Spring or Summer on the Italian Lakes? Join me there!!.

I remember the beginning of the sermon well; firstly, because it was the day after we got married on April 1, secondly because the preacher was very fat. Low Sunday 1967; High Mass in S Mary's Bourne Street; and the homilist began by remarking that, a generation ago, one could have found the entire Anglican Bench of Bishops on the shores of the Italian Lakes on Low Sunday. I suppose we should all rejoice, we of the Ordinariate, that the English Catholic bishops are planning their ten-day break, so richly deserved, lakeside at Palazzola from April 17: a very Patrimonial thing to do!!

Patrimonial, the Italian Lakes, but Trollopian as well! All I knew about them until last year was that Dr Vesey Stanhope spent the emoluments of his Barchester canonry living there and adding to the collection of butterflies for which he was so famous, until the menaces of a new Bishop ... or his Chaplain ... or rather, the Bishop's wife ... induced him to return to the Close. But last year I did get, finally, to Lake Garda; and the wonders of the place swept me off my feet. The "Roman Forum", run by Dr John Rao, is what took me there.  Beneath is what I wrote on my blog shortly after I returned:

FROM  12 JULY 2014 ...
 What a spectacular ten days! I have just returned from the Roman Forum colloquium organised annually by the brilliant and indefatigable John Rao. Centred at a beautiful village on the hillside above the exquisitely beautiful Lake Garda which Caius Valerius Catullus so loved (I did, of course, take my Catullus with me) the colloquium includes two daily lectures; a Sung Mass at 11.30 (said Masses earlier); drinks at Seven ... Dinner at Eight ... you get the idea. It also included a trip around the lake ... as far as Malcesine where thousands of swallows endlessly circled a Venetian tower ... and a superbly organised expedition to Venice: Dr Rao has his own boatmen and the entire day was magically effortless. Some participants later made up a party to go to the opera in the Roman amphitheatre at Verona.

This is not a liturgical conference (although the liturgy used is of course the authentic rite of the Latin Church, done with a very competent Schola in the beautiful baroque Parish Church). A commitment to Tradition is broader than just being fond of the Vetus Ordo. I'm not going to tell you what the common intellectual theme was this year ... you should jolly well make sure you go in 2015. Suffice it to say that the quality of the lectures was (except for my couple) very distinguished indeed. The participants were of every age and included those with ideas to communicate and non-intellectuals who just wished to learn more about the Faith. (English is the language of the colloquium, but lecturers are from all over Europe and America).

I was very glad to meet and talk with, for the first time, the eminent historian of Vatican II, Professor Roberto de Mattei, whose papers will have fascinated you on the Rorate blog. The lecturers were all (except for me) distinguished. The staff of Gloria TV dropped in and filmed us ... It was fascinating to get the low-down on the Austrian Church ...

You just don't know what you missed. But there is 2015 ...

Thayt's what I wrote last year, 2014, and believe me, I can't wait to get back. There are some rooms still vacant in the village and I'll do another Post later in the day.

Gardone: more ...

THE ROMAN FORUM SUMMER SYMPOSIUM GARDONE 2015 will get you the  details via Google. The dates are June 29 until July 10, and the theme this year is Forbidden Topics: a free and rational Catholic challenge to the frightened Modern Mind. An admirable general subject; it took me some time to narrow myself down to the two choices I am allowed to lecture on. I do beg you to give serious consideration to a ten day treat in which one is unsure whether it is first-rate intellectual stimulation varied by food, wine, good liturgy, good conversation, top-notch sight-seeing ... or the food and the etceteras varied by first-rate intellectual stimulation. I append below what I wrote after returning from last year's Forum; WARNING: its original heading apologised for the excessive Classical references. Don't be put off: the Conference is not a Classical Conference! 

FROM 7 AUGUST 2014 ... mainly for Classicists ...
 .... the drill was that we made our own arrangements for lunch ... usually eating in little groups at the various eateries around the square. On just one occasion I acted antisocially. On my own, concealing shamefacedly a small volume of poetry, some of it sexually explicit, I crept down to the waterfront, lined with lavish villas and hotels built by or for the Austrians and Germans for whom this was a convenient riviera. Under the ample and cool portico of the former Casino, looking out over what must be some of the most wonderful views in the world, I ordered a vitello tonnato  and settled down, undisturbed, to reread Caii Valerii Catulli Carmina.

Well, wouldn't you have done so? Perhaps you have done so. How could one visit Catullus's lake, looking across to his Sirmio over the anerithmon gelasma ton kumaton (did he have this line from the Prometheus Vinctus in mind as he wrote O Lydiae lacus undae, ridete quidquid est domi cachinorum?) and not read his Carmina? And not think of his Phaselus cutting through the water? (The commentators, incidentally, discuss whether the river was still navigable when he brought her home for her retirement; but since more than a millennium later the Venetians hauled their galleys over the mountains to have a naval battle with the French, the question seems otiose.)

I wondered whether it was the limpid waters of Garda that got Catullus thinking, while he was still an adulescens, about luxus et veneres: what Jasper Griffin, the Corpus Professor emeritus in this University, once wrote about as the joys of women, water, and nakedness ... the nymphs nutricum tenus exstantes e gurgite cano ... Ariadne on the beach, mindless of her mitra, her amictus and her strophium all slipping off her body to be played with by the cheeky little waves around her ankles as in Catullus 64, his Epyllion in the purest manner of Callimachus ... until I was woken from reminiscences of Neoteric poetry and Oxford Professors by the waiter, who clearly had begun to think quamquam invito Catullo of taking his siesta. He told me that the premises had been used during the War as a German Officers' Club. For the first time in my life (this will confirm you in your view of how amoral and unimaginative I am) I began to wonder whether I might have had a vocation to join the Wehrmacht.

So I strolled through the gardens of the adjoining villa, where Il Duce, another man not indifferent to pleasures of the flesh, set up Clara Pettacci ... in all the circumstances, let us hope that she enjoyed her all-too-brief stay there ... and then I climbed the hill to listen to another particularly spectacular paper by John Rao.

Our Chrism Mass

Another splendid Chrism Mass yesterday! Celebrated as ever by the Nuncio, as the Holy Father's particular representative; a lovely piece of symbolism since it reminds us that canonically and ecclesiologically we are directly under the Sovereign Pontiff himself; a detached portion, you might say, of the Church of Urbs Roma herself, miraculously transplanted into this our land. To great applause (I have to admit we did become a trifle unliturgical in our exuberance) Archbishop Tony, as I have heard him called, assured us (and not just once!) of the very special affection in which Pope Francis holds us. Among the massed concelebrants, our six formerly Anglican bishops. And Keith was very persuasive on Mission ... Chrisma as the "Oil of Mission". What a privilege it is to be incardinated into this splendid body.

Through an open door, I happened to notice, over the fireplace in the Ordinary's study, a fine painting of Bishop Graham Leonard. I felt quite touched; how marvellous to be reminded of that great Pontiff but, even better, to be reminded by him of our continuities ... that we lineally constitute as a Coetus  that Ecclesia Anglicana planted by S Augustine Romanissimus Romanorum which was violently wrenched into schism under the Tudors but then, over the grace-filled centuries, felt its way back to full Catholic orthodoxy and the fullest and most whole-hearted adherence to the Magisterium. (You should have heard us sing Praise to the Holiest at the end!) We have so much to be proud of ... Oops; I should have said, "Grateful for"; grateful for Grace, grateful for each other, grateful for Pope Benedict. God bless him! I am sure it is his prayers, joining with those of the amoluntos Theotokos of Walsingham and of Blessed John Henry, that propel us on our Way.

How the Clergy did chatter, before and after. We are so far flung that we have a lot of catching up to do. I don't think I heard one little bit of bad news; just talk of growth ... and "How's your family?" ... and "I didn't hear about the Letter until it had gone to press" ... and "What a lot of laity this morning, and weren't they cheerful?" ... and "Thank you so much for your blog" (Thank YOU, dear Fathers.) The only hints of sadness were occasional reminiscences of those who had said they would join us on our journey into unity with Peter, but who drew back at the last moment. How much more we could be doing if only ...

Perhaps we have spent too much time enjoying ourselves and not enough time in penitential prayer for them? I, for my part, plead guilty to that failing. God give them the grace to understand, and give to me the grace of self-denial.

in tot adversis

Da quaesumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, qui in tot adversis ex nostra infirmitate deficimus; intercedente unigeniti Filii tui passione respiremus.

Thus today's ancient Collect (Grant, we beg, almighty God: that we, who among so many adversities faint on account of our weakness, may through the mediation of thy Son's passion, get our breath back).

How extraordinarily up-to-the-moment those ancient prayers are. The Church is at this very minute under a great Satanic onslaught: she is still reeling from the wounds inflicted  by the monstrous evil of pedophilia: men privileged to take the Lord into their own hands morning by morning so as to offer the immaculate oblation with the purest of hearts became ... filth. Demonic cunning is putting the Church's doctrine of Marriage is under attack in some of the highest quarters of the Church. Sexual perversion is Proudly paraded before us, and woe-betide any who dissent. And, without the gates, Christians are hounded to Martyrdom by a foul and murderous superstition. Among so many adversities puts it mildly.

The new Rite retains this Collect. But it misses out the words in tot adversis [among so many adversities]. In the breezy and optimistic confidence of the post-conciliar years, we felt that as the Church made herself up-to-date, threw open her windows to the world, and blew her cobwebs away, old liturgical phraseology about her being besieged by afflictions was not particularly ben trovato.

Oh dear. How the chickens so carefully nurtured by the fashionable liturgists of the 1960s really are coming home to roost. One recalls the Lord's words about the yet greater demonic infestation which can occupy the swept and garnished house.

Two notes in response to queries.

Gardone 2015 ... the Roman Forum ... google it ... I plan to write about it next Wednesday, but I do urge readers who can devote 10 days to high living combined with top-notch intellectual pursuits to suss it out and book now. I went last year and it was the experience of a lifetime. All that and Venice too!


Anthony Kenny wrote A Stylometric Study of the New Testament in 1986, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Wason's Bishop and his Extraordinary Sunday

As Catholic Anglicans, we had something like a century's experience of introducing what we used then to call "the Western Rite", i.e. the 'Tridentine' liturgy associated with the name of S Pius V, into parishes which had not previously known it. Quite often this was done overnight; as an interregnum came to its end, the newly instituted incumbent sprang (what Pope Benedict was later to name) the Extraordinary Form on the parish on his very first Sunday morning. I recently shared with you Fr Bernard Walke's moving account of how he did this at S Hilary's in Cornwall.

His friend Fr Sandys Wason did likewise at nearby Cury and Gunwalloe. A few months later, Fr Wason's bishop had heard that some of the congregation were restive. (Wason had also sacked a 'gentry' Churchwarden and appointed in his place a villager; and had expressed from the pulpit his view of the Ordo Recentior by holding aloft a Book of Common Prayer, and affecting to look inside it before throwing it down to the ground with the words "Made in Germany!") So the bishop announced that he was coming over the next Sunday to officiate in the church and to Sort Things Out. Probably surmising that his Lordship did not intend to use a rite that included the Third Confiteor, Father saw to it that he was already well into his own Tridentine Missa Cantata by the time the right reverend prelate's conveyance rolled up to the church. The latter announced to the large crowds of gaping sightseers who had come to watch the 'fun', that he would await the end of the Vicar's Service, and then celebrate the Holy Communion.

The Bishop underestimated both the stamina of the Anglo-Catholic clergy and laity ... and their appetite for Marian devotion. Immediately after Mass, with no greater interruption than the removal of his maniple, Fr Wason began Solemn Rosary ... not one of those rapid Irish Rosaries with the laity racing into the Holy Mary before the priest has even got to the fruit of thy womb, but a slow, meditative, Anglican Rosary in which, at the end of each Mystery, Father preached about it generously and extensively, allowing no typological crumb to fall unexamined to the ground. Eventually the Pontiff, almost fainting because he had not had a bite of lunch, gave up and was driven back to his Palace at Lys Escop. When Fr Wason - after delivering what may have been the most exhaustive treatise on the Coronation of our Lady in the history of Christian homiletics - finally emerged into the setting sun, he dismissed the waiting mob of journalists with a wave of his hand and the information that, since he was of course still fasting, he was off to have his breakfast.

Wason's Cornish critics did score some points against him, most notably when they dumped the putrescent corpse of a donkey on the Vicarage doorstep. There were times when West Country humour may have had its slightly heavy side.

Happy days, that blessed era of the Walkes and the Wasons, the glittering Age of Confessors when 'Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze'; and how authentically it is still right at the heart of our beloved Anglican Patrimony. We must keep alive in our three Ordinariates the spirit of those Heroes of the Faith! Memoria aeterna!

ANGELUS DOMINI

There are customs surrounding the Angelus, familiar to those of the Anglican Patrimony, which I do not see in 'diocesan' Catholic churches.

(1) The use of the Angelus immediately after the main Sunday morning Mass;
(2) the singing of the Angelus;
(3) genuflexion at Et Verbum caro factum est; and
(4) the sign of the Cross at per passionem eius et cru+cem ... .

Can anyone throw any light on these customs (particularly their origins), which seem to me thoroughly admirable?


I rather incline to the narrative according to which the Angelus was instituted by Pope John XXII, who certainly did institute the Solemnity of Corpus Christi as we have it today. He 'provided' that great pontiff and builder and liturgist John de Grandisson to the See of Exeter, and I have long wondered whether that can possibly have anything to do with the fact that Grandisson's patron is commemorated in Avignon by a fine tomb of English manufacture.

GERMANS ARE NOT ALL BAD!

Rorate reproduces a superbly savage piece by Cardinal Cordes smashing a great big hole through all the twaddle we hear from some leading members of the German hierarchy. Read it not only for its truth but for its wonderful rhetoric!

AND The Hermeneutic of Continuity contains an important letter signed by a very large number of British priests on the same subject of Marriage and the Synod. When Vatican II was happening and in the era of Humanae vitae, orthodox presbyters were largely quiescent. It is very good news that so many are resolved not to make the same mistake this time round. Apparently there have been some signs of pressure and intimidation to discourage clergy from signing. I have not been aware of any in the Ordinariate or in the Diocese of Portsmouth. Had I experienced such, I suspect I would have responded with brisk decisiveness, possibly citing the teaching of Dignitatis humanae on Conscience.

Dignitatis humanae: Fr Zuhlsdorf's QUAERITUR

An acute reader of the Archiblogopoios has pointed out to him a slipshod piece in the Vatican website English Language translation of Dignitatis humanae. This does not surprise me; long-time readers will recall that, until I came to fear that they would regard me as a bore for doing it almost daily, I repeatedly gave examples of the truth that very few people in the Vatican appear to have any competence in Latin.

I think I may be able to explain how the problem arose with this passage in Dignitatis humanae. It is easily explicable by recalling the methodology of Textual Criticism, which means the study of different versions of a text so as 
(1) to recover what the original text read before, in the course of scribal transmission, it became corrupt; and
(2) to demonstrate how the corruption occurred.

The Latin original passed by the Council Fathers, which of course does not need to be recovered because it is on record, reads ... contra suam conscientiam neque impediatur quominus iuxta suam conscientiam agat ...

What has happened here is that the English translator's eye slipped from the conscientiam at the end of the first clause to the conscientiam in the second clause, with the consequent omission of the words between. This slipping of the eye is called technically parablepsis. The fact that it is caused by two phrases or two lines ending with the same word (or even, sometimes, with just the same or a similar run of letters) is called homoeoteleuton.

These two phenomena in combination account for a considerable number of scribal errors both in Biblical and in profane manuscripts.

The interesting point here is the evidence that some people both inside and outside the Vatican really do not give a damn what the Council actually taught. Like all good old-fashioned witch-doctors, they use the words "The Council" as an arcane mantra, devoid of meaning, wherewith to beat SSPX or other traditionalists. But we knew that anyway.

Genetics ...

... is a subject in which I have nil competence. And I haven't been able to obtain and read the widely reported Nature article (March 19, I think) about the genetic composition of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; I have had to rely on the reports in the 'broadsheet' papers.

But I feel two main problems (which of course may be dealt with in the full article). Firstly, the statement that "there is little Roman DNA in the British genetic make-up". You see, I don't even understand what such a negative actually means in this context. "Roman", in the first four centuries of the Christian Era, refers to people who could have come from the whole Mediterranean region. "Roman" soldiers and merchants came from anywhere between our Portugal and our Iraq; our Scotland and our Algeria. Many of them will never have visited Rome.

But more: if "Roman" is, on the contrary, intended to mean "only from the city of Rome", the problem is just as great. By the first century, Rome was a gigantic multiracial mix rather like modern London or New York. Even if everyone who came here between 40AD and 400 AD did come physically from the city of Rome and nowhere else, that, surely, still would not offer the investigator a single and simple genetic pattern to recognise or to fail to recognise.

Secondly: the investigators say they were surprised that "Celtic" turns out genetically to be a totally meaningless term. I am immensely surprised by their immense surprise. The "Celtic" myth was exploded in the 1990s at the latest. The word as currently used to bracket together the peoples of Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Man, Scotland, and Ireland, or to refer to the pre-Roman Iron Age inhabitants of Great Britain, is devoid of significatory content except in as far as it may retain linguistically a usefulness based upon the fact that it has conventionally come to denote two groups of similar languages. That convention, of talking about "the Celtic languages", itself goes no further back than 1707, when the Welsh scholar Edward Lhuyd invented it. As long ago as 1998, Simon James wrote "Society as a whole simply accepts Celtdom as a fact, and has made it part of itself. Scholars started the Celtic hare running. The hare has now turned into a chimera, and the debate over how to kill it - if we can, and if we have the right to try - is only just beginning." If people, even academics, persist in being misled into thinking that the term does have any substance, it might be better for the philologists to dream up a replacement term.

And can it be that this 'surprising discovery' is another example of the dividedness of the modern Academy; a world in which geneticists do not read archeologists? I'll stick my neck yet further out and say: a world in which 'scientists' are too grand to bother with 'historians'?

Can anybody supply me with a link to this article? If I have been completely, comprehensively, unfair, It's my duty to admiy it!


Footnote: The alleged distinctiveness of 'Celtic Christianity' was disputed by Kathleen Hughes in 1981 followed by many since; Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards of this University has written dismissively of "that entity beloved of modern sectarians and romantics, but unknown to the early Middle Ages - 'the Celtic Church'."

The Magisterium: latest on the limits of Papal authority

Recently, Cardinal Mueller, in the faithful discharge of the office mandated to him by the Holy Father, has spoken frankly and lucidly about the limitations of the papal office. You will have seen his letter to the Hungarian bishops dated 13 January 2015 (in Vatican Documents).

His intervention is closely in line with the words of  Pope Francis' immediate predecessor: "In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith ... the authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition."

Thus wrote Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, as part of his attack on that maximalising concept of the Papacy which, in the years after the Council, led to the notion that "the pope could really do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the the mandate of an ecumenical council". Let us be clear about this: he was explicitly criticising, not Blessed Paul VI, but an incorrect understanding prevalent during the Montini papacy, and doing so forcefully at a time when he was Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

It is not always observed that our Holy Father the Pope Emeritus was alluding to a controversy which arose after Vatican I. Chancellor Bismarck had accused Vatican I of creating a view of the Papacy under which the Pope was an absolute monarch ... to the detriment of political and other liberties. The German bishops replied (Denzinger 3114) by denying that the conciliar decrees had this sort of effect upon the the civil loyalties of Catholics; and went on to say that "praeterea neque quoad res ecclesiasticas papa monarchus absolutus nuncupari potest, quippe qui cum subordinatus sit iuri divino et obstrictus sit iis quae Christus pro Ecclesia sua disposuit ... ". B Pius IX himself subsequently, formally but with great warmth, approved this statement.

And all this is simply a rolling-out, an explicatio, of the Great Negative of Vatican I in Pastor aeternus; its vitally important teaching that the Holy Spirit was not given to Roman Pontiffs so that they could teach novelties. Moreover, by defining the authority of Roman Pontiffs, that admirable Council automatically set limits upon it (this is a point emphatically made by Newman, LD. 170, 204). That is what the verb definire means. Finis is Latin for a boundary.


What is particulaly interesting and immensely reassuring about Cardinal Mueller's recent intervention is that he explicitly cites the CDF document of 1998, paragraph 7, signed by Joseph Ratzinger, about the Papal Primacy. And that document itself cited with equal explicitness the Declaration of the German Bishops which I quote above (Denzinger 3114), and which was both confirmed and warmly applauded by none other than Blessed Pope Pius IX himself.

It is very disheartening to some faithful Catholics that some Eminent voices appear to ignore this clear Conciliar teaching by advocating a return to that maximalising, innovatory, exercise of papal authority which Benedict XVI discerned as having been so corrosive during the period following Vatican II; accurately discerned and appropriately condemned. 

The sort of faithful Catholics, who in the 1870s after Vatican I were criticised as maximalists for asserting what the Council did decree about extent of papal authority, seems now to run the risk of being criticised as minimalists for asserting what Vatican I decreed about the limits of papal authority. And behind it all is an uneasy feeling, I am sure, groundless, among some such people, that our beloved Holy Father may see them as a Problem standing in the way of what he wishes to achieve. Trust between the Roman Pontiff and those whose great wish is to be his faithful children, is thus damaged. Hence the anguish about this pontificate in 'traddy' areas of the internet.

I write personally as one individual in the communities which entered into Full Communion via the Ordinariates. We had spent decades asserting and defending the decrees of Vatican I on the Primacy and Infallibility of the Successor of S Peter (I particularly have in mind Dom Gregory Dix's papers on Vatican I, and the 'Centenary Papers', both from the 1930s). Our position since we came into Full Communion, I presume, continues to combine (a) full acceptance of both the positive and the negative formulations within Pastor aeternus of Vatican I, with (b) the summary of Catholic Doctrine in the Catechism.  

Meden huper ha gegraptai!