14 January 2016

PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES by HENRY SIRE: UPDATE

On the ANGELICO PRESS blog, Mr H J A Sire published yesterday (January 13) an update of his much-read book Phoenix from the Ashes. I take the liberty of commending this addition warmly to readers.

I grab this opportunity to comment on Mr Sire's narrative style by means of a comparison:
Dr Aidan Nichols, making a characteristically kindly but perhaps rather faint-hearted defence of the documents of Vatican II, wrote " ... the accents of the great doctors are audible in much that is non-controversial in this corpus of teaching ...".
Henry Sire (Phoenix from the Ashes) expresses himself with perhaps a little less sweetness than Fr Aidan: " ... the progressives were not in fact very original. Since on many subjects they had nothing in particular to to say, large tracts of the documents consist in unimpeachable statements of the Church's traditional teaching."

When these liberal chappies were orthodox, Sire suggests, it was only because they were too stupid for original thought!

3 comments:

F.A.D. said...

Is Sire an Englishman? Sounds like the difference between writing in England and the USA.

Mick Jagger Gathers No Mosque said...

It is prolly just a coincidence that Franciscus chose to live in Domus Sancate Marthae which was the venue where the revolutionaries met to organise their forces, to compare notes, and to coordinate their tactical and strategic advances in their suddenly short march through the institution.

Cordelio said...

Dear Froilan,

Which sounds American and which English, I wonder?

Sire was born in Barcelona but educated at Stonyhurst and Exeter College, Oxford (according the "About the Author" write-up). Dr. Nichols is an Oxford educated Englishman (though he might have been a Roosian, a French, or Turk, or Proosian, or perhaps I-tal-i-an!).