Lay Power

Two things have struck me about the last month; the first is: how much of the fury about the Synodal fixings has been expressed by laymen and laywomen. You may think this is because presbyters are often nervous about putting their heads above parapets; I have heard the view that bishops in the Catholic Church have more ways of bringing pressure to bear on clergy they dislike than do the poor toothless old dears who discharge episkope in the C of E. Possibly; but I am more inclined to think it is because orthodox and traditionalist movements in the Catholic Church are so very substantially lay-run and lay-dominated. Rather like the lay Wardens and Brethren of the great Medieval Guilds, they are the powerful people who call upon clergy to do for them the essential things that only clergy can do ... and, like old-style fags grateful to be noticed by the Bloods of the Upper Sixth, we tug our forelocks and jump to it. They are very much in the driving seat. It is in the more liberal corners of the 'mainstream' that naked, unreformed clericalism still flourishes and members of the plebs sancta Dei are bossed around by any ignorant clerical know-all who gets his kicks out of endlessly misinforming them about "the Council".

The other thing I have noticed is that the natural and splendid and time-honoured Catholic instinct to avoid saying critical or disrespectful things about the man who is Sovereign Pontiff is increasingly wearing thinner and thinner. This, I think, is largely because so many of us, clergy and layfolk, bloggers and blogreaders, simply do not know how to understand and interpret the endlessly unkind expressions which flow from the os Petri. Especially after the gentle courtesy and personal charm of Pope Benedict, the predictable condemnations and the merciless language in which Pope Francis' views are couched are so difficult to gloss. Is it simply that this is Latin American culture? Is it because in Argentina nobody listens to what you say unless you give them a good kicking first? Is it something about the particular psychology or even the physiology of this Successor of S Peter? Has Jesuitry got anything to do with it? Does he expect us to be cowed by his words or is he 'up for' us to reply in kind, tit for tat, insult for insult, with lots of jolly and good-humoured knock-about fun? All the stuff about parrhesia ... does he mean it, or is it just code for "If you're in agreement with me I expect you to talk loud and to talk often. Oh, and by the way, if you aren't, well, I am the pope and I've got your card marked already."?

We cannot know how much longer le bon Dieu will permit this hermeneutically unfathomable pontificate to last. But it is surely clear that we are going to need very much more than the usual ration of daily grace to get through it. Come, Holy Ghost ...

Consolator alme, veni,
linguas rege, corda leni;
nihil fellis aut veneni
     sub tua praesentia.

The Ordinariates and the Knockwurst theologians

I thought you might be amused by this diverting little doctrinal Speculation ...

 ... when the Ordinariates were set up, they were specifically given, as their doctrinal standard, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (I've often wondered why Benedict XVI did this; perhaps it's because he ... no; forget it: I'll just get on with my first Speculation.)

I have, in previous posts, manfully defended our present Holy Father against the unworthy accusation made by Knockwurst theologians that he supports their desire to admit to Communion those living in unrepented Adultery. But if ... per impossibile ... just take this as an amusing piece of Scifi or contrafactual fantasy ... some future pope ... Clement XXV, or even the XXVIth, let's say ... were to go down the garden path hand in hand with Cardinals Marx and Kasper, were to set aside the Magisterium of S John Paul II (see Familiaris consortio), and were to sanction this sacrilege ...

 ... would this lead to a situation of Impaired Communion with the Ordinariates? Because, of course, the CCC (paragraph 1650) specifically forbids the reception of Holy Communion by 'remarried' divorcees ( ...ad eucharisticam Communionem accedere non possunt ...). Obviously, we couldn't decently be asked to subvert the doctrinal understanding and basis upon which we entered into Full Communion. We all signed on the Dotted Line, as we were required to. As some people chose very offensively chose to put it, being misogynist was not in itself enough for admission to the Catholic Church. Nor could admission (we were equally offensively told) be on the basis of A la Carte; it had to be Table d'hote. Presumably we would be honourable enough to stick with this, even if some of the diocesan structures around us were to ... er ... I'm not quite sure how to put this ...

Perhaps, in this totally and gloriously impossible scenario, we would subsequently be joined by flocks and flocks of orthodox cradle Catholics flooding into our happy little orthodox enclaves, and learning to enjoy our splendid Liturgy.

A lovely idea. But, of course, a complete doctrinal impossibility. Pope Francis has made it totally clear that, as a Son of the Church, he is bound to the Church's teaching and would never change it, and every succeeding pope will be just as fully and satisfactorily bound as he is. After all, there would be something very odd if Clement XXV were to set aside the Post-Synodal Exhortations of his predecessors S John Paul II (Familiaris consortio) and S Benedict XVI (Sacramentum caritatis), and, mysteriously, expect people to take a Post-Synodal Exhortation of his own as anything other than a joke in distinctly poor taste. I'm sure he, and his successor Innocent XXV, will be much too attached to the Principle of Non-Contradiction to do anything remotely like that.

Notice

For some reason, my computer is behaving erratically; I have recently dealt 'at the hand-gallop'* with 30 or 40 submitted comments. I apologise if, by accident, I have deleted comments deserving to be allowed.

I have deleted some comments which appeared to me to be suggested by a sedevacantist mindset. Sedevacantism is the purest nonsense. Nor will I allow any comments on the Sovereign Pontiff our Holy Father Pope Francis which seem to me to go beyond the limits of Fair Comment.

One comment I deleted because, in two lines, it contained two typos. If you are too busy and important, after dashing off your opinions in a couple of lines, to check them, then please don't bother with my blog.

*Dryden commenting on Ovid's hexameters. 

Query

I read somewhere recently ... it may have been in one of the reviews of the current London exhibition on the 'Celts' ...  that the eighteenth century Scotch forgery The Poems of Ossian (through which Dr Johnson so memorably saw: "But Dr Johnson: could any man have forged such sublime poetry?" "Yes, Sir; any man ... and any woman ... and any child ... "), was credulously praised as some of the greatest literature ever written, by Napoleon and Jefferson and by quite a lot of other easily duped fools.

Napoleon I have heard of, because I have visited, and, by kind permission of Father Abbot, said Mass in the splendid Church at Farnborough Abbey where members of his family are buried. I have even enjoyed a biography of the Empress Eugenie, his relative by marriage, and admired some of the superb benefactions she made to cathedrals and churches.

I gather Napoleon himself, however, was an opinionated foreigner, self-absorbed, who fancied himself enough to compose 'Constitutions' which expressed what his admirers considered his greatness as a political philosopher; who created problems from which the world is still suffering. I gather he was sexually incontinent and made himself unpleasant to Catholic clergy.

But who is this Jefferson?

Thought For the Day

Cardinal Marx, about those who stood up to him in the Synod of 2014:
"It is incomprehensible how the Synod Fathers are more bound to Tradition than to the Pope".

What if the Pope were to ...

People sometimes do me the honour of sharing their fears with me. May I make it clear that I would be very very very surprised indeed  ... very very very very surprised ... if not more so ... if the Holy Father were to contradict the doctrinal Magisterium of his predecessors. My advice, as always, is: DON'T PANIC!! Not now, not ever.

But I will offer a logical  reflection.

It is based on the widely accepted dogma that if you chop through the bough that you yourself are sitting on, something called Gravitation will draw you with increasing velocity in the general direction of Planet Earth.

If Pope Clement XXV were to rubbish the doctrinal Magisterium of Pope Innocent XXV, he would automatically and authoritatively imply the rubbishing of his own doctrinal Magisterium. Despite the fawning rhetoric we hear in each Pontificate (what Robert Mickens has suitably termed Papolatry), no pope has more doctrinal Magisterial authority than any previous pope. So what a pope says or implies about the authority of a previous pope, he ineluctably says or implies about his own.

If Pope Clement XXV contradicts a binding doctrinal proposition authoritatively taught by Pope Innocent XXV, he ipso facto and by virtue of the principle of non-contradiction teaches that doctrinal propositions he himself authoritatively puts forward have no binding authority.

If Clement XXV denies the binding force of doctrine taught in an Encyclical of Innocent XXV, he implicitly denies the binding force of doctrine taught in his own Encyclicals. Ditto, a motu proprio. Ditto, an Apostolic Constitution. Ditto, a post-Synodal Exhortation (such as Familiaris consortio; and Sacramentum Caritatis of 2007). Et cetera et cetera all along the line.

So nobody has anything to worry about. Just to put things at the most rock-bottom and earthy level: no pope in his right mind is going to be stupid enough to cut through the bough that he is himself sitting on. Pope Francis made this abundantly clear in his remarks about how, as a loyal Son of the Church, he had no authority to set aside the teaching of S John Paul II about the purported ordination of women to sacerdotal ministries.

And, just as no pope has any more doctrinal authority than any of his predecessors, so no pope has any more authority than his successors. Now: keep your eye on Archbishop Fernandez. He's one of our Holy Father's main buddies. He's one of these extremist ultrahyperultrapapalists I keep warning you about (he is on record as criticising Traditionalists on the ground that "they seem not to have faith in the special assistance of the Holy Spirit which Jesus promised the Pope"; compare that with what Vatican I actually said about the exact, precise, limited reasons why the Holy Spirit was promised to the Successors of S Peter). This Fernandez chappie has revealed what he says is Papa Bergoglio's plan to make changes in the Church that will be "irreversible". But, believe me, prescinding from irreformable dogmatic definitions, what one pope does can be 'reversed' by a successor and often is. Clio shares this view.

The next pontificate may very well be as different from this one as this one is from the last one. Those who explain how much better this one is than the last one was will not be well placed logically to criticise the next one for being even better.

Three cheers for the best pontificate ever!!! 3x3 cheers for the next and even better one!!!

This time, Peripheries without Irony

One Synod Father has said "We can't leave people dangling in the air and in limbo. The Lord loves us all and we need to find a way of embracing everyone". Just checking, Bishop: by 'embracing everyone' you do include embracing paedophile priests, don't you?

Another Synod Father has said "The Synod would have been enriched if the Synod Fathers had listened to same-sex couples". Just checking, Cardinal: you do think it would have been enriched by also listening to paedophile priests?

Paragraph 85 of the Synod's Final Report (which only jumped over the necessary hurdle by one vote) ... you can see it on Rorate. I invite you to look at the section about the reduced imputability of sin in cases where the sinner can't really help it. And ask yourself: "I wonder if the Fathers intended that to apply to paedophile priests?"

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM IS THAT SOME PRELATES HAVE TACITLY REVISED THEIR LIST OF WHAT THEY REGARD AS REALLY SINFUL.

(1) The old mantra was: Hate the sin, love Mr X the Sinner.

(2) My test questions: Granted that you hate Paedophilia, do you love the Paedophile Fr Y?    

(3) I ask this to test my awkward feeling that (1) has now gone dead out of fashion and has been actually replaced in some minds by:  
                     Don't talk to me about Sin; I just love Mr X without going into all that.
So, you won't condemn Adultery or Sodomy; at least, not if their perpetrators are Nice people living in an overtly attractive pseudo-Marriage.


So my question to a Cupich, a Doyle, a Gracias would be: Does your impressively pastoral language really apply everyone? To Fr Y the Paedophile? Or is the reality of your position that you are unwilling to use the terminology of Sin to describe some Adulterers and Sodomites because you do not really and viscerally feel that their conduct is sinful; whereas, with regard to Fr Y, you do still regard Paedophilia as a Sin, because you sense within yourself a gut revulsion?

And my comment would be: dialogue with your position would be easier if you avoided the vague and kindly woffle and simply spoke frankly about what you do still regard as sinful, and why. Then Catholics on each side of this divide could have a look at Veritatis Splendor (especially, for example, Paragraph 80), and could perhaps discuss intelligently with each other which bits of it they accept, which they deny, and why.

When the Lord spoke about His Father's mercy extending to 'tax-collectors and prostitutes', my understanding is that he chose categories normally seen as beyond the pale, as being on the ultimate ethical periphery. What I think needs to be tested is whether modern pastors, claiming to be garbed in His mantle of Mercy, actually do extend His Mercy to a category of humans still by most people held in unqualified detestation, our modern ultimate periphery. That is why I keep bringing in paedophiles.

Blessed John Henry Newman and Knockwurst Theology

An interview between the Father Rosica who is so very interested in the plight of homosexuals, and  Vincent Cardinal Nichols, in which His Eminence showed all the charm and skill with which he invariably handles 'the Press'. In the course of it, I was intrigued to learn that there had been several references to Blessed John Henry during the Synod. The interview also seemed to me to reveal that the focus of interest had been on the Blessed's writing about Development. Even on the slight evidence provided, I think there are grounds for anxiety that there may have been a suggestio falsi involved in the way in which Newman was 'used' at the Synod.

Some of the Synodal Fathers appear to hope that 'development' might be a useful way of squaring the circle; of smuggling change in under the guise of development. 

I have two comments to make about Newman; facets of his life and thought which nobody could have guessed from that 25-minute interview. I will keep my remarks as simple as I can in the hope that this will enhance their intelligibility.

(1) Newman did not write a thesis discussing how Catholic Dogma might in the future develop in such a way as to become, to all intents and purposes, changed. He wrote as an Anglican who was on the cusp of accepting the entire Magisterium and submitting to it; so he performed a detailed survey of Catholic Dogma as (then) finalised by Trent, and by so doing demonstrated historically to himself the authenticity of it as a development, without rupture, of the Faith committed to the Apostles. His text is retrospective rather than prospective; and unfinished because at the point at which he reached his positive conclusion, he put his pen down and submitted without qualifications to what the Catholic Church taught and teaches.

(2) Newman detested Liberalism and declared that his entire life, both as an Anglican and as a Catholic, had been spent fighting against it. He loathed with every fibre of his being the proposition that there is no objective and intrinsic Truth. If he had been faced with the Knockwurst Theology currently being touted around ... ubi farcimina sua ponerent absque dubio monuisset.

Check it?

Fr Zed gives information about an online version of the Liturgia Horarum in Latin. I am intrigued to know if anyone has tidied up the endless errors and misprints in the 1986 version I possess. Here is an easy way of checking. Cathedra Petri, February 22, occurs both in volume II and III for obvious reasons. In 1986, in Volume II, a line is missed out of the Patristic reading from S Leo, rendering the end of the first paragraph unintelligible gibberish. In Volume II, the missing line remains in the text.

I would be very interested if someone could check that for me! I am, in both senses of the term, curious!

Byzantium to the rescue

There is something worthy of comment in the fact that, during the Synod, two of the clearest Catholic voices have come from Byzantine Christians: from a Romanian woman in full communion with the See of S Peter; and from a Russian Metropolitan who, most sadly, is not in full communion. And there have indeed been comments! I will not duplicate them.

I would simply like to point out the dog which did not bark in Metropolitan Hilarion's night ... what he did not say.

At the beginning of this ghastly mess, Orthodox Marriage praxis was cited as something Catholics should have a new look at. Indeed, Orthodox Oikonomia was set before us as being an expression of the Mercy of God. Metropolitan Hilarion might, therefore, have slipped into his address, somewhere, a sly hint of Orthodox triumphalism ... "How gratifying that you Latins are coming round to our Orthodox way of thinking".

Not a whisker of it.

His address was a straightforward act of support for those Catholics who uphold the witness of the Gospel against the corruptions of the World, the Flesh, and the Zeitgeist. It was an unambiguous condemnation of the Spirit of Apostasy, the Spirit of the Antichrist, which has infected some Latin bishops. Of the Smoke of Satan which Blessed Pope Paul VI detected as having entered the Temple of God. Just think what a cruel disappointment Hilarion's words must have been to the heterodox delegates in the synodal aula! I bet it quite put them off their Knockwurst!

May the Lord remember his Episcopate in His Kingdom. And I hope that faithful orthodox Catholics will not forget this moment and its significance.

And I have a strange premonition that in the next pontificate the Sovereign Pontiff will be that weeny bit less anxious to persuade the Bishop of Second Rome to bless him; and a tadge keener to be photographed with the Patriarch of Moskow and of All the Russias!

Yes, I know there are problems ... but all the same ...

S Edmund Campion, Priest and Martyr

Thank you to everyone who got in touch with me so generously. The first person to do so was the person whom I begged, of her kindness, to send me the book. I am very grateful; it is well worth reading. I haven't finished it yet: but these things strike me: Kilroy has painstakingly reconstructed what the London bookselling quarter was like in the years Campion grew up there ... and, likewise, the Oxford and the Prague that the Saint knew. If you weren't particularly intersed in S Edmund but in those vignettes, you would like the book. The author has also dug up a lot of hitherto unknown archival material. Kilroy is also a Latinist, so he not only gives accurate translations from the Latin but also understands S Edmund's allusions to classical literature ... you just wouldn't believe how many writers think they know Latin but don't and how painful it is to read their books. And the authors are allegedly academics, and the books emerge from respectable academic printing houses.

I have taken the liberty of noting the email addresses of those whose immensely kind offers I did not take up in the hope that they will not feel that I am both arrogant and grasping if I get in touch with them about another book which I feel would help me. But do remember (Mr A T!) that you need to send me your email address.

Celtic?

There is a major exhibition in the British Museum about 'Celtic'. I haven't been yet, but I gather from the reviews that it is really about the instability of the way the term 'Celtic' has been used, particularly since, around the year 1700, its present connotations were invented. The book accompanying the Exhibition describes its purpose as being to trace the use of a label; and elegantly suggests that the term 'Celtic' was in fact used to define people seen as 'other', either by outsiders (such as the Romans) or (more recently) by themselves (as modern-day 'Celts' identify themselves under this name and club together in a desire to show how different they are from the rest of us). Readers will probably be aware that an academic study last summer of DNA in the British Isles Atlantic Archipelago yielded no evidence for a common 'racial' fingerprint in the 'Celtic fringes' distinguishing them from the other populations of these islands.

I repeat below a passage which I included in my ORDO in 2007:

Remember those happy heady days when 'Orthodoxy' was the 'sexy' version of Christianity? Eastern Christianity had more romance and less menace and 'rigidity' than Rome ... because it came from further away. Sadly, when we got to know them better, we discovered that the Orthodox were, if anything, distinctly more 'rigid' than Rome, particularly on questions like 'Intercommunion'.

Now, the 'sexy' religious 'thinggy' is 'Celtic'; religious bookshops flaunt sections on 'Celtic' Spirituality and 'Celtic' Prayer. It's safer than Orthodoxy because it's in an even more distant country called 'The Past', so we can all invent our own 'Celtic Christianities' without any risk that some terribly combative Saint like S Columba, or those Irish monks who spread holy hassle all over Europe, will rise from their graves and beat us up. If you are tempted to buy such books, check them out carefully. Does the 'Compiler' give actual sources for his/her material? Is he/she scholarly?

Historians have decisively abandoned the concept of the 'Celtic', and especially of a supposedly distinctive 'Celtic Church'. In the most recent major scholarly work on this subject, Professor Charles-Edwards' Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), the distinguished author writes dismissively of 'that entity - beloved of modern sectarians and romantics but unknown to the early Middle Ages - "the Celtic Church"', and surveys in a footnote the scholarly work of the last thirty years which has established this.

If the 'Celtic' enthusiasts were serious, there is a Mass-rite they could revive. The earliest surviving Missal from these islands is the 'Stowe Missal', from the 790s [but copied from texts older than the reforms of S Gregory the Great] and of Southern Irish origin. Its Eucharistic Prayer is almost entirely identical with the current Roman 'First Eucharistic Prayer' except that it includes rather more Saints and describes the Pope as 'thy most blessed servant N our Pope, Bishop of the Apostolic See'. And it has a nice Prayer of Humble Access with phrases like 'I am unworthy because I filthily adhere to the mire of dung and all my good deeds are like a rag used by a menstrual woman'.

Splendid 'Celtic' stuff, mystical and uplifting!

Since writing that, I have noticed one attempt to breathe new life into 'Celtic', although not at all along the lines of the books I reprobated in this piece; and I believe there are groups which have experimented with the Stowe Missal. Fair enough; my only quarrel is with people who simply manufacture stuff themselves, sometimes of an in-tune-with-nature or down-with-Roman-dogma-and-legalism type, and slyly claim that it is 'in the Celtic Spirit'.