Surely, even if the British Post Office does not do so, the Vatican Post Office will issue stamps commemorative of the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum?
I wish to quote just once more from the distinguished Anglican scholar Dr Trevor Jalland in order to ease us a little forward in our study of that admirable document the Syllabus of Errors of B Pius IX, the sesquicentenary of which we joyfully celebrate this year of 2014/5 (see earlier post). The Anglican Tradition (now of course to be found safely incarnate and incardinate within the Roman Unity in the Ordinariates) can often be relied upon to give you a more balanced and nuanced judgement than ... er ... Well, anyway, here goes Jalland, again:
"The syllabus naturally evoked a great deal of interest, though in Catholic circles it was not unmixed with some measure of alarm. For the latter the form of the document was no doubt in some degree itself responsible. Dupanloup, who may be taken as representative of its more moderate critics, published a pamphlet on the encyclical as a whole, in which he called attention to the need of interpreting the language of the several views condemned in the light of their proper context ... the distinction made by Dupanloup in the course of his exposition between thesis and hypothesis, between the ideal and the actual, was later formally endorsed by Pius IX's successor Leo XIII. And even if it is true that Dupanloup was less concerned to say what the encyclical was than what it was not, it is at least noteworthy that Pius himself commended his work."
Jalland had begun his Bampton Lectures with Monsignor Felix Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans. "On the morning of Monday, July 18, 1870, as the early glow of dawn was slowly spreading across the sky of north Italy, an express train which had left Rome at half-past seven o'clock on the previous evening was clanking on its way across the plains of Lombardy". Yes; rather a novelistic style. I doubt whether any previous academic delivering the prestigious Bampton Lectures had ever similarly begun. " ... Dupanloup ... felt in the pocket of his douillette and drew out his Breviary. His companion, Monsignor Louis Haynald, archbishop of the the metropolitan see of Kalocsa in Hungary ... who was occupying the opposite corner of the compartment, leaned forward ..." Yes, of course you want to know what happened next. You have every right to. This is Gripping Stuff. The lectures were published, in 1944, as The Church and the Papacy a historical study. I recommend it [Wikipaedia "Bampton Lectures" PDF under 1942, so I am told].
Dupanloup and Haynald were leaving the First Vatican Council early, before its final vote had taken place. They were among the leaders of the unsuccessful ('inopportunist') minority which had opposed the formal definition of Papal Infallibility and Primacy. As we edge forward in finessing our approach to the Syllabus, you need to know this; you need to have it clear in your mind that Dupanloup was not an Ultramontane; not someone who lived safely trapped in the pocket of Pio Nono's douillette. Certainly not another Manning or Ward.
By the way, do you know whom Dupanloup had wanted to take with him to the Council as his personal peritus? Have a guess .... .... .... yes! Yes! You will go far! You have sound instincts! An Englishman called Newman! Just imagine what Mr Archdeacon emeritus Manning would have had to say about that! How he would have pursed his thin lips every time he noticed Newman and Dupanloup and David Moriarty* with their heads together murmuring behind a pillar in S Peter's, or laughing in a trattoria! Ah, the might-have-beens of History! Clio, what a tease thou art!
After Christmass, we shall return, DV, to the admirable Dupanloup and his 'take' on the Syllabus. And then move on to Blessed John Henry. And conclude with some speculations about the light the writings of Dupanloup and Newman throw on the topical question of the appropriate nuancing, exegesis, and taxonomia of papal utterances in our own time. I bet you can't wait.
________________________________________________________________________
*A close friend of Newman's, Bishop of Kerry; another 'inopportunist', apparently one of only two Council Fathers who never quite found the time to get round to subscribing formally the decrees with regard to the Infallibility and Primacy of the Roman Pontiff. The exquisite (mini-Salisbury) Cathedral (with Close) which he helped to finish in Killarney ... with spectacularly Constabular views of it across the water meadows ... was grossly and disgracefully vandalised in the 1970s by a charismatic, up-to-date and progressive young bishop called Eamon Casey. Its architect was Pugin and J J McCarthy, a Kerryman, had done the interiors. I have myself spoken to venerable ladies who described the endless procession of builders' skips carting off the smashed marble and masonry and plaster, a memory still raw in their minds in the 1990s. And when a Kerrywoman has a raw memory ...
Showing posts with label Syllabus of Errors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syllabus of Errors. Show all posts
20 December 2014
15 December 2014
A MASSIVELY IMPORTANT SESQUICENTENARY: 2014/5
(A slightly abbreviated reprint of a piece I published a year ago.)
Er ... yes ... sesqui ... well, according to my trusty Oxford Latin Dictionary sesqui is a conflation of sems, an earlier form of the word that became in Classical Latin semi(s), meaning half, and the enclitic (meaning you tack it on the end of the next word) -que, meaning and. So sesqui- is a prefix meaning "and a half". So
Sesquicentenary
means 150 years on, a century and a half.
2014/2015 will be the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum of B Pius IX.
On December 8, 1864, B Pius IX issued his Encyclical Quanta cura; and, apparently at his direction, an (anonymous) collection of 80 theses, already condemned by Roman Pontiffs in earlier Magisterial interventions, was published simultaneously. In some circles "the Syllabus of Errors" is regarded as the quintessential epitome of reactionary ecclesiastical obscurantism; you have to say the very words in the same tones of hushed horror as "the Inquisition". But I am sure that a special Commission has been put together in Rome to organise this Year in which the Universal Church will be called upon to celebrate, to study, to reappropriate the teaching handed down on the instructions of Papa il Conte Mastai-Ferreti. This blog will, as ever, merely follow humbly the lead of the Magisterium, or, if that lead is a trifle late coming, will examine as best it can one or two hermeneutical questions arising from this laudable document.
I shall eventually come on to remarks upon the Syllabus from the pen of our own beloved Patrimonial Patron B John Henry Newman. But I would like to begin, again out of pietas, with a quotation from another, later, distinguished Anglican Patristic scholar, Dr Trevor Jalland, a predecessor of mine as pp of S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford (Ecclesia Sancti Thomae iuxta ferriviam, as the common folk call it). It was in his Bampton Lectures before this University in 1942 that Fr Jalland launched a public, academic, campaign of attrition designed to undermine the great edifice of anti-papal bigotry which lurked and still lurks today in the guts of so many million of our fellow-countrymen (good mixed metaphors, yes?). These are Jalland's words about the Syllabus:
" ...what many of its detractors failed to appreciate was that the real object of the Pope's attack was not freedom but licence, not reason but rationalism, not state sovereignty but secularism ... If the more determined critics of the nineteenth-century Papacy could have foreseen the present-day progress of secularism, they might have been more willing to recognise that the Syllabus, in spite of its evident limitations, had as its purpose that characteristic aim of Roman pronouncements, namely, the preservation of a via media amid the conflicting claims of modern society, between absolutism and anarchy, between theocracy and atheism. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in this supposedly reactionary document a few at least of the principles on which a modern enlightened democratic regime is based."
I have no doubt that Dr Jalland is part of that great Anglican Patrimony which our Holy Father the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wished the Ordinariates to bring into the unity of the Church, for the benefit and enlightenment of the entire Church. Audite eum!
Er ... yes ... sesqui ... well, according to my trusty Oxford Latin Dictionary sesqui is a conflation of sems, an earlier form of the word that became in Classical Latin semi(s), meaning half, and the enclitic (meaning you tack it on the end of the next word) -que, meaning and. So sesqui- is a prefix meaning "and a half". So
Sesquicentenary
means 150 years on, a century and a half.
2014/2015 will be the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum of B Pius IX.
On December 8, 1864, B Pius IX issued his Encyclical Quanta cura; and, apparently at his direction, an (anonymous) collection of 80 theses, already condemned by Roman Pontiffs in earlier Magisterial interventions, was published simultaneously. In some circles "the Syllabus of Errors" is regarded as the quintessential epitome of reactionary ecclesiastical obscurantism; you have to say the very words in the same tones of hushed horror as "the Inquisition". But I am sure that a special Commission has been put together in Rome to organise this Year in which the Universal Church will be called upon to celebrate, to study, to reappropriate the teaching handed down on the instructions of Papa il Conte Mastai-Ferreti. This blog will, as ever, merely follow humbly the lead of the Magisterium, or, if that lead is a trifle late coming, will examine as best it can one or two hermeneutical questions arising from this laudable document.
I shall eventually come on to remarks upon the Syllabus from the pen of our own beloved Patrimonial Patron B John Henry Newman. But I would like to begin, again out of pietas, with a quotation from another, later, distinguished Anglican Patristic scholar, Dr Trevor Jalland, a predecessor of mine as pp of S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford (Ecclesia Sancti Thomae iuxta ferriviam, as the common folk call it). It was in his Bampton Lectures before this University in 1942 that Fr Jalland launched a public, academic, campaign of attrition designed to undermine the great edifice of anti-papal bigotry which lurked and still lurks today in the guts of so many million of our fellow-countrymen (good mixed metaphors, yes?). These are Jalland's words about the Syllabus:
" ...what many of its detractors failed to appreciate was that the real object of the Pope's attack was not freedom but licence, not reason but rationalism, not state sovereignty but secularism ... If the more determined critics of the nineteenth-century Papacy could have foreseen the present-day progress of secularism, they might have been more willing to recognise that the Syllabus, in spite of its evident limitations, had as its purpose that characteristic aim of Roman pronouncements, namely, the preservation of a via media amid the conflicting claims of modern society, between absolutism and anarchy, between theocracy and atheism. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in this supposedly reactionary document a few at least of the principles on which a modern enlightened democratic regime is based."
I have no doubt that Dr Jalland is part of that great Anglican Patrimony which our Holy Father the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wished the Ordinariates to bring into the unity of the Church, for the benefit and enlightenment of the entire Church. Audite eum!
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