Let me be frank. It costs 2,000 Euro or so. And it takes up June 30 until July 11 of your life. Twelve days taken out of your three-score years and ten!
But nearly a fortnight in the North Italian Lakes in early summer? And the Vetus Ordo on offer daily? And two top-quality lectures a day? And fine food? Cocktails and lake trips and excursions? Something ... well, something to do?
Or, if you can't come, but want to do some good, could you provide a bursary for a priest or a seminarian to enjoy the experience?
Er ..... or both?
Oops ... I should have declared a personal interest: I shall be there myself; I shall giving Conferences (Deo volente). But there are plenty of bars around if you want to skip the Fr H bits.
This is the 22nd Roman Forum Summer Symposium; this year it is about what has happened to Catholicism in the last hundred years. Which is ...yup, you think about it ... quite a lot? Yes?
It is co-ordinated by an American academic, Dr John Rao, who spoke memorably at a recent LMS conference in England.
Join him or help him? Please?
drjcrao@aol.com
10 March 2014
9 March 2014
Nasty
I don't think I have often seen nastier pictures than those of Press photographers clustering round the relatives of those on the lost airliner in order to get good pictures.
A good thing there were Press photographers there to photograph the Press photographers ...
A good thing there were Press photographers there to photograph the Press photographers ...
"They have uncrowned Him" (1)
As I read Archbishop Lefebvre's book (the first that I have read; although I have read Bishop Tissier de Mallerais' biography of the Archbishop) I was struck by a great sense of familiarity ... combined with an overwhelming awareness of unfamiliarity.
The familiarity? The understanding of Society which I found on his pages is radically similar to what, for most of its existence since 1559, would have been seen as the distinctive mark of Anglicanism ... yes, even more so than 'episcopacy' or 'Patristicism'. Our imagination might take us back to the English countryside before the Industrial Revolution or the Catholic Revival; to the Squire and the Parson (each of them probably 'two-bottle men', or better) drinking to "Church and King" or "Church and State". The understanding was that the Crown defended the Church, and the Church upheld the Crown (a view that Gallican Frenchmen might have shared). There had been a hiatus in the middle of the seventeenth century; but that became but a bad memory. True, there were ambiguities after the Dutch Invasion; as Squire and Parson raised their glasses together, perhaps the candlelight glinted on some words etched into the glasses ... Redeat Magnus ille Genius Brittaniae ... and perhaps there was a bowl of water on the table ... and perhaps the drunken voices rose in song to 'bless our King ... soon to reign over us' or to peer into a future 'when the King shall have his own again' ... but the implicit ideology, of a Christian state, of a 'realm', lay beneath it all as a solid foundation. In this sense, if you wanted to call classical cultural Anglicanism 'Lefebvrian', people might find you rather eccentric but you could make quite a strong case for your eccentricity, as long as you made clear that you were referring to the old 'High and Dry' churchmen more than to the new enthusiasts of the Tractarian and Evangelical movements.
The unfamiliarity? A vivid scene described early in the Archbishop's book: go inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where the painter David has been prostituting his skills in the interests of a new ideology, and has turned from oils to papier-mache; instead of the altare Dei and the August Presence, there is a 'mountain' with a 'Greek' temple, occupied by an agreeable little danseuse deemed to be the Goddess Reason and surrounded by her associates singing 'hymns'; then a small gathering moves off to the Assembly so that its President can embrace 'la Deesse'. The date? 20 Brumaire, in the Year II. The Capetian uncrowned, the Redeemer dethroned, the very Calendar remade.
British Society has never experienced quite such a brutal and total moment of discontinuity, which has marked the whole of later history and has bequeathed such rigidly defined polarities. If Britain had done a deal with Hitler in 1941, Buckingham Palace might have been occupied by Wallace Simpson and German Advisers, but the face of her happy slave would have appeared on the coins, the royal standard would have remained on the flagpole, and there would have been a continuity of forms; but French history has been marked by repeated discontinuities in the rituals and the forms, so that Marshal Petain gave the French people Travail Famille Patrie and a Gallique Francisque instead of their Revolutionary motto and symbols. An Englishman has little hope of understanding Lefebvre (or possibly many other Frenchman) if he fails to understand this.
His Excellency describes 'the social doctrine of the Church' thus: "Society is not a shapeless mass of individuals, but an arranged organism of coordinated and hierarchically arranged social groups: the family, the enterprises and trades, then the professional corporations, finally the state. The corporations unite employers and workers in the same profession for the protection and the promotion of their common interests. The classes are not antagonistic, but naturally complementary". You could call this ideal 'Corporatism' and recall with distaste that it appealed to Mussolini, or 'Toryism' and recall that as early as 1749 Henry Fielding was mocking it as old-fashioned, but it has broad links with the picture of High Medieval Society which John Bossy described in the 1980s and the disappearance of which the Anglican 'Radical Orthodox' Catherine Pickstock has seen as the basis of modern, atomised, individualism.
Our more evolutionary history denies us the clarity afforded to Frenchmen by the suddenness of their cultural transformations; but have we not now all ended up in a rather similar place?
I shall return to 'the Christendom State' at the end of this series. Before then, I wish to examine the Archbishop's teaching about 'interfaith dialogue' in the light of the writings of one of our great twentieth century Anglican thinkers.
The familiarity? The understanding of Society which I found on his pages is radically similar to what, for most of its existence since 1559, would have been seen as the distinctive mark of Anglicanism ... yes, even more so than 'episcopacy' or 'Patristicism'. Our imagination might take us back to the English countryside before the Industrial Revolution or the Catholic Revival; to the Squire and the Parson (each of them probably 'two-bottle men', or better) drinking to "Church and King" or "Church and State". The understanding was that the Crown defended the Church, and the Church upheld the Crown (a view that Gallican Frenchmen might have shared). There had been a hiatus in the middle of the seventeenth century; but that became but a bad memory. True, there were ambiguities after the Dutch Invasion; as Squire and Parson raised their glasses together, perhaps the candlelight glinted on some words etched into the glasses ... Redeat Magnus ille Genius Brittaniae ... and perhaps there was a bowl of water on the table ... and perhaps the drunken voices rose in song to 'bless our King ... soon to reign over us' or to peer into a future 'when the King shall have his own again' ... but the implicit ideology, of a Christian state, of a 'realm', lay beneath it all as a solid foundation. In this sense, if you wanted to call classical cultural Anglicanism 'Lefebvrian', people might find you rather eccentric but you could make quite a strong case for your eccentricity, as long as you made clear that you were referring to the old 'High and Dry' churchmen more than to the new enthusiasts of the Tractarian and Evangelical movements.
The unfamiliarity? A vivid scene described early in the Archbishop's book: go inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where the painter David has been prostituting his skills in the interests of a new ideology, and has turned from oils to papier-mache; instead of the altare Dei and the August Presence, there is a 'mountain' with a 'Greek' temple, occupied by an agreeable little danseuse deemed to be the Goddess Reason and surrounded by her associates singing 'hymns'; then a small gathering moves off to the Assembly so that its President can embrace 'la Deesse'. The date? 20 Brumaire, in the Year II. The Capetian uncrowned, the Redeemer dethroned, the very Calendar remade.
British Society has never experienced quite such a brutal and total moment of discontinuity, which has marked the whole of later history and has bequeathed such rigidly defined polarities. If Britain had done a deal with Hitler in 1941, Buckingham Palace might have been occupied by Wallace Simpson and German Advisers, but the face of her happy slave would have appeared on the coins, the royal standard would have remained on the flagpole, and there would have been a continuity of forms; but French history has been marked by repeated discontinuities in the rituals and the forms, so that Marshal Petain gave the French people Travail Famille Patrie and a Gallique Francisque instead of their Revolutionary motto and symbols. An Englishman has little hope of understanding Lefebvre (or possibly many other Frenchman) if he fails to understand this.
His Excellency describes 'the social doctrine of the Church' thus: "Society is not a shapeless mass of individuals, but an arranged organism of coordinated and hierarchically arranged social groups: the family, the enterprises and trades, then the professional corporations, finally the state. The corporations unite employers and workers in the same profession for the protection and the promotion of their common interests. The classes are not antagonistic, but naturally complementary". You could call this ideal 'Corporatism' and recall with distaste that it appealed to Mussolini, or 'Toryism' and recall that as early as 1749 Henry Fielding was mocking it as old-fashioned, but it has broad links with the picture of High Medieval Society which John Bossy described in the 1980s and the disappearance of which the Anglican 'Radical Orthodox' Catherine Pickstock has seen as the basis of modern, atomised, individualism.
Our more evolutionary history denies us the clarity afforded to Frenchmen by the suddenness of their cultural transformations; but have we not now all ended up in a rather similar place?
I shall return to 'the Christendom State' at the end of this series. Before then, I wish to examine the Archbishop's teaching about 'interfaith dialogue' in the light of the writings of one of our great twentieth century Anglican thinkers.
8 March 2014
Book Review
A month or so ago, I was sent some books 'for review' - not new ones, but quite old works. Tomorrow, I shall embark upon They have uncrowned Him, by Archbishop Lefebvre. We are clearly moving into a period of new appraisal of the Council, and many of us have read our own Dr Aidan Nichols' book, gently and elegantly dialoguing with an adherent of the SSPX; and that of Mgr Gherardini, a Canon of S Peter's in Rome with a distinguished academic record. It seems to me appropriate to see how Mgr Lefebvre's book has stood the test of the years ... the quarter of a century since it was written.
As you would expect, I shall approach it quite unambiguously from the point of view of one who accepts ex animo that Vatican II was lawfully convoked and its texts lawfully confirmed; and that it is deserving of the obsequium religiosum due to a Holy Ecumenical Council of the Universal Church, utpote quod defined no new dogmas and uttered no anathemas. And one who accepts, with the appropriate levels of adherence, the Magisterium of the post-Conciliar Church. In accordance with Revised Blog Policy which I announced yesterday, if I find it necessary to disagree with the Archbishop, I shall do so temperately and very gently, determined neither to be divisive nor to upset those who still view the Archbishop with great reverence. In particular, nothing that I write should be deemed to imply any criticism of the SSPX.
As you would expect, I shall approach it quite unambiguously from the point of view of one who accepts ex animo that Vatican II was lawfully convoked and its texts lawfully confirmed; and that it is deserving of the obsequium religiosum due to a Holy Ecumenical Council of the Universal Church, utpote quod defined no new dogmas and uttered no anathemas. And one who accepts, with the appropriate levels of adherence, the Magisterium of the post-Conciliar Church. In accordance with Revised Blog Policy which I announced yesterday, if I find it necessary to disagree with the Archbishop, I shall do so temperately and very gently, determined neither to be divisive nor to upset those who still view the Archbishop with great reverence. In particular, nothing that I write should be deemed to imply any criticism of the SSPX.
7 March 2014
Update
As you know, I have, since reviving this blog, declined to enable comments which abuse the Holy Father or the members of the English hierarchy, either individually or collectively. This will continue to be so. But, additionally, I shall not enable comments which seem to me in the least divisive; divisive vis-a-vis other Catholics; divisive vis-a-vis non-Catholics; or in the teensy weensiest bit uncharitable. This will be the blog that never upsets anyone! My decision results from the words of Cardinal Mueller about Ordinariate blogs; it is, I think, an immensely reasonable request on his part that, having taken advantage of Pope Benedict's generous offer of Full Communion with the See of Peter, we should not import into the Catholic Church the cheerful mud-slinging habits of our Anglican Patrimony. So you all need to become sensitive and unaggressive, like proper Catholic bloggers. I shall, myself, follow the same policy: I think the only possibly upsetting posts I have published recently were one which criticised 'ultra-ultra-traddies' of a sedevacantist disposition who do not believe that Novus Ordo Sacraments and Orders are valid; and another which took apart the Brentwood liturgist who wrote around telling the clergy that it was perfectly OK to use the old, now superseded, ICEL translation of the Missal if they didn't like the new one. I expect these people are all very sensitive types, and if, hitherto, they have sobbed into their unresponsive pillows in the lonely watches of the night because of what I wrote, I'll spare them that in future!
So - readers - please do not put me to the embarrassing unpleasantness of having to censor you! If your contribution fails to pop up, it will be because I deem it upsetting or divisive!
So - readers - please do not put me to the embarrassing unpleasantness of having to censor you! If your contribution fails to pop up, it will be because I deem it upsetting or divisive!
Fisher-More College
I have not been in touch with this college since it moved out of the hands of its founders and changed its site and its name; and I have no first hand knowledge of the reasons behind the events of the last few days. I can only recall an extremely happy visit to St Thomas More College a few years ago, in company with a great friend of the College, Fr Allan Hawkins, then Rector of the Anglican Use parish of St Mary the Virgin in Arlington. It felt like a little piece of Oxbridge in Texas ... two people in MA gowns chatting in the car-park ... lunch with the Chancellor Dr James Patrick ... a young man sitting on my other side with whom I had a most civilised discussion about the ode of Horace he and his fellows had been studying that morning ... time with the Classics don, Mr Harry Lacey (a Yale man, if I remember rightly, and a fine Classicist) and other members of the Senior and Junior Common Rooms.
I hope and pray that something may be salvaged from an unhappy situation. I do not find it in the least easy to understand why, whatever may have gone wrong, a Bishop should pick upon the Vetus Ordo as the root of a malaise, or how banning that will remedy whatever it is he judges to be amiss; but I am not going to pontificate about circumstances with regard to which I am imperfectly informed.
I am simply going to pray for those who have been unjustly hurt or damaged, and I urge readers, of their charity, to do the same.
I hope and pray that something may be salvaged from an unhappy situation. I do not find it in the least easy to understand why, whatever may have gone wrong, a Bishop should pick upon the Vetus Ordo as the root of a malaise, or how banning that will remedy whatever it is he judges to be amiss; but I am not going to pontificate about circumstances with regard to which I am imperfectly informed.
I am simply going to pray for those who have been unjustly hurt or damaged, and I urge readers, of their charity, to do the same.
6 March 2014
Anglican Patrimony in San Antonio
A splendid video of Ash Wednesday Mass at the Atonement Academy in San Antonio, Texas. It must be just about the most remarkable success story of Anglicanism in Full Communion with Peter: Fr Phillips' large church, huge congregations and vast academy ... oversubscribed ... I've only watched the first ten minutes so far, but how it brought back happy memories of days spent there in the summer of 2011; the sound of that marvellous thurible with the bells making its way up the church ... Don't fail to notice the instinctive and natural piety of the young people; we were never so successful in inculcating that at Lancing ... the natural arrogance, do you think, of the English middle classes?
What is it about Texas that makes it such natural soil for transplanting - and giving a new Catholic vigour to - Anglicanism? Viva the Lone Star State! If only poor Dr Cranmer, as they hustled him up the Turl towards the city ditch and the waiting stake, could have known where his liturgical compositions would end up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc3EXZVn3MI
What is it about Texas that makes it such natural soil for transplanting - and giving a new Catholic vigour to - Anglicanism? Viva the Lone Star State! If only poor Dr Cranmer, as they hustled him up the Turl towards the city ditch and the waiting stake, could have known where his liturgical compositions would end up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc3EXZVn3MI
5 March 2014
Of no particular interest
I ran, yesterday afternoon, into Henry Bradshaw and one or two other friends, knowledgeable chaps, and thought I'd see if they knew anything about the dates of the entry of the Mass of the Five Wounds into medieval Missals. Apparently the Hereford Missal, which achieved a printed edition in 1502, lacked this Mass. But there is a manuscript version which has it copied in by a later hand at the end, together with the Sarum introduction about Pope Boniface. And, as in Sarum, it is associated with that other exemplar of late medieval Christological affection, the Mass of the Holy Name.
York was more interesting - my chum Surtees came up with the facts. It has the Mass of the Five Wounds in editions printed in 1509, 1516, 1517, 1530, 1533. However, it is not in the (earlier) manuscript versions of the Missal except ... get this ... that there's a nice ms at Stonyhurst, which Surtees says is from the second half of the fifteenth century, which has it written ... but left unfinished ... on an outside folio.
But it was Henry Bradshaw himself who knocked me for six. You see, I'd always assumed that the Mass of the Five Wounds was an adapted, augmented, version of an earlier Mass de Passione Domini, still preserved in the Missal of S Pius V. Well, as Henry makes clear, neither the Mass of the Five Wounds nor the Mass de Passione Domini was in the (Milanese) 1474 editio princeps of the Missale Romanum. Nor in 1481, 1485, or 1493 editions. But the Mass of the Five Wounds appears in a 1505 edition from Venice and also in Venetian editions of 1508, 1509, 1543, 1558, 1560, and 1561, and Parisian editions of 1515, 1530, and 1540. (A Lyons edition of 1516; two Venetian editions of 1558 and 1560 from the same House; and a 1574 edition from Antwerp, do not have it.) And all these also do not contain de Passione Domini)
So, in a very crude, prima facie sort of way, one might tentatively wonder if de Passione Domini is a chopped down version of the Mass of the Five Wounds, rather than the original from which it is developed..
Can anyone fill in some prehistory here? I am beginning to wonder if the Mass of the Five Wounds (and its putative spin-off de Passione Domini) is even later than I had guessed.
BTW, another learned friend - not Bradshaw or Surtees - says that the Mass of the Five Wounds is not in the Nidaros Missal, which would strengthen the point made on an earlier thread by 'Ben': that physical evidence of the cult of the Five Wounds in Kirkwall Cathedral inclines one to guess that Sarum had, by the end of the Middle Ages, replaced Nidaros in the Orkneys.
York was more interesting - my chum Surtees came up with the facts. It has the Mass of the Five Wounds in editions printed in 1509, 1516, 1517, 1530, 1533. However, it is not in the (earlier) manuscript versions of the Missal except ... get this ... that there's a nice ms at Stonyhurst, which Surtees says is from the second half of the fifteenth century, which has it written ... but left unfinished ... on an outside folio.
But it was Henry Bradshaw himself who knocked me for six. You see, I'd always assumed that the Mass of the Five Wounds was an adapted, augmented, version of an earlier Mass de Passione Domini, still preserved in the Missal of S Pius V. Well, as Henry makes clear, neither the Mass of the Five Wounds nor the Mass de Passione Domini was in the (Milanese) 1474 editio princeps of the Missale Romanum. Nor in 1481, 1485, or 1493 editions. But the Mass of the Five Wounds appears in a 1505 edition from Venice and also in Venetian editions of 1508, 1509, 1543, 1558, 1560, and 1561, and Parisian editions of 1515, 1530, and 1540. (A Lyons edition of 1516; two Venetian editions of 1558 and 1560 from the same House; and a 1574 edition from Antwerp, do not have it.) And all these also do not contain de Passione Domini)
So, in a very crude, prima facie sort of way, one might tentatively wonder if de Passione Domini is a chopped down version of the Mass of the Five Wounds, rather than the original from which it is developed..
Can anyone fill in some prehistory here? I am beginning to wonder if the Mass of the Five Wounds (and its putative spin-off de Passione Domini) is even later than I had guessed.
BTW, another learned friend - not Bradshaw or Surtees - says that the Mass of the Five Wounds is not in the Nidaros Missal, which would strengthen the point made on an earlier thread by 'Ben': that physical evidence of the cult of the Five Wounds in Kirkwall Cathedral inclines one to guess that Sarum had, by the end of the Middle Ages, replaced Nidaros in the Orkneys.
4 March 2014
THE CARNIVAL IS not quite OVER: some Shrove Tuesday and Mardi Gras frivolities
I am not very interested in what the Holy Father meant a few weeks ago when, according to the official English version of his words, he called upon women to be more "capillary". (If I were to offer a hypothesis, it would be that he is opposed to Lesbian hairstyles, just like the Canadian Moslem hairdresser in yesterday's news.) No: the historical aspects of this event, unusually, interest me more than the linguistic.
There seem to me two main possible alternative explanations. Either (1) that the Spanish Desk in the Vatican Press Office is staffed exclusively by gentlemanly and ladylike Spaniards. They are so Princely and Renaissance that they have no knowledge whatsoever about the current urban slang in the slums of Latin America. So they give a literal, dictionary, equivalent of the Pontiff's more impenetrable idioms. This is understandable. After all, if a typical ordinary Englishman were to be snatched Sinbad-like from the streets of Oxford ... as it might be, me, for example ... and, with no philological preparation, were to be dumped into one of New York's more vividly diverse suburbs, it might be some time before I got the syntactical structure, the intonations, and the vocabulary of the dominant patois entirely straight.
Or (2) that there are some jokers at the Spanish Desk determined to make Pope Francis look as ridiculous as possible. They are probably the same nasty evil miscreants who let loose the cruel black crow that ate up the beautiful white dove that the sweet little children standing beside the friendly lovable Pontiff had just released. These humorists are having a field day subverting the pope's persona, his carefully crafted public relations image. If that is what is happening, it is the first scandal, or Francisgate I, of this Pontificate.
But whichever of these is the truth, Francis should do something about it. He should put on hold his grand scheme to Reform The Curia ... after all, pretty well every new pope Postpones the Reform of the Curia about eleven months after his election, so it would be pretty well what everybody is expecting. Then he should spend his every waking hour getting a grip on his Press Office. On the McAdder Management Principle (vide Decline and Fall: "Give hell to the man immediately below you, and you can rely on him to pass it on with interest") he should have Fr Lombardi given an hour or two of Enhanced Interrogation (Yes!!! we 'Old Europeans' have so much to learn from our American Cousins!!!), daily, until everything was sorted out.
Actually, this is in any case probably the best method of solving the Problem of the Curia. Historians assure us that it is very much the way in which Urban VI, Papa Prignano, Reformed the Curia in his day. Those of Francis' cardinals who survived Sant'Angelo would probably flee to Avignon, annul the last Conclave, and elect Cardinal Burke as Leo XIV.
It could all happen in time for a newly independent Scotland, and Merry England, to be under two different 'popes', just as they were in the Good Old Days, the fourteenth century, the Age of Faith! And then Tally Ho for the 'Spirit' of Pisa II and the 'Post-Conciliar Magisterium' of Constance II!!
There seem to me two main possible alternative explanations. Either (1) that the Spanish Desk in the Vatican Press Office is staffed exclusively by gentlemanly and ladylike Spaniards. They are so Princely and Renaissance that they have no knowledge whatsoever about the current urban slang in the slums of Latin America. So they give a literal, dictionary, equivalent of the Pontiff's more impenetrable idioms. This is understandable. After all, if a typical ordinary Englishman were to be snatched Sinbad-like from the streets of Oxford ... as it might be, me, for example ... and, with no philological preparation, were to be dumped into one of New York's more vividly diverse suburbs, it might be some time before I got the syntactical structure, the intonations, and the vocabulary of the dominant patois entirely straight.
Or (2) that there are some jokers at the Spanish Desk determined to make Pope Francis look as ridiculous as possible. They are probably the same nasty evil miscreants who let loose the cruel black crow that ate up the beautiful white dove that the sweet little children standing beside the friendly lovable Pontiff had just released. These humorists are having a field day subverting the pope's persona, his carefully crafted public relations image. If that is what is happening, it is the first scandal, or Francisgate I, of this Pontificate.
But whichever of these is the truth, Francis should do something about it. He should put on hold his grand scheme to Reform The Curia ... after all, pretty well every new pope Postpones the Reform of the Curia about eleven months after his election, so it would be pretty well what everybody is expecting. Then he should spend his every waking hour getting a grip on his Press Office. On the McAdder Management Principle (vide Decline and Fall: "Give hell to the man immediately below you, and you can rely on him to pass it on with interest") he should have Fr Lombardi given an hour or two of Enhanced Interrogation (Yes!!! we 'Old Europeans' have so much to learn from our American Cousins!!!), daily, until everything was sorted out.
Actually, this is in any case probably the best method of solving the Problem of the Curia. Historians assure us that it is very much the way in which Urban VI, Papa Prignano, Reformed the Curia in his day. Those of Francis' cardinals who survived Sant'Angelo would probably flee to Avignon, annul the last Conclave, and elect Cardinal Burke as Leo XIV.
It could all happen in time for a newly independent Scotland, and Merry England, to be under two different 'popes', just as they were in the Good Old Days, the fourteenth century, the Age of Faith! And then Tally Ho for the 'Spirit' of Pisa II and the 'Post-Conciliar Magisterium' of Constance II!!
3 March 2014
"Blessed GK"? Santo subito! Chesterton MATTERS!!
There is to be a day conference on Chesterton, including input from the Chairman of the American Chesterton Association, and containing information about the state of the cause for GK's Beatification.
It will be in Beaconsfield, Chesterton's home town, and the place where I served my Title (first Curacy). The date is Saturday March 29. I have no idea how to transfer flyers onto my blog, so I will simply give this contact email as a source of information:
chestertoninthechilterns@ntlworld.com
and urge those who can make it, and thus support this very important cause, to do their best to go along.
It will be in Beaconsfield, Chesterton's home town, and the place where I served my Title (first Curacy). The date is Saturday March 29. I have no idea how to transfer flyers onto my blog, so I will simply give this contact email as a source of information:
chestertoninthechilterns@ntlworld.com
and urge those who can make it, and thus support this very important cause, to do their best to go along.
Celtic?
[My friend and erudite brother priest Little Black Sambo kindly alludes to a piece which I once included in my ORDO. I think he may mean this, from 2007:]
Remember those happy heady days when 'Orthodoxy' was the 'sexy' version of Christianity? Eastern Christianity had more romance and less menace and 'rigidity' than Rome ... because it came from further away. Sadly, when we got to know them better, we discovered that the Orthodox were, if anything, distinctly more 'rigid' than Rome, particularly on questions like 'Intercommunion'.
Now, the 'sexy' religious 'thinggy is 'Celtic'; religious bookshops flaunt sections on 'Celtic' Spirituality and 'Celtic' Prayer. It's safer than Orthodoxy because it's in an even more distant country called 'The Past', so we can all invent our own 'Celtic Christianities' without any risk that some terribly combative Saint like S Columba, or those Irish monks who spread holy hassle all over Europe, will rise from their graves and beat us up. If you are tempted to buy such books, check them out carefully. Does the 'Compiler' give actual sources for his/her material? Is he/she scholarly?
Historians have decisively abandoned the concept of the 'Celtic', and especially of a supposedly distinctive 'Celtic Church'. In the most recent major scholarly work on this subject, Professor Charles-Edwards' Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), the distinguished author writes dismissively of 'that entity - beloved of modern sectarians and romantics but unknown to the early Middle Ages - "the Celtic Church"', and surveys in a footnote the scholarly work of the last thirty years which has established this.
If the 'Celtic' enthusiasts were serious, there is a Mass-rite they could revive. The earliest surviving Missal from these islands is the 'Stowe Missal', from the 790s [but copied from texts older that S Gregory the Great] and of Southern Irish origin. Its Eucharistic Prayer is almost entirely identical with the current Roman 'First Eucharistic Prayer' except that it includes rather more Saints and describes the Pope as 'thy most blessed servant N our Pope, Bishop of the Apostolic See'. And it has a nice Prayer of Humble Access with phrases like 'I am unworthy because I filthily adhere to the mire of dung and all my good deeds are like a rag used by a menstrual woman'.
Splendid 'Celtic' stuff, mystical and uplifting!
Since writing that, I have noticed one attempt to breathe new life into 'Celtic', although not along the lines of the books I reprobate in this piece; and I believe there are groups which have experimented with the Stowe Missal. Fair enough; my only problem is with people who simply manufacture stuff themselves, sometimes of an in-tune-with-nature or down-with-Roman-dogma-and-legalism type, and slyly claim that it is 'in the Celtic Spirit'.
Remember those happy heady days when 'Orthodoxy' was the 'sexy' version of Christianity? Eastern Christianity had more romance and less menace and 'rigidity' than Rome ... because it came from further away. Sadly, when we got to know them better, we discovered that the Orthodox were, if anything, distinctly more 'rigid' than Rome, particularly on questions like 'Intercommunion'.
Now, the 'sexy' religious 'thinggy is 'Celtic'; religious bookshops flaunt sections on 'Celtic' Spirituality and 'Celtic' Prayer. It's safer than Orthodoxy because it's in an even more distant country called 'The Past', so we can all invent our own 'Celtic Christianities' without any risk that some terribly combative Saint like S Columba, or those Irish monks who spread holy hassle all over Europe, will rise from their graves and beat us up. If you are tempted to buy such books, check them out carefully. Does the 'Compiler' give actual sources for his/her material? Is he/she scholarly?
Historians have decisively abandoned the concept of the 'Celtic', and especially of a supposedly distinctive 'Celtic Church'. In the most recent major scholarly work on this subject, Professor Charles-Edwards' Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), the distinguished author writes dismissively of 'that entity - beloved of modern sectarians and romantics but unknown to the early Middle Ages - "the Celtic Church"', and surveys in a footnote the scholarly work of the last thirty years which has established this.
If the 'Celtic' enthusiasts were serious, there is a Mass-rite they could revive. The earliest surviving Missal from these islands is the 'Stowe Missal', from the 790s [but copied from texts older that S Gregory the Great] and of Southern Irish origin. Its Eucharistic Prayer is almost entirely identical with the current Roman 'First Eucharistic Prayer' except that it includes rather more Saints and describes the Pope as 'thy most blessed servant N our Pope, Bishop of the Apostolic See'. And it has a nice Prayer of Humble Access with phrases like 'I am unworthy because I filthily adhere to the mire of dung and all my good deeds are like a rag used by a menstrual woman'.
Splendid 'Celtic' stuff, mystical and uplifting!
Since writing that, I have noticed one attempt to breathe new life into 'Celtic', although not along the lines of the books I reprobate in this piece; and I believe there are groups which have experimented with the Stowe Missal. Fair enough; my only problem is with people who simply manufacture stuff themselves, sometimes of an in-tune-with-nature or down-with-Roman-dogma-and-legalism type, and slyly claim that it is 'in the Celtic Spirit'.
2 March 2014
Dixit Veritatem
In 1933, Dr N P Williams edited a volume entitled Northern Catholicism ..., in which he himself contributed a preface on 'Northern Catholicism'. Dom Gregory Dix wrote a review of this piece in the Nashdom Abbey periodical Laudate (which has long been out of print).
Dix, without much evidence, regarded himself as being of French origin, and very definitely as a 'Latin' Christian. The idea that, in Scandinavia, one might find a version of Catholicism which was manly and masculine and free of the superstitions of flabby feminine 'Mediterranean' Catholicism, filled Dix with that combination of fury and satirical wit which so often resulted in his best writing. Sometimes he would quip that there once was a Nordic Catholicism; and that its decadence was one of the things that made a reformation necessary in the sixteenth century.
After a few witticisms about Nazi Racism, the Call of the Blood, and Heil Hitler, Dix in his review quotes Williams:
"the essential religious genius of the Northern peoples, where it finds unfettered expression ...[is] of a mystical and soaring quality appropriate to dwellers amidst the less genial aspects of Nature and beneath 'grey and weeping skies' - a quality which urges it to pierce straight upwards to the ineffable Godhead itself, and forbids it to take over-much delight in symbols, or to rest with satisfaction in material objects of devotion".
This risible tosh inspired Dix to comment: "It is a vivid and sympathetic picture. One can almost see these mystical and polygamous freemen at their simple devotions, and catch the rustle of their golden beards as they bend forward to breathe unsuperstitious prayers into their winged casques, seated on damp logs beneath the grey and weeping dome of heaven". In conclusion, Dix, referring to Horace's XVIth Epode, needles Williams with the suggestion that he might situate his Northern Catholicism in the non-existent Happy Happy Isles ... if only he will be prepared to take advice from a Dago poet (History does not record that Horace was a Swede).
Perhaps I ought not to be too hard on Nippy Williams; after all, he used to help out at S Thomas's. And he was a theologian of distinction. I believe he was so upset by Gregory's tour de force that he never spoke to him again. But the plain fact is that Dix exploded what was in reality just one more among the endless Anglican attempts to dream up some alibi for declining to accept the 'claims of the Roman See'. In this futile search, Nippy fell victim, in that very nasty decade, to a whiff of the very nasty 'Aryan' myth. Not nearly as badly as did some of the great names of up-to-the-minute German New Testament Scholarship, with swastikas framing their Fuehrer-worship and their Aryan Jesus in his Gentile Galilee. But even in 1933, when the Extermination Camps were nothing more than a perverted gleam in the Fuehrer's eye, Dix saw through it all. Because he was a papalist.
Dix's summary? "Truth will be held most entirely and in due proportion in a Church which is truly 'Universal', supra-racial, and unaffected by the transient spirit of a particular age".
Dix, without much evidence, regarded himself as being of French origin, and very definitely as a 'Latin' Christian. The idea that, in Scandinavia, one might find a version of Catholicism which was manly and masculine and free of the superstitions of flabby feminine 'Mediterranean' Catholicism, filled Dix with that combination of fury and satirical wit which so often resulted in his best writing. Sometimes he would quip that there once was a Nordic Catholicism; and that its decadence was one of the things that made a reformation necessary in the sixteenth century.
After a few witticisms about Nazi Racism, the Call of the Blood, and Heil Hitler, Dix in his review quotes Williams:
"the essential religious genius of the Northern peoples, where it finds unfettered expression ...[is] of a mystical and soaring quality appropriate to dwellers amidst the less genial aspects of Nature and beneath 'grey and weeping skies' - a quality which urges it to pierce straight upwards to the ineffable Godhead itself, and forbids it to take over-much delight in symbols, or to rest with satisfaction in material objects of devotion".
This risible tosh inspired Dix to comment: "It is a vivid and sympathetic picture. One can almost see these mystical and polygamous freemen at their simple devotions, and catch the rustle of their golden beards as they bend forward to breathe unsuperstitious prayers into their winged casques, seated on damp logs beneath the grey and weeping dome of heaven". In conclusion, Dix, referring to Horace's XVIth Epode, needles Williams with the suggestion that he might situate his Northern Catholicism in the non-existent Happy Happy Isles ... if only he will be prepared to take advice from a Dago poet (History does not record that Horace was a Swede).
Perhaps I ought not to be too hard on Nippy Williams; after all, he used to help out at S Thomas's. And he was a theologian of distinction. I believe he was so upset by Gregory's tour de force that he never spoke to him again. But the plain fact is that Dix exploded what was in reality just one more among the endless Anglican attempts to dream up some alibi for declining to accept the 'claims of the Roman See'. In this futile search, Nippy fell victim, in that very nasty decade, to a whiff of the very nasty 'Aryan' myth. Not nearly as badly as did some of the great names of up-to-the-minute German New Testament Scholarship, with swastikas framing their Fuehrer-worship and their Aryan Jesus in his Gentile Galilee. But even in 1933, when the Extermination Camps were nothing more than a perverted gleam in the Fuehrer's eye, Dix saw through it all. Because he was a papalist.
Dix's summary? "Truth will be held most entirely and in due proportion in a Church which is truly 'Universal', supra-racial, and unaffected by the transient spirit of a particular age".
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