Hot off the Press ...

I advise you to get it now. It is a book which was 'put to bed' only days before the opening of the current Synod, and is absolutely up to the moment. In a month's time, in a year's, five year's time, it will still be a book you will value, and which not sit unvisited upon your bookshelves. You will find it a valuable resource for understanding what has happened to the Church since the Election of Pope Benedict XVI. But get it now ... don't waste an hour ... because you will find it a mind-widening exposition of where we are at this precise moment and how we got here.

The Great Facade  The Regime of Novelty in the Catholic Church from Vatican II to the Francis Revolution is its title. But don't get it second hand because you might find yourself getting the First Edition. This is the Second Edition. And, if you already have the First Edition, 2002, don't think 'this will do'. Because the Second Edition has an extra 250 pages, a new book, really, in itself. The First Edition was a collaboration between Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E Woods, Jr.. The second edition has six new long chapters by Ferrara; a New Preface by Ferrara; and a new Foreward by the great John Rao (which will be a sufficient recommendation in itself if you very naturally feel that my commendation is insufficiently weighty). The Publisher is the Angelico Press.

I wanted to get this message out to you fast. I will write again about the book in a day-or-two's time. But ... just for now ... the new chapters are The Benedictine Respite; The Rise of Bergoglianism; Year of the Synod; The Gathering Storm; The regime of Novelty Goes Green ... and Red; and Synod II. There is a degree to which the new chapters are a Palinode ... you will remember that Stesichorus became so unpopular after his poem about the adulterous sex-pot Helen eloping to Troy that he wrote a new poem in which Helen, now chaste and modest, never went anywhere near Troy! The First Edition of this book drew to a conclusion with a less than fulsome judgement upon Cardinal Ratzinger (and especially his Dominus Iesus), and a pessimistic analysis of the state of the Church. In his new chapters, Chris Ferrara, like the great S Augustine in his Retractationes, revises his judgements in the light of events since the end of the Pontificate of S John Paul II. 

Ferrara begins his new chapters with a passage from Cardinal Ratzinger himself (in 1998). It is a passage I was not familiar with when I wrote a recent post about how very improper it is when publishers, even the Vatican Press, put out translations' of major papal documents in which the Nos [We] of the Latin originals is translated as "I". "When the Pope speaks, he does not speak in his own name. For ultimately it does not matter what private theories or opinions he has worked out for himself over the course of time, even if they should be of high intellectual calibre. The Pope does not speak as a private scholar, with his personal 'I', as a soloist, so to speak, on the stage of intellectial history. He speaks in another mode, from the 'We' of the faith of the entire Church, and the first person singular must step behind it. ... Thus in many respects it is not an entirely inconsequential thing to replace the 'We' with 'I'". Nice to be reassured that I was right!

From this starting point, Ferrara details the significance of Papa Ratzinger's historically significant interventions: 'Fixing the False Translations'; the declaration in 2007 that the Mass of Ages had never lawfully been abolished; the lifting of the SSPX excommunications; his teaching about the proper hermeneutic to be applied to Vatican II.

I would have added to this list the implied correction of false styles of Ecumenism implicit in Pope Benedict's erection of the Ordinariates; an Ecumenism of Return was thus put back in place; nuanced with an acceptance of those elements which, by the work of the Holy Spirit, separated Christians had held in their separation. This bold move thus revived the methodology employed when the Ukrainians and the Melkites returned to unity with S Peter in, respectively, 1595 and 1724.

To be continued.

A Miracle?

Regular readers will be aware that I quite often go into the Ashmolean Museum, England's oldest public museum and part of this University, to commune with that great Pontiff, Papa Lambertini, Pope Benedict XIV. Upstairs, and right along to the furthest room to the West, there he is just inside the door, carved by a very competent anonymous Baroque sculptor, as one of a set of four busts of eighteenth century popes,

Today, he was silent; and then I noticed a tear, a single tear, rolling down from his right eye.

After a few moments of puzzlement, I decided to take a look at the other three Sovereign Pontiffs. Yes! Each of them was clearly lachrymose.

Whatever can this portentous portent portend?

I shall not enable suggestions which are in more than twelve words.

A splendid occasion, last Saturday, in Westminster Cathedral ...

... to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of the priesthood of Mgr Andrew Wadsworth. Solemn Latin Mass in the Ordinary Form in the Cathedral's 10.30 slot (Fr Andrew had celebrated a High Mass in the Extraordinary Form with his fellow Oratorians in America).

Father Andrew is not only one of the best priests and kindest men I know (he has been very good to Pam and myself), but has played a crucial role in one of the most important parts of the return to orthopraxy which took place in Pope Bendict's pontificate and in the last few years of that of his predecessor: the gift to the Anglophone Latin Church of liturgical texts which are usable without offence to God and skandalon to the plebs sancta Dei.

Also present and concelebrating was the mighty Mgr Bruce Harbert, Fr Andrew's predecessor as boss of ICEL.


Two truly great and learned men, who deserve our eternal gratitude, and not least every time we take part in a vernacular Mass. Ad multos annos, plurimosque annos!

Our Lady of Victories (3)

But Christian materialism - our emphasis on the reality of an Incarnate God and the goodness of his created universe - is not the materialism of secular society. S Joseph was the foster-father of God, not his begetter; the chaste Guardian, not the bedfellow, of the Mother of God. This unambiguously masculine figure, whose calling was continent love, is God's witness against the sexual trophyism and appetite of the culture we live in. Dogmatically, S Joseph's witness is encapsulated in another title of our Lady, Aeiparthenos, Ever-Virgin; a title which features so much more largely in the ancient Conciliar documents and the authentic tradition of both East and West than it does in much modern writing. I think we have lost yet more of our nerve when it comes to talking about virginity and purity. And the result has been that we end up with Bishops being gathered at the expense of the faithful from the four corners of the globe (rhetoric, rhetoric!) to discuss sympathetically, tactfully, and without condemnations ... Adultery, fornication, and sodomy!!

How often, Fathers, do you preach on Chastity? How often, brothers and sisters, do you hear your clergy teaching about Purity? How much time would you guess is being devoted, in the Synod of Bishops, to discussing Sexual Abstinence? How many of the clustered, hungry, journalists in Rome are leaking the explosive words of Bishop X about Purity; the angry 'intervention' of Bishop Y on Virginity? The Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age, has used our own doctrine, the inherent materialism of the Incarnation, to undermine the whole concept of Continence; and what have we ended up with? A society which respects, enhances, and protects Marriage as never before? You know that we haven't. We find ourselves with a culture in which fornication and adultery have become norms, and wedlock is treated as endlessly terminable and repeatable, and Marriage is redefined in terms of fluid Gender. (There's such skilled and calculated cynicism here ... who can fail to believe in a personal Devil?) Only now do we see, five decades after Humanae Vitae, that it is solely in the context of a society which exalts Continence and Virginity that Marriage itself has a chance of surviving.

In 1854, Pope Pius IX issued an dogmatic decree, over the small print of which Latins and Byzantines may make differing judgements. What is indisputable about it is that it did put the adjective Immaculata right at the centre of Western devotional culture. By doing so, it brought the Occident into line with the Orient; taught us timorous Westerners the importance of that great word-bag of alpha-privatives with which Byzantine hymnody had for more than a millennium adorned the Mother of God: amomos, akhrantos, apsilos, aphthartos. Khaire, nymphe anympheute! I put it to you that Mary's perpetual Virginity, an immaculate purity of heart and mind and body, is not so much a title, a mere honorific, as it is a dogma. And not so much even a dogma, as God's conquering and triumphant Truth, which alone can win the victory over the disorders of our culture.

The Immaculate and Ever-Virgin Lady of Victories, born aloft by the sculptors on billowing draperies, her gravity-defying bulgy baroque crown precariously perched upon her head, is the Woman of Triumph whom God is giving to this world, and he is giving her now. She treads down all the serpents of heresy; she crushes all the serpents of vice and corruption with her virgin and immaculate heel. Khaire, kataptosis ton daimonon! Her Immaculate Heart will prevail.

Been there, done that ... Boring.

Again, we hear the profoundly silly suggestion that the Church's current discipline of denying Holy Communion to 'remarried divorcees' could be replaced (of course, only on an individual basis) by a (needless to say) very tough period of penitential discipline, followed by readmission.

We tried out all that sort of daft stuff in the Church of England. My recollection is that when I was  ordained to the Sacred Priesthood in the 1960s, those involved in a 'second marriage' in which one of the partners had already been validly married to somebody else were supposed to be subject to the discipline of being excluded from Holy Communion for six months.

This was a dead letter. Neither bishops nor parochial clergy were prepared to risk the fury ... oops, I mean Hurt ... of those who were supposed to be invited to undergo such discipline.

Believe me, we tried such ideas in the C of E and they simply proved to be a brief preliminary step towards the automatic acceptance of all de facto unions.

Now there is a Church of England in which a 'Catholic' bishop, one of the leaders of the rump of Forward in Faith which stayed in the C of E, who, himself divorced, has 'married' the divorced wife of a priest. And he stays in post, ministering to those who are supposed to have secured such a good deal enabling them to remain in the C of E and to 'flourish' there with full 'Catholic' integrity.

With much help from the old Adversary, the dear old C of E got, decades ago, to exactly the place to which you are trying to lead the Catholic Church. I agree that it is jolly sensible for you to follow the Church of England's example and teaching, if that is where, with the same august help, you are determined to go. 

But you seem to me to be (1) bewilderingly naive in not being aware of the destination you are in fact heading for; (2) unendearingly arrogant in imagining that you are the first people ever to have had these Brilliant New Ideas; and (3) thoroughly obtuse in not spotting who it was that crafted them, and where.

Appeal

A friend wants the Latin Collecta, Super Oblata, and Post Communionem for Blessed John Henry Newman. I've got the Collect, but, curiously, don't seem to be able to find the other two. Could somebody help?

Deus, qui beatum Ioannem Henricum presbyterum lumen benignum tuum sequentem pacem in Ecclesia tua invenire contulisti: concede propitius; ut, eius intercessione et exemplo, ex umbris et imaginibus in plenitudinem veritatis tuae perducamur. Per.

Incidentally, I wonder if somebody can find in the euchology of the Latin Church another example of the construction contulisti + accusative + infinitive (= "didst grant that X should do Y"). It reads oddly to me, but that's probably because I've spent too long staring at it straight in the eye ... I wouldn't have batted an eyelid if the text had read "fecisti".

UPDATE A kind reader has supplied the texts for the Liturgia Horarum, but not the Secret and the Postcommunion for the Mass, which are what my friend needs for Friday morning.

Dodgy and Iffy

"The Synod Fathers also considered the possibility of allowing genocide. Various synod fathers insisted on maintaining the the present discipline, because of ... Others proposed a more individualised approach, permitting genocide in certain situations and with certain well-defined conditions ... The subject needs to be thoroughly examined, bearing in mind the distinction between ... " etc. etc..

Thus Paragraph 122 of the Base Document of the Synod, reproducing Paragraph 52 of the document produced at last year's synod. Except, of course, that for genocide read  admission of remarried divorcees to the Sacraments.

I made the change, not because I regard genocide as being on an ethical level with admitting adulterers to Holy Communion, but to illustrate the rhetorical tricks being employed. We are all interested in rhetoric, aren't we? So here we go.


(1) The order of subjects. Maintaining the present discipline comes first, and is followed by Changing it. This is the trick of the Implied BUT.  First of all, you get out of the way the option which you wish to play down; then you follow it with your own preferred option. "Some board members think that you have worked here for fifty years and deserve to be retained in employment; others suggest a more nuanced approach to the moral obligations the firm has towards you ...". There's no doubt which side the speaker is on. You only have to reverse the order in which the alternatives are spelt out to see my point.

(2) Option 1 is laid out in 35 words; Option 2 in 101 words. Surprise!!! Option 2 is deployed with a (dubiously relevant) quotation from the Catechism; one wonders why no mention was made of the vast Magisterial back-up to Option 1.

(3) "The subject needs to be thoroughly examined ...". This is the trick of suppressing actual mention of who it is that has some view ... the Elision of Agency. It is often done by the use of passive or impersonal ("It is felt that ...") constructions. Just ask yourself: Is this sentence the view of the Committee which drafted the text? Or of the 2014 Synod as a whole? Is it what all the 2014 fathers unanimously agreed? Pull the other one! In fact, it is clearly part of the views of those advocating change. But it is given a lofty dignity by the grammatical structure. Not "We think it needs to be examined"; not "Kasper and his chums think it needs to be examined"; not even "Most fathers think it needs to be examined". Just "It needs to be examined"!

It is surprising what you can get away with if you avoid allowing your grammar to give away who is actually advocating what. Make it sound as if what you're saying is so obvious as to be above contradiction.

 It is has become clear to me, from reading this document and analysing its sleights of hand, that, embedded at the heart of the synodical process, are profoundly corrupt operators who are prepared to use any dodge they can lay their hands on, to pervert and to skew the deliberations of the fathers.

It doesn't suggest to me that they are particularly keen to take the risk of leaving it to the Holy Spirit to guide the Synod, despite all the Holy Father's fine talk about Synods being Protected Spaces for the Spirit.

Footnote: If anybody's interested ... this sort of close analysis of a text to see what games are really being played was a speciality of Dr Eric Mascall, a great Anglican Catholic theologian who had enjoyed a Mathematical education which included formal logic. He used to make mincemeat of the documents of Lambeth Conferences. He is part of the Patrimony which is our contribution to the life of the Universal Church.

Does anybody know...

... the date of the birthday of Prebendary Michael Moreton?

Greek Lesson ... and is there a homosexualist Mafia at the Synod?

I have read a suggestion that the (hitherto unknown) curialist who has decided to grab his moment of glory should have been disciplined for sin rather than for news conferences.

I don't agree. I wouldn't like to think that there were witch-hunts going on in the CDF; and, given my awareness of my own frailties with regard to all Ten Commandments, I strongly believe that Mercy is more important than Discipline. At both the personal and professional levels, everybody who has ever spoken to me about Gerhard Mueller has described him as a kind man and a gentle pastor; I think he has been rather badly treated by his colleague. But I expect the man's own bishop will have carefully explained that to him. Very carefully, I hope.

Proclaiming and publicly defending any sin is worse than committing it. I invite you to read the passage in Romans 1 about homosexual actions, and to dwell particularly on the last verse of the chapter. Using the conventions of Greek rhetoric, S Paul works up to a climax of condemnation; Death (thanatos) is the deserving of those who do (prassontes) such things (toiauta), but-and-also (alla kai) of those who syneudokousin with the doers. 

Greek, like German, enjoys compound verbs, and syneudokein is a double compound. Dokein has, as one of its meanings, to think. Eu- stuck on the front gives it a sense of well, favourably. And the syn- adds the meaning of with. So the verb means to give ones warm approval to the commission of the perversion.

Publicly doing what one can to promote and encourage a perversion is a graver sin than to commit the perversion oneself in private, because one is deliberately drawing others, who may be victims of temptation, into this Death-deserving (S Paul uses the phrase thanatou axioi) sin. Promoting this perversion is thus a cruel attack upon the spiritual well-being of good people who have done their best to control an inclination to do "toiauta". It is, surely, just about the most deeply homophobic act one could commit.

There may, however, just conceivably, be good to come out of this sad episode. I wonder what you think about the following speculation. Is it possible that there is a homosexualist mafia at work within the Synod and/or its secretariate, advocating change in one area (remarriage of the divorced) so that they can use it to piggy-back their own cause (promotion of homosexual perversion)? You see, my own experience is that something very like this did happen in the Church of England: some homosexualist clergy, so it seemed to me, keenly supported the 'ordination' of women because they discerned that such a radical 'rethink' on gender would be a useful springboard for their own sad cause.

But the messy complications arising from the episode of this sad apparatchik and his little friend might make the larger players in any such sinister game (if there is one) wonder if now is quite the tactical moment to Go for the Big Prize.

Ordinariate Festival

Gracious me! How long ago it seems that we met together annually under the title Forward in Faith every autumn in the Emmanuel Centre! Though, mind you, my enthusiasm for that place waned when the Vitello d'oro closed, and then even the little Italian cafe ... and, good heavens, I seem to recall that last time we were there even the Chinese place in the basement round the corner was shuttered. But some things stay the same (even though by gracious permission of the authorities, and under a different name) we've moved the mile or so to Westminster Cathedral Hall ... such as the voices of Fr Crane and Bishop Broadhurst. As Gerry Adams said about the IRA, "They haven't gone away, you know".

What a splendid day our recent festival was! Signs of growth and expansion everywhere (though, frankly, I'd never have guessed that representatives of the Jakarta Group would be there). A fine sermon by Archbishop di Noia (the Annunciation teaches that we cannot just wait until we think that we've got everything ready for the Lord). He brought with him another of our Roman friends, Mgr Stephen Lopes, who is, so to speak, the Ordinariate Desk in the CDF. How nice to see Pontifical Mass in Westminster Cathedral versus apsidem. And to hear some of our favourite Marian hymns. The sun shone upon us.

I was very pleased to hear that, at the Precious Blood in Southwark (which is flourishing) they have Churchwardens. That institution was one of the surviving glories of the English Church before the Reformation.

And ... since we are supposed to be a bridge ... how good to see, walking in procession and sitting in choro, our old friend, John Hind Bishop Emeritus of Chichester, one of the very few Anglican bishops still prepared to speak to us rather than either sneering or just pretending that we don't exist.

(I think it must be very hard for Anglican bishops to be saved).

A rather cheeky hint

An enormously big thank you, ------- ---------,  for The Consolations of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy. It has already transformed me: I now chatter over the dinner table about shiny new Aurality and Literacy, rather than boring old Orality and Literacy. I really am grateful.

Which brings me on to a crude and vulgar hint which I haven't quite liked to make before. I really am grateful when kind people send me books within my parameters of interest; some people have been doing that for some years now, and it has made all the difference to my life (not to mention, to this blog). Some bloggers need funds for food and journeys and life: Pam and I live very modestly and survive on our Old Age Pensions and my Church of England pension; and when people invite me to give addresses or conferences or lectures or retreats or whatever, I do my best always to oblige (and very much enjoy doing so) as long as they can handle my travelling expenses.

But books ... yes, I know I could order them up and go and otch from buttock to buttock on a hard chair in Bodley and solemnly read them; but as I motor through my seventies I seem to feel less like doing things that way. And Bodley seems to take an inordinate time between receiving books and processing them through onto the shelves.

Anybody who wishes to be in touch can simply send a 'comment' to this blog. Those that are clearly personal I delete. But, if you need a reply, I do need your email address.

Feminisation

I was recently looking round an Anglican country church ... which was in the charge of a womanpriest ... and I was struck by the oddity of its arrangements. There were two side chapels. The South chapel was decently set out with a veiled aumbry and a white light (albeit electrical). In the argot of old, we would have used the term 'Moderate High Church'. But the matching altar to the North was arranged for ... prayer. There was a large candle on the step before the Altar, its live flame burning brightly; there were the usual accoutrements for prayer: prayer trees, magical stones; there was an educational display which, among other things, told visitors that the bread and wine of the communion service remind Christians of Jesus.

How revealing; that whoever was responsible for such dispositions had no natural inclination to feel that the place for prayer might just possibly be before the Blessed Sacrament Reserved. Faced with two chapels, she invited people to use for prayer the one which did not contain the Reserved Sacrament (let us not on this occasion get into a discussion about what that aumbry really contained). And the notice board revealed that one was invited to attend "Messy Church", which I suspect does not relate to the French Messe or even to the Italian Messa.

My comments can only be anecdotal and your mere assertion might be enough to falsify them. But my instinct is that the style of liturgical life spreading in the Church of England bears a general relationship to the rapid spread of 'ordained' women. And that it is a style which goes easy on the doctrinal and the objective and puts its money on on the folksy and the feely and the personal.

In a generation they will have transformed the Church of England as surely as the Victorian ritualists, in their very different way, transformed it once before. Thank goodness there is no risk of the same thing happening in the Catholic Church ...