FIF & SSPX

How extraordinary (a fashionable word)! While the C of E debates what sort of structures it will give to those who cannot accept women bishops ... will the bishops of the traditionalist minority be Ordinaries with jurisdiction? ... a divertingly similar debate is enlivening the Traditionalist RC blogosphere (go to WDTPRS and find the Papa Stronsay article). Apparently a thriving Traditionalist Redemptorist community on an Orkney island are investigating what Rome might allow them. Fascinating. Will Roman Rigidity be more flexible and generous than Anglican Liberalism? Quite possibly. The Anglican establishment is amazingly broad, tolerant, inclusive .... except in one tiny area. That is: if anybody suggests that diocesan bishops might lose the merest smidgeon of their territorial jurisdiction. On that question, our bishops hold views that make the definitions of Vatican I on Papal Primacy and Infallibility look as flabby as a week-old meringue. Rumour has it that before Consecration those nominated for Anglican bishoprics are subjected to a medical examination the main part of which is a test of their anal retentiveness.

Seriously, what happens to those RC traditionalists tentatively knocking at Rome's door might ... I don't quite know how to finish this sentence.

Ascensions

So which Collect should be used on Ascension Day? At the Vigil Mass and at the First Evensong, the Editio tertia Missalis Romani offers a new Collect; I don't know whether ICEL has authorised a translation of it; but in the Ordo Recitandi which I compile I provide a home-made translation (ISBN 978-1-85311-796-1). And, for the Day itself, we are given the alternative of a new Collect: except that it isn't new, it's the ancient Roman Collect preserved in the 1962 Missal and, of course, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (and in Common Worship). Here is a literal translation of the Latin:
Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God,that we who believe thy only-begotten Son our Redeemer this day to have ascended into the heavens, may also in mind dwell in the heavenly places.
As an example of how Cranmer expanded his Latin originals, I suspect out of a pastoral desire to ensure that the Collect wasn't over before a dozey congregation had cottoned on to what it was saying, I offer his version:
Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens: so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell.
The current Roman Collect uses a beautiful piece of Leonine antithetical rhetoric: for the ascension of Christ thy Son is our provection, and, whither the glory of the Head has gone first, thither also is called the hope of the body. It will be fun to see what NeoICEL makes of this. I share the admiration which the Holy Father recently expressed for Pope Leo's latinity, but I wonder whether the thought pattern is bit too tight and rapid for a Collect. Rhetoric suitable for a homily (which is where the compilers of the post-Conciliar Missal found this phrase) is not necessarily appropriate for the terse and brief literary form of the Collects of the Roman Rite. Perhaps that is why the old Collect is now on offer again. There was a horrible tendency for Twentieth Century Liturgical Committee-persons, both Roman Catholic and Anglican, to be too clever in the formulae they dreamed up as they sat around their tables.

Descensions

I was so infuriated I switched the radio off: it was the sound of Professor A C Grayling misrepresenting the Christian Faith. He clearly loathes it and doesn't like to let pass an opportunity of attacking it in his popular journalism. But this was a program about the philosophy of Materialism; and he assured the listening millions that Christianity was a dualist religion, based on an opposition between Spirit and Matter which regarded the latter as inherently bad, the former as inherently good. I don't suppose we shall ever know whether this assertion is based on dumb stupid ignorance or on a wilful desire to misrepresent and thus traduce Christianity. But it sounds mighty strange as our minds turn to next Thursday's celebration of the Ascension - of the taking of that Body which was conceived in a woman's womb to the heart and throne of Godhead; the ultimate deification of matter. Regnat caro, as the ancient Office Hymn says (I quoted it only the other day: Flesh is reigning).

Oops: did I say that we shall be observing the Ascension on Thursday? Bad news from Rome: the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei has ruled that even those who use the Old Mass by virtue of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum must, in deference to the English Roman Catholic hierarchy, transfer it to Sunday. One can see the logic of a common date for celebrating festivals: I believe that the Vatican expects Latin Catholics living in countries of predominantly Oriental rite to keep the Julian Easter. But the transference of the Ascension seems illogical: this transference is envisaged in the rubrics of the new rite as an option available to hierarchies who seek Roman consent, but the old Missal offers no such option. And PCED may have pandered to the Westminster hierarchy at the expense of convincing traditionalists wavering between SSPX and FSSP that Rome can indeed not be trusted to prevent vandal hands from mutilating the 1962 Missal. The Church of England (it isn't often I say something like this) is more sensible in leaving a number of feasts (for example, the Epiphany; although not, as it happens, the Ascension) to be transferred or not at the decision of the parochial minister - a good example of that principle of subsidiarity which wisely lies at the heart of Summorum Pontificum. And I've never heard of this leading to pastoral problems.

I won't say that the solution for traditionalist Roman Catholics will be to attend Anglican Churches: partly because it would be cheap and vulgar but mainly because I have no interest in weakening the allegiance to the Holy See of those who are fortunate enough to be in unimpaired communion with her. But if somebody secured the services of a SSPX priest to say Mass of the Ascension in Oxford on Thursday and wanted to use S Thomas's Church free of fee (we have splendid sets of Latin vestments, with maniples; a Missale Romanum; and Latin Altar Cards) I'm not sure I'd say No.

O grant us life that shall not end

I am glad we use Latin texts for Benediction here at S Thomas's. To sing Aquinas' original text of the O Salutaris reminds one that what he actually wrote was vitam sine termino. Literally this means 'life without a boundary mark'. Perhaps this means more than just 'bodily death won't be the end of everything'. Our life even in this present age itself has no boundary stones if we are in Christ so that our life is hidden with him in the Father. Everything is ours; there are no oysters we cannot open and enjoy provided we possess God's grace to use as a shucker.

Is Benedict an Anglican?

Our Holy Father has abandoned the bent crucifix which his more recent predecessors carried in favour of a straight golden cross without a figure upon it. And 'traditionalist' RC bloggers explain this by pointing out that the Crucifixion was not the end of the story: i.e. the empty cross is a pointer to the Resurrection.
Dead right. But the whimsy of this is that such is exactly the reason 'modererate ' Anglicans used to give for having crosses rather than crucifixes on their altars. So perhaps Benedict is plummeting in what we Anglicans call 'Churchmanship'.
But stay. This very cross is the one which was used by that great pontiff, my hero Blessed Pius IX! Was Pio Nono also a crypto-Anglican? We should be told. Open the Vatican Archives.

Corrupt 1962 Texts?

To Vespers on Sunday, together with a goodly number of right minded people, at the Oxford Oratory. But what a shock when we got to the Office Hymn. They use the 1962 Breviary, so of course it was the piece of elegant Renaissance Latinity which Urban VIII substituted for the the fifth century text previously in use: with which I am familiar. The problem with the original is that it was written when Latin was still a spoken language, and its text is therefore, from the point of view of classical purists, full of irregularities. For example, it treats stolis (robes) as if it were istolis: which is how they pronounced st- in the 'Vulgar Latin' period. Like most popular texts, it has anacoloutha, diminutives, and 'intolerably' erratic systems of accented syllables. All this is why I like it. I even feel that the author was a considerable poet who used irregular accentual patterns to emphasise words.

Urban's gang of resurrected Horaces so rewrote the second stanza that not a word of the original remained ... but perhaps by this point I have lost non-latinists. Never mind. If you have your English Hymnal to hand, you can find the original, translated by the incomparable John Mason Neale, at 125. You will find the Urbanist replacement at 128. You may feel that both, in their different ways, are good hymns. You are right. I just happen to feel that Vatican II was wise to mandate the restoration of original texts (although the 1968 revisers did straighten out the rhythms a bit). And the Renaissance version can miss things. Neale was convinced that the old text's description of Christ's blood as 'rosy' (roseo: 'light pink', because Roman roses were not modern cultivars) is explained by that fact that if a body is totally drained of blood, the last few drops are ... pink (how did he know?).

Pope preemptively Torpedoes Manchester

Just as we all get excited about the forthcoming publication of the report of the Manchester Group - which will make proposals about how the Church of England can have 'women bishops' while making a space for those who cannot accept them - the Sovereign Pontiff has scuppered the whole project below the waterline. Here is what he said to an ecumenical meeting in America on April 18.

''Too often those who are not Christians, as they observe the splintering of Christian communities, are understandably confused about the Gospel message itself. Fundamental Christian beliefs and practices are sometimes changed within communities by so-called 'prophetic actions' that are based on a hermeneutic not always consonant with the datum of Scripture and Tradition. Communities consequently give up the attemt to act as a unified body, choosing instead to function according to the idea of 'local options'. Somewhere in this process the need for diachronic Koinonia - communion with the Church in every age - is lost, just at a time when the world is losing its bearings and needs a persuasive common witness to the saving power of the Gospel.''

Doesn't this just about say it all? And succinctly?

Patron Saints

A dippy item on the radio this morning; someone has written a book claiming that the Undivided Trinity is a theological prop for the Union in Diversity of ... guess what: the United Kingdom. When will these people learn that all political arrangements are transient and include flawed elements. And the United Kingdom particularly so; it had its genesis in the unwholesome imperatives of the whig agenda after the Dutch Invasion; subsumed Ireland only in 1800; lost most of it little more than a century (of bungled rule) later; and retains only a questionable and debated hold over the part of Britain which Whiggery tried to rename Northern Britain. It seems to me that a much more useful theologoumenon is the suggestion in Fr Aidan Nichols' The Realm that Christians should think of having a bipolar existence. We belong to a cultural construct which is 'at once internationalist as the Church of all nations, and yet patriotic'. And surely our priority must be S Paul's striking metaphor that our politeia is from above: our real passports are issued neither by England nor by the UK nor even by Europe, but in heaven. That is why S George - feast on Wednesday - is such an ideal Patron for England. He never came here; indeed, Provincia Brittannia had not even become Angleland when he bore witness. He reminds us that faith in Christ, even unto death, is what takes priority by several thousand miles over narrow nationalism.


And that dippy 'Trinitarian' admirer of the UK suggested that the UK needs its own patron Saint. He suggested S Aidan on the grounds that he has Irish, Scottish, and English connections. Well, I've nothing at all against S Aidan. Far from it. But my alternative proposal (granted that the UK does need a patron) would be S Theodore: a Greek-speaking Syrian monk sent by a Pope of Rome to be Archbishop of Canterbury.

I feel myself a Christian before a citizen of the UK. Indeed, I feel myself a Latin Christian in my culture before I think of myself as English. I feel quite as much at home in still-quite-Catholic Western Ireland or worshipping at a Latin Mass in Avignon as I do in England. Perhaps sometimes a bit more so. Am I a disgrace?

S Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort

As we approach the Optional Memorial of S Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort on Monday April 28 - a fairly recent addition to the Universal Roman Calendar - we all have to decide whether to say Mass and/or Office of this Saint ... or of S Peter Chanel ... or of the Feria ... or, for that matter, of the Rogation. I shall have no hesitation about 'doing' S Louis. I believe he is a great saint - a view I share with John Paul the Great, who took his motto, totus tuus, from the Saint's writings.

Biographical details about this Breton Saint can of course be found via Google or whatever. He comes from a Baroque devotional milieu which was out of favour until fairly recently, but is currently the Trend of the Moment - but not to be ignored just for that. Particularly out of favour was the wholehearted style of his devotion to our Lady, which involves a consecration of servitus to Mary. In fact, it wasn't too popular in his own time: there were unwholesome people around called Jansenists who sniffed at such things. Grounds for disdain are obvious: granted that the word doulos occurs frequently in Scripture, surely, the condescending will remark, it is Jesus whose doulos, slave, S Paul so often proclaims himself to be. The douleia of Mary is, surely, just another example of putting the Mother of God into the place reserved for her divine Son. But I think this facile analysis disregards two linked truths. The Creator God in his prolific generosity created endless particularities. It is possible for the human intellect to imagine him remaining Himself an endless and solitary monad; or, if he desired to create, to have created just one finite beloved to be the object of his love. But the God who has given us to know something of himself chose to squander his love on a universe ... or universe of universes ... of such finite objects of love. That is why the attitude 'It's just me and my God' is profoundly unChristian. And, secondly, there is the biblical verb hypotassesthai, to submit oneself, to order, to arrange, to subject oneself hypo, beneath, another: be that other a master, a spouse, a ruler, or whatever. S Paul in fact calls upon us to submit ourselves in this way one to another: not just to Jesus (although all must be en Christo). And since Mary alone is unflawed by Original Sin, she is the one to whom a Christian can be in hypotaxis without that relationship being flawed (as all other hypotaxeis can run the risk of being) by unchristlike traits in the other.

S Louis is not the only one to have practised this Slavery of Mary. In his True Devotion to Mary he lists many predecessors in both East and West; to whom I would add my own favourite Bishop of Exeter (he's the bishop I'm thinking of when in my Ordo I refer to binding episcopal decrees in the Diocese of Exeter), John de Grandisson. He concluded a life of servitus to Mary by having himself described on his lead coffin as Matris Misericordiae miserrimus servus. Since the terms kyrios(a) and doulos(e) are correlative, the terms domina and kuria, common in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity (not to mention the more archaic Greek despoina), and the our Lady found in the Anglican Prayer Book, imply this devotional attitude.

English Catholic Hymn Book

Having found a lovely little pile of small green hymn books, apparently dating from the 1930s, in a cupboard at S Thomas's, I'm busily working out how to incorporate its contents into the Sunday hymn pattern. Perhaps May is the time to start. 936 begins 'The happy birds Te Deum sing,/'tis Mary's month of May./Her smile turns winter into spring,/ And darkness into day.' (Does anyone know who wrote it?) It will go nicely to the tune of 'O little town of Bethlehem'.Then there's 928, 'O Mother! will it always be,/That every passing year,/ Shall make thee seem more beautiful,/ Shall make thee seem more dear'. That, of course - no prizes - just has to be by the greatest of the Romantic poets, Fr Faber. It will go to the tune of 'It came upon the midnight clear'.

A lot of the hymns can be identified from the Westminster Hymnal (does any church still use that?), but I'd be glad for the key, if anyone can provide it, to the authors of the rest. The only unhappy gap in it seems to be its lack of Cardinal Wiseman's 'Full in the panting heart of Rome'. Perhaps the advocates of a non-papal Catholicism could do an Anglicanised version celebrating their own infallible magisterial Organ: 'Full in the panting Synod halls /Within Church House's peeling walls/From pilgrims lips that kiss the ground/Breathes in all tongues one only sound/ God bless our Synod, great and good.' or something like that.

DISIMPROVING HYMNS

The text of the hymns in the post-conciliar breviary is a great deal better than in the 1962 breviary; the texts have been restored to what they were before Urban VIII debauched them in the 1620s. They are, many of them, in their original forms. But the coetus which redacted them in 1968 did make some alterations of its own, which seem generally to have an unfortunately flattening effect. Take, for example, Chorus novae Ierusalem, by S Fulbert of Chartres (d1029), now, happily, an optional hymn for Lauds on Paschal ferias. The author called upon the choir of new Jerusalem to utter 'novam meli dulcedinem' ('a new sweetness of melos'), where melos is a Greek word meaning melody or lyric song. The coetus replaced the Greek with a drabber Latin word 'cantus' (which after more reflection became 'hymni') on the grounds that 'meli non facile intelligatur'. But surely S Fulbert had, in half his ear, the Latin word 'mel', 'honey'. Interestingly, the Carmelite breviary followed some manuscripts in reading 'nova mellis dulcedine', 'with new sweetness of honey'. The revised text loses this half-echo, this subliminal suggestion.

More disastrously, the coetus proposed to omit, in the Fifth Century Ascension hymn Aeterne rex, altissime, the glorious words 'culpat caro, purgat caro, regnat Deus Dei caro' ('flesh sins [in Adam], flesh cleanses [in Christ], God [the Son] rules [so what rules is] the flesh of God'. English Hymnal - i.e. the superb Anglican hymnographer J M Neale - renders it (141) 'That flesh hath purged what flesh had stained, and God, the flesh of God, hath reigned'). The coetus found these words 'vel obscuros vel nimio lusu verborum expressos': 'too much playing around with words'. Fortunately, somebody stood up against this philistinism. and the lines survived; unfortunately, in a bowdlerised form: '...regnat caro Verbum Dei' ('flesh reigns, [which is] the Word of God'). This still slightly shies away from the divinely glorious boldness of saying (crisply and epigrammatically) that the God who reigns above the highest heavens is nothing other than the Flesh which the Incarnate Second Person assumed of that Palestinian Girl.

AD ORIENTEM, every morning

The common ancient tradition of the Universal Church was, until recently, to offer the Holy Eucharist facing towards the rising sun understood as as an an Ikon or Type of the rising Lord, the one who comes to us from the Beyond to give us his daily gift of newness. East and West have commonly interpreted psalm 19(MT)=18(Vg & LXX) verses 4-6, referring to the sun, as giving an image of our Lord as the Bridegroom leaving the chamber of his Mother's virginal womb like a strong man running his course with joy. And this insight is now tardily being reappropriated by Western Christendom.

I would like to suggest another application of these truths. Should not the normative time for celebrating the Holy Eucharist and receiving communion be at the beginning of the day, as the sun rises, as Christ, new every morning, comes to us from his Father's House and is given to us by that maternal womb which is the Mediatrix of all Graces?
This has, of course, been historically the general custom in the Church (even if in fasting seasons vesperal masses sometimes concluded the day's fast). It coheres with the ancient Eucharistic Fast, from the night before. Everything here speaks of newness, of the Father's eternal gift of the Son; of the Bread of Life as the Fount of the graces and deeds of the day.
I am not suggesting a new burdensome rigidity. I say mass at 12.30 a couple of days a week; I avail myself of the newer discipline of the fast on necessary occasions. I applaud the modern provision of a Sunday Vigil Mass on Saturday evening. We cannot afford to miss any opportunity of giving people the means of fulfilling their Sunday obligation, or of daily Mass and Communion. But there is a certain breathlessness about the modern arrangements, however splendid it is when an office worker gives up part of her lunch-break to go to a midday Mass. And the gathering on Saturday evening of those Getting It Out Of The Way so that they can sleep in on Sunday morning seems to me to lack the wholesomeness of a regular congregation meeting in the newness of Sunday Morning to consecrate the week to God. Perhaps Anglicans and Orthodox do have here something that it would be a shame to lose.

I affirm all the modern arrangements whereby modern Western Christendom makes our Eucharistic Lord available to a world in a hurry. I am simply suggesting that Mass before breakfast, and on weekdays as well as Sundays, is worth considering as an ideal and a norm which most Christian cultures and most Christian generations have found normal.

ESBVM

Why in Oxford, of all places, should there be no active branch of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary? So Jill Pinnock and I are having a go at revival: on Thursday May 8, in Pusey House at 7.30, Stratford and Leonie Caldecott will talk on Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the poetry of G K Chesterton and G M Hopkins.
Can readers suggest what might be suitable topics for such a group to engage with?

FROM WALSINGHAM TO CANTERBURY

Sancta Maria ad nives: After Cornwall, off with the Parish Pilgrimage to Walsingham as the trees in S Thomas's churchyard look totally magical in their filligree of April snow. And in Walsigham, the biggest snowflakes I have ever seen. But how well the Shrine looks; what a privilege to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at our Lady's feet in her Holy House. For our concluding Mass, I offered a votive of our parish patron, S Thomas of Canterbury, patron of the first Oxford parish in which the Catholic tradition of worship began to be restored. I pointed out that our Lady's image was crowned with the Oxford Crown, given to our Lady in the early days of the Shrine's restoration by Fr Roger Wodehouse, Curate of S Thomas's (he was responsible for our baroque altar and the picture within it of our Lady di Foligno) and then Vicar of S Paul's, one of S Thomas's daughter parishes in West Oxford. A century after Walsingham became a shrine, England's second great shrine grew out of the martyrdom of S Thomas and about this time our church was built. And so after Mass we made a pilgrimage to Canterbury: that is, to the chapel a few feet east of the Holy House where S Thomas is potrayed in the frescoes and a relic of him kept for veneration. We prayed here, remembering that as ours is a religion of God incarnate in a girl's womb, so also it was in the body that our Saviour won his Easter victory, just as in their bodies his martyrs by testimony came to glory and we ourselves hope at the last en somati to rise again. Then we each venerated the relic with a kiss.



My normal place of worship when in London being, of course, the Brompton Oratory, I have often taken part in the weekly veneration of the relic of S Philip Neri (who, curiously, shares the same chapel at Walsingham as S Thomas). After we have kissed the relic, the priest taps the heads of male but not female worshippers with the reliquary. On such excellent authority, I too did this.



But can anyone explain the reason for this custom? Is it because ... but no: I'll see what wiser heads can suggest.

Catholic Cornwall

Back to Cornwall for another Easter break, by the kindness of the Posbury sisters (the Franciscan Servants of Jesus and Mary) who lend us their holiday cottage at Porthcurno near Land's End. As we drive to look at 'our' ravens' nest to see whether they're sitting yet (no), we pass the First and Last Ebbsfleet church in the land, at St Just. Happy memories: it was on the notice board of that church that I first saw the news, three years ago, of the election of papa Ratzinger. Less happy memories as we pass churches which were once great Catholic shrines, back in the days when the Truro diocese had the reputation of being the most Catholic in the Church of England. Its last two bishops have put paid to that. Everywhere there are women who have been through a form of sacerdotal ordination, or their male running dogs (the latter, in my experience, often nastier than the former). And such people so often claim that they are the real successors of the the martyrs and confessors of the Catholic Movement: impertinently they hijack our fathers and apply some condescending argument to the effect that the 'papalism' of these great figures was so conditioned by the circumstances of the time that it doesn't really 'count'. So the heroic Fr Bernard Walke of St Hilary, who had to watch his church being wrecked by a protestant mob, has the heroism of his witness neutered. But his words are just as powerful and as relevant now as when he wrote them in 1935: '[I] was convinced that the Catholic movement in the Church of England, which began in the discovery of the Church as a divine institution, could have no other end but a corporate union with the Apostolic See of Rome. Outside that unity there could be no assurancce of the preservation of the faith and morals of the Christian revelation'. Notice there the words and morals. Fr Walke did indeed begin his incumbency by immediately replacing Prayer Book Mattins with the Tridentine Rite; but he was not some silly simple ritualist. Not long before he wrote, the Lambeth Conference had begun, albeit tentatively, the long but unambiguous process of unhitching Anglicanism from the common ancient tradition of historic Christendom with regard to sexual morality by admitting the possibility (of course, in the rarest and most exceptional cases: where would the liberal agenda be if wedges did not have very thin ends?), of artifical contraception. I am sure Walke had this in mind, and how right his prognosis has proved to be. It is instructive to compare his words with those of Bishop Gore, in a pamphlet which can be found on SORRY; I GAVE A WRONG REFENCE HERE; TRY PROJECT CANTERBURY; LAMBETH CONFERENCES; LAMBETH ON CONTRACEPTIVES. Gore, a 'non-papal' catholic, was a good enough scholar to know that what had happened was a disaster of major proportions. But, blind to the significance in the divine dispensation of the Roman Primacy, his paper, for all its erudition, quite simply flounders. Only unambiguous papalism can reach the parts which other ecclesiologies cannot reach.