Patrimonial Pins

I recently sang an EF Sunday Mass for a priest who, like me, spent some years in that now-defunct organisation called "the Church of England". So, like me, he lives in enjoyment of the two Sacraments of Matrimonium and Sacerdotium and of the Church of England Pensions Board.

As, murmuring Merear ... , I took up the maniple, I noticed with interest that it had obviously been found to be too loose. It had been slightly tightened by the deft use of an old-style decade-of-Vatican-II nappy pin.

Philological Note: The 'Nappy' is what, I gathered half a century ago from Dr Spock, North Americans call the 'Diaper'.

Historical Note: In this much more ecological age, nappies/diapers are 'disposable', that is to say, made of a material which after use is sent off to enrich land-fill sites. In the unreconstructed 1960s, however, they were made of cloth and were reused after careful washing and sterilisation in a substance called, if my memory serves me aright, 'Milton'. Laudato si, as our Holy Father would say if he were a Family Man.

Technological Note: The nappy/diaper was secured by a pin, which had a clever little metal attachment which slipped into place so as to make it impossible for the pin to come undone and penetrate the baby. This was called "a Nappy Pin", and those of us now well into our seventies probably have several of these surviving in odd cupboards and drawers.

Trip Down Memory Lane Note: Ah, how it all takes one back! How well I recall laying three nappies out in a row, placing a minute daughter on each of them, then going along as if along a factory production line and 'doing them up'. And how also (Ah!) I  remember the subsequent processes of extricating the depositum ventris from the fabric; and subsequently wringing out (or 'mangling') the washed nappies and hanging them up on the washing line at the back of the Curate's House. On a January morning, how cold, numb, red, chapped, and crinkly ones hands ended up! Ah, Happy Days. Ah, how well (etc.etc. ad nauseam).

Liturgical Note: How wonderful the operations of Providence, that, so long after the 1960s, Nappy Pins should be reusable as Maniple Tightners! Clearly, even in that dread decade, as the altars fell and Dr Calvin's dark and terrible hand fell upon the sanctuaries of the Catholic Church, Providence already had in mind the provisions both of Summorum Pontificum and of Anglicanorum coetibus.

Optative Note: Long live the Ordinariates! Vivat Benedictus XVI!