Rhodanus Eloquentiae Latinae ... the Feast of S Hilary and of All Holy Airport Bishops

 "The Rhone of Latin Eloquence": is that how you would characterise S Hilary of Poitiers? Truth to tell, I am not totally sure that I understand what S Jerome meant when he thus described the great Athanasius of the West. Or when he used another phrase: that S Hilary was the 'Gallic Cothornus'. The Rhone, of course, for the Romans, was the great River of Gaul ... flowing down through a coastline civilised for centuries by Greek colonies, temples, theatres, vineyards; the river of the city of Arles, which was for late Antiquity one of the world's great, primatial, cities. As one looks across from the pons abruptus at Avignon, one is certainly aware of the might of this river. Perhaps there ought to be a special word for the world's really great rivers. Megalopotamoi?

Today is the "real" festival of S Hilary; it was only because they wanted to disentangle him from the Octave Day of the Epiphany that some usages eased him onto the following day.

I think it was in 2013 that PF coined that inspired and wonderful phrase "airport bishop". Keen though the Airport Pope has himself been (like his predecessors from S Paul VI onwards) to swing around the globe like a besequinned and idolised pop-star, PF is dead scared of anybody else getting in on the same act. But S Hilary was ... whatever "an Airport bishop" would have to be in Greek or Latin (any ideas?). 

One powerful Arian crook, the Primate of Arles himself, by insidiis et dolo got S Hilary exiled to Syria. But ... gracious me ... we orthodox don't play by the rules, do we? Just recall how the Ss Eusebii I mentioned in December, and S Athanasius himself, made good use of their government-imposed exiles. S Hilary did exactly the same. He spread the horrors of Catholic Truth wherever he went. The Arian bully-boys hand-in-glove with the government found him most terribly off-message.

This, of course, was an era very much like our own, when, in S John Henry Newman's neat expression, the Church's Teaching Authority was In Suspense. I don't think you'll find much mention of the Roman Bishopric in the old Breviary readings for S Hilary. In a couple of centuries, when you look at the Breviary Readings for S Raymond Burke and S Athanasius Schneider, you may not find many references to PF.

S Hilary is most definitely, and in so very many ways, a Saint For Our Time.

So ... S Hilary was such a nuisance to the Arians in the East that they were soon plotting to get him out of their hair by sending him back to Poitiers! From there, he seems to have converted the whole of Gaul ... all three parts ... from dozy old unreflective Arian-like assumptions to full-blooded and explicit Nicene Christianity, doing it partly (as S Ambrose was to do later) by composing Catholic hymns with sound Christology for his laity to sing. (One of the metres he used was the trochaic tetrameter catalectic, a 'triumphalist' metre, associated with Victory [Pange lingua gloriosi ...] ... S Venantius Fortunatus ... S Thomas Aquinas ...)

Dom Gueranger says that at Poitiers in his own time, the Preface of the Holy Trinity was used on the Feast of S Hilary. Not a bad idea. Unrubrical; but we mustn't be Rigid.

No; "Airport bishops" don't fit into a Bergoglianical agenda, do they ... and rumour had it that Bishop Schneider was addressed strictly about the need to cut down on his travels and to hand his airmiles over to Cardinal Parolin.

When you are a pope and you have an ingenious master-plan, carefully crafted and based on using your office to spread error and immorality thoughout the world (and to suppress the Authentic Use of the Roman Rite and to miserify those who love it), you're not exactly going to be pleased when some German bishop from Kazakhstan starts popping up all over the place with orthodoxy and orthopraxy springing up around him like the fritillaries along Addison's Walk.

Not quite the sort of "Surprise" the Bergoglians thought they had scripted, is it?

Nor precisely the right sort of "Mess".