vivit traditio

in hodiernis temporibus vincentius s r e cardinalis nonulla bona pulchra orthodoxa e traditione et sumit et adornat.

SABBATHS

Why, instead of calling Mass on (many) Saturdays 'Our Lady on Saturday', why do we not say Our Lady on Sabbath? The Latin for Saturday is still Sabbatum; and that word still does mean Sabbath. Why can we not call today the Great and Holy Sabbath? We should steer clear of the Protestant notion that Sunday is the Sabbath: it is not; it the Dies Dominica, the Lord's Day, the great celebration of the Creation and Resurrection. Saturday is still the Sabbath; while S Paul's warnings against identifying ourselves with the Old People who define their group by 'sabbatizing' (instead of being with the New Easter People) do remain valid, it is also true that, as Pius XI said, we are all spiritually Semites, and the Sabbath remains worthy of great respect even if not of being a sign of our exclusive group-definition. And how better to respect it than by the Western tradition, going back at least to the Carolingian reforms and the time of Alcuin the Englishman, of using the Sabbath to mark the Great Daughter of Sion, the highest of creatures, our blessed Lady. The statutes of all our medieval cathedrals provided most amply for this, and it even survives the post-Conciliar reforms as an option.

Typologically, The Sabbath Rest reminds us that today, on the Greatest and Holiest Sabbath, God the Word rested from his labours before his new deed of creation on the Eighth Day; and Mary's own eschatological rest prefigures the Sabbath Rest to which God's pilgrim people is journeying (Hebrews 4:1-11).

Good Friday

I made a resolution to steer clear of 'Church Politics', that is to say, controversial matters, during Holy Week. It is not easy under this pontificate, because there are such daily provocations. My resolution slipped yesterday afternoon. I think that was a misjudgement.

Now, I wake up on Good Friday morning to the secular media breaking a 'story' that PF has said that Hell does not exist.

I am not interested in explanations and denials and all about Scalfari. The fact is that the Media are spreading this. This is what people will remember.

That is the incontrovertible fact.

Today is Good Friday.

Is there no more worthy 'story' that PF, with his status, his charisma, his media advisers, his conviction that he is the voice of the Holy Spirit, could have thrust into the public domain  ... on Good Friday morning?

The Evil One immediately put into my mind the phrase "This is a maniac out of control". I know it was the Evil One because I cannot see into PF's heart. And, if I could, it would not be for me to judge him. Get thee behind me, Satan. I mean this with all my heart.

But there is an objective term referring, not to silly fevered over-reactions on my part or yours, but to reality in a real world.

Skandalon.

I shall not enable any comments. I suggest that you and I go away and pray and, during the Liturgy, make a special intention for PF; that he may be the pope whom the Sacred Heart of Jesus means him to be.

Cranmer and the Five Wounds (2)

My teaching of Augustan verse, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, was transformed two or three decades ago by a book about Augustus and his imagery, written by a German with the improbable name of Zanker (I leave it to you to imagine what the students changed that into). We all suddenly realised that the ideology of the literature was exactly that of the visible monuments. And not only that of Actian Apollo; the theme and iconography of Augustus's temple of Mars the Avenger relates directly to the ideology of Octavian as the Avenger of Caesar; the Antitype of Aeneas's Type, who avenged Pallas. (When the New Testament writers and the Fathers adopted 'Typology' as the grammatical basis of their thinking, they were using a tool which was part of the fabric of intellectual life, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman.)

Some time ago, I found myself wondering if we liturgists sometimes need to learn a similar lesson about the relationship between artifact and text. Pam and I had walked to South Leigh church near Witney, where a superb painting of the Doom is preserved. On one side, kings, bishops, and laypeople rise from their tombs at the Resurrection of the Dead, to be dragged into the mouth of Hell by ferocious demons. On the other side, the blessed rise from their graves to their eternal bliss. And above the blessed is written Venite Benedicti ... : "Come ye blessed into the kingdom of the Father". And all this was painted on the walls round the place where the Rood would have stood: Christ on the Cross; Christ, the blood streaming from his Five Wounds - those Five Wounds which were so central to English Catholic devotion in the later Middle Ages.

Poor Cranmer must, in his Catholic days, have celebrated Masses galore of the Five Wounds. My reason for asserting this is found in his 1549 First Book of Common Prayer. That is nothing like as Protestant as his next one; or rather, it is; but in 1549 Cranmer was trying to take people along with him, so his heresies are carefully concealed beneath a spurious facade of a Hermeneutic of Continuity. It looks more Catholic. And in his version of the Canon of the Mass, after the end of the Memento etiam, he interpolates the passage I referred to a couple of days ago: " ... that, at the day of the general resurrection, we and all they which be of the mystical body of thy Son, may altogether be set at thy right hand, and hear that his most joyful voice: Come unto me, ye that be blessed of my Father and possess the kingdom ...". This echoes, very closely, the end of the Collect of the Sarum Votive Mass of the Five Wounds: " ... ut in die judicii ad dexteram tuam statuti, a te audire mereamur illam vocem dulcissimam, Venite benedicti in regnum Patris mei ...". My readers will not need to be reminded that it was to be the banner of the Five wounds which would be carried at the head of the Catholic rebellions against Tudor religious policy.

The priests who said their countless votives of the Five Wounds, and the numberless laity who, if they could afford it, left the legacies for those Masses to be celebrated pro requie, had been accustomed to gazing at such pictures all their lives. It was part of the image-fed furniture of their minds.

Two or three years after 1549, in his second Prayer Book, Cranmer eliminated this section from his Communion Office. By then, in very many churches, the Roods had been taken down and the paintings of the Doom had been whitewashed over. It all, sadly, fits. A religious culture in which people were expected to appropriate their Tradition by mainly visual means had been replaced by a novel system in which their aural receptivity was privileged.

In my view, the transition from the Medieval to the Modern can be thought to have begun at the point of the invention of printing and to have been consummated at that of the destruction of Catholic iconography.

Holes; digging

According to a plausible and circumstantial account in Onepeterfive, Lettergate continues to throw up further ramifications.

One no longer expects these people to tell the truth. As Amoris has made clear, the only duty with regard to any of the Commandments (these do still include Thou shalt not bear false witness), is to treat it as a beautiful ideal pleasantly hedged with qualifications.

But someone ought to explain to them that the following two principles can have quite a sting in their  tails, however much any "Apostolic Exhortation" may attempt to qualify them:

(1) Oh what a tangled web we weave: when once we practise to deceive.

(2) It is generally best, when in a hole, to stop digging. 

POST SCRIPTUM

According to the Media, PF plans, this evening, to perform his annual ritual gesture of disdain for Law by washing the feet of Moslems and a Buddhist.  

Eucharistic Hebrews

I have never studied Hebrews deeply; by which I mean that I never had the opportunity of teaching it as a text for A-level ... that's the best way I know of really getting into a text; examining it daily with ones students for an entire year. But I was aware that sharp critical eyes have wondered why a Letter about the Sacrifice of Christ nowhere mentions the Eucharist. But, some time ago the text of Hebrews 13:10 hit me in the eye. "We have a place of Sacrifice [thusiasterion*] from which those who serve [latreuousin] the Tabernacle have no right to eat". Which clearly implies that 'we' do eat of a Thusiasterion which we do 'have'. [S Ignatius used thusiasterion in a Eucharistic sense.]

There is an always-thought-provoking Methodist scholar called Margaret Barker who sees Hebrews as an exposition of the Eucharist as the New Temple; she points to 12:22-24 as a summary of its theology as the synaxis of the Christians with the whole Company of Heaven.

CUT to the sands of Egypt. Where great mounds of ancient rubbish have yielded scraps of papyrus which have been preserved by the dryness of the desert. Thousands of these, excavated more than a century ago, are in the cellars of the Ashmolean Museum here among the Dreaming Spires. And they give us a fresh insight into everyday life in the Greco-Roman world. They include a large number of invitations to the deipnon of a God at his Temple, making it clear that the feast following the sacrifice was, in ancient religion, an integral part of the sacrifice itself. This is why Temples very commonly had, as part of their complex, kitchens and dining rooms. And it is also the reason why S Paul is so concerned (see I Corinthians ... which I have taught) about his converts' dining and eating habits. The religious and the social mingled so closely that it could be very easy to find oneself inadvertently committing idolatry by what one ate, and where.

It is clear to me that Hebrews 13:10 refers in passing to just this connection. The Lord's Table is one with the Altar on High where the Lord eternally pleads his Sacrifice. We eat from this Altar of Sacrifice at the Eucharist. But the non-believing Jews still (as the Author of Hebrews writes his Letter) frequent the sacrifices which the Lord abolished in the combined events of the Cleansing of the Temple, the Last Supper, and Calvary. And they, he points out, logically have no right to eat of his Thusiasterion, which is to say, of "our" Eucharist.

Cranmer and the Five Wounds (1)

When Western England erupted in rebellion in 1549, outraged at the alien religion being imposed upon them, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was very short with them. His answer to their pleas was less than honest; as Gregory Dix observed, "This is a beautiful clean and sinewy piece of English Prose, but there are some things in it which are grotesquely ... misstated. Cranmer in scholarly controversy ... was prepared to reveal a juster knowledge ... with which he apparently did not think it necessary to confuse simple men who might not know of these things for themselves". Yet those Western Rebels carried before them the Banner of the Five Wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ; and the Sarum Mass of the Five Wounds was something which most late medieval English clergy probably knew off by heart. It was a very popular Votive often ordered to be said for the departed in late Medieval wills; it was associated in the minds of many with the corporate duty of prayer for the Church Expectant. Cranmer, dear old Zwinglian that he was, clearly still had the cadences of that Mass resonating in his mind. And conceivably he thought he could offer it as an element of familiarity to those whom he hoped gently to wean from popery.

How do I know? When Cranmer came to compose his 1549 Prayer Book, he included in his 'Eucharistic Prayer' extensive echoes of the Collect of that Mass (mostly in the prayer for the departed at the end of the intercessory section).

I offer below, mainly to demonstrate how inferior an English stylist I am to Cranmer, a translation of that Collect: The parts in ordinary type are by me; those in heavy type are collected from Cranmer's 'Eucharistic Prayer'.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, who descendedst from heaven to earth from the bosom of the Father, and on the wood of the cross didst endure five wounds; and didst pour out thy precious bloud for the remission of our sinnes: we beseche thee; that, at the day of the judgement*, we may altogether be set at his right hand, and merit to heare that his most sweet* voyce: Come o ye that be blessed into the kingdom of my father.

The rest of the Mass is not very different from the Friday Votive in the Vetus Ordo Missal, Humiliavit (with the psalmus of the Introit Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo).

If you spent a few weeks doing a church crawl in the West Country you would find all this iconographically represented; in one church Misericordias domini in aeternum cantabo carved onto a choir stall; in another Venite benedicti in regnum Patris mei painted as part of a Doom on the tympanum behind the Rood; carved bench ends in church after church, and fragments of medieval glass, with the Five Wounds represented upon them.

Or, if you want to be more adventurous, go North and look at a fragment surviving, beautifully carved on the very eve of the Reformation, from the Norman Cathedral at Kirkwall in the Orkneys, showing the wounded hands and feet with the Crown of Thorns circling the pierced Heart of the Redeemer in the centre. The Arma Christi, indeed. Here we have the very essence (in its insistence upon Redemption through the Sacrifice of Christ) of that late Medieval Catholicism which Eamon Duffy demonstrated was so healthy and so virile until poor Cranmer and his friends put an end to it.
______________________________________________________________________________
*For 'judgement' Cranmer substituted generall resurreccion; for 'sweet' he wrote ioyfull.

Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo

During my very happy six years in Devon, I discovered gradually quite a lot about an earlier, late fifteenth century, Rector, Patrick Haliburton. It was surprising how details slotted into place. He turned out to be a Scot. Why a Scot in Devon? Well, because he was presented to the living by a Scottish noble, the Earl of Douglas. How did Douglas come to do that? Because the Black Douglases, having tested their strength against King James II of Scots, lost out; and the Earl fled south to England. The English government, anxious to foment trouble north of the Border, made much of him and gave him an heiress for wife, the daughter of the Duke of Exeter. By right of whom Haliburton was presented to the living of Lifton.

And - gracious - Haliburton was a hitherto unknown Archdeacon of Totnes. How did I discover that? By looking, in the library of All Souls' College in this University, at a book he had owned, which had, inked onto the cover, his style and dignity. And towards the end of his life, he went to Jerusalem on pigrimage. How do we know that? Because an inventory of the ornaments of Exeter Cathedral lists a sudary [humeral veil] which he had brought back with him; and the Chapter records reveal a significant gap in his residence a couple of years before he died. And his family were minor nobility from Southern Scotland; he had their coat of arms put into the church windows. Not they it is there now; but a cavalier called Richard Symonds, who was with King Charles in 1644 when King and army stayed at Lifton, recorded it. Not that Haliburton was a senior member of his family. Because he had his own version of the arms carved onto a choir stall (not that it is there now; it languishes in a dark corner of Launceston museum - no, Joshua, not the Launceston in Tasmania). And, to the family arms, the Rector added, for difference, a number of additional charges taken from the arms of Douglas - indicating either a feudal alliance or a family relationship.

And, also carved onto the choir stall, I read a highly abbreviated verse from the psalms: Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo.
Why those words? I will reveal all ...

O LORD

What a good idea it was - I think it started in the Authorised Version of the Bible - to print LORD in capitals; at least, in the Old Testament and at least when LORD stands for the four Hebrew letters YHWH. Most readers will know that what the Hebrew manuscripts actually have here is the Hebrew Name for God. But for millennia our Jewish brethren have refrained out of reverence from uttering it aloud: when the Reader gets to YHWH in the text what he actually utters is (the Hebrew word for) 'Lord'. To tip him the wink to do this, the texts put the vowel points of that word underneath the consonants YHWH, giving YeHoWaH (which is the origin of the version 'Jehovah'). So when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, and then Latin, the translators wrote, not YHWH, but (the Latin and Greek words for) 'the Lord'.

It is disrespectful towards the Hebrew origins of our Faith for Christians to utter this great and unutterable Name. Even if the philologists are right to say that it was pronounced Yahweh, there is nothing more wince-making than to hear callow students of the Old Testament droning comfortably on about yarwey as if it were the name of their pet cat. Nor should we use in church translations of Scripture which encourage ignorant readers to read the Name aloud. Happily, the latest edition of the neovulgate Latin Bible eliminates 'Yahveh', and the Roman liturgical authorities have banned the public utterance of this word in Bible readings. It is a monstrosity to hear this Name uttered aloud.

We don't always realise the significance of 'LORD' in our worship. The priest starts the Eucharistic Prayer by calling God 'Lord, Holy Father, Almighty Everlasting God' (at least, he does if he is using an accurate translation of the ancient Western 'Preface'). We thus begin by identifying the God we address as the ancient God of the Hebrews before we go on to identify him with the 'Holy Father' to whom our Saviour prayed at the Last Supper (John 17). As Pius XI pointed out, we are all spiritually Semites; the God to whom we offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom we ask to receive it as he accepted the gifts of his righteous servant Abel and the sacrifice of our patriarch Abraham and what was offered by his high priest Melchisedech. Dom Gregory Dix wrote of 'the majestic tradition of the worshipping church, the rich tradition of the liturgy unbroken since the Apostles, and beyond - beyond even Calvary and Sion and the synagogues of Capernaum and Nazareth, back to the heights of Moriah and Sinai and the shadowy altar on Ararat - and beyond that again', in what he called 'the Church's quiet insistent proclamation in the Canon'.

One last point. The priest introduces the Eucharistic Prayer by saying 'Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God' (Cranmer's biggest mistake was to render this 'our lord God' as if 'Lord' is an honorific functioning as in 'my lord bishop'). The celebrant thus calls upon us to join him in making the one all-availing thank-offering to YHWH of his Son's Body and Blood. In the Tridentine Rite the priest, at these words, joins his hands together, the liturgical sign of total self-humbling (as a captive or slave might offer his wrists to be bound). And he raises his eyes to heaven and then bows his head. What a shame it is that modern rites discard this wonderful reverencing of YHWH our creator God, the God of our forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God to whom once we offered a twice-daily Tamid sacrifice of a lamb in His Temple and to whom now we offer the Immaculate Lamb.

Jesus is Temple

On the Palm Sunday when the Lord came to His Temple and 'cleansed' it, it seems to me, as I argued yesterday, that our essential Jewishness is something which we must constantly bear in mind. And this was emphasised most brilliantly in the first published volume of Jesus of Nazareth by our Holy Father Benedict XVI. If, after your initial enthusiastic perusal of its pages, it has during the wearisome preoccupations of this lesser pontificate been rather gathering dust on your shelves, I beseech you to get it up and running again. I would urge you to turn to the very fine section where Joseph Ratzinger deals with the Sermon on the Mount; and does so by engaging with one of the most distinguished historians of Jewish thought in recent decades, Rabbi Professor Dr Jacob Neusner, whom I featured yesterday.

In Northern Ireland they are convinced, not only that the dogs in the streets are either Catholic or Protestant dogs, but that the very atheists are either Catholic of Protestant atheists. People sometimes laugh about this, but our Ulster friends mean, of course, very intelligently, that a man may claim to be an atheist, but that his mindset, the matrix especially of of his antipathies, may have been formed by a cultural background which is differently doctrinaire from his current position of dogmatic atheism. English atheists, for example, often have minds befuddled by a world view which is little other than the old, ranting, Fox's-Martyrs-in-a-sauce-of-Charles-Kingsley-with-a-dash-of-Kensit Protestantism, all in the reassuring clothing of a friendly atheistical sheep.

Jewish scholars who venture into 'Christian Origins' tend very often, I fear, to be Liberal Protestants in sheep's clothing. That is what made Neusner so exhilarating to read. He did not have that sort of crypto-Protestant bagage.

The old Liberal Protestant superstition, such a comfort to the anti-Catholic mind, was that the Eucharist started as a simple fellowship meal which, probably under the influence of Hellenistic Mystery cults, was perverted into the Catholic Mass. Neusner, on the other hand, was free to follow the obvious track which leads from the 'Cleansing of the Temple' (in which Christ emptied the Temple of those who, by changing money or supplying certified animals, enabled the Temple cult to be fulfilled) to the conclusion, documented from his profound knowledge of first century Judaism, that Jesus of Nazareth saw himself as abolishing that sacrificial cult on the Temple Mount because of His intention, on Maundy Thursday, to erect in its place the new sacrificial system of His Eucharistic self-oblation in His Body and Blood.

And, during this Holy Week, let us continually bring back to our memories the self-identification the Lord made of himself with the Temple. "Destroy this Temple, and in three days ...". But he had made this identification during his Galilaean ministry. He forgave sins! Who indeed, as the watchers absolutely correctly asked themselves, can forgive sins but God alone? And where does God do so, if not in the Place of Sacrifice, the Temple?

So ... who ... what ... is this Man?

Paglia

Apparently someone called Paglia is going around shouting at people that the time has come to stop discussing Amoris and just to receive it. Let us hope that he and his chums stay well clear of these Three Kingdoms.

It doesn't seem very long ago that Parrhesia was so insistently commended on such high authority.

What short memories some people have.

Moi, I'll stick with Parrhesia.

Until PF ex cathedra officially demotes it from being a virtue to being a vice.

Loquere nobis, Petre!

Don't rob the Rabbis

Tomorrow, Palm Sunday, with the narrative of the cleansing of the Jerusalem Temple, raises in an acute form the question which the Professionals call Christian-Jewish relations. Well meaning as these people are, it seems to me that they fail to make any real attempt at historical contextualisation. They are so obsessed with rapprochement between third millennium Catholicism and Pharisaic Rabbinic Synagogue Judaism that they almost seem unaware that, in terms of the 'New Testament Period', Judaism was a Temple-centred, Sacrifice-based, Religion. Modern discussions are so concerned with questions like "Does Christianity supersede Judaism?" and "Will Christians pervert Jews from Jewry?" that it pays little attention to the more down-to-earth question 'Exactly what is supposed to be superseding, or not superseding, exactly what?' I think this is a fairly massive lacuna.

Rabbis, very naturally, are preoccupied with anxieties that we might steal their congregations from them (if only they knew how useless we are at Mission!). But when did you last herar the complaint "Will these Catholic Priests stop Jews from going up to make the appointed animal sacrifices in the Temple at Jerusalem"? Since there hasn't been a Temple in Jerusalem for nearly two thousand years, it is very natural that this anxiety need never keep theRabbis awake at night ... you wouldn't expect it to! But Catholicism in fact claims to be the fulfilment and hence (in terms of day-by-day, year-by-year, cultic actions) the replacement, of the Temple's Sacrificial system.

Some thirty years ago, the great Ed Sanders, a self-described "liberal modern secularised Protestant", pointed out that the meaning of the Lord's Palm Sunday 'Cleansing of the Temple' is most obviously seen as the replacement of the Temple. And after all, Jesus does refer to himself as the Temple. And in 1989, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a prolific and brilliant American writer upon First Century Judaism, offered his own, brilliant, refinement of Sanders' argument. The moneychangers, he explains, were there to facilitate the payment of the Temple tax which "serve[d] through the coming year to provide the public daily whole offerings, in the name of the community". So:

" ... the overturning of the moneychangers' tables represents an act of the rejection of the most important rite of the Israelite cult, the daily whole-offering, and, therefore, a statement that there is a means of atonement other than the daily whole-offering, which now is null. Then what was to take the place of the daily whole-offering? It was to be the rite of the Eucharist: table for table, whole-offering for whole-offering. It therefore seems to me that the correct context in which to read the overturning of the money-changers' tables is not the destruction of the Temple in general, but the institution of the sacrifice of the eucharist, in particular. It further follows that the counterpart of Jesus' negative action in overturning one table must be his affirmative action in establishing or setting up another table, that is to say, I turn to the passion narratives centred upon the Last Supper. That, at any rate, is how, as an outsider to scholarship in this field, I should suggest we read the statement. The negative is that the atonement for sin achieved by the daily whole offering is null, and the positive, that atonement for sin is achieved by the Eucharist: one table overturned, another table set up in place, and both for the same purpose of atonement and expiation of sin."

I have highlighted in blue the words in which Neusner the Jew expresses his discernment of how the Eucharistic Sacrifice ordained by Jesus of Nazareth was intended to supersede the Temple Sacrificial system.

I don't think we Catholics should be grabbing or claiming to supersede the synagogue-based Rabbinic Judaism of the last nineteen centuries. That would be sheer theft. The rabbis invented it; how could we possibly have any right to it? But the Temple with its system was the construct 'in possession' at the moment at which they and we, two competing heirs of Second Temple Judaism, began to go our two separate ways. What they took with them on their journey is for them to say and I would not be so discourteous as to lecture them upon it; what we took on ours was the Daily Sacrifice of the Lamb. Deus qui legalium differentiam hostiarum unius sacrificii perfectione sanxisti ...

The Temple hosted the private sacrifices of individuals and families between the Morning and Evening Sacrifices of the People of God. I can think of nothing more like this in spirit as well as in sacramental reality than a great Catholic church in the Medieval or Baroque period. At the High Altar you might see the formal prescribed ritual of the Act of Immolation in the public, communal Capitular Mass. And at the side altars, you hear the murmur of the private Masses laying before YHWH the private intentions of individuals and families.

Yes; the rabbis are more than entitled to undisturbed possession of their own lawful property. All we claim is the propitiatory Oblation which sums up and fulfills and enfolds and transcends all the Temple Sacrifices ... as well as the thusia typike of Our Patriarch Abraham ... and the munera, 'dutiful offerings', of God's Righteous Servant Abel at the dawn of time. If they have no wish to take all that from us, what is there for us both to squabble about?