Unwanted Priest The Autobiography of a Latin Mass Exile, Bryan Houghton, published by Angelico Press and with a Preface by Fr Gerard (say-no-more) Deighan, has loads of goodies.
Fr Houghton thought of retiring in 1964, when people started tampering with the Mass. "But I decided against [it]: the 1964 Mass had not touched the Canon--which in theory remained silent and in Latin. It was still possible to say the 1964 Mass with a certain amount of devotion. However, I wrote to the bishop handing in my resignation the day on which the Canon of the Mass was touched. He wrote back a charming letter in which he says: 'Nobody intends to reform the Canon,' and that 'the bishops are there precisely to preserve it.' Poor, dear Bishop! Little did he know what was going to happen." Yet Bishop Leo Parker had attended all four sessions of the Council; if even he failed to realise the plots that were being hatched ...
But Fr Bryan knew ... " ... interesting gossip ... Missions de France ... Innsbruck ... chat ... Karl Rahner ... Jungmann ... Both were most enlightening." ... ... ... ...
Five years later:
"Anyway, the new Mass was to come into force on the first Sunday of Advent, 1969. I wrote immediately to the bishop. Since the Canon had been altered, he had my resignation in my file since 1964. I should retire at midnight between Saturday and Sunday 29th/30th November, 1969."
So Fr Houghton did the logical thing: he drove South. "It would be absurd not to retire to the South. What I wanted was the northern limit of the South. But how can you tell that the South has started? Ah, that's easy: the olive tree. Thus, I drove down the right bank of the Rhone until I saw an olive tree."
There he stopped; there, the very same day, he bought a house!
Somebody should write a thesis about the relationship between Divine Grace and the possession of oodles of Old Money!
Moi, I have little money and even fewer oodles, but I did plant an olive tree in my garden here after we moved in. During summer, I sit always to the south of it, spitting out olive stones all around it.
In those harrowing events, we have another illustration of the historical problem of the 1960s: the English bishops were not bad men. Far from it. But they had no idea what was going on ... and they were deceived by cunning crooks. Deceived themselves, they then deceived their clergy and laity.
That's the sort of way the Enemy achieves his ends. Because, it does work, doesn't it?
Thank you most kindly, Father, for reminding me of this memoir I intended to read, and have now ordered. Fr Houghton's 1979 epistolary satire 'Mitre and Crook' also looks like a prospectively rewarding read. Have you perhaps already penned a review? If not, it might be a subject worthy of your sense of fine irony...seemingly very much akin to Houghton's...
ReplyDeleteTo be fair to Bishop Parker of Northampton, 1964 was before the reformers had really got going. The 1964 changes were an irritant, certainly, but few Catholics were aware of the weirdness of what was going on in Germany, and few of the E&W episcopacy had any sense of the Bugnini horrors in store, (and even Paul VI did not anticipate them). When they came to pass in 1969, I cannot recall a single E&W bishop 'in illo tempore' expressing public unease. Cardinal Heenan's much-quoted public demur about the new Mass as it was presented before the Bishops in Rome (as if on a liturgical catwalk) was that it was too long. The future implications of the multi-choice and ad populum elements in the rubric were imperfectly understood by many clerics.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Bishop Parker's wiki biography says he retired in 1967 (when he would have been 80), so we can only guess how he might have responded in 1969. Fr Houghton must have resigned under Bishop Parker's successor, Bishop Charles Alexander Grant.
Neville Shute in his autobiography noted how certain officers at the Admiralty were exceptionally brave when it came to difficult decisions. In almost every case, it turned out that they had private wealth and could afford to resign in protest at a disastrous decision without bringing ruin on their families. Other officers were as brave as lions and would have risked their lives in a night attack on an enemy battleship. But being asked to risk their careers on a paper decision seemed unfair.
ReplyDeleteI will be ordering Father Houghton's autobiography soon. I highly recommend his "Mitre and Crook," which I read decades ago: most engaging and illuminating. What a fine priest and courageous man he had to have been. May his dear soul rest in the glory of Christ.
ReplyDeleteAll three of his books ( Mitre and Crook , Judith's Marriage and St Edmund: King and Martyr are excellent, though the first is probably the best, because he's not so good at writing naturalistic dialogue, of which there's a lot in Judith's Marriage. He also wrote some superb articles for Christian Order in the days when it was edited by Fr Paul Crane SJ, and before it fell down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory and anti-Semitism.
ReplyDelete