First and Second Rome

Perhaps I'm obtuse, but I can't see what the Holy Father has done wrong in Constantinople. In the Blue Mosque he bowed a silent head; what else would anyone do (though I'd like to know exactly what it was the Grand Mufti was saying, and it would have been jolly if the Pope had then taken the Mufti into a Catholic church and, kneeling with him before the Tabernacle, had said the Trinitarian Gloria Patri).

When he visited Hagia Sophia, the very neat things he wrote in the book there ... the Greek and then the Latin ... seem to me to make perfectly clear that he visited the place qua the consecrated Christian Church of the Most Holy Wisdom. An elegant and clever piece of contextualising and I would feel quite proud if I'd dreamed it up myself.

Then later, they say he asked Patriarch Bartholomew for a blessing; but all I saw was His All-Holiness instead* giving him a friendly kiss on the Zucchetto; and then attempting unsuccessfully to kiss his hand.

The Patriarch appeared to be wearing a cappa magna ... those wretched things get just everywhere, don't they?
_____________________________________________________________________________
*I suspect that not everybody in the Orient would necessarily approve of the Patriarch blessing the Pope ... some of those Athonite monks have strong views ... I wonder if Pope Francis thought of that side of things ...

Mermaids and Benedict XIV

I paid a fleeting visit, the other day, to our late Holy Father Pope Benedict XIV in Ashmole, and we had our usual discussion about the State of the Church. He liked most of the recent comments of his Current Successor about the European Union, except for that ungallant, rather less than gentlemanly, rhetorical trope of criticising Europe ... by comparing her to an infertile grandmother!! "Ineptum infacetum insipiens invenustum" were the kindest of his comments about that. Prospero Lambertini is nothing if not a true gentleman. But then he gave me a useful tip. "Vade ad dexteram spectatum iocalia nuperrime a Michaele Wellby huic Museo benignissime data." To me, a papal nod is as good as a pontifical wink; so I went to look at a selection of some fifty splendid silver and gold pieces in a case in the room to the Pontiff's right. Next year, the entire splendid collection will have a splendid gallery of its own. Michael Wellby has joined that coruscating band of collectors and benefactors who have enriched this fantastic museum (England's oldest), going right back to the gift of the Arundel Marbles.

My eye was caught by a German tankard, circa 1655, Augsburg, ivory with silver-gilt fittings. It is spectacular (oh dear ... there I go again ... I'm sorry to be encumbering the ground with so many superlatives ... but go and get an eyeful yourself, and, believe me, you'll utter nothing but hyperbole for a fortnight). The carver has represented a marine scene, as such scenes used to be in happier days when fabulous creatures were a little less shy about displaying themselves. Merhorses, monsters, Tritons (you remember that even that old bore and spoilsport Wordsworth retained a furtive, ashamed affection for this sort of thing) and ... mermaids. One mermaid, with well-carved gluteal features, has two scaly tails wriggling beneath her in the sea.

It got me thinking. Most of the mermaids, nice girls, whom I have known personally in the past ... in Zennor Church on a bench end ... in Exeter Cathedral on a boss ... on misericords here and there ... have had but one single tail (and they seem always to be holding some sort of object in front of them just like modern girls endlessly taking Selfies). I rather wondered whether this meant that there are different species within the genus ichthyoparthenos, ... Anglica (gothic) and Germanica (baroque), perhaps? Catholic and Lutheran mermaids? Or had mermaids, under the tuition of Mr Darwin and perhaps assisted by Dr Dawkins, significantly evolved between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries? Would this possibility represent a significant blow to Creationism?

I returned to the Holy Father, and put all those questions to him. "Habes doctos in tuo blogo lectores et praesertim avias doctissimas quarum nonnullae totam hanc rem in lucem palam adducent", was his rather buck-passing reply. So here I am passing the same buck on to you ... with an invitation to supply answers to the questions in the last paragraph; open, despite Pope Francis' rhetoric, to both 'fertile' and 'infertile' readers of any age. Answers in either English or Latin. (And what, incidentally, would be the Latin for a 'Selfie'?)

When did the "Vatican II" liturgical 'reforms' really begin?

Please allow me to commend a small but very important liturgical book. (I do not benefit from its sales!)

But firstly, three preliminaries.

(1) Some people think that the current Novus Ordo liturgical books are prescribed by Vatican II.

(2) Better informed people know that this is in many respects untrue. Many of the changes 'after the Council' were not in any way ordered by the Council. Some, indeed, went against what was ordered in the Conciliar Decree Sancrosanctum Concilium.

(3) But here is something which only the really mega-informed people know. The process of liturgical 'reform' began before the Council; indeed, before the Pontificate of B Paul VI. The Begetter of the 'reform' was in fact Pius XII. It was he who began the long employment of Annibale Bugnini; it was Pius XII who imposed some of the most deeply radical discontinuities in the Roman Rite.

The book I wish to commend today is an ORDO ... a small calendar giving the basic liturgical directions for each day in 2015 ... published by

The Saint Lawrence Press Ltd.
59, Sandscroft Avenue
Broadway
Worcestershire
WR 12 7EJ
United Kingdom

http://www.ordorecitandi.org.uk
ordorecitandi@gmail.com

This little book will show you day by day a wonderland in which festivals have octaves and vigils; even humble festivals have a First Vespers in accordance with  a Tradition which goes back even behind the New Covenant to the Judaic system; commemorations enable you to remember festivals which are partly obscured by other observances; the Last Gospel is sometimes changed to enable a different Gospel to be read; Newman's favourite Canticle Quicumque vult (the 'Athanasian Creed') is said; et cetera and kai ta loipa*.

What you will get a glimpse of is the Roman Rite as it was in 1939, before the Pius XII changes got under way. Not many, of course, will feel able to observe this calendar in their Mass and Office. But you will understand the 'reformed' rites of 1962 and 1970 so very much better by seeing what they replaced. Rather like understanding a diverse landscape all the better by having the geological knowledge of what's underground so as to understand why the visible contours and strata are the way they are. You will see, give or take some details, the skeleton and structure of the daily prayer of B John Henry Newman, Bishop Challoner, the English Martyrs, all the Saints (and sinners and common ordinary Christians) of the Western Church in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, centuries. You will get some surprises!

Go for it!!
_____________________________________________________________________________
*One thing I, personally, particularly love is a trio of now-lost feasts in early summer, at the start of May. The Invention (discovery) of the Holy Cross (an immensely beautiful feast celebrating the Cross suffused, as it were, with the glorious light of the Resurrection); S John at the Latin Gate (kept in the Ordinariate Calendar because it is the happy day of the first secret meeting when the really serious plotting for the Ordinariate began); and the Apparition of S Michael (I will not insult you by explaining why the Anglican Diocese of Truro [Cornwall] still keeps this most attractive feast). Then, at the start of August, is Lammas Day ... or Lughnasa if you insist ...

Google it, Hunwicke it.

A reader offered recently a comment which suggested that he did not know the general outlines of the Ordinariate Mass (which has not been formally published, perhaps because there are thoughts of tidying up a few rubrical details).

I remind readers of the Search Mechanism attached to this blog. Many things can be discovered from this ... within the general limits of what I'm interested in ...

I was dealing with the Ordinariate rite fairly recently: one example ... 29 September.

" ... but what we REALLY mean ..."

On Sunday morning last, I happened to hear the start of the Sunday Worship on the Home Service. It was from the Chapel Royal at S James's Palace. The officiant introduced the service by saying that it was according to to the Book of Common Prayer which, he said, they always use there; and today, he said, was the Feast of Christ the King. (Readers without Anglican Previous need to know that the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England does not include that festival, either in October or in November.)

"What on earth", I thought, "does he mean?" Then my mind went back ... to curious things I recalled from my Anglican days. Celebrating Dr Cranmer's Eucharistic Order and inviting the good people to make their humble confession to Almighty God, "meekly Kneeling upon your Knees" in the sure and certain knowledge that they would totally ignore the peremptorily tautological assonance. Once, when we had a Bishop pontificating at Lancing, and it was deemed convenient to place the Blessed Sacrament Reserved upon the High Altar before Mass (the Tabernacle was down in the crypt at that time, a good five minutes' walk away), he gave the instruction "We shall not genuflect, because morally It is not there". A Miraculous Adverb! A Supra-Divine Adverb, in fact, because even God does not claim to be able to make "X" mean "Non-X". On another occasion, before the Carol Service (which needed to happen before Christmas so that the students and their parents could attend), a new chaplain announced that we would vest the altar in white and wear white copes (previously, we had used purple and called the event an Advent Carol Service) because "Spiritually, it's already Christmas". Of course what he really meant was ... ... YES!! That's exactly it!!! As an Anglican, you spend a lot of your time explaining "what he really meant". Fr Lombardi, I am sure, is a crypto-Anglican. Perhaps all Jesuits are.

Looking back, I rather think one can characterise Anglicanism as a religion of Miraculous Adverbs and of "Let's pretend"; of "We say X but, of course, we really mean Y"; of "I have eaten my cake, yet Lo, I still have it". That would explain why Anglican wedding rites are so very explicit about Marriage being "until death us do part", while divorced bishops have their 'marriages' to divorced ladies publicly blessed by bishops. And why Anglicans asserted so vigorously that their ecclesial body was Catholic and their priesthood identical with that of the Latin and Byzantine Churches, while simultaneously making 'ecumenical' plans (Porvoo; Anglican-Methodist Covenant) to treat Protestant ministers identically with their own priests.

To think that I spent seven decades in the Church of England without ever really having the faintest idea of what it was all about ...

CDW

Perhaps someone could explain what the subtext is in the appointments to the CDW. Two erudite Secretaries were sent packing, and a new Secretary, said to be Bugninistior vel etiam Marinior, was appointed, before the appointment of Cardinal Sarah as Prefect. In the World, you might have thought that the new Departmental Manager would have been appointed first, and then his views taken into account in the appointment of his subordinates.

I know that the position of Cardinal Prefect is technically a promotion, but I wonder if, just conceivably, the Holy Father does not necessarily see it as much of a promotion in this case. This Pope is not someone fascinated by 'Liturgy as a subject'. Readers with Anglican Previous will remember the (true) story about 'Gloomy' Dean Inge, of S Paul's, who, being asked at a dinner party whether he was interested in Liturgy, replied "No, neither do I collect postage stamps". Has Cardinal Sarah, in effect, been put in a position where he can do neither harm nor good, and where his Secretary, who has been there just long enough to get his feet under the table, sets the tone?

Totally Spectacular

I can think of few Calendars ... yes, this is the season, is it not, when people give each other calendars ... which are more spectacular than that of the Papa Stronsay Redemptorists. Breath-taking photographs of intimate yet exquisite liturgy alternate with pictures of the breath-taking scenery as the Brethren go about their tasks on the island. In terms of vestments, I love the shots of the working habits: the habits worn during hard labour, with the leather hems worn and torn. July shows Fr Michael Mary and two brethren walking past a farm gate which I think may have been the one which they kindly and carefully opened for me ... and then cheerfully commented "Bishop Fellay just vaulted over that"!

Do you want to know the important centenaries which occur in 2015? Would you like an attractive iconic painting of the Divine Child, kilted and wearing the Crown of Scotland (a marvellously beautiful late medieval crown, quite unlike the rather boring English Crown which had to be remade after the Great Rebellion) accompanied by a poem by S Robert Southwell which can be sung to the tune of Auld Lang Syne? This Calendar is truly and totally unique. Literally unique! And it has all the details needed for it to serve as a daily ORDO for the 1962 rite.

Golgotha Monastery Island
Papa Stronsay
Orkney
KW 17 2AR
Scotland
UK
www.papastronsay.blogspot.com
email: contact@the-sons.org

Bishop Fellay

Bishop Fellay's latest letter, dated today, has interesting features.

I think that the impact of members of the SSPX upon the wider Traditionalist constituency in the Church has sometimes, in the past, been considerably diminished by a tendency to speak in tones which, whether rightly or wrongly, many ears perceive as sounding schismatic. This is particularly true when an impression is given that it is very important indeed to keep expressing a totally negative view of Vatican II. And when appeals are made to a Platonic idea of 'Catholic Rome' which seem designed to exclude all possibility of engagement with the actual Rome.

Today's letter takes two of Joseph Ratzinger's most remarkable passages and makes them the basis of an interesting analysis of the position of the Church in the modern world.

If, in the past, you have avoided reading anything that emerged from the Society, you might well feel that this letter merits breaking your rule! It seems to me an interesting contribution to a very topical debate. I can see only one half of a sentence which some might feel it would have been tactful not to include.

And, incidentally, instead of ranting indiscriminately against the Novus Ordo (as the SSPX sometimes has given the impression of doing), it acutely puts its finger on the centrally questionable feature of that rite: the provision of alternative Eucharistic Prayers. Exactly. I wonder if Bishop Fellay has seen the Ordinariate Ordo Missae?

"EYE CANDY"

I think that's the phrase Father Zed Archiblogopoios uses for the sort of items I'm going to mention ....

Firstly: as well as some more superb pictures of the waterfront at Margate, Fr Tim has given us another picture of his immensely photogenic Lady Chapel. He really has fallen on his feet, lucky man!! (And he's a bit of a tease: the photograph is so angled that one cannot be sure whether there are three altar cards or only one ...)

And, a close second, there is the Gloria TV* (last summer, I met some of the splendid young people involved in Gloria) video of il Cardinale volante, il vice Papa (see my post of November 8) celebrating Pontifical High Mass in Vienna. Fantastic! Twenty minutes before you even get to the Iudica me Deus!!! I'm almost sure I spotted, in the congregation, the Professor Thomas Stark whom I also met in Italy last summer, and Fr Markus Doppelbauer, priest of the Diocese of Vaduz, a considerable ironist.

God appears to be in his heaven, and all to be right with the world! Trebles all round, as they say in Private Eye!


* And it's on Rorate.

Culture and Taste

I accidentally heard an immensely Tasteful and very Cultured programme on the Beeb about Durham Cathedral. It pulled out all the stops. There was music; history; poetry; a truly wonderful Cultural celebration of that amazing building. And, when I say amazing, I am not exaggerating. I can still remember the first time that, walking along the Thames embankment, I saw the Baroque accumulation of buildings at Greenwich. Similarly, I will never forget when first I saw Durham, its Cathedral, its Castle. There can be few places in the world where architecture so combines with landscape to make such a statement.

In this Tasteful and Cultural radio programme, I heard so much marvellous and evocative stuff. About the monument to England's worst ever mining disaster and the miners' galas; about the monks carrying there the body of S Cuthbert; about the Chapel of the Durham Light Infantry; about the Scots captives locked in and starved to death after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650; about the great embracing forest of deeply chiseled Romanesque columns; about the emaciated faces of the Green Men in bosses; about the pre-Christian as well as the Christian; about the 'simplicity' of the lives of its early Saints. I heard snatches of plainchant to remind me of the monks. We were invited to have an intelligent opinion about whether the marked line beyond which women were not allowed to go should be discerned as Exclusive or Inclusive. And the narrator's reverential, deferential, tones never violated the respect due to such a building. Awe was made audible.

Amongst all the history and literature, only once was there a very slight allusion ... so fugitively allusive that you'd miss it it if you weren't looking for it ... to the reason why that building was built at all. I mean: the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The voracious anthologist who put the programme together, apparently, did not notice, or certainly failed to understand, the heart of the building, the High Altar. As she walked behind the Shrine of S Cuthbert, she did not see, or did not understand, the great expanse of the Chapel of the Nine Altars with its ... well ...  nine altars. The Cathedral, you could be forgiven for concluding, is an incredible building in which there happens to be an unaccountably large number of pieces of table-like furniture which, even in combination, even in their strange, repetitive profusion, do not even begin to add up to Something which a Cultivated person of Taste might deign to notice, still less to mention.

The title of the programme was Something understood.

An Encyclical (2)

Among points which we might expect an Encyclical to expound, there are a number which relate to the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.
(1) It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name;
(2) It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.
(3) It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.
(4) It was ordained to join together a man and a woman.
(5) It was ordained to last as long as they both shall live.

These causes are incapable of being varied by Popes, Ecumenical Councils, Synods, Cardinals, Germans, Bishops, priests, Judges, Presidents, or Legislatures, because they are inscribed within the very nature of Man. This needs to be made explicit.

The teachings de Usu Matrimonii of Pius XI and B Paul VI should be repeated, together with appropriate sections from Veritatis Splendor para 80 (which usefully includes Gaudium et Spes para 27).

In order to clarify the finality of the judgements given, it would be edifying if the Encyclical cited the Decree of Vatican I Pastor aeternus (particularly the words Faith and Morals); and included sentences with the verb definimus; and summarised its teaching in pithy little sentences beginning Si quis dixerit or Si quis negaverit, and concluding Anathema sit.

To comfort those to whom there seemed here to be new burdens, it could conclude by defining that the Mother of God is Mediatrix of All Graces (perhaps, in order to mark the ecumenical significance of the proceedings, this last could be done in Greek using the words of the great Hesychast Doctor S Gregory Palamas).

There. I've done all the work myself, really, haven't I? The whole thing could be solemnly promulgated next Easter Sunday, with the entire world-wide episcopate present to affirm (Placetne vobis, Fratres Venerabiles? PLACET! PLACET!! PLACET!!!), sphragizein, and subscribe it. Our beloved Holy Father would go down in the annals of Papal History as one of a very small handful of the most doctrinally significant Roman Pontiffs.

An Encyclical? (1)

I have several times recently expressed my view that an essential role of the Roman Pontiff is to guard the truth handed down from the Apostles and to act as a breakwater against innovatory error. Benedict XVI expressed this brilliantly and so did B John Henry Newman. It is the teaching of Vatican I Pastor aeternus.

At a time when some doctrinal errors about matters of Family Morality seem to be spiking the decibels, I presume that our Holy Father must be planning, as a matter of urgency, a major Encyclical in order to correct them. He has certainly not been mute in reaffirming the timeless teaching of the Church, but this is not the sort of thing the Media easily hear and relay ... not least because it does not slot into the rather constraining narrative which they have constructed with regard to this Pope. What is necessary is Magisterium laid on with a sufficiently generous trowel so as actually to get heard. What gardeners and builders among us might think of as an encyclical trowel.

I know Encyclicals take a lot of time because they have to go through the relevant dicasteries. And then get translated into Latin, which not many people in Rome understand nowadays. But I do hope it can be done as soon as possible, and preferably before the next Synod. At the moment, it almost looks as if there is some sort of vacatio legis with regard to important parts of the moral Law. This has all happened before. In April 1967, The Tablet, Le Monde, and The National Catholic Reporter published simultaneously the full texts of documents which were very plausibly taken to indicate the strong likelihood that 'the Pill' would be declared morally unobjectionable, thus bringing Rome more or less into line with the 1930 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops. In the year before Humanae vitae emerged, this expectation had hardened into rigid assumption. We don't want something like that to happen again, do we? It would be thoroughly scandalous and a most grave abuse of Christ's faithful people.

The persona so skilfully constructed around the present Pope has the potential to be very useful. People are more prepared to listen to him than they have been to any pope for a long time. But that persona can hardly be an end in itself. It can only be coin to be spent rather than hoarded. Francis himself talked about a "two or three year" papacy. Surely the time has just about come, in this next twelve months, to utilise, to call in, the credit accrued by the Bergoglio persona. When Pope Francis finally dishes it out straight and heavy, the journalists ... and the gullible multitudes who swallow what they're told ... won't be able just to say "Well, he would say that, would'n 'e?" This is not a pontiff of whom it will be so easy for crooked journalists to explain that he graduated from the Hitler Youth via the Panzers to the Inquisition. They will doubtless dream up a substitute narrative lie, probably about how a 'good and loving' Pope Francis has been 'bullied' by 'hardliners' in the Vatican (a sort of new "Prisoner of the Vatican" story); but at least the Gospel message will have forced its way out into the open.

When Cardinal Kasper was going around claiming that Pope Francis shared his own rather eccentric views, Cardinal Burke informed the world that "The Pope doesn't have laryngitis; the Pope is not mute". Good!
Plura d.v. sequentur.