I do not enable comments which claim, for whatever reason , that PF is not (or might not be) the true Bishop of Rome. I do not wish, on the Day of Judgement, to have to explain my collusion in encouraging souls for whom Christ died to separate themselves from His Body the Church.
For similar reasons, I do not enable comments which say, suggest or imply that the Orders of the post-Conciliar Latin Church are not (or might not be) valid.
There is a funny side to this. Often these idiots discuss how many ... or rather how few ... immensely aged but validly consecrated bishops there are now still left in the Catholic Church. They appear to be unaware of the existence of the sui iuris Oriental Catholic Churches, which still today continue to confer Holy Order in accordance with the rites they have uninteruptedly received from Antiquity and which were regarded as adequate for validity at the Council of Florence, and, after that, whenever a dissident community returned to the Roman Unity. One wonders why these nutty specialists on invalidity don't join Ukrainian or Melkite or Syro-Malabar or Maronite or Coptic or Chaldaean jurisdictions. Or have these also all now suddenly become 'invalid'? What weird parodies of rational argument will these people dream up to invalidate the Orders of the Catholic Orientals?
But I have an additional personal reason for not enabling 'invalidist' comments. Only three or four weeks ago, I published a series "Are they really bishops?" in which I discussed this subject in case such discussion might be helpful to people who had been unsettled by Invalidists. I deployed a lot of facts. On the basis of these facts, I asked lots of questions. I have never received, from these lofty and omniscient individuals, any suggested anwers to any of my questions.
So when people write asserting as unargued fact the invalidity of modern Orders, with not even a passing allusion to my articles, I take it very personally as just shockingly bad manners. So, get lost!
A final warning. If sedevacantists or invalidists treat the Sacraments of the "Post-Conciliar" Church as invalid, they will be be committing sacrilege.
Sacrilege is a very bad idea.
Don't go to Hell.
5 February 2019
4 February 2019
Lust (2)
We live in a world in which sexual disorders are actually inculcated by that Dark Hegemony which saps both the joy and the virtue from authentic human life.
I can only describe my own feelings about what is needed.
Above all, the current Suspense in the Magisterium needs to be brought to an end. The Roman Pontiff, if his job description is to have any reality, must do this. The Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter so that, with His help, they should defend and put forth the Tradition handed down through the Apostles, the Deposit of Faith.
Perhaps we need a Year of Purity, like the Year of Faith, in which the Church's ancient Traditions should be reaffirmed ...
... particularly with regard to Chastity, Celibacy, Marital Fidelity, and Virginity.
An Apostolic Letter could begin by confessing to the World that many of the Church's own ministers, even at the highest levels, had fallen short of their calling.
And that the Roman See itself had allowed the Truth to be concealed beneath ambiguities, especially in the document Amoris laetitia.
The ambiguities of that document could then be resolved. An obvious way of doing this would be to answer the Dubia.
Next, the Magisterial teaching of, for example, Casti Connubii (!930), Sacra Virginitas (1954), Sacerdotii nostri Primordia (1959), Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (1967), and Humanae Vitae (1968) should again be set forth, in all its beauty and dignity.
It would be convenient for such a document to conclude with formal anathemas condemning specific and specified erroneous teachings in the field of Holy Purity. After all, is it not the munus of the Roman See is to act as a remora against innovatory error? Perhaps there should be modifications to Canon Law to ensure that adequate and orthodox teaching is given in seminaries, novitiates, Roman academies, etc..
Would it not then begin to become possible for the Church to move on?
I can only describe my own feelings about what is needed.
Above all, the current Suspense in the Magisterium needs to be brought to an end. The Roman Pontiff, if his job description is to have any reality, must do this. The Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter so that, with His help, they should defend and put forth the Tradition handed down through the Apostles, the Deposit of Faith.
Perhaps we need a Year of Purity, like the Year of Faith, in which the Church's ancient Traditions should be reaffirmed ...
... particularly with regard to Chastity, Celibacy, Marital Fidelity, and Virginity.
An Apostolic Letter could begin by confessing to the World that many of the Church's own ministers, even at the highest levels, had fallen short of their calling.
And that the Roman See itself had allowed the Truth to be concealed beneath ambiguities, especially in the document Amoris laetitia.
The ambiguities of that document could then be resolved. An obvious way of doing this would be to answer the Dubia.
Next, the Magisterial teaching of, for example, Casti Connubii (!930), Sacra Virginitas (1954), Sacerdotii nostri Primordia (1959), Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (1967), and Humanae Vitae (1968) should again be set forth, in all its beauty and dignity.
It would be convenient for such a document to conclude with formal anathemas condemning specific and specified erroneous teachings in the field of Holy Purity. After all, is it not the munus of the Roman See is to act as a remora against innovatory error? Perhaps there should be modifications to Canon Law to ensure that adequate and orthodox teaching is given in seminaries, novitiates, Roman academies, etc..
Would it not then begin to become possible for the Church to move on?
3 February 2019
Lust, Lust, Lust, and Bishops. (1)
PF believes that the crisis in the Church is to do with Clericalism. He will not blame homosexuality.
My belief is that the crisis relates to Lust. And to disordered Lust.
If an abusing priest is homosexually inclined, his problem is Homosexual Lust. If he is heterosexually inclined, his problem is Heterosexual Lust. I fail to see that there is very much practical difference between the two. I fail to see that it is particularly helpful to fling the word 'disordered' about. Does anybody seriously argue that there is any 'right ordering' in the abuse of a young girl just because it may be her vagina that is abused?
I share papa Ratzinger's view that the problem acquired vaster dimensions in that period during the 1960s when crooked individuals among seminary and university teachers were spreading the diabolical gospel that there are no absolute moral prohibitions. The dreadful problem has been shown to have peaked in the period 1965-1985.
I can see only one real difference between, say, 1970, and today. It is this: we know now that paedophilia is, at least usually, incurable. This has not always been quite so obvious, not least when there were psychiatrists who were prepared to guarantee that they had cured an abuser. (I wonder, incidentally, why some of these 'clinicians', who assured bishops that Fr X was OK now, are not being given their rightful share of the job of facing the music.)
So I do have some sympathy for some bishops who, back in the 1970s, gave a second chance to 'cured' paedophiles. Whether that same sympathy is owed to bishops who have operated cover-ups in more recent decades, I am far from sure.
If the hierarchs who meet in Rome next month, representing their respective Conferences, let PF get away with his sick dodge of blaming 'clericalism', rather than facing up to the the problem of LUST, and of profoundly disordered seminary teaching, they will have a lot answer for.
And it is not presbyters who should bear the brunt of criticism. The current crisis is the result of massive mismanagement by that Order in the Church which, with so much self-congratulatrion, used Vatican II to award itself an enhanced status in the Church. The pompous episcopal oligarchy which emerged strengthened from that disastrous gathering is a big part of the problem.
I remember Ratzinger, years ago, complaining that so many bishops, timorously faced with difficult decisions which might make them unpopular back home, kicked the ball to Rome for the CDF to do the hard stuff, and then played Mr Nice Guy on their home turf.
Is it not obvious that the current generation of Bishops is, as a whole and generally speaking, a very busted flush? If this were not true, they would have done something before now about this scandalously disfunctional pontificate.
There is an old Anglican joke about a child watching an episcopal consecration. (In Anglicanism, the coconsecrators all gather around the consecrand and impose hands simultaneously.) The kiddy asked what they were all doing.
"Removing his backbone".
A second part of this will discuss , more constructively, what is to be done.
My belief is that the crisis relates to Lust. And to disordered Lust.
If an abusing priest is homosexually inclined, his problem is Homosexual Lust. If he is heterosexually inclined, his problem is Heterosexual Lust. I fail to see that there is very much practical difference between the two. I fail to see that it is particularly helpful to fling the word 'disordered' about. Does anybody seriously argue that there is any 'right ordering' in the abuse of a young girl just because it may be her vagina that is abused?
I share papa Ratzinger's view that the problem acquired vaster dimensions in that period during the 1960s when crooked individuals among seminary and university teachers were spreading the diabolical gospel that there are no absolute moral prohibitions. The dreadful problem has been shown to have peaked in the period 1965-1985.
I can see only one real difference between, say, 1970, and today. It is this: we know now that paedophilia is, at least usually, incurable. This has not always been quite so obvious, not least when there were psychiatrists who were prepared to guarantee that they had cured an abuser. (I wonder, incidentally, why some of these 'clinicians', who assured bishops that Fr X was OK now, are not being given their rightful share of the job of facing the music.)
So I do have some sympathy for some bishops who, back in the 1970s, gave a second chance to 'cured' paedophiles. Whether that same sympathy is owed to bishops who have operated cover-ups in more recent decades, I am far from sure.
If the hierarchs who meet in Rome next month, representing their respective Conferences, let PF get away with his sick dodge of blaming 'clericalism', rather than facing up to the the problem of LUST, and of profoundly disordered seminary teaching, they will have a lot answer for.
And it is not presbyters who should bear the brunt of criticism. The current crisis is the result of massive mismanagement by that Order in the Church which, with so much self-congratulatrion, used Vatican II to award itself an enhanced status in the Church. The pompous episcopal oligarchy which emerged strengthened from that disastrous gathering is a big part of the problem.
I remember Ratzinger, years ago, complaining that so many bishops, timorously faced with difficult decisions which might make them unpopular back home, kicked the ball to Rome for the CDF to do the hard stuff, and then played Mr Nice Guy on their home turf.
Is it not obvious that the current generation of Bishops is, as a whole and generally speaking, a very busted flush? If this were not true, they would have done something before now about this scandalously disfunctional pontificate.
There is an old Anglican joke about a child watching an episcopal consecration. (In Anglicanism, the coconsecrators all gather around the consecrand and impose hands simultaneously.) The kiddy asked what they were all doing.
"Removing his backbone".
A second part of this will discuss , more constructively, what is to be done.
2 February 2019
Ante torum huius Virginis frequentate nobis dulcia cantica dramatis
Some years ago, Fr Sean (quondam Vallis Adurni notissimus Pastor nunc autem montis cultor) and I were trying to solve our mutual perplexities about this antiphon, which so many of you will have been singing with the last psalm of the first nocturn at Mattins of Candlemas. Here is the gist of what, with the help of some learned contributions on threads, we discovered.
Perhaps the easy bit is ante torum. Torus is a couch or bed, and usually means a marriage bed in the Vulgate. Frequentare did sometimes mean to repeat. No problem.
The odd bit is dramatis. It is very uncommon in Latin and does not occur in the Bible. S Anthony of Padua remarks in passing that drama means a rather active form of music, with gesticulatio and repraesentatio. It does, presumably, come from the Greek drao (I do). It is clear that those who quote this antiphon felt a great need to give their readers some sort of account of the meaning of the word. There is a persistent tendency to link it with the Song of Solomon. S Aldhelm (d.708) refers to that Song as a sponsale drama. A writer who died in 1089 calls it cantica dramatis. A writer of the 1150s says that it is called drama "because it is a love song, which is sung by lovers without personae [named characters]; whence that song is called dramaticum where different characters are introduced but not named". Another medieval writer refers drama to the "change of character, as also in the Song of Solomon". An Assumption Day hymn desires all things earthly, and the stars, "to alternate a song of dramata before the bridal chamber of the Virgin".
I am convinced that this antiphon was already venerable when it entered the Divine Office (I have traced it in liturgical books as far back as about 860), and that it came from an already much older source and thus already had the status of a venerable tradition.
The anonymous undated Pseudo-Ildephonsus (PL 96 coll 239 seqq) makes most use of this anthem. He relates it to Bethlehem and to the Dormition. "We are invited to the cradle of this Infancy, which the angels frequent (frequentant) ... For dramaton, my beloved ladies, is a type of song, in which type the Song of Solomon is said to be written. Lo! we are commanded, so that a more generous chanting may be commended, to repeat (frequentare), in honour of this Virgin, sweet songs in this genre, where [Angels, the star, magi, shepherds, are all busy doing it] ... before whose couch, I ask you again, that at her burial you should sing not dirges (threnos) of sorrow, not lamentations of weeping, but sweet songs to God, for today she has now, rejoicing, arrived at the King's bridal chamber ... where the choirs of Saints alternate wedding songs, where epithalamia of bride and groom are melodiously chanted ... she herself [the Virgin] sings with them [the heavenly host] a new song of drama, which nobody is able to sing except in that choir ... ."
I think the writer is enjoying, wallowing in, the deployment of an exotically alien word. The clerks of the Carolingian renascence rather liked this sort of game. Might that be its cultural background?
Perhaps a drily literal account of it would be:
Before the couch of this Virgin repeat for us sweet songs of alternating characters.
Perhaps the easy bit is ante torum. Torus is a couch or bed, and usually means a marriage bed in the Vulgate. Frequentare did sometimes mean to repeat. No problem.
The odd bit is dramatis. It is very uncommon in Latin and does not occur in the Bible. S Anthony of Padua remarks in passing that drama means a rather active form of music, with gesticulatio and repraesentatio. It does, presumably, come from the Greek drao (I do). It is clear that those who quote this antiphon felt a great need to give their readers some sort of account of the meaning of the word. There is a persistent tendency to link it with the Song of Solomon. S Aldhelm (d.708) refers to that Song as a sponsale drama. A writer who died in 1089 calls it cantica dramatis. A writer of the 1150s says that it is called drama "because it is a love song, which is sung by lovers without personae [named characters]; whence that song is called dramaticum where different characters are introduced but not named". Another medieval writer refers drama to the "change of character, as also in the Song of Solomon". An Assumption Day hymn desires all things earthly, and the stars, "to alternate a song of dramata before the bridal chamber of the Virgin".
I am convinced that this antiphon was already venerable when it entered the Divine Office (I have traced it in liturgical books as far back as about 860), and that it came from an already much older source and thus already had the status of a venerable tradition.
The anonymous undated Pseudo-Ildephonsus (PL 96 coll 239 seqq) makes most use of this anthem. He relates it to Bethlehem and to the Dormition. "We are invited to the cradle of this Infancy, which the angels frequent (frequentant) ... For dramaton, my beloved ladies, is a type of song, in which type the Song of Solomon is said to be written. Lo! we are commanded, so that a more generous chanting may be commended, to repeat (frequentare), in honour of this Virgin, sweet songs in this genre, where [Angels, the star, magi, shepherds, are all busy doing it] ... before whose couch, I ask you again, that at her burial you should sing not dirges (threnos) of sorrow, not lamentations of weeping, but sweet songs to God, for today she has now, rejoicing, arrived at the King's bridal chamber ... where the choirs of Saints alternate wedding songs, where epithalamia of bride and groom are melodiously chanted ... she herself [the Virgin] sings with them [the heavenly host] a new song of drama, which nobody is able to sing except in that choir ... ."
I think the writer is enjoying, wallowing in, the deployment of an exotically alien word. The clerks of the Carolingian renascence rather liked this sort of game. Might that be its cultural background?
Perhaps a drily literal account of it would be:
Before the couch of this Virgin repeat for us sweet songs of alternating characters.
1 February 2019
"Annibale Bugnini ..." by Chiron (2)
Continues ...
The Chiron biography of Bugnini records that, during the pre-Conciliar drafting of the decree Sacrosanctum Concilium, "at no time, it seems, did any participant (member or consultor) ever propose - at least publicly - the addition of other canons to the sole Roman Canon then in use. Some, however, were proposing that changes ought to be introduced into it."
Ha!, I hear you cry. So the rats were already nibbling away ...
True. But how deep were these rodents biting? One of them was a man called Vagaggini, later to be a great advocate of the proliferation of Eucharistic Prayers. What, in 1961, was his daringly radical , earth-shaking, proposal?
"Granting the faculty of introducing one or two local saints among those named in the Canon".
!!!
If only!
Some bold Austrian Jesuit called Hofinger said there ought to be no prohibition against changing something in the Canon. This led to an immediate retort from the most distinguished and learned historian of the Canon, J A Jungmann. His magisterial two-volume History of the Roman Rite is still normative. He was a colleague and former teacher of the Bold Jesuit.
"But those changes ought to occur only for the gravest reasons," he said.
We need to remember (1) how rapidly the entire landscape was to change. Less than a decade after these comparatively restrained scholarly debates, the Roman Canon had to all intents and purposes ceased to be used and some two or three hundred home-made "Eucharistic Prayers" were, to S Paul VI's great consternation, in circulation. And (2), that in 1961, neither the avant-garde, the Hofingers, not the rear-gard, the Lefebvres, had the faintest, remotest, tiniest idea of where we know now it would all lead.
Chiron's biography of Bugnini enables you to go back in time and to be a fly on the wall as the 'experts' ... if you will allow me to mix my metaphors ... edged blindly forward into the quicksands and through the mist.
I shall, from time to time, make more use of Chiron.
The Chiron biography of Bugnini records that, during the pre-Conciliar drafting of the decree Sacrosanctum Concilium, "at no time, it seems, did any participant (member or consultor) ever propose - at least publicly - the addition of other canons to the sole Roman Canon then in use. Some, however, were proposing that changes ought to be introduced into it."
Ha!, I hear you cry. So the rats were already nibbling away ...
True. But how deep were these rodents biting? One of them was a man called Vagaggini, later to be a great advocate of the proliferation of Eucharistic Prayers. What, in 1961, was his daringly radical , earth-shaking, proposal?
"Granting the faculty of introducing one or two local saints among those named in the Canon".
!!!
If only!
Some bold Austrian Jesuit called Hofinger said there ought to be no prohibition against changing something in the Canon. This led to an immediate retort from the most distinguished and learned historian of the Canon, J A Jungmann. His magisterial two-volume History of the Roman Rite is still normative. He was a colleague and former teacher of the Bold Jesuit.
"But those changes ought to occur only for the gravest reasons," he said.
We need to remember (1) how rapidly the entire landscape was to change. Less than a decade after these comparatively restrained scholarly debates, the Roman Canon had to all intents and purposes ceased to be used and some two or three hundred home-made "Eucharistic Prayers" were, to S Paul VI's great consternation, in circulation. And (2), that in 1961, neither the avant-garde, the Hofingers, not the rear-gard, the Lefebvres, had the faintest, remotest, tiniest idea of where we know now it would all lead.
Chiron's biography of Bugnini enables you to go back in time and to be a fly on the wall as the 'experts' ... if you will allow me to mix my metaphors ... edged blindly forward into the quicksands and through the mist.
I shall, from time to time, make more use of Chiron.
31 January 2019
"Annibale Bugnini Reformer of the Liturgy" (1)
Thus, the title of a book by Yves Chiron; published by Angelico Press, 2018.
978-1-62138-
411-3 (Paperback)
412-0 (Cloth)
413-7 (ebook)
It is a translation of Annibale Bugnini (1912-1982): Reformateur de la Liturgie. (2016). The translator has made a few very useful explanations and additions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We all know that Bugnini was a crook ... do we? ... but was he a scheming figure of diabolical and Masonic evil?
I think, having read this book, that he was a crook, but not exactly in the way we have, perhaps, in the past assumed. We have, perhaps, tended to to project what actually happened, liturgically, in the post-Concilar decades back onto Bugnini, and seen him as the villain of the piece. This careful book, well written and well translated, has the great merit of enabling one to see how things were at any given point in that period without the corruption of hindsight. As you turn the pages, you visit a world as it was at the time when it was.
The general theme of the book could be summed up as this: Bugnini was immensely hard-working and a skilled networker, and in large bureaucracies these are the people who leave their marks upon events.
Sometimes people draw our attention to the fact that only four of the Fathers voted against the Conciliar decree Sacrosanctum Concilium. Which is indeed an objective historical fact. But the leap is sometimes made of implying that everything which has happened since was directly and formally mandated by the Council, so that anybody who expresses a criticism is 'anti-Conciliar'. This is a very profound error.
Archbishop Lefebvre signed the Decree. He spent much of his distinguished life resisting the neo-Modernism of the post-Conciliar decades, but in 1965 these were the views he expressed:
"There was something to reform and to rediscover. Clearly, the first part of the Mass, which is intended to instruct the faithful and for them to expresss their faith, needed to reach these ends in a clearer and so to speak more intelligible manner. In my humble opinion, two such reforms seemed useful: first [the reform of?] the rites of that first part and also a few translations into the vernacular.
"The priest coming nearer to the faithful; communicating with them; praying and singing with them and therefore standing in the pulpit; saying the Collect, the Epistle, and the Gospel in their language; the priest singing in the divine traditional melodies the Kyrie, the Gloria, the creed with the faithful: these are so many good reforms that give back to that part of the Mass its true finality."
I will conclude this piece tomorrow.
978-1-62138-
411-3 (Paperback)
412-0 (Cloth)
413-7 (ebook)
It is a translation of Annibale Bugnini (1912-1982): Reformateur de la Liturgie. (2016). The translator has made a few very useful explanations and additions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We all know that Bugnini was a crook ... do we? ... but was he a scheming figure of diabolical and Masonic evil?
I think, having read this book, that he was a crook, but not exactly in the way we have, perhaps, in the past assumed. We have, perhaps, tended to to project what actually happened, liturgically, in the post-Concilar decades back onto Bugnini, and seen him as the villain of the piece. This careful book, well written and well translated, has the great merit of enabling one to see how things were at any given point in that period without the corruption of hindsight. As you turn the pages, you visit a world as it was at the time when it was.
The general theme of the book could be summed up as this: Bugnini was immensely hard-working and a skilled networker, and in large bureaucracies these are the people who leave their marks upon events.
Sometimes people draw our attention to the fact that only four of the Fathers voted against the Conciliar decree Sacrosanctum Concilium. Which is indeed an objective historical fact. But the leap is sometimes made of implying that everything which has happened since was directly and formally mandated by the Council, so that anybody who expresses a criticism is 'anti-Conciliar'. This is a very profound error.
Archbishop Lefebvre signed the Decree. He spent much of his distinguished life resisting the neo-Modernism of the post-Conciliar decades, but in 1965 these were the views he expressed:
"There was something to reform and to rediscover. Clearly, the first part of the Mass, which is intended to instruct the faithful and for them to expresss their faith, needed to reach these ends in a clearer and so to speak more intelligible manner. In my humble opinion, two such reforms seemed useful: first [the reform of?] the rites of that first part and also a few translations into the vernacular.
"The priest coming nearer to the faithful; communicating with them; praying and singing with them and therefore standing in the pulpit; saying the Collect, the Epistle, and the Gospel in their language; the priest singing in the divine traditional melodies the Kyrie, the Gloria, the creed with the faithful: these are so many good reforms that give back to that part of the Mass its true finality."
I will conclude this piece tomorrow.
30 January 2019
Fromthecardinalsdesk
"The Pope is infallible in actu, not in habitu -- in his particular pronouncements ex cathedra, not in his state of illumination, as an Apostle might be."
Post Scriptum: I thank a friend for the information that Blessed John Henry's second miracle has been unanimously approved. Patent ianuae!!
I wonder if we shall hear more about plans for the Canonisation after the CBCEW post-Easter meetiing.
It would be jolly to get some fun this autumn.
Dottore subito ...
Post Scriptum: I thank a friend for the information that Blessed John Henry's second miracle has been unanimously approved. Patent ianuae!!
I wonder if we shall hear more about plans for the Canonisation after the CBCEW post-Easter meetiing.
It would be jolly to get some fun this autumn.
Dottore subito ...
29 January 2019
Just checking ...
I was recently offered a comment which stated that the enumeration of years as BCE and CE (rather than BC and AD) is of Jewish origin. I was not aware of this narrative, and I have comment on hold.. I will return to consideration of it when readers have instructed me, giving references!
Mr Rees Mogg
I haven't bored you with opinions about Brexit, because, being totally illiterate in the field of Economics, I have not deemed my views to be worth anything to anybody. Unlike many of the Brexiteers, I don't have the advantage of having read PPE [Politics, Philosophy, and Economics] at this University!
But perhaps, as a humble Greatsman, I may, without being slaughtered, make a minor observation on a minor detail.
We have in English politics a personable, elegant, and engaging MP called Jacob Rees Mogg. He is also a Catholic with a sizeable family who practises his Faith and defends it in the public forum. He is even said to have a preference for the Old Mass. He is in every way a credit to his admirable Nanny, of whom he is not embarrassed to speak. What's not to like?
Yet, some time ago, he reportedly referred to Brexit as being "as worthy for celebration as victory at Waterloo or the Glorious Revolution".
Waterloo? Fair enough. I'd have no problems agreeeing with a favourable view of that encounter. The Allies of Waterloo represented a culture which did (although imperfectly) preserve ancien regime elements. The defeat of Bonaparte meant the fall of those nasty little statelets which had been invented to replace Old Europe; it meant the suppression for a time of the hegemonic intellectual legacy of the French Revolution. It led to the restoration of old monarchies in France and elsewhere. The Monarch of the Two Sicilies stood in triumph over the wreckage of the Parthenopaean Republic! Te Deum laudamus!!
But the Dutch Invasion of 1688 which put a foreign Dutch Calninist on the thrones of the Three Kingdoms ... how can that be laudable? Which meant the subjugation of the economic and military might of England to the quarrel of Protestant powers with Louis XIV? And meant the exile of a Catholic King, anointed and crowned according to the Roman Pontifical, yet who conscientiously advocated freedom of conscience? Under him, after all, in predominantly non-conformist English towns such as my own family borough of Colchester, Dissenters accepted James II's Toleration, ignored the Test Acts and took over the government of their Borough. The events of 1688-9, reinforced after 1715 under a new foreign dynasty, led to the humiliation, for half a century, of this University. Was it 'glorious' to eject from the Church of England its most learned and Catholic-minded bishops and clergy and laity, the "Non-Jurors"? What about those terrible decades of venal and rapacious Whig oligarchy?
Over the water, for nearly a century the de jure King James III (a nice 'Gallican' touch here) nominated to Roman Pontiffs (who included the great Prospero Lambertini, Benedict XIV) the priests who were appointed Vicars Apostolic in England. But here at home, Catholics had to lie low. Genocide was unleashed upon parts of Scotland.
This all seems to me a pretty rum inheritance for a 'traditionalist Catholic' to identify himself with.
Mr Rees Mogg has thus prodded me strongly in a Remoaner direction. If Brexit truly is, as he asserts, "as worthy of celebration as the Glorious Revolution", then Brexit, logically, obviously, stinks. I ought to be grateful to him for this clarification.
And Mr Rees Mogg did read Modern History at this University, while I am just an ignorant Classicist. So he must know best! And he has such nice manners! Even the rabid "let me tell you about my abortions" women on the Labour back benches seem to be charmed by him.
All the same, deep within me I still seem to hear the voice of Fielding's Squire Western baying through the lush coverts of the English countryside "Whiggery! Dam' Whiggery! Hannover Rats!"
But perhaps, as a humble Greatsman, I may, without being slaughtered, make a minor observation on a minor detail.
We have in English politics a personable, elegant, and engaging MP called Jacob Rees Mogg. He is also a Catholic with a sizeable family who practises his Faith and defends it in the public forum. He is even said to have a preference for the Old Mass. He is in every way a credit to his admirable Nanny, of whom he is not embarrassed to speak. What's not to like?
Yet, some time ago, he reportedly referred to Brexit as being "as worthy for celebration as victory at Waterloo or the Glorious Revolution".
Waterloo? Fair enough. I'd have no problems agreeeing with a favourable view of that encounter. The Allies of Waterloo represented a culture which did (although imperfectly) preserve ancien regime elements. The defeat of Bonaparte meant the fall of those nasty little statelets which had been invented to replace Old Europe; it meant the suppression for a time of the hegemonic intellectual legacy of the French Revolution. It led to the restoration of old monarchies in France and elsewhere. The Monarch of the Two Sicilies stood in triumph over the wreckage of the Parthenopaean Republic! Te Deum laudamus!!
But the Dutch Invasion of 1688 which put a foreign Dutch Calninist on the thrones of the Three Kingdoms ... how can that be laudable? Which meant the subjugation of the economic and military might of England to the quarrel of Protestant powers with Louis XIV? And meant the exile of a Catholic King, anointed and crowned according to the Roman Pontifical, yet who conscientiously advocated freedom of conscience? Under him, after all, in predominantly non-conformist English towns such as my own family borough of Colchester, Dissenters accepted James II's Toleration, ignored the Test Acts and took over the government of their Borough. The events of 1688-9, reinforced after 1715 under a new foreign dynasty, led to the humiliation, for half a century, of this University. Was it 'glorious' to eject from the Church of England its most learned and Catholic-minded bishops and clergy and laity, the "Non-Jurors"? What about those terrible decades of venal and rapacious Whig oligarchy?
Over the water, for nearly a century the de jure King James III (a nice 'Gallican' touch here) nominated to Roman Pontiffs (who included the great Prospero Lambertini, Benedict XIV) the priests who were appointed Vicars Apostolic in England. But here at home, Catholics had to lie low. Genocide was unleashed upon parts of Scotland.
This all seems to me a pretty rum inheritance for a 'traditionalist Catholic' to identify himself with.
Mr Rees Mogg has thus prodded me strongly in a Remoaner direction. If Brexit truly is, as he asserts, "as worthy of celebration as the Glorious Revolution", then Brexit, logically, obviously, stinks. I ought to be grateful to him for this clarification.
And Mr Rees Mogg did read Modern History at this University, while I am just an ignorant Classicist. So he must know best! And he has such nice manners! Even the rabid "let me tell you about my abortions" women on the Labour back benches seem to be charmed by him.
All the same, deep within me I still seem to hear the voice of Fielding's Squire Western baying through the lush coverts of the English countryside "Whiggery! Dam' Whiggery! Hannover Rats!"
27 January 2019
Unknown Bones
I've never been atracted to the idea of the Unknown Warrior, buried in Westminster Abbey. His corpse was deliberately chosen after the First World War so that nobody should ever know who he was, or even from which theatre of war he came. It has seemed to me that this idea (although I understand its motivations) disregards the sacred reality and particularity of every individual human being. The airy subPlatonic notion of a representative unknown and depersonalised soldier, surely, is a lesser concept than the rich truth of whoever the real person buried in the Abbey actually and really was, made by God in all his uniqueness.
I feel rather like this about the recent burial, with Jewish rites, of bones from Auschwitz, in the Jewish cemetery at Bushey in Hertfordshire. The site is apparently destined to become a holocaust memorial.
We have been told very little about these bones. Presumably scientific examination was undertaken which did prove that they were Jewish? How so? Might not the results of the investigations have also shown where they originally came from? Were they members of the same family? - that would give a particular resonance to this sombre event. Popular archaeological programmes on TV create the impression that, given DNA and so many other modern wonders of Natural Philosophy, a very great deal can be discovered from the smallest fragments of human tissue.
I don't want to make a great fuss about this. I certainly do wish the Jewish community well as they honour these members of their race with the respectful burial they were denied in the fearful genocide of Hitlerite Europe. And I am very glad that Vincent Nichols was at the event.
I am just uneasy about the lack of information made public in our media. It is almost as if, as in the case of the Unknown Warrior, the real point of the operation is the elimination of the individuality of those buried.
I feel rather like this about the recent burial, with Jewish rites, of bones from Auschwitz, in the Jewish cemetery at Bushey in Hertfordshire. The site is apparently destined to become a holocaust memorial.
We have been told very little about these bones. Presumably scientific examination was undertaken which did prove that they were Jewish? How so? Might not the results of the investigations have also shown where they originally came from? Were they members of the same family? - that would give a particular resonance to this sombre event. Popular archaeological programmes on TV create the impression that, given DNA and so many other modern wonders of Natural Philosophy, a very great deal can be discovered from the smallest fragments of human tissue.
I don't want to make a great fuss about this. I certainly do wish the Jewish community well as they honour these members of their race with the respectful burial they were denied in the fearful genocide of Hitlerite Europe. And I am very glad that Vincent Nichols was at the event.
I am just uneasy about the lack of information made public in our media. It is almost as if, as in the case of the Unknown Warrior, the real point of the operation is the elimination of the individuality of those buried.
26 January 2019
"Philip"
Recently, the spouse of our Head of State was involved in a minor traffic accident. Neither he nor anybody else was seriously hurt. He is 97 years old.
One of our newspapers ... oops ... perhaps I'd better break off here with terminological explanations.
We used to distinguish between 'broadsheet' newspapers and 'tabloids'. The former were reckoned to be more literate than the latter, and their pages were twice the size. However, The Times adopted the tabloid page-size, which confused the lucid antinomies of yesteryear. I think the more proletariate papers are now called 'red-tops' because it is in that colour that they print their names at the tops of their front pages. I think I have heard that the middle-class papers are are sometimes called 'Quality papers'. But I may have got all this wrong. (What I think people should call the Daly Mail is perhaps better left unexpressed.)
Anyway, back to Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark.
One of the Red Tops had a front page banner headline ordering him to give up driving, and addressing him as "Philip".
I have no particular sentimental rapport with the House of Battenberg. My own historical sympathies incline towards Jacobitism. And thus to the happy cities of Munich and Vaduz.
But the aged gentleman concerned did serve with distinction in the last World War. It seems to me moderately outrageous that some crass journalist or editor, probably some dim, sniggering adolescent, should take the liberty of addressing him with such impertinent familiarity.
I have been similarly outraged in hospitals, hearing silly little bits of junior nurses addressing working class men old enough to be their great grandfathers ... "Come along, Billy, take your pills like a good boy". Men who fought in wars and brought up large families and worked all their lives ...
I was rather glad to see that the Earl of Merioneth promptly acquired a car just like the one he had smashed, and made sure he was seen next day by the journalists, driving it around.
It's the only sort of language these people understand.
One of our newspapers ... oops ... perhaps I'd better break off here with terminological explanations.
We used to distinguish between 'broadsheet' newspapers and 'tabloids'. The former were reckoned to be more literate than the latter, and their pages were twice the size. However, The Times adopted the tabloid page-size, which confused the lucid antinomies of yesteryear. I think the more proletariate papers are now called 'red-tops' because it is in that colour that they print their names at the tops of their front pages. I think I have heard that the middle-class papers are are sometimes called 'Quality papers'. But I may have got all this wrong. (What I think people should call the Daly Mail is perhaps better left unexpressed.)
Anyway, back to Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark.
One of the Red Tops had a front page banner headline ordering him to give up driving, and addressing him as "Philip".
I have no particular sentimental rapport with the House of Battenberg. My own historical sympathies incline towards Jacobitism. And thus to the happy cities of Munich and Vaduz.
But the aged gentleman concerned did serve with distinction in the last World War. It seems to me moderately outrageous that some crass journalist or editor, probably some dim, sniggering adolescent, should take the liberty of addressing him with such impertinent familiarity.
I have been similarly outraged in hospitals, hearing silly little bits of junior nurses addressing working class men old enough to be their great grandfathers ... "Come along, Billy, take your pills like a good boy". Men who fought in wars and brought up large families and worked all their lives ...
I was rather glad to see that the Earl of Merioneth promptly acquired a car just like the one he had smashed, and made sure he was seen next day by the journalists, driving it around.
It's the only sort of language these people understand.
25 January 2019
Double Vision
When Vincent Nichols moved to Westminster, pretty well immediately a major change happened in the Cathedral Sanctuary. The 1970s mobile, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, altar was taken out of use.
I have always given VN credit for this. Few traddies would be prepared to, because Traddidom is much preoccupied with the idea that the priest should be facing in the same direction as the Congregation; and, at Westminster, the original High Altar is far enough forward for Eucharistic Celebrants to get behind it and thus face the People. Which is what they do.
However, this post is not re-entering the old ad Orientem controversies. What I am looking at today is the principle that, in the Sanctuary, there should be one Altar. I believe that liturgists of all schools share this view.
It has a theological rationale. The One Altar bears witness to the fact that there is but the One Sacrifice of the One Lord.
I've recently seen ... I think it might have been in the Eponymous Flower blog ... a picture of a church in Ferrara where, just as used to happen back in the dear dead 1970s, what we have come to call a "coffee table" has recently been intruded between the old (baroque) High Altar; and the People.
Aesthetically, of course, this is perfectly horrible. But it is not aesthesis that I am mainly now discussing. My point is that the unicity of the Eucharistic Sacrificial action is here blurred. And blurred, in my view, diachronically as well as synchronically.
In a double-altared sanctuary, the clear implication is that what is now done at the new "coffee table" is not the same Thing that used to be done at the original, structurally authentic, High Altar. Contrary to Benedict XVI's 'Hermeneutic of Continuity', it is visibly taught by such arrangements that a Rupture has occurred; that something New has been intruded.
It is most deplorable that this sort of theological, liturgical, artistic vandalism is still occurring, half a century after the exhilarating catastrophes of the 1970s.
It is further evidence of the illiteracy Cardinal Mueller has recently referred to among those currently being nominated to episcopacy. (NEVER MISS A MUELLER INTERVIEW. That's an order.)
There are few things more archaic and out-of-date, more clinging-to-the-past, than the fashions of the 1970s Trendy Mafia. Original authenticated surviving proponents of this base culture should be professionally stuffed and mounted and preserved in easily accessible museum collections so that crowds of keen young traddy home-schooled children could be taken along to look at them and have a good laugh.
This needs to be done urgently, while there are still some of the dear old things left unstuffed.
I have always given VN credit for this. Few traddies would be prepared to, because Traddidom is much preoccupied with the idea that the priest should be facing in the same direction as the Congregation; and, at Westminster, the original High Altar is far enough forward for Eucharistic Celebrants to get behind it and thus face the People. Which is what they do.
However, this post is not re-entering the old ad Orientem controversies. What I am looking at today is the principle that, in the Sanctuary, there should be one Altar. I believe that liturgists of all schools share this view.
It has a theological rationale. The One Altar bears witness to the fact that there is but the One Sacrifice of the One Lord.
I've recently seen ... I think it might have been in the Eponymous Flower blog ... a picture of a church in Ferrara where, just as used to happen back in the dear dead 1970s, what we have come to call a "coffee table" has recently been intruded between the old (baroque) High Altar; and the People.
Aesthetically, of course, this is perfectly horrible. But it is not aesthesis that I am mainly now discussing. My point is that the unicity of the Eucharistic Sacrificial action is here blurred. And blurred, in my view, diachronically as well as synchronically.
In a double-altared sanctuary, the clear implication is that what is now done at the new "coffee table" is not the same Thing that used to be done at the original, structurally authentic, High Altar. Contrary to Benedict XVI's 'Hermeneutic of Continuity', it is visibly taught by such arrangements that a Rupture has occurred; that something New has been intruded.
It is most deplorable that this sort of theological, liturgical, artistic vandalism is still occurring, half a century after the exhilarating catastrophes of the 1970s.
It is further evidence of the illiteracy Cardinal Mueller has recently referred to among those currently being nominated to episcopacy. (NEVER MISS A MUELLER INTERVIEW. That's an order.)
There are few things more archaic and out-of-date, more clinging-to-the-past, than the fashions of the 1970s Trendy Mafia. Original authenticated surviving proponents of this base culture should be professionally stuffed and mounted and preserved in easily accessible museum collections so that crowds of keen young traddy home-schooled children could be taken along to look at them and have a good laugh.
This needs to be done urgently, while there are still some of the dear old things left unstuffed.
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