(1) CARDINAL MUELLER
There is a fine piece by his Eminence in First Things.
It makes me feel a little bit like a schoolboy learning a new language who turns to the key at the back of the book and discovers that he has got an exercise right ...
... because on Tuesday of last week, I suggested that current events in Germany recalled nothing so much as the German Christianity of the 1930s. Mueller explains this point.
It is, I hear you murmur, rather more powerful a point when it is made by an erudite German than it is when made by me!
And I keep suggesting that, following the analyses of S John Henry Newman, we might think of PF as having placed his Magisterium "in Suspense". Mueller devotes his final three paragraphs to saying what it is the duty of the Roman Pontiff to do ... rather as Bishop Philip Egan listed, a couple of weeks ago, which of his duties PF appears to be failing to perform.
Newman's terminology seems to me to get more and more compelling as the only viable orthodox narrative for understanding this pontificate. I suggest that the exact moment when PF put his Magisterium into Suspense was when he decided to refuse to answer the Dubia of the Four Cardinals.
(2) SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM
I can see no reason to get panicky. I imagine PF felt he had to say something to the Italian Bishops, who are not, as we say, One of Us.
My own impression is that the English Bishops, after initial hysterics on the part of poor Cormack, settled down to peaceful coexistence with the Traddy Community. I very much doubt if they will want to disturb comfortable practical arrangements which they have (in many places) set up in their dioceses themselves. In any case, crisis time is not here yet. Probably it never will be. Make yourselves a soothing cocktail. "White Lady" = 25% lemon juice, 25% Cointreau, 50% gin.
(3) De Sublimitatibus usque ad Iocosiora ... Ecclesandbosco is distinctly jolly this week ... Ubi Eccles ibi Ecclesia ...
8 comments:
How very parochial of you Dear Fr. H. In a gesture of solidarity with all the pain on the Continent, may I suggest dispensing with the gin (I know, I know, mother's milk for an Englishman) and replacing it with some Cognac? You'll then have, more or less, a Sidecar to salve the slings and arrows of the day. (This assumes you only drink one cocktail with one hand at one time; if not, then enjoy a Sidecar with your White Lady. Rather ecumenical, that).
I wasn't alarmed until seeing that Arthur Roche is replacing Cardinal Sarah, and reading the article he wrote and circulated. Can one Pope's Motu Proprio be repealed by a successive Pope's MP?
I think you underestimate, dear and reverend Father, the animus (hatred in many cases) of those in power against the traditional Mass and all things traditional. I suspect mollifying Italian modernists has little to do with it. May you be right, however!
Yes, I fear. Par in parem imperium non habet, as the medieval canonists used to say.
Benedict spent much of his time writing (publishing) books and John Paul learning new languages. Paul produced nothing meaningful following 1968's HV. The papacy has been on ice for decades.
I enjoy thinking about the pontificate of PF being in suspense. Obviously the errors and madness would be cleared up in a future pontificate. However, I cannot determine if the consequences of a suspense are purely a theoretical paradigm, or a practical. Is it a merely a scholarly hermeneutic, or does it have consequences requiring action right now (e.g. resistance of some sort, or shunning)?
Did anyone shun Pope Liberius after his "fall?" Pope John XXII was "shunned" - well, refused absolution - by his confessor on his deathbed until he repudiated his views on soul sleep and the beatific vision.
(The case of Pope Honorius does not lend itself quite so easily to such a question, as he died in 638, three years after he compromised himself in his letter to Patriarch Sergius of C'ple by seemingly endorsing Monoenergism and, arguably, Monothelitism - or inspiring Sergius to invent Monothelitism around the time of the pope's death in 638. Pope Honorius's two immediate successors refused to endorse Monothelitism, however, and Honorius himself was condemned as a heretic by the Third Council of C'ple in 680, a condemnation which the pope at the time, St. Leo II, both ratified and promulgated. Leo wrote, "We anathematize the inventors of the new error, that is, Theodore, Bishop of Pharan, Sergius, Pyrrhus ... and also Honorius, who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted.)
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