Fr Thurston and the CTS

I have copies of Fr Thurston's old CTS pamphlets about the pre-Pius XII rites for Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday, and very good stuff they are. If anybody has copies of his pamphlets on Tenebrae, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday which they don't want, it would be a kind and cheering Easter prezzy to an aged and decaying priest to pop them into an envelope and send them to me at John Coombe's House/ 28 St Thomas's Street/ Oxford/ OX1 1JL.

A shame nobody is likely to reprint them.

Without a City Wall

Mrs Alexander's hymnographical ditties are easily derided, and they're certainly dated. But her words There is a green hill far away without a City wall remind me of one of the Passion sermons of S Leo the Great (I recommend all them as Passiontide readings) in which he reminds us that the Lord was not sacrificed in the one great place of the covenanted sacrifices ordained by the Father, in his Temple at Jerusalem. As that invariably readable scholar from the Jewish tradition, Jacob Neusner, has reminded us, the 'cleansing of the Temple' can only have had one theological meaning: the supersession of the Torah sacrifices. In S Leo's argument, that Cross on that hill without that city wall is the Ara Mundi, the Altar of the World, of the Cosmos, where the dear Lord was crucified who died to save us all.

Frocks

The Dawker, God bless his little cotton socks, has described the Holy Father as a leering villain in a frock.

This is super stuff and much to be encouraged. Could somebody whisper to him that Osama bin Laden and most of our terrorist supremoes (supremi?) wear frocks? It would be good to elicit from him yet more such beautifully subtle and intellectual rhetoric on frock-wearers. The BBC World Service could then disseminate his wisdom in the relevant areas of the globe, like Afghanistan and the Shind Valley.

What we need, as an addition to the Rainbow Diversity of our culture, is a flourishing Bomb The Dawker movement.

Ex Fide Henrici Fynes Clinton

Look at the admirable blog Ex Fide for pictures and a thumbnail sketch of the Palm Sunday Liturgy as it was before Pius XII's lackey Hannibal Bugnini, as his first experiment in liturgical wrecking, messed Holy Week up. This blog comes from the London church of S Magnus the Martyr, long the lair of the great, aristocratic, archpapalist Fr H J Fynes Clinton. I suppose this blog may have more such pictures as Holy Week continues. Give NLM and Fr Zed a break and spend Holy Week blogwise among the Anglican Catholics.

Haec omnia gratia amici nostri benevoli Rubricarii.

Brunero Gherardini THE ECUMENICAL VATICAN COUNCIL II A MUCH NEEDED DISCUSSION

An important new book on Vatican II has just reached me from a kind brother priest, Fr Taylor - thank you, Father. At last, somebody right at the heart of the Vatican is arguing robustly for the points long made by SSPX. I shall be taking a careful look at it after the Pascha. Publisher: cm.editrice@immacolata.ws

Important is not just the book itself, but the fact that such a debate can happen within the Church. Two or three years ago when the Good Shepherd people in Bordeaux regularised their position with the Holy See, they were told that they didn't need to change any of their views, but simply to carry on the debate within the Church. And more recently Anglicanorum coetibus refrained from imposing upon Ordinariates any baggage beyond the contents of the Catechism.

Happy, open-minded, days! A golden Age for those who long for Unity! A thousand flowers blossoming under an enlightened Pontificate!

Get the book and read it!

Pedants' Corner

A helpful word for any who need it: (Anglicanorum) Coetibus is pronounced, in the Italianate 'Ecclesiastical' pronunciation, Chay-ti-buss. This is because (diphthongised) o+e=e; which 'softens' a c.

If you are Ciceronians or Erasmians or whatever, I suppose you say Koy-ti-buss.

In the old-style English pronunciation of Latin, it would be See-ti-buss.

Not Ko-eet-i-buss or Cho-eet-i-buss. Coetus and Coitus are distinct words, although, entertainingly, they do share a common ancestry.

Anglicanorum Coetibus

An idea occurs to me. Would it not be a useful for our bishops, perhaps after the July General Synod, to set up a 'provisional' Ordinariate Council, not to attempt to force Rome's hand, but to show that they have clergy who mean business and that they are consulting?

Pervert Priests

For nearly three decades I served in the Diocese of Chichester under Bishop Eric Kemp. One of the things that made him so admired among his clergy was the care and love that he showed towards a priest with a problem. The fact that he gave an errant priest - even one whose lapse had been sexual - a second chance, seemed to us, back in the 1980s, the mark of a fine pastor. In that far-off decade, forgiveness and mercy were thought very highly of. In those days, forgiveness and mercy were thought of as characteristics of our blessed Lord himself. In those days, secular critics of the Church very commonly attacked her for being "unforgiving" towards those who had fallen from her standards in sexual matters. In those days, fashionable 'libertarian' organisations defended the right of pedophile groups to campaign for the legalisation of consensual sexual activity between adults and children. In those days, as we worked our way through the progressive decriminalisation of sexual activities, there were those who believed that the process would eventually encompass all sexualities. Indeed, why, on secular principles, should this not be so? In my lifetime, we used to imprison for homosexuality and abortion. Now these activities have been elevated into secular sanctities which it is increasingly dangerous to blaspheme and which are to be inculcated even among the very young at public expense. I would have no difficulty explaining to a pedophile why his predilection contravened given Christian Dogma, and why its expression was therefore an absolute evil which no little game of situational ethics could for the tiniest moment justify. I do not know how I would even begin to persuade him of the rationality of current public morality.

We all know that those who are gunning for the Pope are hypocrites. We know that they are in many cases dirty hypocrites whose own lifestyle is unmarked by any evidence of sexual continence. We know that they are bigoted hypocrites who are only marginally, if at all, interested if a rabbi or a humanist gets 'done' for pedophilia or if an Anglican diocese is bankrupted by the compensation it has paid out to abused Inuit children. There is one organisation that they detest with a loathing curiously like Hitler's dislike of the Jews. There is one man for whose downfall they have an insatiable bloodlust.

Nil novi sub sole. Dante described (Purgatorio XX 86-88) how Christ was again made captive and mocked in the person of His Vicar.

How very, very, appropriate that this malevolent evil should be reaching its climax in Holy Week. Satan has a real sense of liturgy.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Veggio ... nel Vicario suo Cristo esser catto. Veggiolo un'altra volta esser deriso; veggio rinovellar l'aceto e'l fiele ...

St John of England ...who he?

Now here's an intriguing thing. When I visited the parish of St Mary the Virgin, Arlington ... sorry to go on about this, but it really was memorable to see with my own eyes the sort of arrangement which the Ordinatiates could give us ... Fr Hawkins very kindly gave me a few copies of a post-card size reproduction of an ikon of John Henry Newman. It appears to have been 'written' in 1991 (!), by someone called Robert Lentz (Info?????). But at the top the inscription reads Ho Hagios Ioannes ho tes Anglias. And he is sporting a very natty halo. Who had canonised him in 1991?

He is holding a scroll inscribed in English "The voice of the whole Church will in time make itself heard" (quoted from???????).

__________________________________________________________________________________(Albuquerque, Albuquerque New Mexico, www.natural-bridges.com

Today's Collect

The ancient Collect for Lent III, with bold for the padding which Cranmer added to the Latin original:

We beseech thee, almighty God, look upon the hearty desires of thy humble servants: and stretch forth the right hand of thy majesty to be our defence against all our enemies.

Like last Sunday's collect, this comes from the Missal which Pope Hadrian sent to Charlemagne at the emperor's request; whose wish it was to reform the worship of the Empire by replacing the 'boisterous Merovingian Latinity' (Dix's phrase) of the 'Gallican' Rites with the elegant 'urban' Latin of the Papal rite. This was a decisive point in the journey of the Roman Rite from being the local rite of the City to being the common rite of nearly all the West.

It had better be admitted that many of these collects, marked by the disorders of the Roman Empire's last period, have, like the chants of the old rite, an embarassing relevance to our own day. Many of them deploy and link three themes: we are being mightily oppressed by our enemies; we deserve these afflictions; and we perform such duties as prayer and fasting that God may grant us the protection which we do not deserve. A millennium and a half later, our culture, too, has 'enemies' within and without: within, societal collapse and a community which seems often to be in terminal disorder; without, the threat of 'Islamic Extremism'. Do we accept that we (collectively) have deserved these things; do we trust to God alone and offer our prayers and abstinence as humble supplications for deliverance? Yet the old postcommunion prayer asks with almost naive succinctness that we may delivered from reatus (guilt) and pericula (perils) - as if these two go hand in hand, like a horse and carriage.

And it is worth looking at the readings which the preconciliar Missal shares with Cranmer's Prayer Book. Ephesians 5:1ff repeats the blunt message that fornication, covetousness, idolatry are the reasons why the Wrath of God has come upon the children of disobedience. Luke 11:14ff finds the Lord observing that a society which has once possessed the Faith (had its demons cast out) and then lost it is, at risk of having seven times as many demons returning to occupy it; the only solution is follow our Lady in humblest obedience to the word of God.

This is not the sort of way Christians tend to think nowadays; simply to suggest it is to run the risk of being attacked for claiming that God whacked the Twin Towers because the people inside were sinners. But this old Mass Proper sticks its neck out and asks us to confront the possibility that our society is under attack because of the internal dynamic of its own corruption.

Anglicanorum continues ...

Stepping back a bit from the considerations I have discussed in the last two days, I suggest that there are fundamental questions of ecclesiology involved.

Take the idea that the Church does well to be involved in Community affairs, and that this manifests the Incarnation of the Lord whose Body the Church. I don't feel that this is so much wrong as important but decidedly secondary. Surely, it is historically a working-out of the consequences of the Constantinian revolution, when the Church emerged (metaphorically) from the catacombs of persecution and walked straight out into Government favour and the possibility of changing Society for the better. It owes a great deal to conditions in late Antiquity, when ecclesiastical institutions to some degree occupied a partial vacuum left by the collapse of some imperial structures. But it does not form part of core ecclesiology. The Lord, after all, did not go around giving advice on the structures of secular life and how to improve the economy. He talked about the Kingdom and does not appear to have taught a Marxian Kingdom of this world.

I do not much believe in the notion that the Church is the only institution which exists for those who are not members - august though the proponent of the idea may have been - because I do not believe that the Church exists, primarily and in the last resort, to do good deeds in the world. With all due respect to Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, I notice that the New Testament invitations to fraternal benevolence relate primarily to the redeemed society itself ... "do good unto all men but especially to those who are of the household of the Faith". The heart of Christian ethics in the New Testament epistles is the relationship between those who are fellow members of Christ. Read Philemon, in which, notoriously, S Paul does not discuss the institution of Slavery and appears to have no awareness of the Rights of Man, but bases his entire casuistry on the transforming fact that this slave and this owner are both en Christoi.

I admire (and find myself judged by) those great Saints who, down the centuries, have displayed the unbounded love of Christ to men and women far beyond the visible boundaries of His Body. But fundamentally it is the Church which matters; and the purpose of the Church is to be Christ's one Body and to offer in all places from East to West one pure Oblation. It is of the essence that this Body should be one, as Christ is in the Father and the Father in Him.

That is why I feel so strongly the imperative to Unity. In an imperfect world, discipleship can indeed mean starting in the place where we were placed; it can mean joining with others in the discernment of the way ahead; it can mean making prudential judgements about timescales. But I need to be able to give a straight and honest answer to the Lord's question "Are you walking towards the oneness of My Body, or are you walking away from it?"

MORE COETIBUS

I find it very irritating that I don't kow how to get my computer to do those joined-up O+Es.

An argument for staying with Rowan and putting up with the Womenbishops which deserves respectful examination, is the "Incarnational" consideration. Here in England, the life of the Church of England is deeply embedded in the life of the Nation. So the Church can appear as an enfleshed sign of the Presence of Christ. This means that a parish priest has the opportunity to be involved in the secular life of his district in a way that RC and Protestant clergy are not. I remember my (second) curacy days in an inner-London slum parish 1970-1973, and our involvement with organs of the Council, with social and community-work groups, with Tenants' groups, with other pressure groups including the Communist Party (which in the 1970s was active in good works and in building social cohesion and pride). I share the view that people without ecclesial links regarded these relationships as natural because they saw the C of E, however confusedly, as relating to the whole community as no other 'Faith Group' did.

Another aspect of the same sort of thing is what I would call the 'porosity' of the C of E. People - especially if they were baptised (and confirmed) as nominal "C of E" - can just drop in ... out of curiosity ... without feeling that this is somewhere wholly alien. They can thereafter be 'hooked' and gradually take a fuller and fuller part in Church life without engaging with complex questions of liminality: without having to decide (as they would if they became Catholic or Orthodox) whether to buy into a definitive credal commitment with implications in terms of breaches in previous relationships. Until - bingo - there they finally are with the full faith. This is real; and I could think of numerous examples of people who ended up RC through this handy little antechamber of Anglo-Catholicism.

These considerations deserve to be taken seriously. People who experience them strongly are not to be despised or derided. I feel, however, that they are now either already unreal or in the process of becoming unreal.

I think that the acceptability of a particular Christian, lay or clerical, in secular community processes is now very much less likely to be a product of his belonging to the Established Church. In as far as such games are still available and possible, my feeling is that they are likely to depend very much more on the personality, interests, and dynamism of the individual than on a C of E background; so that such roles are likely to be just as available to an Imam, a Methodist, or an Ordinariate Anglican. Even in 1970s Southwark, we were helped by the fact that in swathes of the inner City we were just about the professionals still resident in our areas. There is no reason why the same may not be true of Ordinariate Anglican communities.

Finally, I think we have to face up to the fact that in our decade, and not least since the canny and effective Vincent Nichols replaced a bumbling fool at Westminster, the RC Church has shown itself very considerably more successful in maintaining Christian values, ethics, and culture than the "Established" Church. We have to ask ourselves which ecclesial body in this country really now plays the role of Temple or Bell or ......