... exelthen dogma para Arthourou Leuciscou that nobody henceforth should use the old Roman Pontifical ...
I regard this watery edict as being, in principle, the most perverse of the Decrees which keep blowing off the desks of PF and his Roche. True, for clerics and laics, what they have to perform or endure daily or weekly is bound to seem the most perverse. But ...
But hear me out.
The rites of Ordination are that area of liturgy currently most badly in need of reform. Corrupt? That's far too good a word.
As concerns the Diaconate: the euchology there has kept getting worse since the Council. Paragraphs have got added which express a view fashionable in the Sixties, that a deacon is a sort of minister to the poor, the needy, the disadvantaged. This is nonsence. (Vide a book published in 1990, Diakonia, by John N Collins (OUP)). The Ordination Prayer currently in use urgently needs to be cut back down to what it was before the Improvers got to work and glued onto it all manner of rubbish.
The rites for ordination to the Priesthood have suffered least ...
But the Consecration of Bishops suffered very badly in the actions taken (entirely without Conciliar mandate) subsequent to the Council.
The entire, ancient Roman Prayer of Consecration was ... yes; entirely!! ... thrown out.
It has been replaced by a Prayer which, in the 1960s, was erroneously thought to be by an ancient Roman cleric called Hippolytus. It has survived in use in some Eastern churches, sometimes for the Consecration of a Bishop, sometimes for the Elevation of a Patriarch. It involves the use of a phrase (from the psalms) pneuma hegemonikon ['Spirit of Leadership'] to mean 'Episcopacy'.
Now: if our Holy Mother the Church takes a phrase ABC and solemnly proclaims that it shall mean XYZ, then her authority is sufficient: XYZ is what it will mean. So I don't think there is any doubt about the validity of the Consecrations of our current bishops. This sort of deft verbal conjuring gets them (and us) safely across the nervous boundary between Invalid and Valid.
That's a relief!
But the whole procedure seems to me rather seedy ... not really quite Kosher ... it's the sort of thing at which Maiden Aunts would purse their lips ...
The Bergoglio/Roche view, that the ancient Roman formulae must finally be given a lethal clobbering ... dealt an effective death-blow in the Vatican abattoir ... is precisely the opposite of what is needed.
It is the (now discredited) fashions of the 1960s that we now need to bash around the head. And from which we need finally to move on.
We need a lightly revised version of the pre-Conciliar Pontifical.
Dear Father. Since the cessation of the sixties synod, virtually everything - from The Mass, to prayers, to Sacraments, to Holy Orders, to Religious Orders to the praxis of Prelates -was changed and the Church has collapsed.
ReplyDeleteNow, this does not mean that had those changes not occurred that all would be fine but, Good Lord, enough already pretending Vatican Two was not a rupture with the past and the start of a novel epoch.
One can go to The Holy Seee website and click on the General Audience of General Audience of July 2, 1969 and read the words of Paul Vi (In French and Italian ):
GENERAL AUDIENCE
Wednesday, July 2, 1969
Giving authentic Christianity new references
Dear Sons and Daughters
It is our desire to welcome the great words of the Council, those which define its spirit and which, in their dynamic synthesis, form the mentality of those who, in the Church and outside it, refer to it. One of these words is "newness". It is a simple word, much used, very sympathetic to the men of our time. Put in a religious context, it is wonderfully fruitful; but, misunderstood, this word can become explosive. However, it is a word that was given to us as an order, a program. It was announced to us as a hope, and comes to us from the Holy Scripture: "Behold, says the Lord, I will make things new". It is the prophet Isaiah who speaks in this way. Paul echoes him (2 Cor 5:17) and then Revelation: "Behold, I make all things new" (21:5). And was not Jesus, the teacher, an innovator? "You have heard what was said by the elders... But I tell you" (Mt 5), he repeats in the discourse on the mount. Is not baptism, the beginning of the Christian life, also a regeneration? "We too live in a new life" (Rom 6:4). This is the case in the whole tradition of Christianity, on its way to perfection. It constantly takes up the idea of newness when it speaks of conversion, reform, asceticism, perfection. Christianity is like a tree always in springtime, with new flowers, new fruits; its conception is dynamic, with inexhaustible vitality, in beauty.
Yes. Of course. A Church of instability is what us Catholics require.
See the subtle presentation of how a change of doctrine - which the church has always taught never changes owing to the original deposit of faith - is justified by an appeal to Jesus Himself. Lord have mercy.
Jesus is an innovator and so am I?
And men wonder why Bergoglio has as his model Paul Vi.
I like 'PF and his Roche'. I remember someone in Oxford quipping 'beware the Devil and his Wiles'. But Wiles, whatever his doctrinal muddles (if only he had gone on with his patristic work instead!), was a thoroughly decent man and (as I know from the case of a student of his who was dying form cancer) a model of Christian practice.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI recalled, 'The Church says ABC really means XYZ', you actually wrote, "the Church takes a phrase ABC and solemnly proclaims that it shall mean XYZ, then her authority is sufficient"
This cannot be Fr.
I thought at first that you had fallen into nominalism, but now I fear you have fallen into the error of
Mottramism , (usually expressed as ‘I guess it would raining spiritually’)
That is not to say others are not guilty of it too. In order to [attempt to] get round the amply formal statement of Pacelli that a certain form of words were necessary for the consecration of bishops, I suppose the argument that another, different form of words had the same effect would be that attempt. But I do not follow it.
This was in any case not really either believable, or believed. So, a different argument was floated and really only hinted at; that the Egyptian church order was by a man of Rome and so represented authentic Rome of an earlier era.
They could not say this explicitly , because it would have invited conflict with the perfectly clear Pacelli judgment. It didn’t matter what historical document you said you had dug out, the pope had already ruled and that made valid law. End of issue.
It WOULD matter if an oriental church whose orders were accepted was using the enthronement prayer as if a consecration rite, as you say, "sometimes for the Consecration of a Bishop, sometimes for the Elevation of a Patriarch".
Two things, I think you must name all the churches that have the former practice. And, I fear if Rome has been accepting their orders it has been mistaken in practice and a final judgment would necessarily acknowledge that.
It is an interesting question if Rome ceased to use western rites and simply adopted, say, the Greek one, would it remain valid?
Botte was responsible for editing indeed producing the new rites in ’68 (This was the Church’s Woodstock after all, tho I think he could remember it).
He was ALSO responsible for editing the Syriac edition of the Egyptian church order, which he translated into French in his own journal (I have forgotten the exact title, is it Monde Syrien? I think you already have the details). It contains the two different rites clearly distinct. So Botte was aware which was which.
If the enthronement prayer was ever substituted for the consecration rite in oriental practice it could clearly be seen by scholars to be an error. Weren’t the sixties all about using their scholarship to correct past errors? Or just not in this case? Because it was shorter?
Or was it an attempt to redefine the episcopate as the extended priest, instead of the priest as substitute bishop?
It seems both men had decided, whatever they said, that the Church had no need of the episcopal order and would henceforth be making do on a presbyterian system. If that was so they would have done more honestly by asking the scotch to supply them. I can see no other explanation.
A mutual friend makes the entertaining conclusion that the post-Dutch touch anglicans have a better chance of having valid order than post-68 Rome.
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ReplyDeleteTo conclude:
ReplyDeleteThe changes happened on Montini’s watch. I have noticed people make excuses for him that seem extraordinary. I would conclude the opposite.
So vainglory or altering tradition? I would judge Montini to have been capable of either. You can read his letters to his family. He had a very high opinion of his own abilities, and that self-regard could have tipped over into an apocalyptic self-conceit. He would have been up for the pure Nominalist branch of Mottramism; ‘words mean whatever I say, and I can make them mean anything because pope’. But why would you expend energy on trying to do that? I think this is the old Liberal dodge:
‘we need people to change, (meaning other people), the stuff people have, our common inheritance is stopping them changing, before we take it away and replace it, we have to tell people they don't need it, so that means telling them it doesn’t mean what they thought it meant. That wouldn’t actually be true. That means it’s ok to lie because, as we decided at the start, we really need people to change.’ The first part of that is the fallacy; people do not change their nature to order /because ordered to by fiat. Tho tragically as we have seen, many will alter their behaviour and their speech and habits and that changes perception in time... Perhaps we can see that Bergoglio wants to keep that process of changing perceptions on its sixties trajectory.
We might add,
Why do other people need to change? And the usual answer is, So that we can keep our places unchanged.
Not everyone will agree with my conception of liberalism.