Manners

I do not intend to respond to, or take seriously, correspendents who address or refer to me as "Vicar Hunwicke". I would be grateful if such persons would give vent to their bad manners somewhere else and keep off my blog.

I have never been a vicar.

Facing Facts

It is very important that we consider the exact wording of the Apostolic Constitution carefully. After all, God has made us rational beings. But it is even more important that we Anglican Catholics face up to the fact that we are at a historical turning point.

For most of my lifetime, the Ecumenical Movement seemed (I put it like that because it is arguable that it was already flawed and leaky below the waterline) to be going places. However messy things might be, there seemed to be gradual convergence. ARCIC did say some remarkable things; and, at the ground level, there was indisputable liturgical convergence.

The plain fact is that things are now wholely different. The Anglican elite has set out, knowingly, on a path of divergence. And it is not just a divergence in the field of ideas. The insertion of women's ordination into the ministerial structures of Anglican provinces means that we no longer have problems which can be solved by a better mutual understanding of the common Faith. Words are not going to solve this problem. Ordained women are a physical and structural reality which cannot be glossed into oblivion by theological wordsmiths, however erudite and imaginative. Every time just one more woman is 'ordained' to Major Orders, the gap between Anglicanism and the Ancient Churches widens.

Many people wondered why Benedict kept Walter Kasper in position. The two had never got on well; only months before the Conclave they had been publicly at war. I believe that the Holy Father left Kasper where he was for three reasons: The Pope desperately wanted - and wants - unity; Kasper had established contacts and a personal reputation among non-RCs; and Benedict knew that, if he replaced him with X, nobody would take X seriously - 'He's just a Ratzinger hardliner', they would have cried.

The crucial kairos was when Kasper came to talk to the English Anglican bishops. That was the instant when Kasper's ecumenical credit and reputation had a chance to bear fruit. What was it all for if not for just this moment?

He returned to Rome empty-handed.

In a secular business enterprise, what would be the standing of somebody who had been shown - despite his years of hard work and his boasted network of close personal relationships - to be a busted flush; an operative unable to deliver?

The reason why Kasper was not involved in the preparation for the Apostolic Constitution is that the Anglican Bishops had sent him away with nothing. It is they who turned Kasper and his entire ecumenical method into a historical irrelevance.

They made clear that they were determined to pursue a path of ever broader divergence.

To suggest that it is Benedict who has perpetrated an ecumenical disaster is quite preposterous.
Every bishop who, at that fateful July Synod, voted for women bishops, stuck his own personal stiletto between Kasper's ribs. And if they did not realise that this is what they were doing, they were fools. Well, they are. There has rarely been a time when the English bench of bishops has been of poorer quality; when Carey retired they had to go outside England to find a plausible successor.

The Apostolic Constitution is the Good which God, in his usual boring old way, has brought out of Evil.

Benedict XIV on Concelebration

This continues the series of a few days ago.
Innocent III (Pope 1198-1216) made his views on concelebration clear enough; so did S Thomas (see earlier posts). But the former, it could be argued (Durandus did), was writing as a private theologian; and as for the latter, despite his eminence, Cajetan disagreed with him.

Benedict XIV (Pope 1740-1758), undoubtedly one of the half-dozen most erudite men ever to grace the Cathedra Petri, left nothing to chance. As well as in his monumental work de Sacrosancto Missae Sacrificio (Liber III caput xvi), he made his teaching about Concelebration very clear in two magisterial documents, the encyclicals Demandatam (12 December 1743; paragraphs 9-10) and Allatae (26 July 1755; paragraph 38).

The basis of the Sovereign Pontiff's teaching is his conviction that the Eastern and Western churches are at one in this matter so that the practice of the Byzantine East can throw definitive light on the significance of our Latin practice: "It was once a rite common to the Western and Eastern Church equally, that presbyters should offer the Sacrifice of the Mass together with the bishop [copious references follow] ... at the present moment the Rite of Concelebration has grown obsolete in the Western Church, except in the Ordination of Priests which the bishop performs, and in the Consecration of Bishops, which is carried out by a bishop with two other bishops assisting".

He points out that the obsolescence of Concelebration in other circumstances in the West is comparatively recent (temporibus haud ita ab aetate nostra remotis), and that previously the 'disciplina Ecclesiae Occidentalis' demanded (postulabat) that on major solemnities, when a bishop was celebrating, presbyters should celebrate together with (una cum) the bishop - and the words of Innocent III are one of a number of exempla that he draws in to support the assertion. Not that he believes Concelebration is confined to Concelebration cum episcopo. He had to dealing with a request from Byzantines who desired to celebrate the Eucharist daily but who lacked enough altars to do so; Byzantine custom insists that every Eucharist be celebrated on a 'fasting' altar. He categorically refuses them permission to celebrate twice on the same altar and advises them instead to concelebrate "with a bishop or with another priest".

He insists that concelebrants should vest as celebrants and utter the words of Consecration "just as if they were saying Mass on their own [perinde ac si sacrosanctum sacrificium singulatim conficerent]". Benedict denies the wriggle-argument that such priests are merely saying the Words of Consecration "materialiter et recitative", insisting that they utter them "significative". They are true celebrants, albeit secondary ones (etsi secundarii, tamen vere celebrantes).

It's the cash that counts. I hope to finish with Benedict XIV in the next day or two.

Exciting

I'm feeling very excited, because the Great Fr Zed has referred to a certain megacranky American RC bishop as "Ineffable Trautman".

Excited, because (so the SEARCH facility reveals) on Feb 9 and July 5 this year I did just that on my blog.

Does this mean that Fr Zed reads my humble little blog? Or is it a matter of Great Minds Thinking Alike? Or did Fr Zed coin the phrase earlier than me and then it rested in my subconscious? Or (Source Criticism as applied the Synoptic Gospels kicks in here) was the phrase in some yet earlier and even more exciting document we could call Urhunwicke or Protozed or the Bloggenquelle?

There must be some pedant who reads this blog and could research the answer.

Ordo Ordo Ordo Ordo

I would be very hurt if I thought that any reader had not already bought a copy of my 2010 Ordo. But I would like to commend an Ordo which is not mine - although it is compiled by a friend of mine.

http://www.ordorecitandi.org.uk/page2.htm

will enable you to order the S Lawrence Press Ordo.

This fine and elegantly produced ORDO provides information about the Roman Calendar and Rite as it was left on the Accession of Pius XII (although there are just two or three ... I'll come clean: I've only spotted two ... small indications that the world did not end in 1939). That cut-off is very well chosen; the Pontificate of Pius XII is the beginning of Bugnini. That gentleman began his wrecking career as Secretary of the Commission which 'reformed' the rites of Holy Week. This is commonly thought of as a mere detail; but it is not. Holy Week and the Easter Vigil are the most significant points of the Christian Year, and Bugnini changed them in ways even more radical and subversive than he subsequently did the rest of the Roman Rite. The Bug***i got away with it because - we had better be honest - the liturgical rites of Holy Week had come to be largely ignored by the great majority of the laity. They were not of obligation and they were lengthy and they were opaque.

Pius XII was not the Start of the Rot. Pius X changed the rubrics regarding the Calendar. Thus, before his time, a large number of Sundays were obscured by the permanent fixing onto the xth Sunday of Ymonth of lollipop celebrations which superseded them (see my Holy Relics post on November 5). Pius X put the lollipops onto fixed days and restored the Sunday Masses; but, out of pastoral sensitivity and an instinct for a Hermeneutic of Continuity he allowed the Lollipop masses to continue to be said on the Sundays they previously owned (the S Lawrence ORDO gives these optional survivals of the previous Baroque Calendar).

Pius X also messed up the distribution of the Breviary Psalter, eliminating, for example, psalms 148-149-150 from their permanent position at daily Lauds. Since this usage had been part of the worship of devout Jews in the time of our Incarnate Lord, a lot of liturgists were rather grumpy about it. And even Papa Sarto was not the first to breach the really ancient continuities; in the 1620s Urban VIII completely rewrote the Breviary Hymns to make them sound as if they had been written by the pagan Augustan poet Horace. Vatican II rightly ordered the ancient texts to be restored. As I have explained in recent posts (have you tried the SEARCH engine on this blog?), the invention of printing was the crucial factor which made such papal arrogance a viable possibility, and led to its apotheosis in the post-Vatican II disasters. God bless Benedict XVI for beginning a process of rolling it all back.

And the S Lawrence ORDO will also show you the full old system of commemorations. You see ... but no: I've written on that also - on the synchronic and diachronic unities involved - not long ago. Try the SEARCH facility!

If you get the S Lawrence ORDO and constantly revisit my former posts through SEARCH, you will begin to discover just how revolutionary and discontinuous the Missal of 1962 is; and how unworthy to be treated in a fundamentalist way. That was something Mgr Lefebvre got wrong.

Stable Groups in the Patrimony

Our Holy Father provided, in his motu proprio, that where Stable Groups (sound like Guilds attached to the Christmass Cribs, don't they?) exist and request it, the Pastor should provide them with Mass in the EF. Happily, a Stable Group has sprung into life ex nihilo in an ecclesiastical Peculiar within this City and informally attached to this University (no names, no pack-drill. Whatever does that peculiar phrase mean?).

I would have been very willing, had the Pastor concerned not responded positively to this admirable request, to assist the Group in its appeal to the Bishop of O****d to get him to direct the Principal, Dr B***r, to fulfil the requirements of Summorum Pontificum. Indeed, had the Diocesan himself then proved remiss, I could have helped them in their further appeal to the Ecclesia Dei section of the Inquisition, God bless it, so as to make them require poor P*******d to provide for the legitimate needs of this Group.

But, fortunately, Dr B***r has proved willing ... indeed, enthusiastic ... to perform his canonical duty. So I don't have to bother. How good it is when a priest obeys to the letter the Church's liturgical law.

I regard this as another example of the Anglican Patrimony vigorously at work. We have so much to contribute to the Wider Church.

The Roman Rite of 1965

In 1965 two liturgical texts appeared and were imposed by authority. It was ordered that they be incorporated in the Roman Missal and faithfully observed "ab omnibus".

The first was an Ordo Missae. It was a very lightly revised Order, which nobody could criticise as belonging to a hermeneutic of rupture. Its 'organic' changes were, mainly, the elimination of the psalm Judica (which was not invariably said in the earlier rite) and of the Last Gospel (which also already had its rubrical elements of instability). The Doxology of the Canon and the Libera nos were to be said or sung aloud. Corpus Christ became the form at the administration of Holy Communion to the people - a rite which now became integral to the Order of Mass instead of an occasional appendage. Optionally, the Liturgy of the Word could be done at the sedilia.

I have it on authority which I regard as first-hand and reliable that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre himself contentedly used this revised Order of Mass for some years, and only reverted to the books of 1962 when it became clear that the rite of 1965 was itself to be superseded by a rite which exemplified rupture rather than continuity. In view of the Decree accompanying this Order of 1965, it seems to me at least arguable that this was the legally correct form of the Old Rite until Benedict XVI in his motu proprio imposed the books of 1962.

A few weeks later, Rome issued an Order for Concelebration to go with the revised Order of Mass. At this point in this post, my post of October 16 0n Sacrosanctum Concilium is deemed to be an essential footnote. That rite of Concelebration presupposed the substantially unspoiled Old Rite of Mass. The concelebrants were to wear all their vestments - including the maniple. They were recommended to hold a paten under the Host after receiving it. But I find most interesting the features of this rite which were forgotten when the Bugnini Mass, and its associated rite of Concelebration, were authorised. The 1965 rubrics were very concerned about the numbers of concelebrants (Bad Marini's book gives background to this particular worry). The bishop was ordered to keep an eye on this. The controlling principle was to be that all the concelebrants be able to stand around the altar, even though each one might not be able directly to touch it. This would exclude some of the monster concelebrations which have become fashionable, not only among RCs but Anglican Catholics (one recalls the great Millennium Mass, and the SSC celebrations a few years ago).

The rite also repeated the Conciliar provision that every priest retains an almost absolute right to say his own separate Mass.

It has, I know, been suggested that this Rite of Concelebration is still legally available to accompany the Traditional Mass.

It seems to me that we traditionalists ought to be open to proper 'organic' development of the Liturgy. At the moment, in the RC Church, traditionalists are naturally so wounded by the traumata of the last 40 years that they need the stability of the 1962 rite in its unmuckedaboutwith state. That is natural. Indeed, in S Thomas's I celebrate it uncorrupted and in accordance with a Calendar even earlier than that of 1962. But in principle, Traditionalism is damaged by being turned into Fundamentalism. Liturgy has always - organically - developed, and, paradoxically, this mutability is part of Tradition. Ultimately, we must free ourselves from unnecessary hangups and a fetich for the rite of some particular year. The standing of the traditional Mass can only be enhanced if its gentle and organic evolution does not automatically and fanatically exclude elements of the Bugnini Mass.

And Concelebration in the circumstances mandated by the Council - see my October 16 post - is one such element.

MORE PAPACY

Few theologians shaped Anglo-Catholicism in the twentieth century more than Dom Gregory Dix. In 1938 he published a scintillating succession of articles contextualising papal power. Near his conclusion came the following:

The language of the Vatican [I] decrees on the Roman Pontiff is admittedly formidable at a first reading. ..."A primacy of jurisdiction, ordinary, immediate and episcopal" in every diocese in Christendom ... It is so unlike the powers we Anglicans concede to a Primacy. But is it? [Dix next refers to the episode when the Bishop of Exeter refused to institute a clergyman, Mr Gorham, to a benefice and excommunicated latae sententiae anybody who should do so; the institution was done by a Commission from the Archbishop of Canterbury. He goes on:] That was an act of jurisdiction in another man's diocese. It was an act of "ordinary" jurisdiction, since the Archbishop had an indisputable right, in the circumstances, to do it. It was an act of "immediate" jurisdiction, since he did not act as the bishop's delegate but against his protests. It was an act of "episcopal" jurisdiction, since it conveyed cure of souls ... the whole Vatican definition of a primacy ... !

In our own time, when the Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, refused to ordain or license women, these acts were performed within the Chichester Diocese by Commission from Archbishop Carey, thereby providing another example of Dix's point. Carey as a reincarnation of Blessed Pio nono ... there's a thought.

The gist of Dix's arguments is that the early popes indeed did not exercise jurisdiction over the whole Church, but this was a period when Bishops didn't exercise jurisdiction either ... because the whole concept of canonical jurisdiction only came later and so is anachronistic. The sort of authority which popes did exercise in the universal church was exactly the same sort of authority that bishops exercised in their local church. When Vatican I defined the Petrine Ministry, it did so in the juridical/canonical language of its own period; just as the first four Ecumenical Councils framed their Christology in the terms of the Greek metaphysics of their own time (although, as Dix puts it, the Gospel writers had not been Greek metaphysicians). Swallow episcopal jurisdiction, you can't avoid swallowing papal jurisdiction. Swallow the anachronisms of Nicea, you can't avoid swallowing those of Vatican I.

No catholic-minded Anglicans need have problems with "the Papacy". Unless they want to have problems ... as an ignorant alibi for a disunity which for some reason they desire to perpetuate.

The Feast of the Holy Relics

What a wholesome liturgical instinct this festival represents. In the medieval English rites, it tried out various dates; May 22 or the Monday after the Ascension at Exeter; the Sunday after thr Translation of S Thomas (July 7) at Hereford and Sarum - although Sarum notes that 'nuper' it occupied the Octave Day of our Lady's Nativity, with an appropriate Collect "Grant we beseech thee Almighty God, that the merits may protect us of the holy Mother of God and Ever Virgin Mary and of thy Saints whose relics are kept in this church ...". The traditional Benedictine rite keeps this festival on May 13.

Before the reforms of S Pius X, this festival occurred among the Masses For Some Places on October 26, or on the Last Sunday of October (October was a good month for avoiding Sunday masses; by indult the English RC dioceses observed the Motherhood, the Purity, and the Patronage of our Lady respectively on the second, third, and fourth Sundays). After Pius X, the Feast of the Relics settled onto a day suitably within the Octave of All Saints, November 5, where it was observed by papal indult in certain places; for example, in the diocese of Oxford within the Archdeaconries of Oxford and Berkshire but not in that of Buckinghamshire (did the Sacred Congregation of Rites presciently foresee the Day of the Barmy Bishop of Bux?). The proper lections at Mattins were from that splendid Doctor who was probably not Dr Bugnini's bedside reading: S John of Damascus (Eric Mascall once observed the propensity of Roman liturgists to resort to Eastern sources whenever they needed to say something 'extreme'). "For since Life itself and the Author of Life was numbered among the dead, we do not call those who finished their last day in the hope of Resurrection and of faith in Him 'Dead'. For how can a dead body utter miracles? Through relics the devils are cast out, diseases sent fleeing, the sick healed, the blind see ..." etc. etc.. The Collect is a fine composition which likewise sees the miracles performed through the relics of Saints as pledges of the Resurrection: Increase in us O Lord our faith in the Resurrection, who in the relics of thy Saints dost perform marvellous works: and make us partakers of the immortal glory of which our veneration of their ashes [cineres] is a pledge.

A celebration, in my view, ripe for revival. The Relics Chapel in the Oxford Oratory has now been gloriously restored after the Jesuitical vandalism of the previous regime (if you are in Oxford, today is a good day to pop up to S Alyoggers and see it and pray); and, thanks to a kind benefactor, S Thomas's is no longer bereft of relics. And good old Therese recently gave the cult of relics a spiffing boost in Oxford, and elsewhere.

More Patrimony

I apologise for being unjust to the SSPX by not mentioning that they have gone a lot further than FSSP; they have actually invested a lot of money in the Anglican Patrimony.

The chapel of their English House near Bristol, formerly an Anglican convent, was the work of George Frederick 'Anglican Patrimony' Bodley [we have a Bodley cope at S Thomas's].

Happily, SSPX has not 'reordered' the chapel - a fate which usually befalls former Anglican Patrimony buildings taken over by the mainstream RCC.

I Respond ...

... to two comments appended to a recent post:
(1) The declaration about women being not capaces of receiving Holy Order was declared to be an example of the Infallible Ordinary Magisterium of the Church.
(2) Cardinal Ratzinger declared that Apostolicae curae was not de fide but was definitively to be believed. He said nothing about the current situation with regard to Anglican Orders, which of course is quite different from the situation in the 1890s. This was made clear when the former Bishop of London was asked - by Joseph Ratzinger - to be ordained to the presbyterate only sub conditione.

Patrimony

I blinked ... there on the FSSP website was a picture of EF High Mass at the East Altar of Pusey House, showing the very 'Comper' gold-leafed pillars holding up the baldachino and the immensely 'Comper' stained glass.

An illusion; it was really London Colney: both buildings, of course, were built for Catholic Anglicans by Sir Ninian 'Anglican Patrimony' Comper.

How good that the FSSP feels so at home in the Anglican Patrimony.

And how natural.

A dash of prolepsis here, do you think?