion on the views of Vasari. A defence mechanism - contrived dispassion - against the danger of actual response? A friend of mine picked up a rumour that the attendants had been warned to be on the lookout for nutters who might try to damage the exhibits ... or to pray before them! If I'd known before I went, I would have tried it (the prayer, I mean, not the vandalism) to see what happened.

Hint hint.