Remembrance Sunday

The Requiem Mass for the War dead prays for men and women who, like all of us, stand in need of merciful forgiveness. We plead the sacrifice of Christ, offering His Body and Blood, for them, not as heroes but as sinners. On the other hand, the customary rituals of Cenotaph observance do have - surely, even now - a nationalism built into them, while Holy Mass subverts every nationalism. It was, after all, offered on both sides in the European wars.

The great Fr Bernard Walke, who made St Hilary's in Cornwall into an Anglo-Catholic village, instituted the service of Benediction during WW1 "as an act of reparation to the Sacred Heart for the wrongs of war, and as a means of uniting ourselves with our enemies in that Sacrament which knows no frontiers". Walke, a papalist, wholeheartedly supported the attitude of Benedict XV to that War and was beaten up in the street for refusing to accept the disgusting rhetoric of the war-time hysteria.

He used to go to Dartmoor Prison to offer Mass for the 'conchies' there; denied use of the Anglican Chapel, he accepted the offer of the Methodist place of worship. I find it a moving picture ... the cold moorland mists and 'Ber' offering the Tridentine Mass in the meanest of proddy surroundings with a congregation largely consisting of persecuted and emaciated Quakers.

There, surely, was a true Ecumenism, so unlike the cosy twaddle we are expected to go along with nowadays. I am not so impressed by the popularity of a Cardinal Hinsley during WW2, who was praised as being "an Englishman first and a Christian second".

I wonder if it was a conscious echo of Walke's words about reparation to the Sacred Heart which led the congregation at my own old Anglican church of S Thomas's to put up a German-carved statue of the Sacred Heart as their War Memorial, beside tablets inscribed with the names of the departed.

As far as WW2 is concerned, I often think about the contrast between two great fictional literary products of that war, both written by combatants; both overtly semi-autobiographical. Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea is written by an ideologically and morally rudderless lapsed Marxist; as a memorial to the men who fought the war of the Atlantic convoys. I find it full of venom; venom against adulterous wives back home; against tall blond German submarine captains; against bullying Australians; against the Irish who denied Cork Harbour and Bantry Bay to the Royal Navy. 

Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy is quite different. At its beginning, Waugh's character, a traditionalist Catholic gentleman burdened with ethical Rights and Wrongs, saw the conflict as a chivalrous crusade on behalf of Christian civilisation against Nazi barbarism and its atheist allies in Moskow. When the war was ending, with Uncle Jo a genial ally and sitting in triumph on half of Europe, Waugh had come to perceive it as a sweaty tug of war between two teams of scarcely distinguishable louts. Waugh discerns the ironies and hypocrisies as embodied in the Sword of Stalingrad - a gift from the Christian King of England; a symbol of chivalry to congratulate Marshal Stalin; a triumph of craftsmanship ... and with the symbols on its scabbard upside down. Waugh's hero sees, as Waugh himself had seen, the vicious post-War savaging of Christian Europe in Tito's Jugoslavia.

The Mass is just as subversive of our modern tyrannies as it was of the horrible nationalisms of the twentieth century. It joyously subverts now-fashionable assumptions of roles and genders. As a communal and hierarchical act with a formal and inherited structure, it subverts the cultures of choice, of spontaneity, of individual autonomy, of each man constructing her own identity, everybody manufacturing their own god and their own good. As a ritual which looks beyond itself, it subverts the assumptions of human self-sufficiency. And it speaks of Judgement; Judgement passed by a Court of No Appeal far beyond any Court of Human Rights.

Indeed, the rights which the Mass enthrones are the sovereign rights of a Creator and the vested interests of a Redeemer. Vivat Christus Rex.