It occurred to me yesterday as I buried my nose in my Breviary that the 'revisers' of the 1960s had, among their favourite little fetiches, a compulsion to eliminate from the Calendar those Saints who were engaged in opposition to Slavery.
S John of Matha founded an order "ad redimendum de potestate Saracenorum captivos". The Master Liturgists of the 1960s left him 'for particular calendars'"quia non agitur de Sancto 'momentum universale revera prae se ferente'".
So out he had to go.
Nice to know that Slavery is ... or was in the 1960s ... not really of world-wide interest.
Not many years ago, I was horrified by the way the Saracens of ISIS treated their Yazidi women captives ... and, indeed, any subject populations.'Vile' and 'disgusting' and 'filthy' would be words infinitely too mild to be adequate.
I think that Christian Saints who fought against the Islamic enslavements, especially of women, deserve to be brought out again into the light of liturgical day.
Time was, when our Brethren of the Third Abrahamic Religion used to go raiding round the South West of England to supply the Slave Markets of the Islamic World. I have, previously, suggested that the last hill in Cornwall, Carn Brae, should have on it a large monument to the victims of this vile 'trade'.
In a period when the Woke are combing Bristol and Oxford for names to ban because of their associations with the Slave Trade, I am at a loss to know why ... as far as I can make out ... they confine their searches to Slavers of Anglo-Saxon racial or cultural provenance. A Carn Brae monument should have large penitential inscriptions in Arabic. Perhaps, neon-illuminated.
Why should our friends and allies in the oil-rich states of the Middle East not wish to share these parts of our cultural memories?
Bravo! One can only fully agree with your suggestion to guild a monument at Carn Brae in memory of the British victims of arab slavetrade, which is perhaps the oldest slavestrade. The arabs captured and sold into slavery millions of christian eastern slavs (mainly ukrainians), as well as Western Europeans of divers nationalities, and were the first to capture and enslave sub-saharan Africans, a fact nowadays deliberately forgotten by Establishment culture-marxists.
ReplyDeleteI don't know when John de Matha and Felix de Valois were added to the Kalendarium but found it of interest yesterday that while the oration of S John makes explicit mention of the Saracens from whom the enslaved were freed that of S Felix (in November) doesn't. I wonder if Saint John's is the only feast still celebrated (said collect remains un-'updated' in the arrangements of Ioannes XXIII) with such an explicit mention?
ReplyDeleteSt Josephine Bakhita …Fortunata…ora pro nobis.
ReplyDelete"In a period when the Woke are combing Bristol and Oxford for names to ban because of their associations with the Slave Trade, I am at a loss to know why ... as far as I can make out ... they confine their searches to Slavers of Anglo-Saxon racial or cultural provenance. "
ReplyDeleteBecause this is not really about Slavery. They probably could actually care less, as demonstrated by the fact they say nothing about Islamic slave trade. It is just another way to denigrate Western Civilization and by association its moral center the Catholic Church.
Well, to be fair, the Norse and the Irish were both pretty heavy into the international slave trade, at one point, as were a good chunk of Slavic tribes that sold members of other Slavic tribes to the Norse.
ReplyDeleteBut it's a good point.
And don't forget that St. Vincent de Sales was briefly enslaved by the Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast.