One of the most important perceptions of the document Liturgiam authenticam, by which Rome set a new course in the matter of how Latin liturgical texts should be translated into the vernacular, is the idea that stability in liturgical texts enables people to make an interior appropriation of them so that the texts can then feed their Christian lives. I can illustrate this from my own life. I am nearly 70. I became familiar with the day hours of the Breviary in Latin as a 15-year old. The text I used had the Vulgate psalter in it. Then circumstances found me using a text with the new psalter of Pius XII. Then it became convenient to return to the Vulgate psalter. For the 25th anniversary of my priesthood, I acquired the Second Edition of the Liturgy of the Hours. It contains the psalter of the neo-Vulgate. Three different psalters.
The result of all this is that I can't say any one single psalm (except, for obvious reasons, Judica me and Lavabo), with confidence, by heart. If I try to do so, I find, creeping into my recitation, variants from the other psalters that my memory is cluttered up with. And I get lost. At Benediction, I need to make a conscious act of memory to tell me whether, in the second verse, to sing "laudate"(with the Vulgate) or "praedicate" (with Pius XII) or "collaudate" (with John Paul II). I am sure that hours of learned committee work and gallons of ink led those committeepersons, all doubtless infinitely cleverer than me, to hone and finesse every syllable of their texts to perfection. Sod the b*****s.
I hope that future generations, whether they are using Latin or English, will be spared this problem.
4 February 2011
3 February 2011
Fr Tim ...
... has written a very good piece on Initiation (Hermeneutic of Continuity blog) pointing out that all the modern stuff about witholding sacraments until endless catechesis has been done is rather like the puritanical Jansenism of the 18th century. It is a must-read. Somebody one day will have to write a history of the contribution of the blogosphere to investigating the Tradition and recovering its wholeness and bringing new - yet traditional - awarenesses to the attention of the modern Church.
Tesco zucchetto
Continues a series on Episcopacy
Anglican Diocesan Bishops are, formally, the pastors of the congregation which meets in the building where they have their cathedra. But that congregation will in fact only see them on major occasions and at the main festivals. Otherwise, the congregation will be pastored ... not even by the Dean or Provost, who is himself a grand functionary running a large and expensive piece of heritage ... but by a priest sometimes called a Precentor. However, in the case of diocesans, at least the technical proprieties of episkopos, ekklesia, kathedra, are, on paper, maintained.
With suffragan bishops and 'area bishops', even this fictitious memory, this pretence, is absent. A suffragan bishop does not even formally have a congregation of which he is pastor; nor does he have a building in which you can go and look at a piece of furniture which - even if he never sits in it - is his cathedra. I do not find it easy to think of a more corrupt perversion of Episkope than this. No wonder the Free Churches are (except for some of their aspiring bureaucrats) so resistant to it. Unless one believes that, underneath the prelacy, the pompous dysfunctionality, the unreformed medievalisms, the sheer corruption, we Anglicans still do, in Episcopacy, really possess that Apostolic Ministry with which the Lord wished to endow His Church, only a fool would put up with it all. What it amounts to is episkope conceived purely as management; as our own Patrimonial Dom Gregory Dix put it with his characteristically lapidary accuracy, "the business-man in gaiters" [perhaps this could be translated into RC-speak as "the Tesco Area Boss in a zucchetto"]. For the Modern Church, there are senior managers; there are junior managers; there are the managed; and from time to time we ask the question 'How shall we make this management system work better?'
Why is such a corrupt system not reformable? Let me tell you a story ... or is it a myth?
The First Vatican Council gave expression to the ambitions of a centralising papacy; power, both in terms of government and of teaching, was concentrated in the hands of the Roman Pontiff and his collaborators. This needed to be balanced. In fact, it needed to be balanced by the Ordo Episcoporum. So we had Vatican II, which recovered the truth that bishops are themselves successors of the Apostles and not merely Vicars of the Roman Pontiff. Thank the Lord! So we moved into Broad Sunlit Uplands. The bishops returned from Vatican II, their faces wreathed in broad, sunlit, complacent smiles of self-satisfaction. Propriety ... balance ... embodied in themselves and their own perception of their own corporate importance ... had been restored.
Nowhere, as far as I am aware, did the conciliar documents of Vatican II, while they were busily and cheerfully 'balancing' the papacy, show the least awareness that the current expression of Episcopacy, at least in the Western Church, was itself arguably in need of reform. Nor, in the decades since, has there been any substantial movement for rethinking this episcopal system. In fact, matters have in some respects become worse. The aggrandisement of Episcopal Conferences has brought in its wake - people say - bureaucratic structures of Advisers and Committees, vast enough - so I am told - even to rival the bloated bureaucracies of Anglicanism. The old dream of the Bishop as the Man of, the Father of, his own Church ... what has become of that? Indeed, I can't help feeling that it may have been easier - especially before the advent of modern instantaneous electronic communications - to ignore the diktats of a pleasantly, gloriously, remotely, distant and ineffectual Roman Curia, than it is to be one's own man (or rather, the Man of One's Church) when enmeshed today in the structures of an Episcopal Conference. But, as a mere Anglican, I know I ought not to express views on this.
As far as I can see, not many people have any sort of inkling of any endemic weaknesses in the structures of modern Western Christianity. One man does; the man who shared responsibility for John Paul II's document (1998, Apostolos suos) reminding Episcopal Conferences of their very limited nature and status: and, my goodness, how the pair of them were vilified for that overdue and very necessary reform. Curiously, or perhaps not curiously, it is that same Bavarian gentleman who has legislated that the Ordinariates should, in 'episcopal' vacancies, submit their own ternas directly to the Holy See ... rather than going through the Nuncios.
There is a paradox in all this. Undoubtedly - in my view - Churches should choose their own bishops. But is this the historical moment to effect such a change? Perhaps this Pontiff's aim is gradually to move back to a system of local choice, starting with those ecclesial bodies whom he knows he can most confidently rely on to possess and perpetuate a holistic and orthopractic Church life ... such as Ordinariates.
There can rarely have been a more intellectually exciting time than the pontificate of Benedict XVI. The exhilaration I felt on hearing of his election has in no way abated.
Anglican Diocesan Bishops are, formally, the pastors of the congregation which meets in the building where they have their cathedra. But that congregation will in fact only see them on major occasions and at the main festivals. Otherwise, the congregation will be pastored ... not even by the Dean or Provost, who is himself a grand functionary running a large and expensive piece of heritage ... but by a priest sometimes called a Precentor. However, in the case of diocesans, at least the technical proprieties of episkopos, ekklesia, kathedra, are, on paper, maintained.
With suffragan bishops and 'area bishops', even this fictitious memory, this pretence, is absent. A suffragan bishop does not even formally have a congregation of which he is pastor; nor does he have a building in which you can go and look at a piece of furniture which - even if he never sits in it - is his cathedra. I do not find it easy to think of a more corrupt perversion of Episkope than this. No wonder the Free Churches are (except for some of their aspiring bureaucrats) so resistant to it. Unless one believes that, underneath the prelacy, the pompous dysfunctionality, the unreformed medievalisms, the sheer corruption, we Anglicans still do, in Episcopacy, really possess that Apostolic Ministry with which the Lord wished to endow His Church, only a fool would put up with it all. What it amounts to is episkope conceived purely as management; as our own Patrimonial Dom Gregory Dix put it with his characteristically lapidary accuracy, "the business-man in gaiters" [perhaps this could be translated into RC-speak as "the Tesco Area Boss in a zucchetto"]. For the Modern Church, there are senior managers; there are junior managers; there are the managed; and from time to time we ask the question 'How shall we make this management system work better?'
Why is such a corrupt system not reformable? Let me tell you a story ... or is it a myth?
The First Vatican Council gave expression to the ambitions of a centralising papacy; power, both in terms of government and of teaching, was concentrated in the hands of the Roman Pontiff and his collaborators. This needed to be balanced. In fact, it needed to be balanced by the Ordo Episcoporum. So we had Vatican II, which recovered the truth that bishops are themselves successors of the Apostles and not merely Vicars of the Roman Pontiff. Thank the Lord! So we moved into Broad Sunlit Uplands. The bishops returned from Vatican II, their faces wreathed in broad, sunlit, complacent smiles of self-satisfaction. Propriety ... balance ... embodied in themselves and their own perception of their own corporate importance ... had been restored.
Nowhere, as far as I am aware, did the conciliar documents of Vatican II, while they were busily and cheerfully 'balancing' the papacy, show the least awareness that the current expression of Episcopacy, at least in the Western Church, was itself arguably in need of reform. Nor, in the decades since, has there been any substantial movement for rethinking this episcopal system. In fact, matters have in some respects become worse. The aggrandisement of Episcopal Conferences has brought in its wake - people say - bureaucratic structures of Advisers and Committees, vast enough - so I am told - even to rival the bloated bureaucracies of Anglicanism. The old dream of the Bishop as the Man of, the Father of, his own Church ... what has become of that? Indeed, I can't help feeling that it may have been easier - especially before the advent of modern instantaneous electronic communications - to ignore the diktats of a pleasantly, gloriously, remotely, distant and ineffectual Roman Curia, than it is to be one's own man (or rather, the Man of One's Church) when enmeshed today in the structures of an Episcopal Conference. But, as a mere Anglican, I know I ought not to express views on this.
As far as I can see, not many people have any sort of inkling of any endemic weaknesses in the structures of modern Western Christianity. One man does; the man who shared responsibility for John Paul II's document (1998, Apostolos suos) reminding Episcopal Conferences of their very limited nature and status: and, my goodness, how the pair of them were vilified for that overdue and very necessary reform. Curiously, or perhaps not curiously, it is that same Bavarian gentleman who has legislated that the Ordinariates should, in 'episcopal' vacancies, submit their own ternas directly to the Holy See ... rather than going through the Nuncios.
There is a paradox in all this. Undoubtedly - in my view - Churches should choose their own bishops. But is this the historical moment to effect such a change? Perhaps this Pontiff's aim is gradually to move back to a system of local choice, starting with those ecclesial bodies whom he knows he can most confidently rely on to possess and perpetuate a holistic and orthopractic Church life ... such as Ordinariates.
There can rarely have been a more intellectually exciting time than the pontificate of Benedict XVI. The exhilaration I felt on hearing of his election has in no way abated.
1 February 2011
Fr H is furious yet again
I recently listened on the Steam Wireless to some daft woman who's got an exhibition opening at the Tate. She appeared to me to be incapable of opening her mouth without imparting misinformation. I give the gist of her meanderings as I remember them, with my own bracketed comments in italic.
"I collect Holy Water [since she asserts this about herself, I am inclined to give it some credence; although in view of what follows, you may think I am over-credulous]; you get Holy Wells wherever there is Celtic influence [you get Holy Wells all over the place; and, in any case, the whole idea of the 'Celtic' is regarded as extremely questionable in the eyes of a lot of modern scholarship] which were originally associated with a Mother Goddess before being Christianised [I myself know of no evidence for this popular old fantasy]; for example, at Lourdes you can still buy bottles of Holy Water [where in Lourdes can you do this? I saw not a shred of evidence of it. There are a number of rather ordinary taps where you can help yourself to shrine water free of charge; I picked up a discarded plastic mineral water bottle off the ground, gave it a good wash and rinse under the tap, and filled it with Lourdes water which I brought home and subsequently used for the Asperges on Assumption Day. I never paid anybody so much as a Eurocent for it.]".
How is it that Christians, of all people, are suspected of credulity and superstition? It often seems to me that, in a world of twaddle, we Christians are the only folk around who test facts, attempt to be accurate, and try to apply the canons of elementary logic.
"I collect Holy Water [since she asserts this about herself, I am inclined to give it some credence; although in view of what follows, you may think I am over-credulous]; you get Holy Wells wherever there is Celtic influence [you get Holy Wells all over the place; and, in any case, the whole idea of the 'Celtic' is regarded as extremely questionable in the eyes of a lot of modern scholarship] which were originally associated with a Mother Goddess before being Christianised [I myself know of no evidence for this popular old fantasy]; for example, at Lourdes you can still buy bottles of Holy Water [where in Lourdes can you do this? I saw not a shred of evidence of it. There are a number of rather ordinary taps where you can help yourself to shrine water free of charge; I picked up a discarded plastic mineral water bottle off the ground, gave it a good wash and rinse under the tap, and filled it with Lourdes water which I brought home and subsequently used for the Asperges on Assumption Day. I never paid anybody so much as a Eurocent for it.]".
How is it that Christians, of all people, are suspected of credulity and superstition? It often seems to me that, in a world of twaddle, we Christians are the only folk around who test facts, attempt to be accurate, and try to apply the canons of elementary logic.
31 January 2011
Pastor in valle Adurni ...
... has written, on his blog (the only criticism of which I can make is that his sabbatical prevents him from writing as often as one would wish), a very thought-provoking comment on my piece in re Liverpudlitana (incidentally, while I simply adore the coinage Hepatopolis, offered by a learned correspondent, it is a fact that Vatican documents from the dear old SCR used to latinise the Venice of the North as Liverpudlia). Let me take up and run with one point that Pastor makes: a preference for Bishops administering the Sacrament of Confirmation.
This is very Anglican. In the days when Christianity was an urban phenomenon, a thing of the polis, and pagani were by definition pagans, bishops did perform the unsundered initiatory process of Water-Baptism+Confirmation+First Communion. When Christianity spread into the countryside, this became impracticable and the East responded by keeping the Rite undivided and committing it to presbyters; the West retained the involvement of the Bishop, the par excellence Apostolic Minister, but divided the Rite. Dix used to point out that there were advantages and disadvantages in each choice.
Anglicanism has been the most determined tradition in confining Confirmation to Bishops. In the East, the parish priest regularly chrismates; in the Roman Communion there are many circumstances in which the Sacrament is delegated to presbyters. But in Anglicanism, the absolutist restriction of Confirmation to bishops has led to a deplorable corruption: the multiplication of Bishops as confirming machines who are rewarded for their drudgery by Status and the hope dangled before them of a diocese. That is why we have so many Anglican bishops: for example, in the area of the RC diocese of Plymouth, which, I think, has one bishop, the C of E has two and a half diocesans and four 'suffragans' (which in Anglican terminology means a bishop with delegated jurisdiction who serves a Diocesan). This is driven mainly by the need to have Confirmers. It means, of course, Mitres for the Boys ... well, soon, I suppose, for the Girls as well. I gather that this 'Area Bishop' corruption is becoming increasingly common, too, in Roman Catholicism; that bright young men become Westminster Area Bishops and, having Shown Their Quality, have their names put at the top of the Nuncio's ternas.
I will follow this with an analysis of the corruptions inherent in the modern practice of Episcopacy among Anglicans and Roman Catholics.
This is very Anglican. In the days when Christianity was an urban phenomenon, a thing of the polis, and pagani were by definition pagans, bishops did perform the unsundered initiatory process of Water-Baptism+Confirmation+First Communion. When Christianity spread into the countryside, this became impracticable and the East responded by keeping the Rite undivided and committing it to presbyters; the West retained the involvement of the Bishop, the par excellence Apostolic Minister, but divided the Rite. Dix used to point out that there were advantages and disadvantages in each choice.
Anglicanism has been the most determined tradition in confining Confirmation to Bishops. In the East, the parish priest regularly chrismates; in the Roman Communion there are many circumstances in which the Sacrament is delegated to presbyters. But in Anglicanism, the absolutist restriction of Confirmation to bishops has led to a deplorable corruption: the multiplication of Bishops as confirming machines who are rewarded for their drudgery by Status and the hope dangled before them of a diocese. That is why we have so many Anglican bishops: for example, in the area of the RC diocese of Plymouth, which, I think, has one bishop, the C of E has two and a half diocesans and four 'suffragans' (which in Anglican terminology means a bishop with delegated jurisdiction who serves a Diocesan). This is driven mainly by the need to have Confirmers. It means, of course, Mitres for the Boys ... well, soon, I suppose, for the Girls as well. I gather that this 'Area Bishop' corruption is becoming increasingly common, too, in Roman Catholicism; that bright young men become Westminster Area Bishops and, having Shown Their Quality, have their names put at the top of the Nuncio's ternas.
I will follow this with an analysis of the corruptions inherent in the modern practice of Episcopacy among Anglicans and Roman Catholics.
30 January 2011
S Gregory Palamas
A kind friend has sent me a Kalendar published by one of the Melkite eparchies in North America. It is good to be reminded how similar the instincts of East and West are when it comes to liturgical observances; the West has Vigils and Octaves and the East has Preparations and days stretching out after a festival until they are concluded by a "Leave-taking". The East is happy to crowd several observances on to one day, just as the West has its 'commemorations'. Oops: I should have said that the West used to do all this, because two generations now have had to live with the Carthaginian General's vandalistic abolition of nearly all Vigils, Octaves and Commemorations.
This Melkite Calendar gives one particularly intriguing example of different observances crowded together on one day. In Orthodox Christianity, as my readers will be aware, the Second Sunday in Lent is the Sunday of the great fourteenth century Hesychast Doctor and mystical theologian, S Gregory Palamas ... the last but certainly not the least of the Greek Fathers. Sadly, nit-picking Westerners used to accuse him of heresy because of some of the terminology he used in his exposition of the wonderful mystery of our Deification in Christ. So, after the 1720s, when the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Successor of S Peter, renewed the fulness of his communion with that other Successor of S Peter a bit further West, it was deemed prudent to remove S Gregory from the Melkite Calendar. To fill the vacuum thus created, in 1843 the Patriarch Maximos III Mazloom made that Sunday the Commemoration of the Holy Relics.
In my 2011 Melkite Calendar, I see that S Gregory has returned to the Second Sunday in Lent. Splendid! Since the Patriarch of Antioch is - surely - the second most senior hierarch (after the Pope) of the Catholic world in communion with Rome, this is a tremendously authoritative affirmation, by the magisterium of the Catholic Church, of the sanctity and doctrinal soundness of S Gregory Palamas (and, by the way, in this calendar S Gregory also recovers his festival on November 16). Not that the Holy Relics have done runner. They share this same Sunday with S Gregory: a happy detail because Mazloom was one of the greatest Melkite Patriarchs, who secured the formal status of the Melkites as a Nation within the Ottoman Empire.
But I can't find within this Melkite Calendar poor old S Mark of Ephesus ... on whose festival a very dear friend of mine was chrismated into Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, I regard the reinstatement of S Gregory Palamas, who lived, taught, and was canonised outside formal canonical unity with the Apostolic See of Rome, as a good omen for the beatification, for the Ordinariate, of our Anglican Catholic beati.
This Melkite Calendar gives one particularly intriguing example of different observances crowded together on one day. In Orthodox Christianity, as my readers will be aware, the Second Sunday in Lent is the Sunday of the great fourteenth century Hesychast Doctor and mystical theologian, S Gregory Palamas ... the last but certainly not the least of the Greek Fathers. Sadly, nit-picking Westerners used to accuse him of heresy because of some of the terminology he used in his exposition of the wonderful mystery of our Deification in Christ. So, after the 1720s, when the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Successor of S Peter, renewed the fulness of his communion with that other Successor of S Peter a bit further West, it was deemed prudent to remove S Gregory from the Melkite Calendar. To fill the vacuum thus created, in 1843 the Patriarch Maximos III Mazloom made that Sunday the Commemoration of the Holy Relics.
In my 2011 Melkite Calendar, I see that S Gregory has returned to the Second Sunday in Lent. Splendid! Since the Patriarch of Antioch is - surely - the second most senior hierarch (after the Pope) of the Catholic world in communion with Rome, this is a tremendously authoritative affirmation, by the magisterium of the Catholic Church, of the sanctity and doctrinal soundness of S Gregory Palamas (and, by the way, in this calendar S Gregory also recovers his festival on November 16). Not that the Holy Relics have done runner. They share this same Sunday with S Gregory: a happy detail because Mazloom was one of the greatest Melkite Patriarchs, who secured the formal status of the Melkites as a Nation within the Ottoman Empire.
But I can't find within this Melkite Calendar poor old S Mark of Ephesus ... on whose festival a very dear friend of mine was chrismated into Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, I regard the reinstatement of S Gregory Palamas, who lived, taught, and was canonised outside formal canonical unity with the Apostolic See of Rome, as a good omen for the beatification, for the Ordinariate, of our Anglican Catholic beati.
29 January 2011
Justification
Some time ago, Joshua sought clarification of what I wrote concerning fiducia. Let Dix explain the Proddy dogma:
"[Man] needs nothing more, can do nothing more, than be conscious of feeling that confidence in the merits of Christ's sacrifice. He must cling to that feeling of confidence, for it is all that stands between him and eternal torment. Yet even so, he must always remember that this feeling of confidence cannot really undo the terrible effects of original sin in his soul. The fact that he feels this confidence does not render anything he does or could do in itself pleasing to God. He is not in any way made holy even by 'justifying faith'; otherwise his own actions would aid in his own redemption and sanctification; grace would no more be the absolutely free gift of God, but something man had at least partially merited. He is therefore emphatically not made holy but simply 'accounted holy' by God, for the sake of Christ, whose righteousness is imputed to the believing sinner by God through a sort of fiction. But in himself the redeemed and 'justified' sinner remains an entirely sinful sinner still, and only the consciousness of his own faith in the redeeming merits of Christ stands between him and the damnation his own inescapable sinfulness entails. That is the famous doctrine of 'Justification by faith alone', which in the eyes of all protestants was the very essence of Protestantism."
Dix was vilified for what was called a travesty of the Prod dogma. But when, decades later, the ARCIC document on Justification attempted to explain and bury this old controversy, a critique published by English Evangelicals damned it on the simple grounds that they could not find in it the (for them) essential truth that "Fides est fiducia".
Hell, unless you can sustain within your gut a fervent feeling [fiducia] that Christ's merits have saved you! Scary, isn't it?. In such a preposterous perversion of the Christian faith, the Sacraments can only usefully function as tools to sustain this feeling. There is all the difference in the world between this dogma and our belief that the Eucharist is the objective reality, made present, of the Lord's One Sacrifice, so that we can enter into it, and be transformed by it.
"[Man] needs nothing more, can do nothing more, than be conscious of feeling that confidence in the merits of Christ's sacrifice. He must cling to that feeling of confidence, for it is all that stands between him and eternal torment. Yet even so, he must always remember that this feeling of confidence cannot really undo the terrible effects of original sin in his soul. The fact that he feels this confidence does not render anything he does or could do in itself pleasing to God. He is not in any way made holy even by 'justifying faith'; otherwise his own actions would aid in his own redemption and sanctification; grace would no more be the absolutely free gift of God, but something man had at least partially merited. He is therefore emphatically not made holy but simply 'accounted holy' by God, for the sake of Christ, whose righteousness is imputed to the believing sinner by God through a sort of fiction. But in himself the redeemed and 'justified' sinner remains an entirely sinful sinner still, and only the consciousness of his own faith in the redeeming merits of Christ stands between him and the damnation his own inescapable sinfulness entails. That is the famous doctrine of 'Justification by faith alone', which in the eyes of all protestants was the very essence of Protestantism."
Dix was vilified for what was called a travesty of the Prod dogma. But when, decades later, the ARCIC document on Justification attempted to explain and bury this old controversy, a critique published by English Evangelicals damned it on the simple grounds that they could not find in it the (for them) essential truth that "Fides est fiducia".
Hell, unless you can sustain within your gut a fervent feeling [fiducia] that Christ's merits have saved you! Scary, isn't it?. In such a preposterous perversion of the Christian faith, the Sacraments can only usefully function as tools to sustain this feeling. There is all the difference in the world between this dogma and our belief that the Eucharist is the objective reality, made present, of the Lord's One Sacrifice, so that we can enter into it, and be transformed by it.
28 January 2011
Liverpool Rules OK!
Three cheers for the RC Archbishop of Liverpool, who has decreed that Confirmation should precede First Communion in his diocese. We Anglicans know that this is the right thing to do (however much we sympathise with some of the general principles behind S Pius X's promotion of frequent Communion), and it is good to see a rolling-back of the (really distinctly iffy) common RC practice of deferring Confirmation until after First Communion.
And another cheer for Liverpool; these Sacraments will be conferred on eight-year-olds. There has been a most unfortunate tendency among some in the Roman Catholic Church to follow a deplorable Anglican mistake: of regarding Confirmation as a sort of Christian Bar-Mitzvah, an adolescent Rite of Passage. In my view - I did spend 28 years teaching 13-19 year-olds - nothing is more misguided than mixing up the Sacraments of Initiation in this way with the hormonal problems which thirteen-year-olds are having to face. Moreover, Confirmation is a Sacrament, not a Rite of Passage.
I think this is the time to resurrect a persistent argument of Dom Gregory Dix; that Confirmation is in fact that Baptism in the Spirit of which Biblical and Patristic texts speak. So Confirmation really is terribly important; arguably more important, Dix provocatively urged, than Water Baptism!
Dix's argument has weaknesses; the biggest of which is that liturgical patterns in the early centuries, we now know, were not as uniform as he liked to think; which makes it a little dodgy to try to force every liturgical tradition into the same straight-jacket. But the main reason while Dix was so vilified was that his emphasis on the importance of Confirmation created a very unwelcome obstacle to the pan-Protestant ecumenical schemes then in vogue. It implied that one would have to tell Free-Church people that they lacked something immensely important; or the equally unfortunate alternative of telling them that they were OK after all because they had 'equivalent' rites, such as extending the right-hand of fellowship to adolescents (here again we have a spin-off from the old Anglican error that Confirmation is really about Adolescence).
You don't need to try to persuade me that Byzantium has got things right in its simple, logical, unwillingness to sunder the Sacraments of Initiation at all. I rather tend to think that too. Indeed, I suspect that, more recently than we always assume, Confirmation was conferred upon newly-born Westerners if only their parents were of enough consequence to have a tame bishop right on tap. Isn't this what happened to Elizabeth Tudor? Perhaps the general Western custom of separating Baptism and Confirmation would never have arisen if Christianity had stuck with the old Mediterranean city-bishopric system, in which the bishop was fairly accessible because he was in the nearest market town, rather than acquiring the vast tribal dioceses of Northern Europe*.
But the Instauratio Liverpudlitana is a splendid step in the right direction for Latin Christians. There are elements in S Pius X's 'reforms' which, a century later, can do with reexamination.
Will the Ordinariate be supporting LU or Everton?
____________________________________________________________
*The Thames formed the boundary between Lincoln and Winchester!
And another cheer for Liverpool; these Sacraments will be conferred on eight-year-olds. There has been a most unfortunate tendency among some in the Roman Catholic Church to follow a deplorable Anglican mistake: of regarding Confirmation as a sort of Christian Bar-Mitzvah, an adolescent Rite of Passage. In my view - I did spend 28 years teaching 13-19 year-olds - nothing is more misguided than mixing up the Sacraments of Initiation in this way with the hormonal problems which thirteen-year-olds are having to face. Moreover, Confirmation is a Sacrament, not a Rite of Passage.
I think this is the time to resurrect a persistent argument of Dom Gregory Dix; that Confirmation is in fact that Baptism in the Spirit of which Biblical and Patristic texts speak. So Confirmation really is terribly important; arguably more important, Dix provocatively urged, than Water Baptism!
Dix's argument has weaknesses; the biggest of which is that liturgical patterns in the early centuries, we now know, were not as uniform as he liked to think; which makes it a little dodgy to try to force every liturgical tradition into the same straight-jacket. But the main reason while Dix was so vilified was that his emphasis on the importance of Confirmation created a very unwelcome obstacle to the pan-Protestant ecumenical schemes then in vogue. It implied that one would have to tell Free-Church people that they lacked something immensely important; or the equally unfortunate alternative of telling them that they were OK after all because they had 'equivalent' rites, such as extending the right-hand of fellowship to adolescents (here again we have a spin-off from the old Anglican error that Confirmation is really about Adolescence).
You don't need to try to persuade me that Byzantium has got things right in its simple, logical, unwillingness to sunder the Sacraments of Initiation at all. I rather tend to think that too. Indeed, I suspect that, more recently than we always assume, Confirmation was conferred upon newly-born Westerners if only their parents were of enough consequence to have a tame bishop right on tap. Isn't this what happened to Elizabeth Tudor? Perhaps the general Western custom of separating Baptism and Confirmation would never have arisen if Christianity had stuck with the old Mediterranean city-bishopric system, in which the bishop was fairly accessible because he was in the nearest market town, rather than acquiring the vast tribal dioceses of Northern Europe*.
But the Instauratio Liverpudlitana is a splendid step in the right direction for Latin Christians. There are elements in S Pius X's 'reforms' which, a century later, can do with reexamination.
Will the Ordinariate be supporting LU or Everton?
____________________________________________________________
*The Thames formed the boundary between Lincoln and Winchester!
27 January 2011
Ordinariate, Anglican Patrimony, and theological method
In 1948, Dom Gregory Dix wrote these words in a private (and unpublished) letter:
What are the minimum requirements for [Eucharistic] validity? I suppose: (1) a priest; (2) bread and wine; (3) the Words of Institution. (I personally would reduce this last to any plain indication that the rite now being performed with bread and wine by the priest is intended as a deliberate fulfilment of the command at the Last Supper, touto poieite eis ten anamnesin mou. A repetition of the Words of Institution is the most compendious and unambiguous and best authorised way of doing this.)
Dix was writing about the 1552 Communion Office, not Addai and Mari (the Assyrian Eucharistic Prayer which lacks an Institution Narrative). But I suspect he had AM in mind when adding his bracketed caveat. He more allusively suggests the same conclusion when discussing AM in Shape of the Liturgy. In effect, this is the very conclusion that Rome herself came to (see an earlier post) in its agreement with the Assyrian 'Church of the East', some sixty years after Dix wrote.
I suggest that this represents a theological method which is data-driven and has immense respect for Tradition - so that it finds it extremely repugnant to 'invalidate' a sacramental formulary which has de facto sanctified countless Christian lives for centuries. This method is in marked contrast to a theological method which works from theoretical first principles (to the time-conditioned subjectivity of which it is often blind) to a priori conclusions which may make a nonsense of historical fact. The most disastrous example of this latter method was Eugene IV's Decree for the Armenians. I think there is something rather Anglican Catholic about the data-driven approach; that it might even count as part of our Patrimony.
I suggest further that this cultural/methodological divergence is an example of what Manning had in mind when, writing to Talbot (a dodgy and theory-driven character if ever there was one) he so memorably criticised Blessed John Henry in the words "It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church". I would add to Manning's adjectives another: "historical".
It is Newman, not Manning, who has been beatified; Newman, not Manning, who is Benedict XVI's bed-time reading. Four cheers for the Old Anglican Patristic Literary Historical Oxford Method! I wonder if our Holy Father has copies of Dix?*
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*I am certainly not suggesting that all RC theologians are theory-driven and all Anglican Catholics data-driven (or even that the two methods are exclusive, or that they inevitably reach conflicting conclusions); life certainly isn't as clear-cut as that. As an example of a very data-driven Roman theologian I would offer Benedict XIV (the last Pontiff before Benedict XVI to achieve enormous distinction from his writings as a private theologian); my own excursions into this massively and historically erudite pontiff suggest to me that he also was rather an Oxford-Newman-Dix sort of chap at heart ... the sort of bloke you could easily run into lurking behind a pile of folios in Duke Humphrey ... and that he could do with some resurrecting!
What are the minimum requirements for [Eucharistic] validity? I suppose: (1) a priest; (2) bread and wine; (3) the Words of Institution. (I personally would reduce this last to any plain indication that the rite now being performed with bread and wine by the priest is intended as a deliberate fulfilment of the command at the Last Supper, touto poieite eis ten anamnesin mou. A repetition of the Words of Institution is the most compendious and unambiguous and best authorised way of doing this.)
Dix was writing about the 1552 Communion Office, not Addai and Mari (the Assyrian Eucharistic Prayer which lacks an Institution Narrative). But I suspect he had AM in mind when adding his bracketed caveat. He more allusively suggests the same conclusion when discussing AM in Shape of the Liturgy. In effect, this is the very conclusion that Rome herself came to (see an earlier post) in its agreement with the Assyrian 'Church of the East', some sixty years after Dix wrote.
I suggest that this represents a theological method which is data-driven and has immense respect for Tradition - so that it finds it extremely repugnant to 'invalidate' a sacramental formulary which has de facto sanctified countless Christian lives for centuries. This method is in marked contrast to a theological method which works from theoretical first principles (to the time-conditioned subjectivity of which it is often blind) to a priori conclusions which may make a nonsense of historical fact. The most disastrous example of this latter method was Eugene IV's Decree for the Armenians. I think there is something rather Anglican Catholic about the data-driven approach; that it might even count as part of our Patrimony.
I suggest further that this cultural/methodological divergence is an example of what Manning had in mind when, writing to Talbot (a dodgy and theory-driven character if ever there was one) he so memorably criticised Blessed John Henry in the words "It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church". I would add to Manning's adjectives another: "historical".
It is Newman, not Manning, who has been beatified; Newman, not Manning, who is Benedict XVI's bed-time reading. Four cheers for the Old Anglican Patristic Literary Historical Oxford Method! I wonder if our Holy Father has copies of Dix?*
_____________________________________________________________________
*I am certainly not suggesting that all RC theologians are theory-driven and all Anglican Catholics data-driven (or even that the two methods are exclusive, or that they inevitably reach conflicting conclusions); life certainly isn't as clear-cut as that. As an example of a very data-driven Roman theologian I would offer Benedict XIV (the last Pontiff before Benedict XVI to achieve enormous distinction from his writings as a private theologian); my own excursions into this massively and historically erudite pontiff suggest to me that he also was rather an Oxford-Newman-Dix sort of chap at heart ... the sort of bloke you could easily run into lurking behind a pile of folios in Duke Humphrey ... and that he could do with some resurrecting!
26 January 2011
July 2
Very graciously, the Angelus Press has sent me a review copy of their ORDO for users of the 1961/2 liturgical books. I am very grateful; it is very interesting; and I shall write about it soon. But ...
... upon opening it, I immediately found an erratum slip. As an ORDO compiler myself, I instinctively felt a great tidal wave of sympathy. This is the ultimate, the appalling nightmare. As soon as the print run is finished, one discovers that one has got the date of Easter wrong or inserted the readings for year for Year A rather than Year B, vel sim.. But, when I looked at things more closely, I began to wonder why they feel that their original text is wrong. This is what the slip says:
On July 2nd the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (2nd class) is celebrated. The Feast of the Most Precious Blood will not be celebrated in 2011.
Now I instinctively think I feel that the Visitation should be celebrated that day. It is a much older feast than the Precious Blood. It was probably Urban VI who instituted it to beseech God for Christian Unity. There are Byzanine analogues. Whereas the Precious Blood is distinctly rather more parvenu.
But shouldn't a First Class Feast of Christ trump a Second Class Feast of the Theotokos?
Perhaps a reason lies in the fact that July 2 in 2011 immediately follows the Feast of the Sacred Heart. You could see the logic of suppressing the second celebration. But ... what happened? Did PCED issue a decree .... ???? Do SSPX follow PCED rulings? (Which Good Friday Prayer for the Jews do they use?)
... upon opening it, I immediately found an erratum slip. As an ORDO compiler myself, I instinctively felt a great tidal wave of sympathy. This is the ultimate, the appalling nightmare. As soon as the print run is finished, one discovers that one has got the date of Easter wrong or inserted the readings for year for Year A rather than Year B, vel sim.. But, when I looked at things more closely, I began to wonder why they feel that their original text is wrong. This is what the slip says:
On July 2nd the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (2nd class) is celebrated. The Feast of the Most Precious Blood will not be celebrated in 2011.
Now I instinctively think I feel that the Visitation should be celebrated that day. It is a much older feast than the Precious Blood. It was probably Urban VI who instituted it to beseech God for Christian Unity. There are Byzanine analogues. Whereas the Precious Blood is distinctly rather more parvenu.
But shouldn't a First Class Feast of Christ trump a Second Class Feast of the Theotokos?
Perhaps a reason lies in the fact that July 2 in 2011 immediately follows the Feast of the Sacred Heart. You could see the logic of suppressing the second celebration. But ... what happened? Did PCED issue a decree .... ???? Do SSPX follow PCED rulings? (Which Good Friday Prayer for the Jews do they use?)
25 January 2011
Apollos
Can anybody explain why, in the old and new Vulgates, and in the old and new Latin Office Books in texts for today, Apollos is (nominative) 'Apollo'?
My assumption is that Apollos is a syncopated form of Apollonios; and I find it potentially confusing that it appears in Latin indistinguishable from the name of the Archer of Delos and 'Partner', as we have to say nowadays, of Daphne and various other nymphs.
I spent nearly three decades nagging students to remember the S at the end of of Apollos!
My assumption is that Apollos is a syncopated form of Apollonios; and I find it potentially confusing that it appears in Latin indistinguishable from the name of the Archer of Delos and 'Partner', as we have to say nowadays, of Daphne and various other nymphs.
I spent nearly three decades nagging students to remember the S at the end of of Apollos!
23 January 2011
Apology from me
A regular poster was irritated to find on a recent thread a comment under his name ... which he had not written. In fact he had ... because that Post was a heavily reworked version of something I wrote in early 2008, and still had its 2008 comments attached. I have now cleansed it appropriately. Sorry.
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