In previous pontificates, prelates wearing a pectoral cross with their 'house clothes' used to suspend it from a dinky little hook which was inserted into one of the button-holes in the middle of the chest of their soutane. There was a chain round the neck, but what actually supported the cross, as well as keeping it in place, was the hook. That, at least, is my recollection.
Nowadays, photographs of prelates seem always to show the cross as simply dangling from the chain.
No dinky little hook.
This is our beloved Holy Father's own practice.
Is the prevalence of this new custom since 2013 analogous to the cultural tendency which led to so many German males wearing neatly trimmed little moustaches during the Hitler years?
Is there some connection with the fact that so many aged Italians, born in the 1930s, bear the name 'Benito'?
I intend to begin a rumour that the Sovereign Pontiff has started wearing a nose-ring, so as to see how long it is before nose-rings peep delightfully out of the elegant nostrils of our Most Eminent, Most Reverend, and Right Reverend Fathers in God.
30 August 2017
28 August 2017
World War II
The English novelist and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh (he went to school in the college I taught at for three decades and then to my College at Oxford) began the Second World War enthusiastically in favour of a Crusade against the Russian-German Alliance. Now, spendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.
When this conflict turned into a war in which Britain was in alliance with Stalinist Atheism, he felt it had become a sweaty tug of war between two indistinguishable teams of louts. Only the chill bonds of law and duty and custom kept him to his obligations as an army Officer.
I wonder how Catholic historians in a hundred years time will analyse the role of the Second World War in the decline of what I believe some ghastly neocon once called old Europe: the Catholic and Orthodox Europe.
When this conflict turned into a war in which Britain was in alliance with Stalinist Atheism, he felt it had become a sweaty tug of war between two indistinguishable teams of louts. Only the chill bonds of law and duty and custom kept him to his obligations as an army Officer.
I wonder how Catholic historians in a hundred years time will analyse the role of the Second World War in the decline of what I believe some ghastly neocon once called old Europe: the Catholic and Orthodox Europe.
27 August 2017
Is this intimidation fair? Is it Christian or Diabolical?
There was an early stage in this pontificate when the Holy Father was convinced that all good men and true knew, deep down, that the Church's marriage discipline needed changing. All that was needed was for the Synod Fathers to speak boldly the Bergoglian Truth that was really in all their hearts. During this period, Papa Bergoglio made incessant calls for Parrhesia: for courageous boldness in speaking out. This was the period in which his friend and ghostwriter 'Tucho' Fernandez was memorably heard to say "He means, Mueller [then Prefect of the CDF] won't come after us".
Mind you, some of Bergoglio's highly-placed supporters knew that the Spirit of Parrhesia was going to be needing a bit of a helping hand, in the shape of deft and careful management of process. Someone in the upper reaches of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, on hearing that some 450 of the English clergy were preparing to sign a public Letter calling for adherence to orthodoxy and orthopraxis, put a lot of pressure on the organisers to discontinue their project. Or so the Catholic Herald reported. The line was: there were perfectly adequate private channels for the clergy to make their views privately known to ... their, er, bishops. Exactly. Beautiful. That dodge is neatly laid out on page 665 of the much-thumbed manual How to be a successful Church Manager. Happily, and bravely, the organisers ignored the pressures.
Then we had the Letter of the 45. This was followed by deplorable episodes of intimidation, some of it immensely cruel and very wicked, in various parts of the world. You will understand that I cannot break confidences by saying who leaned on whom and how. But I assure you that Bully A did lean on Intermediate Bullies B and C to put their gloves on and to go and sort out D and E.
And now, as I write this in August 2017, similar episodes of intimidation are coming to light.
Whatever has happened to all the need for Parrhesia? Why has that word suddenly done a runner from the Papal Vocabulary? Has Bergoglio suddenly forgotten his Greek?
Again, for an answer you need only turn to How to be a successful Church Manager, this time to page 666: "Shut the inferior clergy up until you've fixed your Synods and confected your post-synodal Exhortations, then use the big stick of Papal Magisterium to keep them permanently quiet. Most of them are a pretty scared and pathetic lot anyway, and you'll only need to make a public example of a few of the louder troublemakers. Don't forget to make clear to any seminarians you may have, that the seminary gates are wide open. And there is never any harm in allowing the sweet fragrance of the words Excommunication and Suspension to linger suggestively in the air. Our Father Below is very keen on rigorous ecclesiastical discipline."
Like Parrhesia, Mercy is now so very Yesterday, isn't it?
Mind you, some of Bergoglio's highly-placed supporters knew that the Spirit of Parrhesia was going to be needing a bit of a helping hand, in the shape of deft and careful management of process. Someone in the upper reaches of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, on hearing that some 450 of the English clergy were preparing to sign a public Letter calling for adherence to orthodoxy and orthopraxis, put a lot of pressure on the organisers to discontinue their project. Or so the Catholic Herald reported. The line was: there were perfectly adequate private channels for the clergy to make their views privately known to ... their, er, bishops. Exactly. Beautiful. That dodge is neatly laid out on page 665 of the much-thumbed manual How to be a successful Church Manager. Happily, and bravely, the organisers ignored the pressures.
Then we had the Letter of the 45. This was followed by deplorable episodes of intimidation, some of it immensely cruel and very wicked, in various parts of the world. You will understand that I cannot break confidences by saying who leaned on whom and how. But I assure you that Bully A did lean on Intermediate Bullies B and C to put their gloves on and to go and sort out D and E.
And now, as I write this in August 2017, similar episodes of intimidation are coming to light.
Whatever has happened to all the need for Parrhesia? Why has that word suddenly done a runner from the Papal Vocabulary? Has Bergoglio suddenly forgotten his Greek?
Again, for an answer you need only turn to How to be a successful Church Manager, this time to page 666: "Shut the inferior clergy up until you've fixed your Synods and confected your post-synodal Exhortations, then use the big stick of Papal Magisterium to keep them permanently quiet. Most of them are a pretty scared and pathetic lot anyway, and you'll only need to make a public example of a few of the louder troublemakers. Don't forget to make clear to any seminarians you may have, that the seminary gates are wide open. And there is never any harm in allowing the sweet fragrance of the words Excommunication and Suspension to linger suggestively in the air. Our Father Below is very keen on rigorous ecclesiastical discipline."
Like Parrhesia, Mercy is now so very Yesterday, isn't it?
26 August 2017
Notice
For the next fortnight, I shall not be reading in-coming messages on my computer. But, all being well, I shall publish a post every morning. Comments will have to await moderation, and emails will be unread, for the next couple of weeks.
I venture to commend to readers the advantages of not being at the mercy of in-coming traffic, and all its distractions.
I venture to commend to readers the advantages of not being at the mercy of in-coming traffic, and all its distractions.
24 August 2017
"IRREVERSIBLE"? UPDATED
"After this Magisterium, after this long journey, we can affirm with certainty and with Magisterial authority that the Liturgical Reform is irreversible".
This sort of thing has the capacity to upset people; even to make them panic. And, true, there is a dash of "I'm the Big Magisterial Boy in the Playground and I can make facts happen just with one little word" in the way this rather unappealing man expresses himself. But I think panic is quite unnecessary, and is even an unfair overreaction to what he has actually said.
"Irreversible". Pope Pius XII rightly condemned 'liturgical archaeologism'. Of course you cannot reverse liturgical development. Nobody has ever done that, in the course of these two millennia. But the liturgical texts and practices established after the Council are themselves not immutable. If a papal instruction, such as that of S Pius V in Quo primum, was in itself subject to change ... and Bergoglio seems to assume that it was changeable ... then clearly what Blessed Paul VI did, and what the current occupant of the Roman See now says ... are themselves changeable; they cannot be set in stone for ever.
Pope Francis has exactly as much papal authority as S Pius V. He does not have a milligram less.
And he does not have a milligram more.
And if it was acceptable (the Holy Father seems to assume that it was) for 'experts', in the decades before the Council, to explain at great length what (in their view) was wrong with the Liturgy as it then existed ...
... then it acceptable now for us to explain, at any length we like, what (in our view) is wrong with the Liturgy as it is done now in so many places.
Geese and ganders.
Pope Bergoglio is absolutely right. Liturgy is not reversible. Nobody can magic the Catholic Church back to how it was in 1962. Or in 1939. Or any other time. Liturgy will go on. Two of the ways in which it seems to be going on are the continuing reappropriation of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. And an increasing tendency to do the Ordinary Form with more reverence for Tradition.
Exemplum: When Vincent Nichols became Archbishop of Westminster, there was an instantaneous change. The unworthy little table on wheels, which had stood in the middle of the Sanctuary of his Cathedral Church, was wheeled right away, and the original, central, noble High Altar, symbol of Christ, was restored to use. Apparently Archbishop Nichols did not regard the 1970s 'coffee table' fad as "irreversible". [In fact, Pope Francis has celebrated versus Orientem in the Sixtine Chapel.]
All over the world, cathedral and church sanctuaries are being freed from the worst of the mistakes of the 1970s. And Pope Francis, in his latest address, includes a fine section explaining the importance of this instinctive respect for the Altar. (Might it perhaps have been written for him by Cardinal Sarah?) And, while I am on this subject, I will remind you of the Holy Father's Address at the general audience of August 2, when he spoke about the liturgical significance of facing East. He lamented that "in modern times, the fascination of this rite [facing East in Baptism] has been partially lost: we have lost sensitivity to the language of the cosmos". (Might he perhaps have listened to Cardinal Sarah?) Traddies should not always too readily assume that everything Jorge says is the blackest villainy.
And the Extraordinary Form is in cultural (rather than rubrical) ways rather different now from how it was before the Council (in the 1950s, I was in my teens). It is no longer performed in a hurried, perfunctory, slipshod way. The congregation no longer packs the back of the church because it is in such a hurry to escape at the very earliest possible moment. Among both celebrants and congregations, at the Extraordinary Form there is a wonderful sense of freshness and of wonder, which is certainly lacking in many of the 'mainstream' churches, with their sluggish and infantilised congregations, their frightful music, their unworthy homilies.
Are the 1962 liturgical books immutable? They are certainly not so regarded by many who most enthusiastically attend them. Over the last couple of decades, increasing numbers of groups have restored the pre-Pius XII Holy Week ceremonies. Just as the Novus Ordo recovered euchological texts drawn from early sacramentaries and brought them back into use, so the Vetus Ordo will naturally do something similar. It will not, because it cannot, remain static.
There is, indeed, nothing sacrosanct about '1962'; Benedict XVI appears to have selected that particular edition and recension of the Roman Rite mainly because it was what Archbishop Lefebvre had done earlier. I would like to see, not a wholesale and block and doctrinaire restoration of the texts or practices of any particular year in the past, but the further sensitive and unhurried and judicious evolution of the Old Rite.
I have already mentioned Holy Week. I will add: the restoration of more vigils and octaves; and (at least for doubles of the Second Class) the restoration of First Vespers.
I also think we should follow the SSPX French Ordo in providing for the use of the so-called 'Gallican' Prefaces. And we could borrow from the Novus Ordo the permission, on lots of ordinary weekdays, either to commemorate a Saint or to observe the Feria.
If I am making a general point, it is this: rather than digging our heels in and nervously crying "Not an inch", we should let the classical Roman Rite shine ever more gloriously, attracting yet more people (not least, the young) to it by its eternal youth and its irrepressible virility and vigour.
And we should take up the powerful hint which our Holy Father is surely giving us: that Summorum Pontificum is "irreversible".
This sort of thing has the capacity to upset people; even to make them panic. And, true, there is a dash of "I'm the Big Magisterial Boy in the Playground and I can make facts happen just with one little word" in the way this rather unappealing man expresses himself. But I think panic is quite unnecessary, and is even an unfair overreaction to what he has actually said.
"Irreversible". Pope Pius XII rightly condemned 'liturgical archaeologism'. Of course you cannot reverse liturgical development. Nobody has ever done that, in the course of these two millennia. But the liturgical texts and practices established after the Council are themselves not immutable. If a papal instruction, such as that of S Pius V in Quo primum, was in itself subject to change ... and Bergoglio seems to assume that it was changeable ... then clearly what Blessed Paul VI did, and what the current occupant of the Roman See now says ... are themselves changeable; they cannot be set in stone for ever.
Pope Francis has exactly as much papal authority as S Pius V. He does not have a milligram less.
And he does not have a milligram more.
And if it was acceptable (the Holy Father seems to assume that it was) for 'experts', in the decades before the Council, to explain at great length what (in their view) was wrong with the Liturgy as it then existed ...
... then it acceptable now for us to explain, at any length we like, what (in our view) is wrong with the Liturgy as it is done now in so many places.
Geese and ganders.
Pope Bergoglio is absolutely right. Liturgy is not reversible. Nobody can magic the Catholic Church back to how it was in 1962. Or in 1939. Or any other time. Liturgy will go on. Two of the ways in which it seems to be going on are the continuing reappropriation of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. And an increasing tendency to do the Ordinary Form with more reverence for Tradition.
Exemplum: When Vincent Nichols became Archbishop of Westminster, there was an instantaneous change. The unworthy little table on wheels, which had stood in the middle of the Sanctuary of his Cathedral Church, was wheeled right away, and the original, central, noble High Altar, symbol of Christ, was restored to use. Apparently Archbishop Nichols did not regard the 1970s 'coffee table' fad as "irreversible". [In fact, Pope Francis has celebrated versus Orientem in the Sixtine Chapel.]
All over the world, cathedral and church sanctuaries are being freed from the worst of the mistakes of the 1970s. And Pope Francis, in his latest address, includes a fine section explaining the importance of this instinctive respect for the Altar. (Might it perhaps have been written for him by Cardinal Sarah?) And, while I am on this subject, I will remind you of the Holy Father's Address at the general audience of August 2, when he spoke about the liturgical significance of facing East. He lamented that "in modern times, the fascination of this rite [facing East in Baptism] has been partially lost: we have lost sensitivity to the language of the cosmos". (Might he perhaps have listened to Cardinal Sarah?) Traddies should not always too readily assume that everything Jorge says is the blackest villainy.
And the Extraordinary Form is in cultural (rather than rubrical) ways rather different now from how it was before the Council (in the 1950s, I was in my teens). It is no longer performed in a hurried, perfunctory, slipshod way. The congregation no longer packs the back of the church because it is in such a hurry to escape at the very earliest possible moment. Among both celebrants and congregations, at the Extraordinary Form there is a wonderful sense of freshness and of wonder, which is certainly lacking in many of the 'mainstream' churches, with their sluggish and infantilised congregations, their frightful music, their unworthy homilies.
Are the 1962 liturgical books immutable? They are certainly not so regarded by many who most enthusiastically attend them. Over the last couple of decades, increasing numbers of groups have restored the pre-Pius XII Holy Week ceremonies. Just as the Novus Ordo recovered euchological texts drawn from early sacramentaries and brought them back into use, so the Vetus Ordo will naturally do something similar. It will not, because it cannot, remain static.
There is, indeed, nothing sacrosanct about '1962'; Benedict XVI appears to have selected that particular edition and recension of the Roman Rite mainly because it was what Archbishop Lefebvre had done earlier. I would like to see, not a wholesale and block and doctrinaire restoration of the texts or practices of any particular year in the past, but the further sensitive and unhurried and judicious evolution of the Old Rite.
I have already mentioned Holy Week. I will add: the restoration of more vigils and octaves; and (at least for doubles of the Second Class) the restoration of First Vespers.
I also think we should follow the SSPX French Ordo in providing for the use of the so-called 'Gallican' Prefaces. And we could borrow from the Novus Ordo the permission, on lots of ordinary weekdays, either to commemorate a Saint or to observe the Feria.
If I am making a general point, it is this: rather than digging our heels in and nervously crying "Not an inch", we should let the classical Roman Rite shine ever more gloriously, attracting yet more people (not least, the young) to it by its eternal youth and its irrepressible virility and vigour.
And we should take up the powerful hint which our Holy Father is surely giving us: that Summorum Pontificum is "irreversible".
23 August 2017
Amoris laetitia and Auschwitz
According to AL, a conscience may "recognize that a a given situation does not correspond objectively to the demands of the Gospel" but sees "with a certain moral security ... what for now is the most generous response".
Let us examine how this moral principle might apply in situations of organised and industrialised genocide. A man involved in the extermination of Jewry, for example ... if he were to decline to collaborate in any more murders, not only might he be subjected to discriminatory responses, but his family also might suffer grievously. His marriage might suffer! Is he, perhaps, required by the Bergoglian moral principle of "what is for now the most generous response" to try, gradually so as not to be noticed, to reduce the number of Jews whom he kills each day? Or might Bergoglianism mean that he should do his very best to see that they die less painfully? Or should he attempt, again without drawing too much attention to himself, so to work the system that in three months time he gets transferred to duties which involve him less directly in extermination ... like, for example, harmlessly organising the train schedules?
I am aware that my questions lay me wide open to an accusation that I am either an unbalanced crank in making an equivalence between well-mannered habitual adultery among the nice, if rather gleefully rutting, German middle-classes, and genocide; or 'antisemitic' for illustrating a moral priple by talking so calmy about something as vile as what Nazi Germany did to the Jews. It is my view that such an accusation by such an interlocutor would in fact amount to an admission that Adultery is not really sinful ... that it is, well, perhaps not technically in accordance, quite, with the book of rules, but it is not really wrong. Cardinal Coccopalmerio has in fact said something rather like this.
It is also my view that a mortal sin is a mortal sin is a mortal sin is a mortal sin. And Mortal Sin is the area into which, like several fair-sized and unstable bulls in a very tiny china shop, Bergoglio and his cronies have strayed. And by sanctioning what Fr Aidan Nichols has neatly called "tolerated concubinage", I do not think they will bring a single murdered Jew back to life or even save a single victim in future genocides. In fact, quite the contrary. Do we save lives ... or marriages ... by chipping away at the Decalogue, or by shoring it up when it comes under threat?
A person, you tell me, may well know a rule yet be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently. So .... if this does not also apply within genocidal situations, where can it apply?
A person's long involvement, you tell me, in sinful actions may well so habituate him to those actions that the subjective sinfulness, as AL claims, is radically diminished ... yes; I happen to agree with you there, and, like all confessors, I am mindful of this when I sit with my ear against the grill. But you won't forget, will you, that somebody who has been killing Jews for a couple of years might also well be in such a condition. And the tribunals which judged War Criminals after 1945 don't seem to have taken this laudable casuistic principle into their jurisprudence.
Bergoglio's 'jesuitical' campaign to circumvent Veritatis splendor paragraph 80, as well as Familiaris consortio, is both a moral and an ecclesial disaster. If Bergoglian 'moral principles' prevail, then, as Fr Aidan Nichols has accurately put it, "no area of Christian morality can remain unscathed".
Let us examine how this moral principle might apply in situations of organised and industrialised genocide. A man involved in the extermination of Jewry, for example ... if he were to decline to collaborate in any more murders, not only might he be subjected to discriminatory responses, but his family also might suffer grievously. His marriage might suffer! Is he, perhaps, required by the Bergoglian moral principle of "what is for now the most generous response" to try, gradually so as not to be noticed, to reduce the number of Jews whom he kills each day? Or might Bergoglianism mean that he should do his very best to see that they die less painfully? Or should he attempt, again without drawing too much attention to himself, so to work the system that in three months time he gets transferred to duties which involve him less directly in extermination ... like, for example, harmlessly organising the train schedules?
I am aware that my questions lay me wide open to an accusation that I am either an unbalanced crank in making an equivalence between well-mannered habitual adultery among the nice, if rather gleefully rutting, German middle-classes, and genocide; or 'antisemitic' for illustrating a moral priple by talking so calmy about something as vile as what Nazi Germany did to the Jews. It is my view that such an accusation by such an interlocutor would in fact amount to an admission that Adultery is not really sinful ... that it is, well, perhaps not technically in accordance, quite, with the book of rules, but it is not really wrong. Cardinal Coccopalmerio has in fact said something rather like this.
It is also my view that a mortal sin is a mortal sin is a mortal sin is a mortal sin. And Mortal Sin is the area into which, like several fair-sized and unstable bulls in a very tiny china shop, Bergoglio and his cronies have strayed. And by sanctioning what Fr Aidan Nichols has neatly called "tolerated concubinage", I do not think they will bring a single murdered Jew back to life or even save a single victim in future genocides. In fact, quite the contrary. Do we save lives ... or marriages ... by chipping away at the Decalogue, or by shoring it up when it comes under threat?
A person, you tell me, may well know a rule yet be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently. So .... if this does not also apply within genocidal situations, where can it apply?
A person's long involvement, you tell me, in sinful actions may well so habituate him to those actions that the subjective sinfulness, as AL claims, is radically diminished ... yes; I happen to agree with you there, and, like all confessors, I am mindful of this when I sit with my ear against the grill. But you won't forget, will you, that somebody who has been killing Jews for a couple of years might also well be in such a condition. And the tribunals which judged War Criminals after 1945 don't seem to have taken this laudable casuistic principle into their jurisprudence.
Bergoglio's 'jesuitical' campaign to circumvent Veritatis splendor paragraph 80, as well as Familiaris consortio, is both a moral and an ecclesial disaster. If Bergoglian 'moral principles' prevail, then, as Fr Aidan Nichols has accurately put it, "no area of Christian morality can remain unscathed".
22 August 2017
KYRIA KAI DESPOZOUSA
... the Virgin is Lady according to her worthiness, as being Mistress of all, since it was in virginity that she conceives and divinely gives birth to the One who by nature is Master of All. And of course she is still Lady as not only free from slavery, and possessed of divine lordship, but also as fount and root of the freedom of the race, and especially after the ineffable and joyful childbearing; for the woman who is yoked to a man is lorded rather than lady, and especially after after her sorrowful and painful childbearing according to the curse made against Eve ... the Virginmother, freeing the human race from this curse, receives joy and blessing from the angel; for he comes in and says: 'Hail Graced One, the Lord is with you, you are blessed among women'. The archangel is not proclaiming the future in saying 'The Lord is with you', but announcing what unseeing he sees at this very moment fulfilled. And knowing her to be the place of divine and human charisms, and adorned with all the charisms of the divine Spirit, truly he proclaims her Graced.
A little gem for you from the great and untranslatable hesychast father S Gregory Palamas. Sometimes I fantasise about the ecumenical day when Rome might feel able to add him to the Calendare Romanum Generale and to proclaim him a Doctor of the Church.
By the way, today, old Octave Day of the Assumption, is regarded by Dom Gueranger as quintessentially the day when we think of the Mother of God as Queen; among other quotations from the great masters of Christian spirituality, he gives us the passage from S Bernardine of Sienna which so enrages Marian minimalists: that even God obeys Mary. The post-Conciliar placing of Maria Regina on this day makes more obvious sense than the (Pius XII) Feast of her Immaculate Heart. Let nobody accuse me of being an unthinking critic of all post-Conciliar liturgical ideas. Although the Feast of the Immaculate Heart does bear with it notions of Divine Victory: her Immaculate Heart will triumph.
Today Blessed John Henry Newman began the wearing of the Miraculous Medal. And, centuries before, one of England's greatest bishops, John Grandisson of Exeter, chose to be enthroned this day and to order our Lady's Octave Day to be kept henceforth for ever as a feast of the highest rank. Furthermore, even though it was not the day of his death, he disposed that tomorrow be kept as his obit. I am sure that all right-thinking clerics will wish to remember him at Mass tomorrow. Grandisson was a Sound Bloke. Friend and protege of John XXII, he reacted to the threat of a Metropolitan Visitation by having the Archbishop of Canterbury repelled by his private army. Let nobody slander the Avignon Papacy in my hearing.
A very Anglican Patrimony Day. Perhaps the Ordinariate should bring in the cause for Grandisson's Beatification, as well as including the Miraculous Medal in our Mission Statement.
A little gem for you from the great and untranslatable hesychast father S Gregory Palamas. Sometimes I fantasise about the ecumenical day when Rome might feel able to add him to the Calendare Romanum Generale and to proclaim him a Doctor of the Church.
By the way, today, old Octave Day of the Assumption, is regarded by Dom Gueranger as quintessentially the day when we think of the Mother of God as Queen; among other quotations from the great masters of Christian spirituality, he gives us the passage from S Bernardine of Sienna which so enrages Marian minimalists: that even God obeys Mary. The post-Conciliar placing of Maria Regina on this day makes more obvious sense than the (Pius XII) Feast of her Immaculate Heart. Let nobody accuse me of being an unthinking critic of all post-Conciliar liturgical ideas. Although the Feast of the Immaculate Heart does bear with it notions of Divine Victory: her Immaculate Heart will triumph.
Today Blessed John Henry Newman began the wearing of the Miraculous Medal. And, centuries before, one of England's greatest bishops, John Grandisson of Exeter, chose to be enthroned this day and to order our Lady's Octave Day to be kept henceforth for ever as a feast of the highest rank. Furthermore, even though it was not the day of his death, he disposed that tomorrow be kept as his obit. I am sure that all right-thinking clerics will wish to remember him at Mass tomorrow. Grandisson was a Sound Bloke. Friend and protege of John XXII, he reacted to the threat of a Metropolitan Visitation by having the Archbishop of Canterbury repelled by his private army. Let nobody slander the Avignon Papacy in my hearing.
A very Anglican Patrimony Day. Perhaps the Ordinariate should bring in the cause for Grandisson's Beatification, as well as including the Miraculous Medal in our Mission Statement.
21 August 2017
The Convert Problem
Mr Austin Ivereigh thinks that we converts should be quietly humble. We should remember that we can never have the same pure, balanced and holistic understanding of the Faith that he and his fellow cradle Catholics have. Well, I'm not going to criticise him, because I find him rather scary. He got money from the Daily Mail some years ago because they, as the Jury in the Libel Court unanimously decided, grossly misrepresented some episodes in his earlier life.
I don't like the Mail ... it seems to me a nasty little paper ... so good luck to anyone who can do them for libel ... but I've no desire to have to fish my own cheque book out for anybody. So ... forelock duly tugged ... deference elaborately exhibited ... yes, Squire, no Squire ... whatever you say, Mr Ivereigh. And I expect you are even crosser with us converts, now that yet another of our number, the iniquitous Fr Aidan Nichols, has just had the temerity to suggest that there is a crisis in the Roman Magisterium and that there ought to be means of canonical redress for people who think an occupant of the Roman See should be held accountable for heterodoxy. That's just the sort of thing some convert, who wastes his time going around lecturing and writing a couple of books a year about Catholic doctrine and history, would say, isn't it ? I'm with you, Austin, all the way. Good On Yer Cobber, as they reportedly say in Oz.
So, instead, I'll turn my spotlight on an American who is a convert himself. David Mills humbly confesses that we converts will indeed always be creatures inferior to genuine, encradled, Catholics. And Mr Mills appears to demonstrate something even worse: that since he entered the Catholic Church, his understanding of Catholic doctrine has deteriorated. Two examples: (1) he appears to think of our blessed Lady as a sort of vessel which contained the Incarnate Word. Rather off-centre: the Lord took his human substance of the Virgin Mary His Mother (as the Christmas Preface in the Anglican Use makes clear); he did not merely pass through her as water does through a pipe, or as the Lord's Blood is contained in a chalice. And (2): he calls the Church "a living body moving through History" ... which is jejune. The Church is the Body and Bride of Christ. The Church Triumphant (our Lady and all the glorified Saints) and the Church Expectant (the souls whom we remember before the Father) are not within History in any natural sense of that phrase. Only the Church Militant could be described in the way David Mills does.
The habit of regarding "the Church" as synonymous with the Church Militant here in Earth is a common mistake among Roman Catholic theologians as well as 'ordinary' Catholics. Those of us from the Anglican Patrimony have had the opportunity of being taught (for example, by the great Eric Mascall) that the Church is something immeasurably greater than merely the Church Militant. In the words of another mighty Anglican writer, C S Lewis, she is "spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners".
I suspect that this much healthier and more balanced understanding of "Church" may owe something to the influence which some Orthodox writers had on Anglican Catholics such as Mascall in the twentieth century. However that may be, we see the wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI in calling us corporately into the Catholic Unity and urging us to hold fast to the riches which are legitimately ours.
I for one have no intention of asking Mr Mills to share his sackcloth with me or to spare me some of his ashes.
I don't like the Mail ... it seems to me a nasty little paper ... so good luck to anyone who can do them for libel ... but I've no desire to have to fish my own cheque book out for anybody. So ... forelock duly tugged ... deference elaborately exhibited ... yes, Squire, no Squire ... whatever you say, Mr Ivereigh. And I expect you are even crosser with us converts, now that yet another of our number, the iniquitous Fr Aidan Nichols, has just had the temerity to suggest that there is a crisis in the Roman Magisterium and that there ought to be means of canonical redress for people who think an occupant of the Roman See should be held accountable for heterodoxy. That's just the sort of thing some convert, who wastes his time going around lecturing and writing a couple of books a year about Catholic doctrine and history, would say, isn't it ? I'm with you, Austin, all the way. Good On Yer Cobber, as they reportedly say in Oz.
So, instead, I'll turn my spotlight on an American who is a convert himself. David Mills humbly confesses that we converts will indeed always be creatures inferior to genuine, encradled, Catholics. And Mr Mills appears to demonstrate something even worse: that since he entered the Catholic Church, his understanding of Catholic doctrine has deteriorated. Two examples: (1) he appears to think of our blessed Lady as a sort of vessel which contained the Incarnate Word. Rather off-centre: the Lord took his human substance of the Virgin Mary His Mother (as the Christmas Preface in the Anglican Use makes clear); he did not merely pass through her as water does through a pipe, or as the Lord's Blood is contained in a chalice. And (2): he calls the Church "a living body moving through History" ... which is jejune. The Church is the Body and Bride of Christ. The Church Triumphant (our Lady and all the glorified Saints) and the Church Expectant (the souls whom we remember before the Father) are not within History in any natural sense of that phrase. Only the Church Militant could be described in the way David Mills does.
The habit of regarding "the Church" as synonymous with the Church Militant here in Earth is a common mistake among Roman Catholic theologians as well as 'ordinary' Catholics. Those of us from the Anglican Patrimony have had the opportunity of being taught (for example, by the great Eric Mascall) that the Church is something immeasurably greater than merely the Church Militant. In the words of another mighty Anglican writer, C S Lewis, she is "spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners".
I suspect that this much healthier and more balanced understanding of "Church" may owe something to the influence which some Orthodox writers had on Anglican Catholics such as Mascall in the twentieth century. However that may be, we see the wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI in calling us corporately into the Catholic Unity and urging us to hold fast to the riches which are legitimately ours.
I for one have no intention of asking Mr Mills to share his sackcloth with me or to spare me some of his ashes.
20 August 2017
Wiggery
In the passage by the Dining Room of the Clergy House attached to S James, Spanish Place, I noticed an engraving of a prelate carying the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance. I think the engraving had a date around 1792.
The prelate was wearing a wig.
I'm sure there are zillions of you out there who have the following sort of information right at your snuff-stained finger tips: did prelates eo fere tempore wear their wigs all through Mass? Even after their zucchetto had been removed as they approached the Consecration? When did Catholic bishops stop wearing wigs? (I think it went out of fashion in Anglican cicles in the 1830s.)
Changing the subject ... readers will have seen the splendid picture on Fr Tim's blog some time ago of the admirable Bishop Richard Challoner wearing his wig and blue choir dress. French and Irish bishops also wore blue ... illuminating comments?? A sign of Gallicanism? When did it cease?
We poor converts need all the help we can get in our struggle to become genuinely inculturated.
Good to see Fr Tim blogging again. Like all good Catholics, I check his blog daily.
The prelate was wearing a wig.
I'm sure there are zillions of you out there who have the following sort of information right at your snuff-stained finger tips: did prelates eo fere tempore wear their wigs all through Mass? Even after their zucchetto had been removed as they approached the Consecration? When did Catholic bishops stop wearing wigs? (I think it went out of fashion in Anglican cicles in the 1830s.)
Changing the subject ... readers will have seen the splendid picture on Fr Tim's blog some time ago of the admirable Bishop Richard Challoner wearing his wig and blue choir dress. French and Irish bishops also wore blue ... illuminating comments?? A sign of Gallicanism? When did it cease?
We poor converts need all the help we can get in our struggle to become genuinely inculturated.
Good to see Fr Tim blogging again. Like all good Catholics, I check his blog daily.
18 August 2017
A Problem
Hmmmmph. A Problem. Some time ago I ran into a friend I had not seem for some time. In the course of conversation, he communicated to me the information that the Conclave for the election of the next Pope will take place in October. He was taciturn, but confident, about his sources.
Well, there you go. My own instinct had been that the present occupant of the Roman See would carry on as long as he could, so as to make his own particular agenda even more rigidly safe, and to make yet more of his wise appointments.
So, in an unwise moment, I advanced a reckless wager that my friend was wrong.
Now I've got Cold Feet. Suppose my friend knows something I don't know ... What will he say when my cheque bounces?
Dear Readers, I desperately need the current pontificate to carry on at least until the early hours of All Saints' Day, Greenwich Mean Time.
I look to everyone to do anything they can to ensure this.
Well, there you go. My own instinct had been that the present occupant of the Roman See would carry on as long as he could, so as to make his own particular agenda even more rigidly safe, and to make yet more of his wise appointments.
So, in an unwise moment, I advanced a reckless wager that my friend was wrong.
Now I've got Cold Feet. Suppose my friend knows something I don't know ... What will he say when my cheque bounces?
Dear Readers, I desperately need the current pontificate to carry on at least until the early hours of All Saints' Day, Greenwich Mean Time.
I look to everyone to do anything they can to ensure this.
17 August 2017
Apologies
Ten days ago, we whizzed off South for a break, rendering me yet again incommunicado. I have just got back; I have, I think, enabled all the comments I received (and may I say how much I enjoyed them; not a single nastiness). Regretfully, I have to decline to answer some really pertinent queries, because I now have hundreds of emails to dispose of, as well as snailmail, and some unwritten papers which are creeping up on me, with catlike tread ....
It would be great if learned readers were able to look through the now enabled comments of the period 6 August to 17 August, and turn up one or two answers.
I do apologise to readers, who do me the kindness of reading this blog, and have thought me discourteous over these few days. I think I have been.
It would be great if learned readers were able to look through the now enabled comments of the period 6 August to 17 August, and turn up one or two answers.
I do apologise to readers, who do me the kindness of reading this blog, and have thought me discourteous over these few days. I think I have been.
The Octave of the Assumption ...
... does not, of course, exist, either in the OF calendar or in the (already heavily reformed) books of 1962. Except vestigially; the old Octave Day was made the Feast of our Lady's Immaculate Heart in 1944 by Pope Pius XII. One of the changes made in the post-Conciliar Calendar which I find very attractive is the movement of the Feast of our Lady, Queen, originally placed on May 31 by Pius XII in 1955, to this slot. The reasons for associating this observance with the Assumption cycle are too obvious to need spelling out. The great fourteenth bishop of Exeter John de Grandisson (whom old lags in the reading of this blog will remember I have mentioned several times) arranged to have his enthronement on August 22 and (although it was not the anniversary of his death) to have his obit kept on the day following (is such a practice common?). Naturally; he was a devoted client of our Lady, particularly under the title of Mater Misericordiae, and his devotion seems to have been very much along the lines of that recommended by S Louis Grignion de Montfort.
I suppose an unofficial repetition of the Assumption Mass on the days within the Octave is contrary to current rules both in OF and EF; votive masses of events in the life of our Lord and his Mother are, with the exception of the Immaculate Conception, not allowed. One could, however, say ordinary votives of our Lady. I would like to see restored, as an optional Votive, the old Gaudeamus mass of the Assumption, the one superseded in 1950. It makes an important point about the Assumption: that we ought to see that mystery in terms of our Lady's mediatorial role. The Collect: it is Mary's intercession we need to be saved; the Secret: she has migrated so that we may sense her intercession in heavenly glory; the Postcommunion: it is by her intercession that we pray to be delivered a cunctis malis imminentibus.
I suppose an unofficial repetition of the Assumption Mass on the days within the Octave is contrary to current rules both in OF and EF; votive masses of events in the life of our Lord and his Mother are, with the exception of the Immaculate Conception, not allowed. One could, however, say ordinary votives of our Lady. I would like to see restored, as an optional Votive, the old Gaudeamus mass of the Assumption, the one superseded in 1950. It makes an important point about the Assumption: that we ought to see that mystery in terms of our Lady's mediatorial role. The Collect: it is Mary's intercession we need to be saved; the Secret: she has migrated so that we may sense her intercession in heavenly glory; the Postcommunion: it is by her intercession that we pray to be delivered a cunctis malis imminentibus.
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