Our beloved Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has put out an absolutely superb, first-rate, nuclear-dimensions, demolition of the Kill-the-Wrinklies bill currently before their Lordships' House;
Our beloved Holy Father has spoken of "infants killed in the womb, deprived of that generous love of their parents and then buried in the egoism of a culture that does not love life";
and the Sovereign Pontiff has also, after mentioning the Jewish couple Simeon and Anna, spoken of Jesus as "salvation for every person and for every people", thus not excluding the Jewish people from the Salvation brought by and through and in the Jew Jesus Christ and Him alone (as so many anti-semites do).
Let's not go into the 'stands' being taken by the dreary has-beens of History, the Careys, the Tutus, the whatevers. This should be a day of celebration.
29 December 2014
27 December 2014
Fr Valentine Young, Fr Charles Wesley, and Mgr Andrew Burnham
Mgr Andrew kindly sent me a link to Views from the Choir Loft, in which sixteen Christmas Carols are rendered into Latin by a Fr Valentine Young (except that, I rather suspect, Adeste fideles may originally have been composed in the Latin!). They provide a very festive seasonal treat, even if quite a number of them are unknown to me in the original English (are they American?).
On a serious note: they demonstrate that translations can never express the real sublimity, or even the full sense, of an original (I might conceivably allow John Mason Neale's versions to come closest to being an exception to that generalisation). An example:
One of the most nearly perfect hymns ever written in any language is the Reverend Charles 'Anglican Patrimony' Wesley's Hark how all the welkin rings, usually sung in the impoverished version Hark! the herald Angels sing*. I have particularly in mind the stanza in which Wesley puts into our melodious mouths the Mystery of the Incarnation, and does it
firstly in the Teutonic dialect we learned at our Mothers' knees
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
and then in Latin
Hail the incarnate Deity
and finally in Aramaic/Hebrew
Jesus our Emmanu-el here.
It is as if the Poet is excavating downwards through our own crude maternal patois, and then penetrating the Latin in which the Gospel was brought to our land, right back to the raw data of first-century Palestine.
Most importantly, this is superb as dogma; and it is breathtaking in the apparently effortless ease with which it draws these three linguistic and cultural traditions into a harmony of joyous proclamation. But, to us literary types, it is also a first rate example of the sort of verbal and interlingual tropes enjoyed so much by S Ambrose and his admirers, and then by the poets of the Carolingian Renaissance and their followers such as S Peter Damian. It is, quite simply, classical Western Christian hymnography at its finest.
But it is impossible, totally impossible, to render Wesley's sublime English into Latin. Fr Valentine gives us the bare bones very well with
Carne tamquam obsitus,
Homo ex Deo factus.
(although perhaps a really pedantic dogmatician might pause for just a tiny moment over the ex). But you can't drag more than about 15% of it, at the most, out of the fine English original into a Latin crib.
So try to imagine this scenario. Up comes some benighted, arrogant, ignoramus, fluent in Latin but ignorant of English. He, posturing fool, announces to us (via the Google Translation Facility) "I don't have to learn English in order to understand or appreciate Wesley's hymn. Latin translations are just as good as the English originals. Latin is just as good a language to address God in as English is. I've got Father Valentine's Latin translation. That's all I need".
Compelled by the truth to be brutal, we would simply have to say (again using the Translation Facility), "No, Sunshine, you jus' gotta learn English, otherwise you're deceiving yourself. Only the English original does the job. As we English love to put it, Traduttore traditore."
_______________________________________________________________________________
* Personally, I object to the ruin later meddlers, from Whitefield onwards, have made of this exquisite poiesis. "Rise the Woman's conquering Seed,/ Bruise in us the serpent's head" is a sad typological loss, and the echo of the Christmas antiphon O admirabile commercium, which Wesley worked into his last stanza, was clever; perhaps too clever, or, indeed, too Catholic/Orthodox in its assertion of Theosis, for some eyes.
On a serious note: they demonstrate that translations can never express the real sublimity, or even the full sense, of an original (I might conceivably allow John Mason Neale's versions to come closest to being an exception to that generalisation). An example:
One of the most nearly perfect hymns ever written in any language is the Reverend Charles 'Anglican Patrimony' Wesley's Hark how all the welkin rings, usually sung in the impoverished version Hark! the herald Angels sing*. I have particularly in mind the stanza in which Wesley puts into our melodious mouths the Mystery of the Incarnation, and does it
firstly in the Teutonic dialect we learned at our Mothers' knees
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
and then in Latin
Hail the incarnate Deity
and finally in Aramaic/Hebrew
Jesus our Emmanu-el here.
It is as if the Poet is excavating downwards through our own crude maternal patois, and then penetrating the Latin in which the Gospel was brought to our land, right back to the raw data of first-century Palestine.
Most importantly, this is superb as dogma; and it is breathtaking in the apparently effortless ease with which it draws these three linguistic and cultural traditions into a harmony of joyous proclamation. But, to us literary types, it is also a first rate example of the sort of verbal and interlingual tropes enjoyed so much by S Ambrose and his admirers, and then by the poets of the Carolingian Renaissance and their followers such as S Peter Damian. It is, quite simply, classical Western Christian hymnography at its finest.
But it is impossible, totally impossible, to render Wesley's sublime English into Latin. Fr Valentine gives us the bare bones very well with
Carne tamquam obsitus,
Homo ex Deo factus.
(although perhaps a really pedantic dogmatician might pause for just a tiny moment over the ex). But you can't drag more than about 15% of it, at the most, out of the fine English original into a Latin crib.
So try to imagine this scenario. Up comes some benighted, arrogant, ignoramus, fluent in Latin but ignorant of English. He, posturing fool, announces to us (via the Google Translation Facility) "I don't have to learn English in order to understand or appreciate Wesley's hymn. Latin translations are just as good as the English originals. Latin is just as good a language to address God in as English is. I've got Father Valentine's Latin translation. That's all I need".
Compelled by the truth to be brutal, we would simply have to say (again using the Translation Facility), "No, Sunshine, you jus' gotta learn English, otherwise you're deceiving yourself. Only the English original does the job. As we English love to put it, Traduttore traditore."
_______________________________________________________________________________
* Personally, I object to the ruin later meddlers, from Whitefield onwards, have made of this exquisite poiesis. "Rise the Woman's conquering Seed,/ Bruise in us the serpent's head" is a sad typological loss, and the echo of the Christmas antiphon O admirabile commercium, which Wesley worked into his last stanza, was clever; perhaps too clever, or, indeed, too Catholic/Orthodox in its assertion of Theosis, for some eyes.
22 December 2014
Christmas Address to the Curia
If somebody addressed a body to which I belonged, just before Christmas, in that sort of way, with sixteen paragraphs of sustained and immoderate abuse, I think I would ...
I think someone should have a word with him.
I think someone should have a word with him.
20 December 2014
Dear Old Mother Hilarious
A friend tells me that at the moment, the C of E, dear sweet old thing, is agonising over 'the Green Report'. It's a laugh a line. Don't miss it. It reads like a satirical spoof by Mgr R A Knox. Perhaps it is.
Another friend tells me of an Anglican Diocese which has invented an 'Archdeacon for Generous Giving'. In other words, the pew-fodder shell out for the stipend of an archdeacon whose job it then is to screw even more money out of them! (But 'Green' is going to cost £2,000,000.)
Turkeys not so much voting as paying for Christmas! Like buying tickets to gain admission to the abattoir!
Magnifique!! Trebles all round! Pass another mince pie!
Another friend tells me of an Anglican Diocese which has invented an 'Archdeacon for Generous Giving'. In other words, the pew-fodder shell out for the stipend of an archdeacon whose job it then is to screw even more money out of them! (But 'Green' is going to cost £2,000,000.)
Turkeys not so much voting as paying for Christmas! Like buying tickets to gain admission to the abattoir!
Magnifique!! Trebles all round! Pass another mince pie!
2014/5, YEAR OF THE SYLLABUS: more guidance from Dr Jalland
Surely, even if the British Post Office does not do so, the Vatican Post Office will issue stamps commemorative of the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum?
I wish to quote just once more from the distinguished Anglican scholar Dr Trevor Jalland in order to ease us a little forward in our study of that admirable document the Syllabus of Errors of B Pius IX, the sesquicentenary of which we joyfully celebrate this year of 2014/5 (see earlier post). The Anglican Tradition (now of course to be found safely incarnate and incardinate within the Roman Unity in the Ordinariates) can often be relied upon to give you a more balanced and nuanced judgement than ... er ... Well, anyway, here goes Jalland, again:
"The syllabus naturally evoked a great deal of interest, though in Catholic circles it was not unmixed with some measure of alarm. For the latter the form of the document was no doubt in some degree itself responsible. Dupanloup, who may be taken as representative of its more moderate critics, published a pamphlet on the encyclical as a whole, in which he called attention to the need of interpreting the language of the several views condemned in the light of their proper context ... the distinction made by Dupanloup in the course of his exposition between thesis and hypothesis, between the ideal and the actual, was later formally endorsed by Pius IX's successor Leo XIII. And even if it is true that Dupanloup was less concerned to say what the encyclical was than what it was not, it is at least noteworthy that Pius himself commended his work."
Jalland had begun his Bampton Lectures with Monsignor Felix Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans. "On the morning of Monday, July 18, 1870, as the early glow of dawn was slowly spreading across the sky of north Italy, an express train which had left Rome at half-past seven o'clock on the previous evening was clanking on its way across the plains of Lombardy". Yes; rather a novelistic style. I doubt whether any previous academic delivering the prestigious Bampton Lectures had ever similarly begun. " ... Dupanloup ... felt in the pocket of his douillette and drew out his Breviary. His companion, Monsignor Louis Haynald, archbishop of the the metropolitan see of Kalocsa in Hungary ... who was occupying the opposite corner of the compartment, leaned forward ..." Yes, of course you want to know what happened next. You have every right to. This is Gripping Stuff. The lectures were published, in 1944, as The Church and the Papacy a historical study. I recommend it [Wikipaedia "Bampton Lectures" PDF under 1942, so I am told].
Dupanloup and Haynald were leaving the First Vatican Council early, before its final vote had taken place. They were among the leaders of the unsuccessful ('inopportunist') minority which had opposed the formal definition of Papal Infallibility and Primacy. As we edge forward in finessing our approach to the Syllabus, you need to know this; you need to have it clear in your mind that Dupanloup was not an Ultramontane; not someone who lived safely trapped in the pocket of Pio Nono's douillette. Certainly not another Manning or Ward.
By the way, do you know whom Dupanloup had wanted to take with him to the Council as his personal peritus? Have a guess .... .... .... yes! Yes! You will go far! You have sound instincts! An Englishman called Newman! Just imagine what Mr Archdeacon emeritus Manning would have had to say about that! How he would have pursed his thin lips every time he noticed Newman and Dupanloup and David Moriarty* with their heads together murmuring behind a pillar in S Peter's, or laughing in a trattoria! Ah, the might-have-beens of History! Clio, what a tease thou art!
After Christmass, we shall return, DV, to the admirable Dupanloup and his 'take' on the Syllabus. And then move on to Blessed John Henry. And conclude with some speculations about the light the writings of Dupanloup and Newman throw on the topical question of the appropriate nuancing, exegesis, and taxonomia of papal utterances in our own time. I bet you can't wait.
________________________________________________________________________
*A close friend of Newman's, Bishop of Kerry; another 'inopportunist', apparently one of only two Council Fathers who never quite found the time to get round to subscribing formally the decrees with regard to the Infallibility and Primacy of the Roman Pontiff. The exquisite (mini-Salisbury) Cathedral (with Close) which he helped to finish in Killarney ... with spectacularly Constabular views of it across the water meadows ... was grossly and disgracefully vandalised in the 1970s by a charismatic, up-to-date and progressive young bishop called Eamon Casey. Its architect was Pugin and J J McCarthy, a Kerryman, had done the interiors. I have myself spoken to venerable ladies who described the endless procession of builders' skips carting off the smashed marble and masonry and plaster, a memory still raw in their minds in the 1990s. And when a Kerrywoman has a raw memory ...
I wish to quote just once more from the distinguished Anglican scholar Dr Trevor Jalland in order to ease us a little forward in our study of that admirable document the Syllabus of Errors of B Pius IX, the sesquicentenary of which we joyfully celebrate this year of 2014/5 (see earlier post). The Anglican Tradition (now of course to be found safely incarnate and incardinate within the Roman Unity in the Ordinariates) can often be relied upon to give you a more balanced and nuanced judgement than ... er ... Well, anyway, here goes Jalland, again:
"The syllabus naturally evoked a great deal of interest, though in Catholic circles it was not unmixed with some measure of alarm. For the latter the form of the document was no doubt in some degree itself responsible. Dupanloup, who may be taken as representative of its more moderate critics, published a pamphlet on the encyclical as a whole, in which he called attention to the need of interpreting the language of the several views condemned in the light of their proper context ... the distinction made by Dupanloup in the course of his exposition between thesis and hypothesis, between the ideal and the actual, was later formally endorsed by Pius IX's successor Leo XIII. And even if it is true that Dupanloup was less concerned to say what the encyclical was than what it was not, it is at least noteworthy that Pius himself commended his work."
Jalland had begun his Bampton Lectures with Monsignor Felix Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans. "On the morning of Monday, July 18, 1870, as the early glow of dawn was slowly spreading across the sky of north Italy, an express train which had left Rome at half-past seven o'clock on the previous evening was clanking on its way across the plains of Lombardy". Yes; rather a novelistic style. I doubt whether any previous academic delivering the prestigious Bampton Lectures had ever similarly begun. " ... Dupanloup ... felt in the pocket of his douillette and drew out his Breviary. His companion, Monsignor Louis Haynald, archbishop of the the metropolitan see of Kalocsa in Hungary ... who was occupying the opposite corner of the compartment, leaned forward ..." Yes, of course you want to know what happened next. You have every right to. This is Gripping Stuff. The lectures were published, in 1944, as The Church and the Papacy a historical study. I recommend it [Wikipaedia "Bampton Lectures" PDF under 1942, so I am told].
Dupanloup and Haynald were leaving the First Vatican Council early, before its final vote had taken place. They were among the leaders of the unsuccessful ('inopportunist') minority which had opposed the formal definition of Papal Infallibility and Primacy. As we edge forward in finessing our approach to the Syllabus, you need to know this; you need to have it clear in your mind that Dupanloup was not an Ultramontane; not someone who lived safely trapped in the pocket of Pio Nono's douillette. Certainly not another Manning or Ward.
By the way, do you know whom Dupanloup had wanted to take with him to the Council as his personal peritus? Have a guess .... .... .... yes! Yes! You will go far! You have sound instincts! An Englishman called Newman! Just imagine what Mr Archdeacon emeritus Manning would have had to say about that! How he would have pursed his thin lips every time he noticed Newman and Dupanloup and David Moriarty* with their heads together murmuring behind a pillar in S Peter's, or laughing in a trattoria! Ah, the might-have-beens of History! Clio, what a tease thou art!
After Christmass, we shall return, DV, to the admirable Dupanloup and his 'take' on the Syllabus. And then move on to Blessed John Henry. And conclude with some speculations about the light the writings of Dupanloup and Newman throw on the topical question of the appropriate nuancing, exegesis, and taxonomia of papal utterances in our own time. I bet you can't wait.
________________________________________________________________________
*A close friend of Newman's, Bishop of Kerry; another 'inopportunist', apparently one of only two Council Fathers who never quite found the time to get round to subscribing formally the decrees with regard to the Infallibility and Primacy of the Roman Pontiff. The exquisite (mini-Salisbury) Cathedral (with Close) which he helped to finish in Killarney ... with spectacularly Constabular views of it across the water meadows ... was grossly and disgracefully vandalised in the 1970s by a charismatic, up-to-date and progressive young bishop called Eamon Casey. Its architect was Pugin and J J McCarthy, a Kerryman, had done the interiors. I have myself spoken to venerable ladies who described the endless procession of builders' skips carting off the smashed marble and masonry and plaster, a memory still raw in their minds in the 1990s. And when a Kerrywoman has a raw memory ...
BOXING DAY ABSTINENCE
I have added an UPDATE to this post, because there seem to be some worriers. Don't worry. You are NOT obliged to abstain on December 26.
19 December 2014
That splendid Father Ray Blake ...
... has a charming little video on his admirable blog showing a lot of clips of Liturgy as it was before the Great [fill in here your own term of preference] of the 1960s. And it includes our wonderful Anglican Patrimony!! And it involves my own last Anglican church, S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford!!! And it even hints at our magnificent Ordinariate!!!!
At about 3.44 you will find a shot of the Translation of our Lady of Walsingham, October 15, 1931. The rather Protestant Bishop Pollock of Norwich had sniffily asked Fr Hope Patten to remove the statue of OLW from the Parish Church; so Father built a beautiful Shrine Church at the other end of the village, including within it a reconstruction of the Holy House of Nazareth (which had been the focal point of the medieval pilgrimage to Walsingham). Accordingly, on October 15, after the Bishop emeritus of Accra had sung Pontifical High Mass in the Parish Church, our Blessed Lady was carried in solemn procession to her new Shrine while the bells both of the Church and of the Shrine (baptised with the oils on the previous Saturday by the Bishop) rang out her praises. "In the midst of this throng, high and lifted up upon the shoulders of four clergy in dalmatics, and under a blue and gold canopy fixed to the feretory, sat the venerated figure of our Lady, crowned with the silver Oxford Crown, and robed in a mantle of cloth of gold" (the Oxford Crown had been given by the congregation of one of the daughter churches of S Thomas's). That is the moment captured in the video.
The Holy House had ... has ... a Latin foundation stone dating itself by the pontificate of Pius XI and the episcopate of Bishop Pollock. When he heard about this, the Bishop objected to being thus associated with the Bishop of Rome, so Fr Hope Patten duly obscured ... the name of the bishop! But fear not: after Dr Pollock's death, his name re-emerged. When you go to look at it, don't forget to say a prayer for him; and for Fr Hope Patten and Fr Fynes Clinton, the Latinist who composed the inscription. They were both mighty priests in what one might call the Pre-History or the Proto-Evangelium of the Ordinariate.
As Fr Ray says ... Oh, such happy days! But, in the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham, Happy Days live again!!
At about 3.44 you will find a shot of the Translation of our Lady of Walsingham, October 15, 1931. The rather Protestant Bishop Pollock of Norwich had sniffily asked Fr Hope Patten to remove the statue of OLW from the Parish Church; so Father built a beautiful Shrine Church at the other end of the village, including within it a reconstruction of the Holy House of Nazareth (which had been the focal point of the medieval pilgrimage to Walsingham). Accordingly, on October 15, after the Bishop emeritus of Accra had sung Pontifical High Mass in the Parish Church, our Blessed Lady was carried in solemn procession to her new Shrine while the bells both of the Church and of the Shrine (baptised with the oils on the previous Saturday by the Bishop) rang out her praises. "In the midst of this throng, high and lifted up upon the shoulders of four clergy in dalmatics, and under a blue and gold canopy fixed to the feretory, sat the venerated figure of our Lady, crowned with the silver Oxford Crown, and robed in a mantle of cloth of gold" (the Oxford Crown had been given by the congregation of one of the daughter churches of S Thomas's). That is the moment captured in the video.
The Holy House had ... has ... a Latin foundation stone dating itself by the pontificate of Pius XI and the episcopate of Bishop Pollock. When he heard about this, the Bishop objected to being thus associated with the Bishop of Rome, so Fr Hope Patten duly obscured ... the name of the bishop! But fear not: after Dr Pollock's death, his name re-emerged. When you go to look at it, don't forget to say a prayer for him; and for Fr Hope Patten and Fr Fynes Clinton, the Latinist who composed the inscription. They were both mighty priests in what one might call the Pre-History or the Proto-Evangelium of the Ordinariate.
As Fr Ray says ... Oh, such happy days! But, in the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham, Happy Days live again!!
Celebrations
Like all decent right-thinking people, I rejoice mightily at the idea of Catholics and Protestants celebrating together the centenaries of Martin Luther's Reformation in 2017 and the Convocation of the Council of Trent in 2045.
The joyous celebrations set in place by the Vatican to commemorate, this year, Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors, provide a very fine example of how the Reformation could and should be commemorated.
The joyous celebrations set in place by the Vatican to commemorate, this year, Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors, provide a very fine example of how the Reformation could and should be commemorated.
Massacres
I find it hard to get out of my mind the possibility that the Taliban perpetrated their horrendous and cowardly massacre of schoolchildren as a response to the international parading around of a schoolgirl whom they had previously, criminally, shot for her advocacy of the education of girls (a cause which I strongly favour). It culminated a few days ago in the award to her of a 'Nobel Peace Prize'; the same vacuous but prestigious award which, I recollect, was given to Obama for being black. Not for the first time, I am left wondering how useful provocative gestures are, not least when those making them are not the ones who will probably have to pay the price.
17 December 2014
Midwives, Conscience, and Abortion in the British Supreme Court
" ' Participate' in my view means taking part in a 'hands on' capacity".
Thus the Court dismissed the appeal of two Catholic midwives who are not prepared, even in a solely administrative capacity, to organise and supervise abortions.
What a shame these judges were not around in time to defend that poor Adolf Eichmann when the Israelis so unfairly tried and hanged him for organising the transportation of Jews to the Death Camps. And they would have been really in their element during the Nuremburg trials, defending the bureaucrats who masterminded the war crimes.
But stay: it is not too late. If the International Criminal Court ever finds itself trying former tyrants who gave orders for genocide, these judicial jokers will be invaluable to the defence teams.
Memo to all those contemplating crimes against humanity: OK, dears, as long as you aren't HANDS ON.
Thus the Court dismissed the appeal of two Catholic midwives who are not prepared, even in a solely administrative capacity, to organise and supervise abortions.
What a shame these judges were not around in time to defend that poor Adolf Eichmann when the Israelis so unfairly tried and hanged him for organising the transportation of Jews to the Death Camps. And they would have been really in their element during the Nuremburg trials, defending the bureaucrats who masterminded the war crimes.
But stay: it is not too late. If the International Criminal Court ever finds itself trying former tyrants who gave orders for genocide, these judicial jokers will be invaluable to the defence teams.
Memo to all those contemplating crimes against humanity: OK, dears, as long as you aren't HANDS ON.
OZ and pervert priests and Celibacy
It is a sound rule never to criticise the words of others unless one has read them carefully and in full. So I Fess Up now, and apologise in advance, if my admitted failure to do this has led to my being unfair in what follows.
Rumour has it, back here in far-away Blighty, that a report generated somewhere within the Australian Catholic Church has raised a question about a possible relationship between the law of Celibacy, the style of Formation of the Catholic Clergy: and clerical sexual abuse of minors.
If such possibilities were to be explored further and in greater depth, I am in the happy position of being able to suggest a number of extremely helpful lines of enquiry.
(1) It seems to me, anecdotally and from my own experience in my four decades in the Anglican Priesthood, that there is quite a bit of sexual abuse in the Church of England (and that it is by no means confined to unmarried clergy). Australian investigators might like to begin their researches by reading the reports about the scandals and cover-ups in the diocese of Chichester, and those relating to the former Dean of Manchester. Much of this is available online. And the Church of England has not imposed celibacy for some 450 years, and trains its clergy in quite a different way from the Catholic Church. Just as medical researchers like to have 'control groups', so might those researching clerical sexual perversion.
(2) Over here, recently, the Scouts have been paying out big time for abuse by Scoutmasters. Indeed, since the 1920s, if not earlier, 'scoutmasters' have been a common source of vulgar jocosity with regard to paederasty. No law of celibacy there. The Scouts could provide another 'control group'.
(3) Our own much loved Beeb has recently had ginormously large problems in this area. Sir Jimmy Savilles appear, in the past at least, to have carpeted the studios wall to wall! Another culprit sentenced just yesterday. Not much evidence of a law of celibacy in Broadcasting House! A veritably magnificent potential 'control group'.
(4) Our late Holy Father Pope Benedict advanced the theory that the promotion by those teaching in seminaries, during and after the 1960s, of 'relativistic' theories regarding ethical issues, in which nothing is per se wrong, may have contributed to the problem of what, rather neatly, he called 'the filth'. This intellectual fashion cannot be the entire cause of sexual delinquency among Catholic Clergy down the ages; after all, for centuries, Roman Pontiffs were obliged to legislate against Sollicitatio (although that seems generally to have applied to delicts with adult women). But, I would have thought, the suggestion is well worth going into.
(5) Since the 1960s, there has been much talk about mercy, and forgiveness, and similar very splendid things. It has been an era in which we have been urged not to be too preoccupied with sin, particularly sexual sin. A Catholic priest with much professional competence in this area has explained to me that one psychological reason for the bitter hatred of the Extraordinary Form among senior clergy of a certain age has been that they associate it with a cruel, rigid, sin-obsessed sex-proccupied form of Catholicism upon which they look back with fear and detestation. So: 'merciful' bishops were disinclined to 'ruin' a priest for 'just one lapse', or even two or three. Or four. After all, as we have been informed over and over again, sexual sins are not the only sorts of sins; spiritual sins such as Pride, and sins against Social Justice, are far more displeasing in the sight of God than mere lapses from Chastity. Our Oz friends could look into the problem of 'liberal' bishops as well.
(6) My own, again anecdotal, experience has inclined me to think that 'charismatic' leaders, admired by the media and surrounded by adoring groupies, can be peculiarly vulnerable to sexual temptation. J F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and, within the Church, bishop Eamonn Casey ... and Fr Macial Maciel ... and Fr Lelio Cantini ... spring to mind; and one bishop of my acquaintance in the Church of England was another. He was held in such tremendously high regard, not least in the very highest reaches of the British Establishment, that after acknowledging his guilt, accepting a police warning, and resigning his diocese, he immediately started spreading it around that he was completely innocent, but had pleaded guilty to save the Church the embarrassment of a public trial. This claim was accepted by people unwilling to face up to the fact that they had been gullible dupes. So plausible was he that his one-time diocesan superior, when he came later to write his own autobiography, roundly asserted the total innocence of his fellow-bishop and put the entire episode down to a Wicked Plot. I think psychometric experts should examine with even more than their usual acuity candidates for ordination who are at the extreme 'extrovert' end of the spectrum. Oz could look into this side of things as well.
(7) I sometimes wonder if somebody should keep an eye on the troubling question of false or possibly false accusations, sometimes, conceivably, financially generated.
(8) A competent historian might be able to unearth interesting parallels between the present atmosphere, and the use, by the National Socialists, of sexual allegations in order to discredit the clergy and the Catholic Church.
(9) Finally, a somewhat dangerous suggestion. Some say that the pervert priest phenomenon sometimes relates to activity with teenage boys rather than with those properly called children, and in some such cases should be seen as a product of a homosexual orientation. This suggestion creates great outcries of "Homophobia!!". Ideological promoters of homosexualism as a political cause mercilessly persecute anybody guilty of such talk (which, indeed, certainly ought not to be spread thickly around with an indiscriminate brush of generalisation). But if, down in Oz, they really do want to get this business sussed, they should leave no stone unturned. Brave the inevitable huffing and puffing and examine this one too!
Perhaps readers will be able to add (10), (11), and (12)? I'm sure the Wise Men from the Oz could do with all the help they can get.
________________________________________________________________________________-
ADDENDUM I believe it is important not to use the existence of abuse in other groups as a justification for any toleration of abuse in the Church. The Church should not be just-a-little-bit-better than the BBC! My point, which I make three times, is that anybody who wants to do a scientific investigation about alleged links between Celibacy and Pedophilia should do what researchers in other disciplines do: use 'control groups' to discern whether there is a statistical correlation.
A logical question which would remain with regard to pedophile priests and celibacy is: were they perverts who sought the clerical state because of the obscene opportunities it provided; or did celibacy (as the Oz report is inclined to suggest) predispose them to an orientation which they did not have previously?
Rumour has it, back here in far-away Blighty, that a report generated somewhere within the Australian Catholic Church has raised a question about a possible relationship between the law of Celibacy, the style of Formation of the Catholic Clergy: and clerical sexual abuse of minors.
If such possibilities were to be explored further and in greater depth, I am in the happy position of being able to suggest a number of extremely helpful lines of enquiry.
(1) It seems to me, anecdotally and from my own experience in my four decades in the Anglican Priesthood, that there is quite a bit of sexual abuse in the Church of England (and that it is by no means confined to unmarried clergy). Australian investigators might like to begin their researches by reading the reports about the scandals and cover-ups in the diocese of Chichester, and those relating to the former Dean of Manchester. Much of this is available online. And the Church of England has not imposed celibacy for some 450 years, and trains its clergy in quite a different way from the Catholic Church. Just as medical researchers like to have 'control groups', so might those researching clerical sexual perversion.
(2) Over here, recently, the Scouts have been paying out big time for abuse by Scoutmasters. Indeed, since the 1920s, if not earlier, 'scoutmasters' have been a common source of vulgar jocosity with regard to paederasty. No law of celibacy there. The Scouts could provide another 'control group'.
(3) Our own much loved Beeb has recently had ginormously large problems in this area. Sir Jimmy Savilles appear, in the past at least, to have carpeted the studios wall to wall! Another culprit sentenced just yesterday. Not much evidence of a law of celibacy in Broadcasting House! A veritably magnificent potential 'control group'.
(4) Our late Holy Father Pope Benedict advanced the theory that the promotion by those teaching in seminaries, during and after the 1960s, of 'relativistic' theories regarding ethical issues, in which nothing is per se wrong, may have contributed to the problem of what, rather neatly, he called 'the filth'. This intellectual fashion cannot be the entire cause of sexual delinquency among Catholic Clergy down the ages; after all, for centuries, Roman Pontiffs were obliged to legislate against Sollicitatio (although that seems generally to have applied to delicts with adult women). But, I would have thought, the suggestion is well worth going into.
(5) Since the 1960s, there has been much talk about mercy, and forgiveness, and similar very splendid things. It has been an era in which we have been urged not to be too preoccupied with sin, particularly sexual sin. A Catholic priest with much professional competence in this area has explained to me that one psychological reason for the bitter hatred of the Extraordinary Form among senior clergy of a certain age has been that they associate it with a cruel, rigid, sin-obsessed sex-proccupied form of Catholicism upon which they look back with fear and detestation. So: 'merciful' bishops were disinclined to 'ruin' a priest for 'just one lapse', or even two or three. Or four. After all, as we have been informed over and over again, sexual sins are not the only sorts of sins; spiritual sins such as Pride, and sins against Social Justice, are far more displeasing in the sight of God than mere lapses from Chastity. Our Oz friends could look into the problem of 'liberal' bishops as well.
(6) My own, again anecdotal, experience has inclined me to think that 'charismatic' leaders, admired by the media and surrounded by adoring groupies, can be peculiarly vulnerable to sexual temptation. J F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and, within the Church, bishop Eamonn Casey ... and Fr Macial Maciel ... and Fr Lelio Cantini ... spring to mind; and one bishop of my acquaintance in the Church of England was another. He was held in such tremendously high regard, not least in the very highest reaches of the British Establishment, that after acknowledging his guilt, accepting a police warning, and resigning his diocese, he immediately started spreading it around that he was completely innocent, but had pleaded guilty to save the Church the embarrassment of a public trial. This claim was accepted by people unwilling to face up to the fact that they had been gullible dupes. So plausible was he that his one-time diocesan superior, when he came later to write his own autobiography, roundly asserted the total innocence of his fellow-bishop and put the entire episode down to a Wicked Plot. I think psychometric experts should examine with even more than their usual acuity candidates for ordination who are at the extreme 'extrovert' end of the spectrum. Oz could look into this side of things as well.
(7) I sometimes wonder if somebody should keep an eye on the troubling question of false or possibly false accusations, sometimes, conceivably, financially generated.
(8) A competent historian might be able to unearth interesting parallels between the present atmosphere, and the use, by the National Socialists, of sexual allegations in order to discredit the clergy and the Catholic Church.
(9) Finally, a somewhat dangerous suggestion. Some say that the pervert priest phenomenon sometimes relates to activity with teenage boys rather than with those properly called children, and in some such cases should be seen as a product of a homosexual orientation. This suggestion creates great outcries of "Homophobia!!". Ideological promoters of homosexualism as a political cause mercilessly persecute anybody guilty of such talk (which, indeed, certainly ought not to be spread thickly around with an indiscriminate brush of generalisation). But if, down in Oz, they really do want to get this business sussed, they should leave no stone unturned. Brave the inevitable huffing and puffing and examine this one too!
Perhaps readers will be able to add (10), (11), and (12)? I'm sure the Wise Men from the Oz could do with all the help they can get.
________________________________________________________________________________-
ADDENDUM I believe it is important not to use the existence of abuse in other groups as a justification for any toleration of abuse in the Church. The Church should not be just-a-little-bit-better than the BBC! My point, which I make three times, is that anybody who wants to do a scientific investigation about alleged links between Celibacy and Pedophilia should do what researchers in other disciplines do: use 'control groups' to discern whether there is a statistical correlation.
A logical question which would remain with regard to pedophile priests and celibacy is: were they perverts who sought the clerical state because of the obscene opportunities it provided; or did celibacy (as the Oz report is inclined to suggest) predispose them to an orientation which they did not have previously?
15 December 2014
A MASSIVELY IMPORTANT SESQUICENTENARY: 2014/5
(A slightly abbreviated reprint of a piece I published a year ago.)
Er ... yes ... sesqui ... well, according to my trusty Oxford Latin Dictionary sesqui is a conflation of sems, an earlier form of the word that became in Classical Latin semi(s), meaning half, and the enclitic (meaning you tack it on the end of the next word) -que, meaning and. So sesqui- is a prefix meaning "and a half". So
Sesquicentenary
means 150 years on, a century and a half.
2014/2015 will be the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum of B Pius IX.
On December 8, 1864, B Pius IX issued his Encyclical Quanta cura; and, apparently at his direction, an (anonymous) collection of 80 theses, already condemned by Roman Pontiffs in earlier Magisterial interventions, was published simultaneously. In some circles "the Syllabus of Errors" is regarded as the quintessential epitome of reactionary ecclesiastical obscurantism; you have to say the very words in the same tones of hushed horror as "the Inquisition". But I am sure that a special Commission has been put together in Rome to organise this Year in which the Universal Church will be called upon to celebrate, to study, to reappropriate the teaching handed down on the instructions of Papa il Conte Mastai-Ferreti. This blog will, as ever, merely follow humbly the lead of the Magisterium, or, if that lead is a trifle late coming, will examine as best it can one or two hermeneutical questions arising from this laudable document.
I shall eventually come on to remarks upon the Syllabus from the pen of our own beloved Patrimonial Patron B John Henry Newman. But I would like to begin, again out of pietas, with a quotation from another, later, distinguished Anglican Patristic scholar, Dr Trevor Jalland, a predecessor of mine as pp of S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford (Ecclesia Sancti Thomae iuxta ferriviam, as the common folk call it). It was in his Bampton Lectures before this University in 1942 that Fr Jalland launched a public, academic, campaign of attrition designed to undermine the great edifice of anti-papal bigotry which lurked and still lurks today in the guts of so many million of our fellow-countrymen (good mixed metaphors, yes?). These are Jalland's words about the Syllabus:
" ...what many of its detractors failed to appreciate was that the real object of the Pope's attack was not freedom but licence, not reason but rationalism, not state sovereignty but secularism ... If the more determined critics of the nineteenth-century Papacy could have foreseen the present-day progress of secularism, they might have been more willing to recognise that the Syllabus, in spite of its evident limitations, had as its purpose that characteristic aim of Roman pronouncements, namely, the preservation of a via media amid the conflicting claims of modern society, between absolutism and anarchy, between theocracy and atheism. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in this supposedly reactionary document a few at least of the principles on which a modern enlightened democratic regime is based."
I have no doubt that Dr Jalland is part of that great Anglican Patrimony which our Holy Father the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wished the Ordinariates to bring into the unity of the Church, for the benefit and enlightenment of the entire Church. Audite eum!
Er ... yes ... sesqui ... well, according to my trusty Oxford Latin Dictionary sesqui is a conflation of sems, an earlier form of the word that became in Classical Latin semi(s), meaning half, and the enclitic (meaning you tack it on the end of the next word) -que, meaning and. So sesqui- is a prefix meaning "and a half". So
Sesquicentenary
means 150 years on, a century and a half.
2014/2015 will be the Sesquicentenary of the Syllabus Errorum of B Pius IX.
On December 8, 1864, B Pius IX issued his Encyclical Quanta cura; and, apparently at his direction, an (anonymous) collection of 80 theses, already condemned by Roman Pontiffs in earlier Magisterial interventions, was published simultaneously. In some circles "the Syllabus of Errors" is regarded as the quintessential epitome of reactionary ecclesiastical obscurantism; you have to say the very words in the same tones of hushed horror as "the Inquisition". But I am sure that a special Commission has been put together in Rome to organise this Year in which the Universal Church will be called upon to celebrate, to study, to reappropriate the teaching handed down on the instructions of Papa il Conte Mastai-Ferreti. This blog will, as ever, merely follow humbly the lead of the Magisterium, or, if that lead is a trifle late coming, will examine as best it can one or two hermeneutical questions arising from this laudable document.
I shall eventually come on to remarks upon the Syllabus from the pen of our own beloved Patrimonial Patron B John Henry Newman. But I would like to begin, again out of pietas, with a quotation from another, later, distinguished Anglican Patristic scholar, Dr Trevor Jalland, a predecessor of mine as pp of S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford (Ecclesia Sancti Thomae iuxta ferriviam, as the common folk call it). It was in his Bampton Lectures before this University in 1942 that Fr Jalland launched a public, academic, campaign of attrition designed to undermine the great edifice of anti-papal bigotry which lurked and still lurks today in the guts of so many million of our fellow-countrymen (good mixed metaphors, yes?). These are Jalland's words about the Syllabus:
" ...what many of its detractors failed to appreciate was that the real object of the Pope's attack was not freedom but licence, not reason but rationalism, not state sovereignty but secularism ... If the more determined critics of the nineteenth-century Papacy could have foreseen the present-day progress of secularism, they might have been more willing to recognise that the Syllabus, in spite of its evident limitations, had as its purpose that characteristic aim of Roman pronouncements, namely, the preservation of a via media amid the conflicting claims of modern society, between absolutism and anarchy, between theocracy and atheism. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in this supposedly reactionary document a few at least of the principles on which a modern enlightened democratic regime is based."
I have no doubt that Dr Jalland is part of that great Anglican Patrimony which our Holy Father the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wished the Ordinariates to bring into the unity of the Church, for the benefit and enlightenment of the entire Church. Audite eum!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
