The "binitarian" genius of the Roman Tradition (5)

Liturgical addresses to the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Holy, Blessed, and Undivided Trinity, ar rare. My instinct is that the most extreme example I know ... a Eucharistic Prayer authorised by the Church of Ireland in which the Prayer is divided into three parts, each in turn assigned to one of the Persons ... should be categorised a liturgical corruption. Perhaps the only addresses to the Holy Ghost which are fairly central to the worship of our Latin Church are the daily hymn at Terce; and the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, sung at priestly ordinaions to accompany anointing.

I regard this balance as very sensible.

I certainly regard Montanism as a heresy; I am more than suspicious of such Pentecostalist movements as seduce Catholics into leaving the Ark of Salvation and undergoing a sacrilegious second 'baptism'.

Latin Catholics, and, I think, Byzantines, have not often had shrines, pilgrimages, in honour of the Holy Ghost ... He (Latin) It (Greek) She (Semitic) has never attracted a great deal of popular devotional regard. Sometimes Catholics feel guilty about this; sometimes they even wonder if they should remedy this lack; perhaps, take a leaf or two out of a Pentecostalist book. I do not agree; I think that the everyday liturgical and devotional lives of Latins and Byzantines are perfectly sound and balanced and  wholesome and healthy.

I suspect that the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church is completely and totally central, just as breathing and the circulation of the blood are central and natural to a human body. But it is natural for us to talk about the things we are enabled to do or have done because of our breath or our circulating blood, rather than to be preoccupied about those processes in themselves. Sometimes something  is  so central that it is unnatural to keep talking self-consciously about it. Analogies may also be discerned in the states of being-a-priest, and being-married. This is why, I suggest, in our Roman Canon, and in the Gloria in excelsis, the Holy Ghost is simply and naturally taken for granted, being only mentioned in the summary doxologies at the end.

I repent of facile essays I wrote as a seminarian in the 1960s, explaining how the apparent near-absence of the Spirit by Catholic and Anglican Liturgies at that time left them 'defective'! Dear me, how much we were brain-washed in that decade! How much more acutely critical we ought to have been in discriminating between babies and bath-water!

I did appreciate that new eucharistic prayers with epicletic appeals for the Spirit before the Institution Narrative were neither authentically Western nor authentically Eastern, and I noticed that the innovation had received no encouragement whatsoever from Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II, but it took me quite a time to come to appreciate the full force and implications of the archaic and powerful "Binitarianism" of the Roman Canon.

In a very humbly personal way, I see myself as an example of how heterodoxy, as so often, has led to a better understanding of orthodoxy!

As far as concerns the life of the Church, I was suspicious, in my Anglican days, of those who explained to us that 'the Spirit' was calling for the ordination of women to sacerdotal ministries. This has made me, after entry into full communion, equally suspicious of 'Bergoglianism' ... by which I mean, not so much the words and actions of PF himself (although these are not always above criticism) as the expressed views of his associates; who assure us that he is daily guided by the Holy Spirit; that his words may safely be taken as the utterances of the Spirit. My Anglican experiences have left me convinced that references to the Holy Spirit by those who promote innovations can easily be cheap and dishonest short-cuts, very much like those taken by impatient children who move their counters illegally when playing Snakes and Ladders.

I venture to propound a Prudential Principle: If someone keeps talking about the Holy Spirit, keep a critically open mind about his practical agenda.

As well as by the classical Roman Liturgy, I am strengthened by the beautifully laconic words of Vatican I ... so sharply expressed, almost as if those admirable Fathers foreknew Bergoglianism and even PF himself!

"The Holy Spirit was not promised to the Successors of Peter so that by his revelation they could make new doctrines known, but so that by His help, they should devoutly guard and faithfully expound the revelation handed down by the apostles: the Deposit of Faith."