Before being ordained Deacon in the Church of England in 1967, I, and my fellow seminarians in the great seminary of S Stephen's House in North Oxford, stood around a table in the company of a gentleman wearing an outlandish wig (the sixties were a bit like that). Under his guidance we swore an oath; all speaking together we uttered a formula which was supposed to end " ....and in public prayer and administration of the Sacraments I will use the form in the said book prescribed, and none other, except as far as shall be ordered by lawful authority." However, what we actually said was " ... prescribed, and one other ...". If you feel that this was a not entirely honourable proceeding, then, as the Holy Father said with regard to homosexuals, who am I to condemn you?
The ordinands of the Franciscans of the Immaculate are going to have to swear an oath. I have to say that I could swear this oath with a very much clearer conscience than I had on that day in 1967 ... indeed, without any qualms at all. The text available does not commit them to use the Novus Ordo. They merely have to accept that "the Novus Ordo is an* authentic expression of the liturgical tradition of the Church". That would give me no problems whatsoever. Good heavens, I even use the Novus Ordo when pastoral circumstances require it! Not long ago I actually said it daily for an entire fortnight in a parish of the Portsmouth Diocese where I was doing duty! (Mind you, I am careful always to use the First Eucharistic Prayer, as I trust all my clerical readers are.)
Nor does this oath in any way imply that the one taking it prefers the Novus Ordo. It is inherent in the motu proprio Summorum pontificum that different clergy (and laity) will have different, and lawful, preferences. I can see no objection to the requirement that ordinands formally accept the authenticity of the NO. I personally think the Vetus Ordo is more authentic than the NO because .... er .... no ... that's not what I'm on about today. But the contents of the NO are largely taken from earlier books of the Latin Church; the arrangement is generally speaking traditional; so how could one reasonably deny its positive authenticity? Surely the concept of authentic admits the grammatical modalities of positive, comparative and superlative?
I feel this so strongly that I am prepared to drive my argument even further. In modern Catholic seminaries, so rumour has it, many of the ordinands are much more 'traditional' nowadays than the ordinands of a generation ago were. Eccellente. But there may possibly still be among them just a tiny residual handful of young men who are violently prejudiced against the Vetus Ordo ... quaint young fogies weirdly fixated upon the out-dated fads of the 1970s, eternally mouthing strange mantras about Hippolytus and versus populum, resistant to the Magisterium of Summorum pontificum. The sort of sad little chaps who secretly read the Tablet or even Mgr Loftus (utrumque censeo delendum) and take selfies of themselves in polyester chasubles. I think, therefore, for safety's sake, all ordinands throughout the Church should also have to swear that they accept the Vetus Ordo as "an* authentic expression of the liturgical tradition of the Church".
It would help to weed out such precious young men, and to prevent them from sneaking through to ordination.
You know it makes sense.
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*Indefinite article.
13 December 2013
12 December 2013
Whatever happened to Genesis? (5)
The Church of England's 1922/1928/1961 Lectionary for the Divine Office is not now its most commonly used lectionary. I think this is a shame (although, of course, this is no longer any business of mine). Its 'Common Worship' replacement is unbelievably complex and convoluted and, following the Bugnini abandonment of the 'gesimas', can make no attempt to start Genesis with Septuagesima. But the 1922/1928/1961 Lectionary is a product of the Catholic Revival's high summer of liturgical erudition. It bases itself patristically on what Pope Gregory the Great devised and explained about the meaning of his 'Gesima' season. It then uses the 'lectio continua' instinct and provides a systematic reading-through of most of the Bible each year (the New Testament, twice a year). This embodies, of course, an aim which the Anglican Patrimony owes to the Reformation period (together with the entire structure of the Anglican Divine Office): the principle that clergy and laity together should "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the Scriptures.
Eventually, I imagine, Rome will authorise an Office lectionary which will be available to the whole Ordinariate world. I hope she does not base it on the untraditional English lectionaries devised more recently, or upon the equally untraditional lectionary of the American Prayer Book; and I hope Rome does not attempt to construct it out of the post-Conciliar lectionaries of the Latin Church. These were not devised for an Office structured like the Anglican Office, and attempts to adapt them to an Anglican format would only demonstrate what a painful knife and uncomfortable bed Procrustes had. No such option would fulfill the aim of Pope Benedict: that Anglicans should bring into the unity of the Catholic Church the finest elements of their own inheritance. And at a time when some elements of the post-Conciliar settlement in the Latin Church are coming increasingly under critical scrutiny, I think it would be a shame to produce a chopped-up-rearranged-and-pasted version of one of its weakest features - its Office lectionary - and to impose this upon the Ordinariates.
This is the moment to return to the lectionary system the outlines of which go back at least to Pope S Gregory the Great, and which has served not a few provinces of the Anglican Communion well from 1871 until just recently.
This series has now reached its conclusion.
Eventually, I imagine, Rome will authorise an Office lectionary which will be available to the whole Ordinariate world. I hope she does not base it on the untraditional English lectionaries devised more recently, or upon the equally untraditional lectionary of the American Prayer Book; and I hope Rome does not attempt to construct it out of the post-Conciliar lectionaries of the Latin Church. These were not devised for an Office structured like the Anglican Office, and attempts to adapt them to an Anglican format would only demonstrate what a painful knife and uncomfortable bed Procrustes had. No such option would fulfill the aim of Pope Benedict: that Anglicans should bring into the unity of the Catholic Church the finest elements of their own inheritance. And at a time when some elements of the post-Conciliar settlement in the Latin Church are coming increasingly under critical scrutiny, I think it would be a shame to produce a chopped-up-rearranged-and-pasted version of one of its weakest features - its Office lectionary - and to impose this upon the Ordinariates.
This is the moment to return to the lectionary system the outlines of which go back at least to Pope S Gregory the Great, and which has served not a few provinces of the Anglican Communion well from 1871 until just recently.
This series has now reached its conclusion.
11 December 2013
Whatever happened to Genesis? (4)
Dom Gregory Dix, who did little to endear himself to bishops (had he tried to join an Ordinariate, the Catholic bishops would undoubtedly have been apprehensive that he would turn upon them the the same bright beams of wit and erudition which their Anglican opposite numbers had for so long endured) characteristically observed in 1944 that "even when the stately summer of the Carolines was over, the 'Whig grandee' bishops of the eighteenth century and the 'Greek Play' bishops of eighty years ago still had something for which the genial energy of a business man in gaiters does not always quite compensate". Dix's list of episcopal styles missed out a certain breed of English Anglican bishops, still alive only two decades before he wrote, who were, even by Dixian standards, very impressive men. The Tractarian movement had already leavened Church of England to a considerable extent. There were members of the episcopal bench who, having been trained in our ancient universities in the Classics, and imbibed [this is Manning's bitter, angry, true comment upon B John Henry Newman:] "the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone", were learned men, far from being Papalists but very much further from being Reformation Protestants. And English Academe was replete with scholars who had spent their lives immersed in the Fathers and in the ever increasing number of hitherto unavailable liturgical texts, in the process of being published by the Henry Bradshaw Society. During the First World War, a liturgical committee was formed including such bishops as Robertson of Exeter, Chase of Ely, Gibson of Gloucester, and scholars including Swete, Frere, Brightman,Christopher Wordsworth, H A Wilson, J N Dalton ... as well as dear old Percy Dearmer. (Several of those, of course, later became bishops.)
This was the Liturgical Committee which bore responsibility for, among other things, the Lectionary which the Church of England ... well, actually the Crown, but you know what I mean ... authorised in 1922. It was this Lectionary which finalised the return to the old Roman lectionary system which Quinones had wished to preserve and to expand into a full reading of Genesis from Septuagesima onwards; an intention which Thomas Cranmer had once shared but, most unfortunately, had abandoned.
I suppose that Lectionary could be called the Back to Gregory the Great, Back to the Early Roman Rite, Back to Sarum, Back to Cranmer's best draft, Lectionary system.
One more episode ...
This was the Liturgical Committee which bore responsibility for, among other things, the Lectionary which the Church of England ... well, actually the Crown, but you know what I mean ... authorised in 1922. It was this Lectionary which finalised the return to the old Roman lectionary system which Quinones had wished to preserve and to expand into a full reading of Genesis from Septuagesima onwards; an intention which Thomas Cranmer had once shared but, most unfortunately, had abandoned.
I suppose that Lectionary could be called the Back to Gregory the Great, Back to the Early Roman Rite, Back to Sarum, Back to Cranmer's best draft, Lectionary system.
One more episode ...
10 December 2013
A MASSIVELY IMPORTANT SESQUICENTENARY: 2014
Er ... yes ... sesqui ... well, according to my trusty Oxford Latin Dictionary ... since I am English, that's the volume that never departs from my elbow; the terribly antiquated [and American] Lewis and Short [1879, based upon Freund's Latin-German Dictionary of 1850], beloved by Fr Zed, may be good enough for Americans, but for us products of "Old Europe" [shall we ever forgive the anti-European malevolence of Donald Rumsfeldt?], only the rather more up-to-date scholarship of OLD [1982] is good enough ...
... sesqui is a conflation of sems, an earlier form of the word that became in Classical Latin semi(s), meaning half, and the enclitic (meaning you tack it on the end of the next word) -que, meaning and. So sesqui- is a prefix meaning "and a half". So
Sesquicentenary
means 150 years on, a century and a half. Every good Catholic, by the way, is obliged to learn off by heart every word in the preceding paragraph.
2014 will be the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum of B Pius IX.
On December 8, 1864, B Pius IX issued his Encyclical Quanta cura; and, apparently at his direction, an (anonymous) collection of 80 theses, already condemned by the Roman Pontiff in earlier Magisterial interventions, was published simultaneously. Among Promethean semi-Pelagian sourpusses (good tongue-twister, yes?), "the Syllabus of Errors" is regarded as the quintessential epitome of reactionary ecclesiastical obscurantism; you have to say the very words in the same tones of hushed horror as "the Inquisition". But I am sure that a special Commission has been put together in Rome to organise this Year in which the Universal Church will be called upon to celebrate, to study, to reappropriate the teaching handed down on the instructions of Papa Mastai-Ferreti. This blog will, as ever, merely follow humbly the lead of the Magisterium, or, if the lead is a trifle late coming, will examine as best it can hermeneutical questions arising from this laudable document..
I shall eventually come on to the remarks upon the Syllabus from the pen of our own beloved Patrimonial Patron B John Henry Newman. But I would like to begin, again out of pietas, with a quotation from another, later, distinguished Anglican Patristic scholar, Dr Trevor Jalland, a predecessor of mine as pp of S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford (Ecclesia Sancti Thomae iuxta ferriviam, as the common folk call it). It was in his Bampton Lectures before this University in 1942 that Fr Jalland launched a public, academic, campaign of attrition designed to undermine the great edifice of anti-papal bigotry which lurked and lurks in the guts of so many million of our fellow-countrymen (good mixed metaphors, yes?). These are Jalland's words about the Syllabus:
" ...what many of its detractors failed to appreciate was that the real object of the Pope's attack was not freedom but licence, not reason but rationalism, not state sovereignty but secularism ... If the more determined critics of the nineteenth-century Papacy could have foreseen the present-day progress of secularism, they might have been more willing to recognise that the Syllabus, in spite of its evident limitations, had as its purpose that characteristic aim of Roman pronouncements, namely, the preservation of a via media amid the conflicting claims of modern society, between absolutism and anarchy, between theocracy and atheism. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in this supposedly reactionary document a few at least of the principles on which a modern enlightened democratic regime is based."
I have no doubt that Dr Jalland is part of that great Anglican Patrimony which our late Holy Father wished the Ordinariates to bring into the unity of the Church, for the benefit of the entire Church. Audite eum!
__________________________________________________________________________
Comments upon the Syllabus will pop up intermittently, if the Lord spares me, during 'Syllabus Year'.
... sesqui is a conflation of sems, an earlier form of the word that became in Classical Latin semi(s), meaning half, and the enclitic (meaning you tack it on the end of the next word) -que, meaning and. So sesqui- is a prefix meaning "and a half". So
Sesquicentenary
means 150 years on, a century and a half. Every good Catholic, by the way, is obliged to learn off by heart every word in the preceding paragraph.
2014 will be the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum of B Pius IX.
On December 8, 1864, B Pius IX issued his Encyclical Quanta cura; and, apparently at his direction, an (anonymous) collection of 80 theses, already condemned by the Roman Pontiff in earlier Magisterial interventions, was published simultaneously. Among Promethean semi-Pelagian sourpusses (good tongue-twister, yes?), "the Syllabus of Errors" is regarded as the quintessential epitome of reactionary ecclesiastical obscurantism; you have to say the very words in the same tones of hushed horror as "the Inquisition". But I am sure that a special Commission has been put together in Rome to organise this Year in which the Universal Church will be called upon to celebrate, to study, to reappropriate the teaching handed down on the instructions of Papa Mastai-Ferreti. This blog will, as ever, merely follow humbly the lead of the Magisterium, or, if the lead is a trifle late coming, will examine as best it can hermeneutical questions arising from this laudable document..
I shall eventually come on to the remarks upon the Syllabus from the pen of our own beloved Patrimonial Patron B John Henry Newman. But I would like to begin, again out of pietas, with a quotation from another, later, distinguished Anglican Patristic scholar, Dr Trevor Jalland, a predecessor of mine as pp of S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford (Ecclesia Sancti Thomae iuxta ferriviam, as the common folk call it). It was in his Bampton Lectures before this University in 1942 that Fr Jalland launched a public, academic, campaign of attrition designed to undermine the great edifice of anti-papal bigotry which lurked and lurks in the guts of so many million of our fellow-countrymen (good mixed metaphors, yes?). These are Jalland's words about the Syllabus:
" ...what many of its detractors failed to appreciate was that the real object of the Pope's attack was not freedom but licence, not reason but rationalism, not state sovereignty but secularism ... If the more determined critics of the nineteenth-century Papacy could have foreseen the present-day progress of secularism, they might have been more willing to recognise that the Syllabus, in spite of its evident limitations, had as its purpose that characteristic aim of Roman pronouncements, namely, the preservation of a via media amid the conflicting claims of modern society, between absolutism and anarchy, between theocracy and atheism. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in this supposedly reactionary document a few at least of the principles on which a modern enlightened democratic regime is based."
I have no doubt that Dr Jalland is part of that great Anglican Patrimony which our late Holy Father wished the Ordinariates to bring into the unity of the Church, for the benefit of the entire Church. Audite eum!
__________________________________________________________________________
Comments upon the Syllabus will pop up intermittently, if the Lord spares me, during 'Syllabus Year'.
9 December 2013
Who has anathematised you?
How to 'reconcile' the Catholic and Orthodox attitudes to our Lady's Conception? Noble attempts have been made to reconcile the two traditions, not least under the auspices of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and it has become clear that differences in the Latin and Greek traditions with regard to Original Sin have a fair bit to do with the 'problem'. I applaud these attempts, but instead of picking around in the gloom of 'problems' (or, as we nowadays call them, 'issues'), I want, briefly, to look at ... er ... well, I want to enjoy ... the underlying theological convergence between the Festival we Catholics celebrate today, and the meaning of a festival which has a low profile in the Roman Calendar but is right up with the front-runners in the Byzantine Calendar: that of our Lady's Presentation in the Temple (Nov 21).
In each case, our Lady is situated in a prelapsarian context. For us Latin Catholics, she is the new Eve and as immaculate as the first Eve was before her Fall. The Obedience of the New Eve leads to the Obedience of the Second Adam, just as the disobedience of the First Eve led to the Fall of the First Adam, the felix culpa. And, for the great Byzantine Doctor S Gregory Palamas*, Mary, after she was presented in the Temple by SS Anne and Joachim, was fed there with "mystic food by the care of the angels, food which Adam had not tasted: because, if he had, he would not have fallen from life". Palamas goes on to argue that "this immaculate woman" did not logically need to die; although briefly she did so before her Assumption. West and East unite in seeing our Lady as the Paradisal Mother of the New Adam, Queen of Eden, Queen of Heaven, the Immaculate one.
Those, of course, who deny the Immaculate Conception fall under the anathema attached to Blessed Pius IX's definition of 1854. Those who deny the Presentation fall under the anathemas of the fourteenth century 'Palamite' Councils, damning those who say that "the Immaculate One, the Theometer ... did not enter into the Holy of Holies".
Moi, I don't incur either anathema. How sad that some people incur both.
____________________________________________________________________________
* He is accorded the style Saint in Calendars of Eastern Catholics in full communion withe the Holy See, and by the Roman document of 1995 on Filioque.
In each case, our Lady is situated in a prelapsarian context. For us Latin Catholics, she is the new Eve and as immaculate as the first Eve was before her Fall. The Obedience of the New Eve leads to the Obedience of the Second Adam, just as the disobedience of the First Eve led to the Fall of the First Adam, the felix culpa. And, for the great Byzantine Doctor S Gregory Palamas*, Mary, after she was presented in the Temple by SS Anne and Joachim, was fed there with "mystic food by the care of the angels, food which Adam had not tasted: because, if he had, he would not have fallen from life". Palamas goes on to argue that "this immaculate woman" did not logically need to die; although briefly she did so before her Assumption. West and East unite in seeing our Lady as the Paradisal Mother of the New Adam, Queen of Eden, Queen of Heaven, the Immaculate one.
Those, of course, who deny the Immaculate Conception fall under the anathema attached to Blessed Pius IX's definition of 1854. Those who deny the Presentation fall under the anathemas of the fourteenth century 'Palamite' Councils, damning those who say that "the Immaculate One, the Theometer ... did not enter into the Holy of Holies".
Moi, I don't incur either anathema. How sad that some people incur both.
____________________________________________________________________________
* He is accorded the style Saint in Calendars of Eastern Catholics in full communion withe the Holy See, and by the Roman document of 1995 on Filioque.
8 December 2013
The Franciscans of the Immaculate
Lanherne is a Cornish recusant house situated - like many recusant properties - in the back of beyond. It contains one of the greatest relics in England, which Pam and I had the privilege of venerating when we visited the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate, who have a flourishing community there, in 2010 (three posts about Lanherne, its history, its great relic, its sisters may be found by tapping 'Lanherne' into the search engine at the top left-hand corner of the blog).
Where God gives many graces, the envy of the Evil One is always to be feared. Don't you find that to be true in your own lives? I humbly beg readers to pray for the protection of the sisters and for that whole order; if priests, to say Mass for them.
Where God gives many graces, the envy of the Evil One is always to be feared. Don't you find that to be true in your own lives? I humbly beg readers to pray for the protection of the sisters and for that whole order; if priests, to say Mass for them.
Rigidity
Rigidity, inflexibility, is the hallmark of the Bugnini, post-Conciliar, liturgical Calendar.
Let me explain what I mean. Today is The Second Sunday of Advent. I'm glad. We get the third collect in that wonderful sequence of Excita collects; 'Stir up' is what we pray because we know that our indolence and our Sin call for a rude shake up. (If I were the Holy Father, I would speak about the fact that we are all Laodiceans, which would sort out the Men who had read Apocalypse 3:15sqq. from the Boys who hadn't.) Today's collect in the Vetus Ordo could serve beautifully as the rallying prayer of the New Evangelisation. Heaven forbid that we should lose this Sunday collect.
But today is also the Feast of our Immaculate Lady's Conception. And this feast comes below a Sunday in Advent in the Bugnini Order of Precedence which (forgive me for going on about this, and for the horrible pun) precedes the Council (I have a 1957 ORDO, pontificate of Pius XII, beside me which proves this!). So ... Hard Cheddar ... the Festival gets transferred to Monday. Which is undoubtedly better than completely ignoring it. But there's not a tiniest mention of it in the Sunday Mass. This is the same rubrical problem which I raised in my piece for S Andrew's Day. (You may be surprised to learn that the Church of England's Liturgical Commission, when publishing extensive propers for this feast in 1991, commented on how appropriate they were to the season of Advent. Indeed so. Mary is hardly a person to be ashamed to mention in Advent, even if she is destined to get a bit of a plug in the Novus propers of Advent IV.)
Is there another solution? In the Byzantine Rite, when two celebrations coincide, parts from each are often combined. The attitude behind this is not unknown in Anglicanism, where there were for centuries no rules at all about the problems of Occurrence and Concurrence. So there survive Tractarian sermons for 1842 and 1853, when Good Friday occurred on March 25, combining the themes of the Annunciation with those of Good Friday; a splendid opportunity, indeed, for thinking about the Co-Redemptrix*, the Compliant New Eve, at the foot of the Cross of the Obedient New Adam.
The older Tradition of Latin Christendom provides the neatest answer. It relies upon the simple concept of "Commemoration". So, in the Saint Lawrence Press ORDO on my desk, giving the Roman Rite according to the rules of 1939, Our Lady's Feast occupies the day. (The blog Rorate has reminded us that the Rubrics of 1960, happily, reverted to this traditional, pre-Pius XII, arrangement, although, in less than a decade, the Novus Ordo dragged us back to Pius XII). But there is a commemoration of the Sunday; which means that its Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion are said after those of our Lady. And in the pre-Pius XII rite, on such occasions as this, the Sunday Gospel is read as the Last Gospel at the end of Mass, rather than the Johannine Prologue ... after all, Vatican II did call for a Richer Table of the Word of God ... so why is it so unspeakably dreadful to have two Gospels on a Sunday?.
I prefer the flexible and Common Sense instincts at work here, backed by the authority of Pius XI and B John XXIII, to the rigid winner-takes-all system backed by Pius XII and Paul VI.
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*As the (2005) Anglican-Roman Catholic agreement on Mary puts it, "The New Eve shares in the New Adam's victory over sin and death".
Let me explain what I mean. Today is The Second Sunday of Advent. I'm glad. We get the third collect in that wonderful sequence of Excita collects; 'Stir up' is what we pray because we know that our indolence and our Sin call for a rude shake up. (If I were the Holy Father, I would speak about the fact that we are all Laodiceans, which would sort out the Men who had read Apocalypse 3:15sqq. from the Boys who hadn't.) Today's collect in the Vetus Ordo could serve beautifully as the rallying prayer of the New Evangelisation. Heaven forbid that we should lose this Sunday collect.
But today is also the Feast of our Immaculate Lady's Conception. And this feast comes below a Sunday in Advent in the Bugnini Order of Precedence which (forgive me for going on about this, and for the horrible pun) precedes the Council (I have a 1957 ORDO, pontificate of Pius XII, beside me which proves this!). So ... Hard Cheddar ... the Festival gets transferred to Monday. Which is undoubtedly better than completely ignoring it. But there's not a tiniest mention of it in the Sunday Mass. This is the same rubrical problem which I raised in my piece for S Andrew's Day. (You may be surprised to learn that the Church of England's Liturgical Commission, when publishing extensive propers for this feast in 1991, commented on how appropriate they were to the season of Advent. Indeed so. Mary is hardly a person to be ashamed to mention in Advent, even if she is destined to get a bit of a plug in the Novus propers of Advent IV.)
Is there another solution? In the Byzantine Rite, when two celebrations coincide, parts from each are often combined. The attitude behind this is not unknown in Anglicanism, where there were for centuries no rules at all about the problems of Occurrence and Concurrence. So there survive Tractarian sermons for 1842 and 1853, when Good Friday occurred on March 25, combining the themes of the Annunciation with those of Good Friday; a splendid opportunity, indeed, for thinking about the Co-Redemptrix*, the Compliant New Eve, at the foot of the Cross of the Obedient New Adam.
The older Tradition of Latin Christendom provides the neatest answer. It relies upon the simple concept of "Commemoration". So, in the Saint Lawrence Press ORDO on my desk, giving the Roman Rite according to the rules of 1939, Our Lady's Feast occupies the day. (The blog Rorate has reminded us that the Rubrics of 1960, happily, reverted to this traditional, pre-Pius XII, arrangement, although, in less than a decade, the Novus Ordo dragged us back to Pius XII). But there is a commemoration of the Sunday; which means that its Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion are said after those of our Lady. And in the pre-Pius XII rite, on such occasions as this, the Sunday Gospel is read as the Last Gospel at the end of Mass, rather than the Johannine Prologue ... after all, Vatican II did call for a Richer Table of the Word of God ... so why is it so unspeakably dreadful to have two Gospels on a Sunday?.
I prefer the flexible and Common Sense instincts at work here, backed by the authority of Pius XI and B John XXIII, to the rigid winner-takes-all system backed by Pius XII and Paul VI.
________________________________________________________________________________
*As the (2005) Anglican-Roman Catholic agreement on Mary puts it, "The New Eve shares in the New Adam's victory over sin and death".
7 December 2013
Worrying? [UPDATED]
The adulation surrounding Nelson Mandela reminds me of the Diana Spencer hysteria. I'm not sure what these odd occasions tell us about our society, but, whatever it is, I feel uneasy about it.
This morning, Sunday, I have heard most of the BBC Sunday morning service, from S Martin's in the Fields, with Justin Welby preaching. I do not think I have ever heard a more disgraceful parody of Christian worship.
This morning, Sunday, I have heard most of the BBC Sunday morning service, from S Martin's in the Fields, with Justin Welby preaching. I do not think I have ever heard a more disgraceful parody of Christian worship.
Whatever happened to Genesis? (3)
In 1549, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer placed, in the Preface to his English Book of Common Prayer, the following complaint (borrowed from Cardinal Quinones) about the pre-Reformation Liturgy: "... commonly, when any book of the Bible was begun, after three or four chapters were read out, all the rest were unread. And in this sort the book of Isaiah was begun in Advent, and the book of Genesis in Septuagesima; but they were only begun, and never read through ..."
And it remained the aim of the Church of England through four centuries to provide its clergy and laity with what the Second Vatican Council was later to call a "ditior mensa verbi Dei" so that "praestantior pars Scripturarum Sanctarum populo legatur". These words echo those of Cranmer: "all the whole Bible or the greatest part thereof". More Scripture; most of the Bible. That is the good news. The bad news is that Cranmer went about providing for the greatly enlarged diet of Scripture which the Church of England was to have by distributing the books of the Bible according to the Civil Calendar. Thus Genesis started at the beginning of January, and Scripture marched relentlessly on, almost entirely ignoring Lent and Easter (even Good Friday and Easter Day did not have a complete provision proper to the Day). Every year, on March 31, you got the same readings, whether it was Sunday or weekday, fast or festival, Holy Week or Easter Week.
The Catholic Revival in the Church of England led to a recovery, first among the Tractarians and then, eventually, in the church at large, of the old sense of the distinctiveness of the Christian seasons. And so, once again, Genesis began to be read on Septuagesima Sunday, as first ordered by S Gregory the Great on the eve of the Conversion of England a millennium and a half before. This process of restoration started in 1871, when Genesis was restored to the Gesima Sundays. And in 1922 a new lectionary completed that process by rolling out Genesis also onto the weekdays from Septuagesima; and that lectionary remains still legally available for use in the Church of England. It appeared in the Prayer Book which the synodical organs of the Church of England approved in 1928; and in 1961 an improved revision of it was authorised (although that particular authorisation has now lapsed). Various provinces adopted its main lines, even reputedly 'Evangelical' provinces like Ireland and Canada. The Scottish Prayer Book of 1929 did not adopt the English lectionary, but made its own ... with Genesis locked onto Septuagesima. This had become the consensus of informed Anglicanism. With one oddity*, this arrangement survived into the Alternative Service Book, which took the Church of England through to the end of the millennium.
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*The oddity in the ASB was that Sunday Office readings started Genesis on the Ninth Sunday Before Christmas, because of the whimsical invention of a Creation Etcetera Season. This Brilliant Idea never endeared itself to anybody. But ... curiously ... as far as weekdays were concerned, Genesis still began in the ASB on (the Monday after) Septuagesima (renamed the Ninth Sunday Before Easter).
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To be continued, so that I can draw some conclusions from this narrative.
And it remained the aim of the Church of England through four centuries to provide its clergy and laity with what the Second Vatican Council was later to call a "ditior mensa verbi Dei" so that "praestantior pars Scripturarum Sanctarum populo legatur". These words echo those of Cranmer: "all the whole Bible or the greatest part thereof". More Scripture; most of the Bible. That is the good news. The bad news is that Cranmer went about providing for the greatly enlarged diet of Scripture which the Church of England was to have by distributing the books of the Bible according to the Civil Calendar. Thus Genesis started at the beginning of January, and Scripture marched relentlessly on, almost entirely ignoring Lent and Easter (even Good Friday and Easter Day did not have a complete provision proper to the Day). Every year, on March 31, you got the same readings, whether it was Sunday or weekday, fast or festival, Holy Week or Easter Week.
The Catholic Revival in the Church of England led to a recovery, first among the Tractarians and then, eventually, in the church at large, of the old sense of the distinctiveness of the Christian seasons. And so, once again, Genesis began to be read on Septuagesima Sunday, as first ordered by S Gregory the Great on the eve of the Conversion of England a millennium and a half before. This process of restoration started in 1871, when Genesis was restored to the Gesima Sundays. And in 1922 a new lectionary completed that process by rolling out Genesis also onto the weekdays from Septuagesima; and that lectionary remains still legally available for use in the Church of England. It appeared in the Prayer Book which the synodical organs of the Church of England approved in 1928; and in 1961 an improved revision of it was authorised (although that particular authorisation has now lapsed). Various provinces adopted its main lines, even reputedly 'Evangelical' provinces like Ireland and Canada. The Scottish Prayer Book of 1929 did not adopt the English lectionary, but made its own ... with Genesis locked onto Septuagesima. This had become the consensus of informed Anglicanism. With one oddity*, this arrangement survived into the Alternative Service Book, which took the Church of England through to the end of the millennium.
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*The oddity in the ASB was that Sunday Office readings started Genesis on the Ninth Sunday Before Christmas, because of the whimsical invention of a Creation Etcetera Season. This Brilliant Idea never endeared itself to anybody. But ... curiously ... as far as weekdays were concerned, Genesis still began in the ASB on (the Monday after) Septuagesima (renamed the Ninth Sunday Before Easter).
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To be continued, so that I can draw some conclusions from this narrative.
6 December 2013
Whatever happened to Genesis? (2)
Even when Cardinal Quinones published, with papal approval, his very radical revision of the Breviary in 1535, he retained the association of Genesis with Septuagesima, although he gave more space to the reading of greater sections of this book than had the traditional Breviary. In England, an already theologically compromised Archbishop of Canterbury eagerly read the Spanish cardinal's reworked Office, despite the fact that the King's Great Matter put him on the opposite side from Quinones in European politics. There survive a couple of liturgical drafts by Thomas Cranmer from the same period showing that he, too, was working along the same lines as ... er ... well, actually, the similarities are so many and exact that is clear that Cranmer's drafts are closely indebted to the Spanish Breviary which had emerged under the patronage of Pope Paul III. The two drafts have been variously dated, but it is pretty obvious that Cranmer was devouring Quinones as volumes rolled off the presses and flew across the Channel. And, in one draft, Cranmer follows Quinones in preserving the ancient link between Septuagesima and Genesis and building on it to provide an in-depth reading from the same Book through Lent.
However, Cranmer was obsessed by the need for simplicity. Medieval clerics did not have an ORDO; they had to work things out for themselves. The raw materials were to be found in a Directorium called Pie. Cranmer, notoriously, observd that "the number and harshness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was [sic] the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out". So, lamentably, in his other draft Cranmer went instead for a lectionary based entirely on the civil year's Calendar; Genesis started at the beginning of January and marched inexorably on, ignoring
the Ecclesiastical year. And this was the model which he followed in his first English Prayer Book of 1549.
That was a shame.
To be continued
However, Cranmer was obsessed by the need for simplicity. Medieval clerics did not have an ORDO; they had to work things out for themselves. The raw materials were to be found in a Directorium called Pie. Cranmer, notoriously, observd that "the number and harshness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was [sic] the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out". So, lamentably, in his other draft Cranmer went instead for a lectionary based entirely on the civil year's Calendar; Genesis started at the beginning of January and marched inexorably on, ignoring
the Ecclesiastical year. And this was the model which he followed in his first English Prayer Book of 1549.
That was a shame.
To be continued
5 December 2013
Only for Classicists who like Cicero and Euripides
Scurra nescioquis in interrete scribens conatus est repertorium efficere in quo probra inveniri possint omnia quae in dies effundit domnus apostolicus. Facetus est hic, et illum lepidum Caius Valerius dixisset. Mihi praeter modum et hic et ille et quae scripta sunt probra placent. Hoc tantum addere velim ... assonantiam et alliterationem mihi cordi placere. Ex experimento 'narcissisticos narcoleptas' fortasse insusurrem. Seu potius ad Iasonem coniugi blanditias edentem et litteras i et s vomentem respiciam (o misos, o megiston echthiste ...ktl) et talibus - 'sisypheis semisocinianis' - vel similibus flagellis eiusdem domni hostes quoslibet omnes verberem. Eis polla ete Despota! Oves proculdubio oles!
Archbishop Cranmer Blogspot ...
... has got a superb article on the Maaloula nuns. An exceptional, sinewy, powerful piece of English; every word absolutely right and absolutely in the right place.
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