A MASSIVELY IMPORTANT SESQUICENTENARY: 2014/5

(A slightly abbreviated reprint of a piece I published a year ago.)

Er ... yes ... sesqui ... well, according to my trusty Oxford Latin Dictionary 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.

2014/2015 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 Roman Pontiffs in earlier Magisterial interventions, was published simultaneously. In some circles "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 il Conte Mastai-Ferreti. This blog will, as ever, merely follow humbly the lead of the Magisterium, or, if that lead is a trifle late coming, will examine as best it can one or two hermeneutical questions arising from this laudable document.

I shall eventually come on to 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 still lurks today 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 Holy Father the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wished the Ordinariates to bring into the unity of the Church, for the benefit and enlightenment of the entire Church. Audite eum!