Archbishop Scicluna and Meghan Markle

It seems quite a time now since Mgr Scicluna was commissioned to look into the Barros business. I read somewhere that he handed his report in a month or more ago.

There wasn't, surely, a great deal for him to do. He simply had to interrogate Barros, the complainants, those involved in the transmission of 'the Letter', and, of course, PF. That would have enabled him to survey at least the first three questions: Was the 'Five Page Letter' indeed conveyed to Cardinal O'Malley? Did he indeed convey it to PF? Is it indeed in the archives?

So why has no report been made public? Could it be that experts have been called in to do tests on PF's memory? That, I concede, could cause delays. You know what expensive doctors are like when it comes to amassing items on their bills. There are always yet more tests they can conduct ... and still some more ... the Manchester psychometrics team may be involved ...

Did the Man from Malta minutely examine PF's emails, Twitters, phone-calls, etc.? Shall we eventually have Watergate-style tapes played to us with the fouler of the expletives deleted? Ah ... the Millhouse years ... he was by far my favourite  favorite American president ...

In our delightfully corrupt British politics, 'spin-doctors', as they used to be called, are skilled at 'placing' bad news. They rely on lengthy delays ('kicking it into the long grass') so that people half-forget what the whole thing was all about anyway; publishing reports on the eve of a parliamentary dissolution or the day of the birth of a Royal Baby ...

Heureka! That's it! The Scicluna Report will be published on the morning the whole Universe is rejoicing at the birth of Meghan Markle's first Baby and Osservatore Romano has a special five-page Supplement!

Or when Mr Putin pays his State Visit!!

Or when we win back the Ashes!!!

Or when Justin Welby resigns because of his mishandling of the Bishop Bell affair!!!!

Or when dear Mr Scalfari publishes his next 'interview' [probably on Christmas Eve] in which he will claim that PF told him he no longer  believes in God; and the Press Office is feverishly explaining that these may not have been precisely the exact words PF used!!!!! 

I can't find 'frabjous' in Dr Johnson's Dictionary. But you can certainly start stacking up the Beamish!

God's Daughters

When ever does the learned and admirable Dr Peter Kwasniewski not write good theology, good liturgy, and good sense? I commend his recent characteristically brilliant piece at Onepeterfive to those who might otherwise  ... 'leave it for later' ... because it looks a bit technical. It is in fact extremely important and perfectly accessible even to those who think of themselves as non-academic. I would add just one point.

Dr K cites paragraph 9 of the CDF document Placuit Deo and criticises it for talking about "Sons and Daughters of God" when the Biblical logic, basically Pauline, of the passage requires the phrase "Sons of God". We are, indeed, Sons of God only because we share in the One Sonship of the One Son. Strictly speaking, the Father has only the one Son, whom the Johannine writings and the 'Nicene' Creed very pointedly call Monogenes, Unigenitus. So, strictly speaking, none of us is simpliciter God's Son; but all the Baptised, through the filiation, huiothesia ('Son-ification') of Baptism, are made members of Him and thus sharers of his unique Sonship. (Hence the common shorthand phrase 'sons of God'.)

So Archbishop Ladaria's CDF has got things wrong. Big black mark.

Or has it?

A trawl through the various languages in which the Vatican has so far published Placuit Deo reveals that, in the Romance languages, the phrase is given as "Sons of God". Only in the English and the German does "Sons and Daughters of God", a corruption of Biblical teaching and logic, make its appearance. (I still cannot find a Latin 'official version': if there is one, perhaps somebody could point me to it. Similarly, if anyone has evidence for which language this document was drafted in ... I suspect, Italian ...)

So we have here a very jolly example of the importance of Latin in expressing accurately and decisively and unitively the Church's teaching (see S John XXIII Veterum sapientia especially paragraphs 5-7 & 11). Once this essential safeguard slips away, we are well down the slippery slope to a fissiparous ex-Catholic religion in which every culture gallops along its own dodgy path and we are not really 'Catholics', members of a Universal Church, any more. That, of course, is precisely what the schismatically-minded German bishops crave. (Admiration is due to some brave Bavarian bishops who have recently broken ranks with the heterodox majority in the German Conference.) Bearing in mind Archbishop Ladaria's own high reputation, we should probably assume that this office-glitch results from the CDF being undermanned. I wonder why that might be.

The fact that the English-language version of Placuit is defective is particularly worrying. English is a widely employed global language, so much so that translators providing for Catholics who use other than mainstream European  languages very often do their translations from the English. This dangerous error is, therefore, likely to be disseminated via the English version. When you get your Swahili or Urdu or Mandarin version, I bet you will find  ...

Dr K points out that the (anti-biblical, anti-Pauline, anti-Catholic) mistranslation of 'sons' as 'sons and daughters' is also found in at least three places in our current English translation of the Pauline Missale Romanum. I wonder ... perhaps Dr K knows ... or perhaps somebody else does who can inform us under a pseudonym ... whether this mistake does represent the translation as put together by ICEL, or whether it resulted from the unfortunate and rather ragged fiddling around to which the ICEL draft was subjected under the auspices of Vox clara.

Eyebrow-raising, doncha think, that the German and English translations should alone share this nasty and presumably intentional mistake. It reminds me that when the English bishops, a couple of years ago, so thoroughly disgracefully attacked Pope Benedict's new Good Friday Prayer for the Jews, they did so (they more or less admitted) at the urging of the almighty German bishops. Some pretty shifty business afoot somewhere here. Or do I mean shady? Shabby, perhaps?

Heil Marx, indeed. Jawohl, mein Fuehrer! It's enough to make a simple man (and his daughter) wonder who won the war.

S Leo II and S Peter and the Papal Magisterium.

Still interested in contributing to the debate on the limits of papal authority, today I reprint two pieces with which I accompanied the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul last year.

...  as I look into the pre-Pius X breviary by my desk, I discover that in even earlier days, June 28, yesterday, was occupied by a great pope, S Leo II (681-683).

Did I say a great pope?

Our Holy Father Pope S Leo II was great because he undertook the unhappy but necessary duty of ratifying the condemnation, by the Sixth Holy Ecumenical Council, of his own predecessor, Pope Honorius I (625-638), as a heretic. As the Vicar of Christ wrote to the Spanish bishops, Pope Honorius "did not, as befits the Apostolic dignity, extinguish the fire of heretical teaching when it began, but by his negligence fostered it".

Some people believe the Petrine Ministry means that a Pope is set in place and guided by the Holy Spirit in order to give exciting new perspectives, perhaps even surprises, to the Church. Not so. Not in a month of Sundays. As Blessed John Henry Newman taught, in a memorable passage in his Apologia about which I will write more tomorrow, the ministry of the Roman Church, its "extraordinary gift", has always been negative, to be a remora, a barrier against novelty, innovation.

At the jagged and dangerous edge of a high and precipitous cliff, the Pope is the Council Workman whose very simple job it is to put up a notice saying  
                                       DANGER: KEEP AWAY.
'Negative', laconic, 'rigid', but, oh, so necessary. A mischievous or homicidal or mischievously homicidal pope who put up a notice reading
                                 ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND
or
                 YOUR CONSCIENCE WILL TELL YOU WHEN TO JUMP 
or  
                WE WILL ACCOMPANY YOU RIGHT UP TO YOUR JUMP
would be failing in the duty set him by his Master.

Through  two millennia, it has been the duty of successive Bishops of Rome to resist, condemn, and extirpate novelty and any attempt to change the Faith.

That is why S Vincent of Lerins (circa 450?) quotes Pope S Celestine (422-432) as writing "Innovation should stop attacking what is ancient", and the next pope, S Sixtus III, (432-440) as writing "Innovation has no rights, because it is inappropriate to add anything to what is ancient; clearly, the faith and belief of our ancestors should not be stirred up by any mixture of filth". The great Anglican historian of the Papacy, Trevor Jalland, wrote of the "supernatual grandeur" of the Roman Church; "its strange, almost mystical faithfulness to type, its marked degree of changelessness, its steadfast clinging to tradition and precedent".

On this great feast of the Holy Apostles of the Church in Rome, we can do worse than listen to those powerful words of S Leo II. His predecessor Honorius had been Pope when a particular error arose; it had been his duty as domnus Apostolicus to extinguish the blaze; but he was negligent; he failed to do his (negative) duty of repelling innovation; and his negligence led to the growth of the error.

It therefore fell to an Ecumenical Council to condemn him, together with the leaders of the heresy he failed to extinguish, with the unambiguous noun heretics and the unambiguous verb anathematizomen.

There is more than one way of qualifying for the title of Heretic!

Yesterday, the great Feast of the Holy Apostles of Rome, I strolled down to Sandford lock. I took with me my battered "summer picnic" volume of the Pars Aestiva; and, since Blessed John Henry Newman, Patron of our Ordinariate, must often have walked there from nearby Littlemore, I took also his Apologia pro Vita sua.

I love the Mattins readings for the Second Nocturn, from S Leo I's First mighty Sermon In natali Apostolorum Petri et Pauli. It gets to the heart of the Romanita of the Western Church, and especially of the English Church; S Leo I, the finest Latin stylist since Cicero, explains to the plebs Romana (now the plebs sancta Dei) how all that is meant by being Roman has been transformed ... yet, in transformation, preserved and enhanced ... by the Gospel. "For although, glorified by many victories, you have advanced the jus of your imperium by land and by sea, yet, what the labour of war subdued to you, is less than what the Pax Christiana subjected to you". The culture of classical Roman antiquity was baptised by S Leo; my view is that he is the one who finally recast the Roman Eucharistic Prayer in a Latinity moulded by the the prayer-style of the old, pre-Christian, prayer-style of early Rome. Under S Leo, being a Christian finally ceased to be adherence to a foreign and dodgy sect largely followed by Greekling immigrants, and became the new majestic embodiment of all that it meant to be Roman in culture and law and liturgy. And, with S Augustine, that Romanita was parachuted into Kent and became the marker too of the Anglo-Saxon Church; the Church of Augustine and Justus and Mellitus; of Wilfrid and Bede and Alcuin. The Kentish king who had considered it beneath his dignity to adopt his wife's Merovingian Christianity rejoiced in the opportunity to receive Christianity from its august and Roman fount. Therein lies the exquisite beauty of "the Anglo-Saxon Church", a Roman island beyond the Alps.

And that same Mr Newman expressed the essence of the Petrine Ministry, of the munus of the Successor of Peter, in an epigrammatic passage: "It is one of the reproaches urged against the Church of Rome, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or break in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift". It is precisely along these lines that Cardinal Ratzinger in a passage of lapidary elegance criticised the bloated and corrupt hyperpapalism of the post-Vatican II period, with its disordered, disordering belief that a pope, especially if backed by a Council, could monkey around at will with Tradition. It is, Ratzinger asserted, the Pope's job to be the Guardian of the Tradition and the preserver of its integrity and authenticity. This is where the essence of our Holy Father's Ministry lies ... not (as some very foolish and dreadfully noisy people mistakenly think) in being a charismatic innovator, the herald of a God of Surprises.

Heaven forbid that any Pope should ever sink so low, should be so deaf to his true ecclesial vocation.

The Pope's Necessary Obedience to the Church

In the spirit of this weekend's Conference in Rome in which two distinguished speakers are listed as due to speak on the limits of Papal authority, I here reprint, with its original thread, a piece from last year. I'll add two other relevant pieces tomorrow, including one which brings in the testimony of Blessed John Henry Newman.

Is the pope above the Church? Depends what you mean. There is, of course, no doubt that the Roman Pontiff is the supreme law-giver of the whole state of Christ's Church Militant here in earth. But he is a member of, therefore within, the Church. He is therefore also a subject of the Church. (This does indeed mean that he qua Jorge Bergoglio is subject to the Church and therefore to the Pope qua Supreme lawgiver.) He is not the one person upon earth who is solutus ab omni lege.

Regular readers will recall my repetitious quotation from the writings of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: " ... 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."

Although not thus footnoted by its author, this phraseology is clearly based upon a statement by the German bishops after Bismarck had attacked the Definition of Papal Infallibility agreed at Vatican I. Bismarck had alleged that it made the pope "an absolute monarch". The German bishops replied that Papal Infallibility, being an instance of the Infallibility of the Church, is bound to the doctrine contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition and definitions already promulgated by the Church's Magisterium. The pope, they explained, is bound (obstrictus) to those things which Christ set in place in His Church. He cannot change the constitution given by the Church's Divine Founder, and the constitution of the Church is founded in all essential things in the divine arrangement (ordinatione) and is free (immunis) from every arbitrary human arrangement.  

Blessed Pius IX praised, in fulsome language, this explanation of the German bishops.

The question of the limitations upon the papal office came up again at Vatican II. In Lumen Gentium paragraph 22 (at the end), Blessed Paul VI, laudably anxious that papal authority should not be given away on his watch, wished to add the words uni Domino devinctus. In the old Abbott translation, this would have made part of the last sentence read "provided that the pope himself, bound fast to the Lord alone [or bound fast to one Master], calls them to collegiate action." But the Council's Theological Commission refused the pope's request on the grounds that it represented an excessive simplification (nimis simplificata); "the Roman Pontiff is bound to observe Revelation itself, the fundamental structure of the Church, the Sacraments, the definitions of previous Councils, etc. [sic]. All of these cannot be counted".

Indeed he is. Indeed, they can't.


Every pope is as tightly bound in obedience to the Magisterium as you are. He is no more allowed to set aside a syllable of it than I am.

Giving a lead?

Somewhere in the Meejah yesterday I heard it suggested that, despite the inspiring lead given by Martin Luther King, an American National Hero, America had still not cleansed itself entirely from the sin of Racism.

America, like my own country, has still not entirely cleansed itself from the sin of Adultery. But I am uncertain how clear a lead the Great Man gave in this area of Ethics.

Mueller on whether Laudato si is Magisterial

"... nobody is obliged to accept uncritically everything that [the pope is] saying, for example, about political or scientific questions. That's his personal opinion, but nothing to do with our Catholic Faith."

The Threefold Interface between Rigidity, Hypocrisy, and Absurdity

"About rigidity and worldliness, it was some time ago that an elderly monsignor of the curia came to me, who works, a normal man, a good man, in love with Jesus - and he told me that he had gone to buy a couple of shirts at Euroclero and saw a young fellow - he thinks he had not more than 25 years, or a young priest or about to become a priest - before the mirror, with a cape, large, wide, velvet with a silver chain. He then took the Saturno, he put it on and looked himself over. A rigid and wordly one. And that priest - he is wise that monsignor, very wise ... etc.."

The Speaker condemns someone he has never met, and does so on the say-so of a third party. One is reminded of the sacking of some workers in the CDF who were reportedly condemned instantly, without any consultation with the Prefect of that dicastery, on a report that those concerned had been heard speaking critically about the leniency accorded to clergy convicted of child abuse. The Speaker had no compunction about swallowing, hook, line and sinker, without any due process, those delated to him, as long as the delation fitted neatly into his own prejudices. This impatience with due process is the characteristic of the tyrant in every age. In his own great wisdom, the Mighty Man is competent to discern the guilt of those delated to him without the tedium of making enquiries about such vulgar details as evidence.

Indeed, recent events in the 'Barros' case reveal that the Speaker did not look at or cannot now remember looking at an eight-page letter containing details of sexual abuse and handed to him by a Cardinal.

The Speaker appears to have been blithely unaware, when talking to his curial chum, of the risk that, given his own position, there will be sycophants around, anxious to secure or enhance their own positions by telling him the sort of stories he likes hearing. And, if you do tell him the sort of tales he wants to hear, then, clearly, you are normal, good, wise ... er ... "very wise".

The Speaker apparently has ample leisure to listen to delatores who gossip about their shopping and pander to his prejudices, as well as to chatter incessantly to scalfaris, although his door is shut to curial cardinals.

The delator was buying shirts. Presumably, even if he never wears a cassock, he does wear trousers to the South of his shirts. Personally, I am the shabbiest priest in England, but, buying shirts and trousers, I either look them over in the mirror in the shop or as soon as I get home, so that if there is something amiss, I can take them back for a refund. Does the delator never do that? When the Speaker himself was being fitted up with white cassocks in the Room of Tears next to the Sixtine Chapel, is he absolutely sure that he resisted Mr Gammarelli's invitation to consider himself in the mirror?

Do they sell real silver chains on their cloaks at Euroclero? Perhaps some reader resident in Rome could check that. Before I was ordained to the Diaconate in 1967, I purchased a cloak from the clerical tailor who came from Wolverhampton to Staggers; the clasp was, I concede, of pleasantly silvery appearance but is of undoubtedly base metal. I may, conceivably, have contemplated myself in a mirror: I can't now remember. In the last 50 years I have worn that cloak when stumbling in front of coffins across uneven hillside cemeteries in the pouring rain; when taking the Blessed Sacrament to elderly villagers through winter weather; when commemorating the departed of two World Wars at village War Memorials on cold Sundays in November. Why the h**l should I feel guilty? I do not know that I have ever noticed photographs of the Speaker himself standing unprotected in pouring rain, humble though he is. And, had he ever done so, there would undoubtedly have been photographers there to record and to give worldwide publicity to his humility.

Indeed, why does the Speaker go around all the time in a white cassock? His face is well known; he does not, like an ordinary priest or even bishop, need a 'uniform' to identify himself to people. Indeed, a white cassock must, because white shows the dirt, need dry-cleaning a lot more often that cassocks in most other colours ... to the detriment of vital Environmental resources. Bishops, less showy men, nowadays often wear black, much the same as their clergy. The cassocks, incidentally, visible in photographs of the Speaker show no obvious signs of wear and of mending. I am in only the second cassock of my clerical career (I was deaconed in 1967): I wonder if the Speaker could say as much.

But ... why does he need to wear a cassock at all? What is wrong with doing what the Speaker has recommended to other clergy: wearing shorts and a tea-shirt so that the Youff can admire his tatoos?

Could it just possibly, just conceivably, be something to do with status and with other rigid wordly considerations?

Headlam and the Wendy House (2) UPDATE

Obliged to keep an appointment with 'Nazi' Headlam, Dix turned up punctually. He was not surprised that the Bishop was not yet at leisure to receive him. Anglican bishops (I'm sure Catholic bishops are quite different) generally keep you waiting. This is a very old and effective Management trick to make the point that your time is of no value whatsoever, while the Bishop is extremely grand and important.  Into the room in which Dom Gregory had been parked there wandered a small and very sad girl, sobbing inconsolably. After a while, Dix asked her who she was. She broke off to tell him that she was the bishop's granddaughter, and then returned to her grief. After another interval, Dix enquired why she was crying. "It's my Wendy House", he was informed. (Wendy Houses are toy houses for children to play in, scaled down to less than adult proportions.) With bachelor reticence, Dix hesitated to invade with gross masculine insensitivity these maidenly mysteries ... until the renewed sobs drove him in exasperation to seek more precise information. "Well", said the tiny, "We were playing together in the nursery and I persuaded grandpapa to crawl into my Wendy House. It wasn't really big enough for him, but in the end I got him wedged inside. Then I shut ... ". Here the distraught female resorted again to heart-rending sobs. Dix pressed upon her the cleaner of his two monastic handkerchiefs, and tactfully asked her to develop her narrative. "Well, I shut the door and then I locked it and then I went for a ride on my pony and there was nobody else in the nursery wing of the Palace so nobody heard him shouting for three hours and then when they got him out he was stiff and hoarse and all he could say was Now I've got to go and see that bloody monk ... "

Recounting this story afterwards to an admiring circle of friends, Dix - who, one is compelled to confess, did rather like to 'play' his audiences - paused to stuff some more tobacco into his pipe. Right on cue, one of his hearers pressed him: "So what, Father, did you do?".

"I patted her on the head and told her what a good girl she was and gave her half a crown."

UPDATE An eagle-eyed correspondent tells me that Headlam had no offspring, and suggests that the young woman was a great-niece.

Simon Bailey's 1995 biography of Dix perpetuates the same mistake that I did.

Headlam and the Wendy House (1)

I wasn't around during the Thirties, but the anecdotally-driven impression I get is that European culture was divided. There were those who believed in stark, virile, Nordic culture, combined with 'race' and 'blood' imperatives. This involved Improving the Race by Eugenic methods which included sterilisation, abortion, and 'euthanasia', and the supersession or even elimination of lesser races. And there were those who strongly opposed these deadly superstitions. Nazism, of course, grabbed these ideas and ran with them, but they had been around in Northern Europe and North America long before the advent of Nazism. With varying levels of extremism, such ideas found within the churches a degree of support. German Protestantism split; those who would not run with the Zeitgeist formed a 'Confessing' Church which repudiated the mainstream and more conformist parts of German Protestantism.

Englishmen who were inclined to Satire, had enormous scope. I have forgotten who it was who observed that Aryans were as tall as Goebels, as slim as Goering, as blond as Hitler. Mgr R A Knox saw the ridiculous side of the Nordic, Teutonic, fashion; so did G K Chesterton ... and Dom Gregory Dix lost the friendship of 'Nipper' Williams by mocking it throughout the 1930s in the Anglican Benedictine journal Laudate.

One of Dix's least favourite bishops was Headlam of Gloucester. Headlam was a disdainful upper-class Wykehamist; he saw things from an 'Establishment', 'Management' standpoint. So he profoundly disliked the 'Confessing' Church for their anti-government approach. He had made himself interested in 'Church Unity'; so he disapproved of the split in German Protestantism caused (as he saw it) by the opponents of Hitlerism. As late as 1938, he was criticising those who insisted upon an incompatibility between Christianity and National Socialism. Dix, with his contempt for Nordophilia, his suspicion of 'ecumenical' initiatives which amounted to pan-Protestantism, and his radical, magnificent antipathy to grand people who took themselves seriously, couldn't have been more different from Headlam.

No, not at all hilarious so far. I'll get on to the Wendy House soon. I thought you would like to have some background.

Calendars ... Days of the Duty to have a Double Laugh REFRAMED

(1) April Fools' Day and the Gregorian Pascha don't often coincide so as to demand of us the duty of a duplex risus. Last time: 1956. The next time is rather sooner: 2029.

About the Risus Paschalis, see Ratzinger, Images of Hope.

Qui crucifixus erat Deus, ecce per omnia regnat! Salve festa Dies!! (S Venantius Fortunatus, echoing Publius Ovidius Naso.)



(2) Why did I like Vincent Nichols' Times piece on Holy Saturday? Because we are in an age when people pussyfoot around with "Some Christians believe" and "According to legend" and so on, thus allowing the 'Enlightenment' to put a great gulf between us and a simple assertion of the Tradition. But, happily, Nichols just told it straight and, I thought, put things rather well.

As for his piece on the BBC on Friday, about Scalfarigate, I felt distinctly sorry for him. All over Christendom, priests and bishops and not least cardinals have long been preparing for their great duty of sanctifying God's people through the Triduum ... and then you get dragged into Broadcasting House on Good Friday morning to be interrogated by that condescending bore John Humphrys because PF, in his enormous but enormously inscrutable wisdom, has yet again given some crook called scalfari the opportunity to attribute to PF some words which immediately throw the Media into a ferment and are considered to require official denial.

RISUS PASCHALIS DIESQUE PRIMA APRILIS ANNI MMXVIII SALUTIS

Last Friday, it chanced that I was lunching with a couple of friends in the Gay Hussar, at the top end of Greek Street, when I felt that strange sensation of recognising a member of the party at the next table. As I was finishing the Hot Cherry Soup, the penny dropped. It was Jacob Rees Mogg, MP. He was tucking heartily into the Smoked Swan's Breast on Scholet, which is always a safe bet. Accidentally, our glances met; and in a couple of moments, our two groups were chatting amicably. You know how such things happen. Jacob explained that one reason for his presence was to give the restaurant, as custom prescribes, a copy of a book he had just published. I should explain to transpontine readers that in the Gay Hussar, traditionally the eatery of choice for those of a particular political tendency, one contributes a copy of one's own publications to the already large collection of the literary endeavours of other members of The Party over the decades.

Conversation settled into Jacob's memories of his old School. Seeing that we were all clerics deservedly enjoying a leisurely day off, he mentioned Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, Rector of the Catholic Parish Church round the corner. "Just within these four walls" he said, "let me tell you something I've heard about when Fr Alexander and Archbishop Nichols were at School together ... ".

"Hang on" said an Ordinariate priest sitting to my left, "I didn't know Nichols was at Eton". Jacob glanced quickly round to check that no stranger was eavesdropping. "No," he said. "They managed to keep it out of his Wikipedia entry. Wrong image. But he was, and he was in the same House as Fr Alexander. More than that, he was Fr Alexander's fag. Rather a cheeky fag, in fact."

I mused silently on how elegantly, just as an Etonian would, the Archbishop had handled the Scalfarigate question on the Beeb that morning, and the waiter refilled our glasses (I suspect he hoped we might soon be gone, because it was past 3 o'clock). When he had left our tables, Jacob continued "I don't think he's ever really forgiven him." "Forgiven him? What on earth for?" we all cried. "Well", said Jacob, "I think the reason is ... well ... to be blunt ... I think Fr Alexander caned Vincent quite a lot, especially whenever he got lippy ... that's why the Cardinal's so cautious nowadays in everything he says ..."

Ah, School days, happy days, the happiest of our lives! Yes? Quanta et qualia fuerunt illa Sabbata ...

Did you know that the good old Anglo-Catholic Hymn I'll sing a song to Mary, the Mother of my God ... goes beautifully to the tune of the Eton Boating Song? I got that idea from the late Fr Melrose of S Giles, Reading. I bet it rejoices the heart of Eton's devout and Royal Founder St Henry VIII.

Num risistis? Eheu!

A very holy and happy Easter to all readers except Mr Scalfari. Hi there, Tucho!