The Society of SS Wilfrid and Hilda

I gather that, while Pam and I were enjoying the Cornish Sun, those slippery folk, the 'Catholic Bishops of the Church of England', took advantage of my absence to hold a 'Sacred Synod' without my supervision.

By 'slippery Catholic Bishops' I mean, not our worthy and stalwart Flying Bishops who are still studying the Ordinariate offer with admirably open and unbiased minds - may the Holy Spirit soon enlighten them - but a collection of 'Establishment' prelates who seem, so many of them, to have some sort of connection in their CVs with John Hinde, the Bishop of Chichester. From this stable comes the Society of SS W and H, as the answer to the crisis facing the Catholic Movement in the C of E.

Considering the track record of those two saints in tidying up the C of E in a relentlessly Romanising direction, a Man from Mars might have thought that this proposed society was a cunning scheme for rounding up the troops for an enthusiastic and immediate mass entry into the Ordinariate. He might have been encouraged in this assumption by the fact that the first stated aim of the new Society is: to secure the full visible unity of the Church. But if this is what the begetters of the scheme have in mind, they are being very delicately allusive, indeed, Jesuitically cunning, about it. Would it not be more English, more Manly, to dump the devious and be open and frank? You will have discerned that I am feeling in rather a Charles Kingsley sort of mood about all this.

Alternatively, might it be that they are trying to syphon off some Anglicans who might be tempted by the Ordinariates? "Stay in Mother Damnable and you can kid yourselves that by joining our game you are more or less joining the Ordinariate ... except that completion will be just that little bit further down the road". But if this is what the begetters of the scheme have in mind, would it not be more English, more Manly, to be open, honest, and frank?

After 1992, we waited for the "Leaders of the Catholic Movement" to come up with something; to do something resolute and virile. They came up with an Act of Synod which, essentially, sold the pass (there are growing numbers of women priests in every diocese) but enabled those gentry to retain palaces and cathedrals; seats in the House of Lords and - perhaps the really insidious temptation - the trappings of status and deference. They even delicately distanced themselves from the groundroots organisations, such as Forward in Faith, which raised the money and did the fighting and took the opprobrium ("It's the tone we don't like"). Now a new generation of such "Leaders" has decided that, after all, just one organisation more really is the solution to all our problems.

If founding yet more Societies were the solution, bully for wilfn'hilda. But does anybody seriously suppose that our opponents are suddenly going to cave in and allow such an organisation to have jurisdiction and the necessary autonomies? And even if women bishops don't jump over the numerical hurdle in the next General Synod ... well, does anyone doubt that they will in the one after? And even if that innovation were per impossibile held permanently at bay, how can any Catholic see ecclesial integrity in a 'Church' in which more than half the presbyterate will very soon be female? Or in a 'Society' sponsored by bishops who, while they salve their incomprehensible consciences by declining physically to taint their own hands with the touch of female hair, nevertheless ordain women by proxy and license and institute them to the cure of souls ("which is mine and thine") and treat them in their dioceses as in every respect de facto priests? Ordained women, wearing stoles priestwise, participate liturgically with these bishops, and Bishop Hind has even established forms of priestly ordination in his diocese in which the collegial imposition of hands by the presbyters present includes the participation of women 'priests'. Are such compromised men as this the toughies who will put on their boxing gloves and "take it if we are not given it" and be prepared to break the Law and face down the bailiffs?

Perhaps I had better not be too rude about the Society. If the English RC bishops were to succeed in so smothering, tying up, and impeding the local Ordinariate, that the Holy Father's generous intentions were cleverly frustrated, I suppose some among us might have to fall back on wilfn'hilda. But I don't see how, to any real Catholic, it can be plan A. I don't see how it could even be Plan B. Plan Z, fifteen times removed, a bastard begotten on the wrong side of the blanket, is just about the best it could be.

The Church of England

A load of stuff in the post, inviting me to vote for the House of Clergy in the next General Synod.

Do I really want to vote for Catholic candidates? Is it best for there to be a strong Catholic presence in the next Synod; or for it to be even weaker?

I wish I had that sound Churchman, the late Fr Lenin, to advise me. I seem to recall that he said something apposite about such dilemmas, but I can't quite summon it to mind.

By the way: people ask what I think about 'The Society of S Wilfrid and S Hilda' which, apparently, is now the solution to all the problems of the Catholic Movement. I'll work through the night and try get something on the blog by 6.00 tomorrow morning (Central European Time).

Embarassing!

A kind friend whose handwriting I can't quite identify has sent me an offering for a requiem for his parents ... EF, of course. But he didn't put his name at the bottom. I don't need it since he did include hisparents' Christian names, but ...

I feel so silly ...

Father of God

Going through some old rubbish the other day, I came across a document which was embellished with episcopal seals ... plastic, not wax ... do RC bishops seal in red plastic? Or is it part of the Patrimony?

It gave me a shock. Proddies among you may be aware that among papists and those traitors to the Reformation in the Church of England who ape them, Mary is referred to as "Mother of God". Nonsense, as you will remind me; for how can God have a Mother? But in the Diocese of Exeter, he has a Father too. The document begins: "I JOHN by Divine Permission Bishop of Plymouth under the authority of the Right Reverend Father of God MICHAEL ..."

And there is some superb gibberish at the end. "In Testimony whereof I have hereto set my hand on the Episcopal Seal The Bishop of Exeter as hereunto affixed this 11th day ...".

I have sometimes been unfriendly about the ignorance, within the Latin Church, of Latin. In all fairness, I should admit that, in the English Church, the English language is very imperfectly known.

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Textual Criticism of ancient texts is often bedevilled by the fact that in some scriptoria a text was read aloud to be taken down by a room full of slaves. Sometimes a rather thick slave didn't understand what he heard, and wrote down nonsense. Exactly the same has happened in this document. Readers with time to waste might like to have a go at emending the corrupt text beginning "In Testimony ...".

Cranmer's Typology

"Our sacraments contain presently the very things signified no more than theirs [the Jews'] did".

Chilling words, revealing the depth of Dr Cranmer's Zwinglianism. I am no expert in Reformation theology, but I doubt if even Dr Calvin would have written that.

I suppose he had in mind the saxum mobile of I Corinthians 10. But I wonder how he can have reconciled his dreadful heresies with the exposition in I Peter of Noah's Ark as the Type of Baptism.

APOLOGIES

Pam and I have just returned from a fortnight in Cornwall, homeland of the Glorious Rebellion of 1549. If you have emailed me and got no reply, this is because of the massive numbers of emails I've just tried to race through and deal with. If it was personal /important, please get in touch again!

For the same reason, I have not been able to respond to comments on the blog.

The dangers of schism and of ultratraditionalism

I recently commented on how Bishop Richard Williamson, of the SSPX, in attacking the 'conciliar Church', employed a concept of Intention which is contrary to what the Western Church has magisterially taught and practised for a millennium and a half. Persistent readers of my blog will recall that on two occasions I have done a long series on Concelebration, demonstrating that the Magisterium of Innocent III, Benedict XIV, and of the praxis of the Church for over a millennium conclusively regard, and in practice treat, Concelebration as being genuinely celebration in the real sense. I do this (although my own view is that the post-conciliar efflorescence of concelebrations is thoroughly unwholesome) because it is a fact. And I do it because the practice of Concelebration in the limited circumstances in which it was actually mandated by the Council has the AUCTORITAS of at least a millennium of of praxis in the Roman Rite.And today I wish to make an additional point.

Both within the SSPX and in the Traditionalist circles in full canonical unity with Rome, I sometimes fear a tendency to make up Tradition. Sometimes this is in violent reaction against abuses in those other circles who have themselves invented The Spirit Of The Council. But it really is no service whatsoever to the real Tradition of the Church and to its authentic Magisterium, and to the Auctoritas which is at the basis of good liturgical praxis, to lapse oneself into error or worse. We need to be soundly based in the wholeness of Tradition in exposing the abuses of the latter twentieth century.

And when correspondents, offering no response to facts I put before them, cheerfully retort that Williamson Is Right, I feel some degree of despair.

Tradition is not something which we each confect day by day so as to have a stick with which to beat those of whom we disapprove.

I have a considerable respect for SSPX (although I do think it took a wrong turn in deciding that 1962 has to be the authentic form of the Traditional Rite); one of my dearest priest friends was himself ordained by le grand archeveque. My copy of the SSPX Repertoire is more thumbed than many would think proper. And, as I have argued before, I believe that the current discussions between the Vatican and SSPX about the status and hermeneusis of conciliar documents could provide a gift to the entire Church.

But it is a fact that theological ... er ... eccentricity ... can result from from breaches in communion or from a distancing of oneself from the main body of the Church. Heaven only knows, we Anglicans can provide ample evidence of that.

My weaknesses

... are many. I succumbed to one of them when Rubricarius sent me the Decree of Clement XIII about using the Trinity Preface on 'Ordinary' Sundays.

The propers of Trinity Sunday wallow in medieval elegances as they praise the Trinity in sonorous and repetitive phraseology (" ... vera et una Trinitas una et summa Deitas sancta et una Unitas.") which I suspect goes back to the rhetoric of S Augustine. Lovely stuff. I mean that.

But it is the Baroque, in all its manifestations, that leaves me helpless. Even in its earlier literary forshadowings such as the predilection of Carolingian hymnwriters and homilists for grandifying their verse and prose with Hellenisms and punning juxtapositions ("Magnus aeterni Logotheta Verbi" to describe the wordsmith S John the Evangelist).

I had a real wallow when reading Clement XIII's Decree. The Trinity is described as Augustissima Trias. Authentic eighteenth century. Could a Pope have coined such words in any other period?

A phrase to die for.

The epiclesis of the Roman Rite

Dear old Fortescue's The Mass records the long debates of liturgists a century ago about where the epiclesis of the Roman Rite originally was before it ... er ... "dropped out". Their assumption, of course, was that the epiclesis was original to Christian liturgy and that the Oriental rites which preserve it were more 'primitive' than the Roman Rite. Now, happily, we know better. We see the Oriental epiclesis as a comparatively late fad in the evolving liturgical tradition. Rather than seeking traces of a lost epiclesis in the Canon Romanus, we realise that the prayer Supplices te rogamus, in which we pray that our offerings be taken to the Heavenly Altar, represents an earlier and lovelier expression of the linkage between our offering and the eternal oblation of the Eternal Son at the Heavenly Altar. Patrimony liturgists such as E C Ratcliffe played a large role here, not to mention Dom Gregory.

There has been an unfortunate fashion among Anglican Committees, not only for inserting epicleses (they have even plopped the Holy spirit into Dr Cranmer's Consecration Prayer), but also for putting them after the Institution Narrative. This is partly due to the rather naive idea that it is terribly Sophisticated to avoid the notion of a Moment of Consecration*, and partly to the dislike among the resurgent Evangelical Party for any idea at all of Consecration (expressed also in rubrical provisions for the celebrant, if he realises he is running short of consecrated Elements, simply to add some more hosts to the ciborium without saying anything). Evangelicals, who have historically claimed to be 'confessional' Anglicans committed to the formulae of the Church of England, apparently forget these principles when it comes to those deft and significant changes introduced into Cranmer's rite in 1662 to restore both the terminology and the logic of Consecration.

We know, moreover, that the 1960s Roman Catholic Reformers were simplistic and orientalising in their insistence upon creating, in their new Eucharistic Prayers, epicleses of the Holy Spirit. But the ethos of the Western liturgy reminds us that the Holy Spirit should be invoked: by the celebrant and his ministers. The Praeparatio ad Missam contains no fewer than seven collects invoking the Holy Spirit. One of them, which featured also in the Sarum Rite among the vesting Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, is the collect Deus cui omne cor patet [Sarumists in the Adur Valley will probably remind us that it was preceded by the entire Veni Creator; a lovely way of recalling one's ordination before offering the Holy Sacrifice], which survived into Dr Cranmer's rite as Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open ...

That's our tradition.

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*The assumption is that regarding a dozen words as consecratory is mechanistic if not superstitious; seeing 938 words as consecratory is enlightened and unproblematic.

Hoops and Fireworks

As the anniversary comes round today of the Holy Father's initiative, Summorum pontificum, one recalls that bishops have the option, after three years, to make comments about 'problems' which have arisen. It will be interesting to see what attempts are made to bully the Pope. These occasions remind us that the Roman Catholic hierarchy worldwide is a very varied body. Its range stretches all the way from those bishops who have themselves made enthusiastic use of the newly clarified legal status of the preconciliar rite; and those whose entire pastoral energies appear to have been spent dreaming up ingenious hoops through which to force any priest courageous enough to wish to do something which the Church's supreme legislator has stated he is free to do without hindrance.

Similar questions may arise with regard to that other example of Benedictine courage: Anglicanorum coetibus. Here again, those trained in the traditional art of hoop-making may have been enabled to deploy their ancient skills. Will Ordinariates be given, as their Ordinaries, men who have suffered alongside their fellow Anglicans for the last fifteen years; who know them and know their anxieties and their hopes; who already have the experience of pastoring them; or will somebody be parachuted in who left our faith-community fifteen years ago and has been 'clubbed' by a native Roman Catholic hierarchy and its ethos? If the latter, this will give a fair indication of who has 'won' in the competition to bend the ear of Cardinal Levada. And if the local hierarchies prove indeed to have won this personal game, that victory will almost certainly be matched by an institutional triumph: the issuing of Norms for particular Ordinariates which provide very adequately for the provision of hoops. Back in the early nineties, the English RC hierarchy was deeply practised in discouraging ('discerning', as it is technically known) Anglican clerical enquirers. ("What are the English Bishops so frightened of?" as somebody once put it.) It will be illuminating to see how its attitudes have changed, this time round.

But, even looking at it from the most pessimistic stance, something will most surely have been gained. Hostile hierarchies, unsympathetic towards the Holy Father's vision of a renewed Church, may indeed demonstrate their capacity to ensure that the Ordinariates, or some of them, have small, slow, and halting starts. But what will count will be what future generations make of them. The Gospels give us the Parable of the Mustard Seed; perhaps Divine Grace will supply a pendant narrative, the Parable of the Fireworks: about how the dampest of unwanted squibs became the most coruscating pyrotechnic ever discerned in the sky.

Organic problems

Oh dear! At vast expense, we are having our church organ cleaned and serviced. And now the craftsmen doing it have discovered that ... 56, I think it was ... little thingummies ... I forget the technical name ... will have to be replaced; and this will cost us at least a thou' more. Apparently, these delicate little pieces of wood have to have bits of sheepskin cut up and attached to them, and S Thomas's has a major Perished Sheepskin Problem. Happily, they have a sheepskin to cut up and use, so there won't be too horrendous a delay before the organ is back in use, but what am I to say when the bill arrives?

Perhaps it would help if I could supply them with a replacement sheepskin. Those lambs that provide the wool for pallia ... I seem to recall that the nuns concerned eat them for their Easter lunches ... I wonder what they do with the skins?

Anglicanorum Coetibus

The Latin text of AC (thanks, Joshua) has one or two points of interest; I suspect that there is clearly at least one place at which a deliberate alteration has been made in the sense of the provisional English text. The phrase "the Anglican Communion" has disappeared, to be replaced by the word "Anglicanismum". I suspect that this might have something to do with accomodating the Continuum: Anglican groups which might not technically be categorised as part of the Anglican Communion as recognised by Canterbury.

Felicitously, the English phase that disunity "wounds that which the Church is and that for which the Church exists" is replaced by the statement that it "gravely wounds the mystery of the Church". This raises it to a more theological level, yes? And eliminates woffle.

"In a corporate manner" is replaced by the adverb "glomeratim", which means "in a ball, in a mass". This distinctly suggests a mass movement. It cannot bear the meaning that each individual seeking admission must belong to a local group; it clearly indicates that the Holy Father discerns a mass movement towards unity, and that this is what he is providing for. This is important. There is, for example, manifestly no ground in AC for limitations in the number of Anglican clergy who can be admitted to the presbyterates of Ordinariates. VI (1) says that the Ordinary can accept Anglican deacons, priests, and bishops who enjoy the qualities demanded by Canons 1026-1032. None of these canons, as far as I can see, gives any grounds for thinking that a priest who "doesn't have a group" should not be allowed to enter into the presbyterate of the Latin Church by means of the Ordinariate structures.

This is very important. It is necessary that the Ordinariates should have a large number of available clergy. Those who have served in the parochial ministry of any major denomination know the importance of a large pool of clergy - mostly retired - to oil the wheels. A pastor may need to go on holiday ... or go to a Deanery meeting ... or go on retreat ... or go and preach somewhere else ... . And solemn liturgy traditionally requires three sacred ministers; and solemn liturgy is something to which the Patrimony is very attached. Ordinariate groups may be small, but it would still be very difficult to pastor them on one priest and a retired priest (not least because retired clergy can also have commitments). The nearest Ordinariate group could be a hundred miles away; its clergy might not find it terribly convenient to travel such distances in order to cover my 12.30 Low Mass on Friday and Wednesday. And if I have to be away on a Sunday, and the local RC priest is already having to trinate in order to serve the churches in his care, he might not be terribly enthusiastic when I phone him up to ask if he can cram another Mass in for an Ordinariate group. It is clear that Ordinariates may not be able to pay a large number of clergy, and I certainly do not suggest that the local RC hierarchy should have to unearth money to do so; but it would be very wrong if extremely experienced clergy, retired and living on their C of E pensions, and desirous of exercising their priesthood in Full Communion, were, in effect, told that they could only enter Ordinariates in the lay state. Don't forget that retirement in the Church of England tends to happen much earlier than in the RC Church. Are droves of healthy active priests in their sixties really to be declared clerically redundant under the Ordinariate system? Are we sure that this is what the Holy Father has in mind?

And, if all one hears about the age profile of the Roman Catholic clergy in some places is true, you would have thought that Roman Catholic clergy themselves would distinctly welcome the advent of a large new pool of clergy whom they can "try" for occasional - or, indeed, more than occasional - duty. Being incardinated into an Ordinariate does not mean that one can't be lent. In the Good Old Days of the Irish Church, it lent clergy in shiploads to dioceses all over the world. To this day, there are probably many more Irish clergy working outside than there are inside Ireland. There is no reason why Ordinariates could not make a modest, and enthusiastic, contribution to staffing in the dioceses.