"Annibale Bugnini Reformer of the Liturgy" (1)

Thus, the title of a book by Yves Chiron; published by Angelico Press, 2018.
978-1-62138-
                      411-3  (Paperback)
                      412-0  (Cloth)
                      413-7  (ebook)
It is a translation of Annibale Bugnini (1912-1982): Reformateur de la Liturgie. (2016). The translator has made a few very useful explanations and additions.

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We all know that Bugnini was a crook ... do we? ... but was he a scheming figure of diabolical and Masonic evil?

I think, having read this book, that he was a crook, but not exactly in the way we have, perhaps, in the past assumed. We have, perhaps, tended to to project what actually happened, liturgically, in the post-Concilar decades back onto Bugnini, and seen him as the villain of the piece. This careful book, well written and well translated, has the great merit of enabling one to see how things were at any given point in that period without the corruption of hindsight. As you turn the pages, you visit a world as it was at the time when it was.

The general theme of the book could be summed up as this: Bugnini was immensely hard-working and a skilled networker, and in large bureaucracies these are the people who leave their marks upon events.

Sometimes people draw our attention to the fact that only four of the Fathers voted against the Conciliar decree Sacrosanctum Concilium. Which is indeed an objective historical fact. But the leap is sometimes made of implying that everything which has happened since was directly and formally mandated by the Council, so that anybody who expresses a criticism is 'anti-Conciliar'. This is a very profound error.

Archbishop Lefebvre signed the Decree. He spent much of his distinguished life resisting the neo-Modernism of the post-Conciliar decades, but in 1965 these were the views he expressed:

"There was something to reform and to rediscover. Clearly, the first part of the Mass, which is intended to instruct the faithful and for them to expresss their faith, needed to reach these ends in a clearer and so to speak more intelligible manner. In my humble opinion,  two such reforms seemed useful: first [the reform of?] the rites of that first part and also a few translations into the vernacular.

"The priest coming nearer to the faithful; communicating with them; praying and singing with them and therefore standing in the pulpit; saying the Collect, the Epistle, and the Gospel in their language; the priest singing in the divine traditional melodies the Kyrie, the Gloria, the creed with the faithful: these are so many good reforms that give back to that part of the Mass its true finality."

I will conclude this piece tomorrow.

Fromthecardinalsdesk

"The Pope is infallible in actu, not in habitu -- in his particular pronouncements ex cathedra, not in his state of illumination, as an Apostle might be."

Post Scriptum: I thank a friend for the information that Blessed John Henry's second miracle has been unanimously approved. Patent ianuae!!

I wonder if we shall hear more about plans for the Canonisation after the CBCEW post-Easter meetiing.

It would be jolly to get some fun this autumn.

Dottore subito ...

Just checking ...

I was recently offered a comment which stated that the enumeration of years as BCE and CE (rather than BC and AD) is of Jewish origin. I was not aware of this narrative, and I have comment on hold.. I will return to consideration of it when readers have instructed me, giving references!

Mr Rees Mogg

I haven't bored you with opinions about Brexit, because, being totally illiterate in the field of Economics, I have not deemed my views to be worth anything to anybody. Unlike many of the Brexiteers, I don't have the advantage of having read PPE [Politics, Philosophy, and Economics] at this University!

But perhaps, as a humble Greatsman, I may, without being slaughtered, make a minor observation on a minor detail.

We have in English politics a personable, elegant, and engaging MP called Jacob Rees Mogg. He is also a Catholic with a sizeable family who practises his Faith and defends it in the public forum. He is even said to have a preference for the Old Mass. He is in every way a credit to his admirable Nanny, of whom he is not embarrassed to speak. What's not to like?

Yet, some time ago, he reportedly referred to Brexit as being "as worthy for celebration as victory at Waterloo or the Glorious Revolution".

Waterloo? Fair enough. I'd have no problems agreeeing with a favourable view of that encounter. The Allies of Waterloo represented a culture which did (although imperfectly) preserve ancien regime elements. The defeat of Bonaparte meant the fall of those nasty little statelets which had been invented to replace Old Europe; it meant the suppression for a time of the hegemonic intellectual legacy of the French Revolution. It led to the restoration of old monarchies in France and elsewhere. The Monarch of the Two Sicilies stood in triumph over the wreckage of the Parthenopaean Republic! Te Deum laudamus!!

But the Dutch Invasion of 1688 which put a foreign Dutch Calninist on the thrones of the Three Kingdoms ... how can that be laudable? Which meant the subjugation of the economic and military might of England to the quarrel of Protestant powers with Louis XIV? And meant the exile of a Catholic King, anointed and crowned according to the Roman Pontifical, yet who conscientiously advocated freedom of conscience? Under him, after all, in predominantly non-conformist English towns such as my own family borough of Colchester, Dissenters accepted James II's Toleration, ignored the Test Acts and took over the government of their Borough. The events of 1688-9, reinforced after 1715 under a new foreign dynasty, led to the humiliation, for half a century, of this University. Was it 'glorious' to eject from the Church of England its most learned and Catholic-minded bishops and clergy and laity, the "Non-Jurors"? What about those terrible decades of venal and rapacious Whig oligarchy?

Over the water, for nearly a century the de jure King James III (a nice 'Gallican' touch here) nominated to Roman Pontiffs (who included the great Prospero Lambertini, Benedict XIV) the priests who were appointed Vicars Apostolic in England. But here at home, Catholics had to lie low. Genocide was unleashed upon parts of Scotland.

This all seems to me a pretty rum inheritance for a 'traditionalist Catholic' to identify himself with.

Mr Rees Mogg has thus prodded me strongly in a Remoaner direction. If Brexit truly is, as he asserts, "as worthy of celebration as the Glorious Revolution", then Brexit, logically, obviously, stinks. I ought to be grateful to him for this clarification.

And Mr Rees Mogg did read Modern History at this University, while I am just an ignorant Classicist. So he must know best! And he has such nice manners! Even the rabid "let me tell you about my abortions" women on the Labour back benches seem to be charmed by him.

All the same, deep within me I still seem to hear the voice of Fielding's Squire Western baying through the lush coverts of the English countryside "Whiggery! Dam' Whiggery! Hannover Rats!"

Unknown Bones

I've never been atracted to the idea of the Unknown Warrior, buried in Westminster Abbey. His corpse was deliberately chosen after the First World War so that nobody should ever know who he was, or even from which theatre of war he came. It has seemed to me that this idea (although I understand its motivations) disregards the sacred reality and particularity of every individual human being. The airy subPlatonic notion of a representative unknown and depersonalised soldier, surely, is a lesser concept than the rich truth of whoever the real person buried in the Abbey actually and really was, made by God in all his uniqueness.

I feel rather like this about the recent burial, with Jewish rites, of bones from Auschwitz, in the Jewish cemetery at Bushey in Hertfordshire. The site is apparently destined to become a holocaust memorial.

We have been told very little about these bones. Presumably scientific examination was undertaken which did prove that they were Jewish? How so? Might not the results of the investigations have also shown where they originally came from? Were they members of the same family? - that would give a particular resonance to this sombre event. Popular archaeological programmes on TV create the impression that, given DNA and so many other modern wonders of Natural Philosophy, a very great deal can be discovered from the smallest fragments of human tissue.

I don't want to make a great fuss about this. I certainly do wish the Jewish community well as they honour these members of their race with the respectful burial they were denied in the fearful genocide of Hitlerite Europe. And I am very glad that Vincent Nichols was at the event.

I am just uneasy about the lack of information made public in our media. It is almost as if, as in the case of the Unknown Warrior, the real point of the operation is the elimination of the individuality of those buried.

"Philip"

Recently, the spouse of our Head of State was involved in a minor traffic accident. Neither he nor anybody else was seriously hurt. He is 97 years old.

One of our newspapers ... oops ... perhaps I'd better break off here with terminological explanations.

We used to distinguish between 'broadsheet' newspapers and 'tabloids'. The former were reckoned to be more literate than the latter, and their pages were twice the size. However, The Times adopted the tabloid page-size, which confused the lucid antinomies of yesteryear. I think the more proletariate papers are now called 'red-tops' because it is in that colour that they print their names at the tops of their front pages. I think I have heard that the middle-class papers are are sometimes called 'Quality papers'. But I may have got all this wrong. (What I think people should call the Daly Mail is perhaps better left unexpressed.)

Anyway, back to Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark.

One of the Red Tops had a front page banner headline ordering him to give up driving, and addressing him as "Philip".

I have no particular sentimental rapport with the House of Battenberg. My own historical sympathies incline towards Jacobitism. And thus to the happy cities of Munich and Vaduz.

But the aged gentleman concerned did serve with distinction in the last World War. It seems to me moderately outrageous that some crass journalist or editor, probably some dim, sniggering adolescent, should take the liberty of addressing him with such impertinent familiarity.

I have been similarly outraged in hospitals, hearing silly little bits of junior nurses addressing working class men old enough to be their great grandfathers ... "Come along, Billy, take your pills like a good boy". Men who fought in wars and brought up large families and worked all their lives ...

I was rather glad to see that the Earl of Merioneth promptly acquired a car just like the one he had smashed, and made sure he was seen next day by the journalists, driving it around.

It's the only sort of language these people understand.

Double Vision

When Vincent Nichols moved to Westminster, pretty well immediately a major change happened in the Cathedral Sanctuary. The 1970s mobile, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, altar was taken out of use.

I have always given VN credit for this. Few traddies would be prepared to, because Traddidom is much preoccupied with the idea that the priest should be facing in the same direction as the Congregation; and, at Westminster, the original High Altar is far enough forward for Eucharistic Celebrants to get behind it and thus face the People. Which is what they do.

However, this post is not re-entering the old ad Orientem controversies. What I am looking at today is the principle that, in the Sanctuary, there should be one Altar. I believe that liturgists of all schools share this view.

It has a theological rationale. The One Altar bears witness to the fact that there is but the One Sacrifice of the One Lord.

I've recently seen ... I think it might have been in the Eponymous Flower blog ... a picture of a church in Ferrara where, just as used to happen back in the dear dead 1970s, what we have come to call a "coffee table" has recently been intruded between the old (baroque) High Altar; and the People.

Aesthetically, of course, this is perfectly horrible. But it is not aesthesis that I am mainly now discussing. My point is that the unicity of the Eucharistic Sacrificial action is here blurred. And blurred, in my view, diachronically as well as synchronically.

In a double-altared sanctuary, the clear implication is that what is now done at the new "coffee table" is not the same Thing that used to be done at the original, structurally authentic, High Altar. Contrary to Benedict XVI's 'Hermeneutic of Continuity', it is visibly taught by such arrangements that a Rupture has occurred; that something New has been intruded.

It is most deplorable that this sort of theological, liturgical, artistic vandalism is still occurring, half a century after the exhilarating catastrophes of the 1970s.  

It is further evidence of the illiteracy Cardinal Mueller has recently referred to among those currently being nominated to episcopacy. (NEVER MISS A MUELLER INTERVIEW. That's an order.)

There are few things more archaic and out-of-date, more clinging-to-the-past, than the fashions of the 1970s Trendy Mafia. Original authenticated surviving proponents of this base culture should be professionally stuffed and mounted and preserved in easily accessible museum collections so that crowds of keen young traddy home-schooled children could be taken along to look at them and have a good laugh.

This needs to be done urgently, while there are still some of the dear old things left unstuffed.

Auberon Waugh ...

 ... was a son of Evelyn; and himself a very considerable satirist. C.A.P.D..

I gather from a book review that someone has published a selection of his output. The reviewer mentions 'Bron's' comment on the introduction of WCs (I think some dialects of English call them Restrooms or Washrooms) into rural Anglican churches ... observing tartly that such things had been unnecessary in earlier ages when the churches were full, but appeared to be required now that they were largely empty.

It is a neat point, but as so often the satirist sharpens his barbs by eliding contextualising nuance. A pedant might remind you that before the invention of what the Victorians called 'ecclesiology', churches mostly contained Georgian 'box' pews. The pews which were provided for Gentry families had higher walls than the plebeian pews, and contemporary critics sometimes alluded to what these walls could conceal. Ladies' maids, apparently, kept close at hand discreet ceramic receptacles which could conveniently be slipped under voluminous garments. Gentlemen, perhaps, just popped out and made use of the ... er ... environment. The Victorians not only restored decayed buildings but radically reformed the informalities which had accompanied preTractarian churchgoing habits. Canon Chamberlain, my own predecessor at S Thomas's in Oxford, pointedly alluded to the indelicacies perpetrated in box-pews as good reason for his own policy of eliminating them ("scenes were enacted that prevented females attending church"). I believe there is a Hogarth print making some of these points.

Even in my own experience, it has not been uncommon for binating or trinating country clerics arriving in a hurry from their previous church to seek the traditional hospitality of the spaces betwen the buttresses on the North Sides of churches. Might it be that the women clergy of today do not find the gracious customs of English rural life so much to their taste?

Travelling clergy do deserve some sympathy. I used to spend my College Summer Vacations serving a couple of Church of Ireland churches. Most years, on one of my summer Sundays, Ned Darling the Bishop of Limerick used to make the long journey from Limerick all the way (remember that he was Bishop of seven other dioceses too, including Ardfert and Aghadoe) to the Dromod Union in County Kerry. His wife and driver Patricia was accustomed to select apt roadside bushes outside townlands for his Lordship therein to find comfort.

Happy days, for which seminary had not entirely prepared me.

One Sunday morning I cadged a lift with the Darlings from Knightstown to Waterville ... as we drove through one village, we were passed by a large and unconstrained bovine animal, travelling, very hurriedly and not without an implication of menace, in the opposite direction. "I think", said Patricia, "that was a bull".

Her eyes had not deceived her.

Ireland was such fun before it decided to move into the twentieth century.

C S Lewis and ... porn ..

There is a tiny exhibition in the atrium of the New Bod (you young things probably call it the Weston Library) devoted to the old Phi classification in Bodley. This denoted indecent books which undergraduates were not allowed to order up.

Not allowed, that is, unless their tutor wrote a note authorising them to do so. Among the exhibits is a note written by C S Lewis authorising one of his pupils to order up some Phi books.

Trouble is, I am growing some interesting things called cataracts, which means that my eyesight, formerly A1, is now poor.

Out of prurient curiosity, I would like to know what the books were which Lewis allowed his pupil to read. If anyone who habitually passes along Broad Street could pop in and find out for me, I would be grateful.

A bit confused

Somewhere on the Internet there is a clip of a couple of homosexuals presenting their son for Baptism in one of those very liberal Catholic Churches that they seem to delight in over the water. One of these parents wittily said that Jesus had had two fathers, and He turned out all right.

Possibly like you, I was so irritated by the blasphemy that it was only later that it struck me how illogical the poor (if rather loud) fellow was.

Certainly over here, a big step in the campaign for 'ordaining' women to sacerdotal ministries in Old Mother Damnable came when many of the homosexual clergy cottoned onto a bright idea. If 'development' was the Magic Wand which sanctioned the ordination of women; then the same instrument of Circean enchantment could surely sanctify 'same-sex marriage'. All of a sudden, cohorts of the lace and silver-buckles gentry in the diocese of London allowed their subscriptions to organisations opposing Women's Ordination to lapse. Roger the Lodger could piggy-back into paradise on the backs of the ladies. (Now there's some rich imagery for you.)

But this dapper and jokey American homosexual, swaying back and forth as he clutched the baby, was implying that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ was ... a Father.

But that, duckie, is off-message. As some of the Anglican womenbishops over here feel it important to explain (my goodness me, how intellectual they are), God is not masculine.

Fromthecardinalsdesk

"I am told that some wicked men, not content with their hitherto cruel conduct, are trying to bring in [the] doctrine of inherent infallibility, of which there is not a hint in the definition. Perhaps they would like to go on to call [the Pope] a Vice-God ...".

The Tyranny of the Ignorant

Papa Ratzinger tried to establish a correct translation of the word pollon [many] in the Eucharistic Prayer. He was unable to secure compliance from some Episcopal Conferences.

In this reversed-mirror-image pontificate, PF desires a correct translation of me eisenengkes hemas eis peirasmon [lead us not into temptation] to be replaced by a false one. And the Italian Episcopal Conference was not allowed even to have an opinion about whether the old, accurate, translation could be one of the options upon which they voted. They were instructed, from above, as it were, that the only liberty to be allowed to them was between new and erroneous translations.

One crack of an Argentine whip and people, it appears, hardly dare breathe. So much for the proud notion of the 1960s that Bishops are successors of the Apostles rather than mere Vicars of the Roman Pontiff. What price now, Vatican II and all those brave words!

And whatever did happen to the policy of leaving matters to local decision? Only weeks ago, the American bishops were forbidden to discuss the Abuse Crisis ... because the February meeting in the Vatican (with PF sitting there to hear every word that is said and to mark every speaker) will be primed and programmed to decide that "Clericalism" is the real problem. It would have been so dangerous to risk any alternative analysis acquiring traction among those several hundred American bishops. Papa knows the answer already, because Papa knows everything.

Our Protestant brethren sometimes forsaw more clearly than Catholics did, where the dangerous papal personality cult could lead us if it ever got into the wrong hands. Fifty years ago, non-Catholics might say things like "Even if the pope were to change the Ten Commandments or the Lord's Prayer, you'd just do as you were told. When he says jump, the only question you people ask is 'Please Sir, how high do we have to jump?'".

"Dearie me No", we would confidently reply in honest innocence. "No pope could possibly dare to go as far as that!!".

No previous pope would have dared to "go as far as that". But, as one of PF's own circle has claimed, PF is free from the constraints of Scripture and Tradition. And it became clear in the debate about 'remarried' divorcees that we now have a Roman Bishop who has no problem whatsoever about setting aside the most explicit recorded words of the Incarnate Second Person of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity. Words sustained by two millennia of Holy Tradition. Truths still authoritatively taught by his immediate predecessor only a decade previously.

And we have a pope whose poor sight lacks the acuity to detect incontinent Sexual Lust when it is staring him right in the face. (Readers of C S Lewis may recollect Fernseed and Elephants.)

The problems of this pontificate have nothing whatsoever to do with Primacy or Infallibility, so wisely defined and so moderately taught by Vatican I. Bergoglianism, as promoted by PF's elite circle, is nothing less than a vulgar and preposterous claim to Divine Omniscience and Divine Omnipotence and Personal Inerrancy.

No wonder PF describes critics and whistle-blowers ... amid much other abuse ... as Judas Iscariot.