A la billabong (1)

It is reported that the Queensland parliament has joined other Australian legislatures in providing for the imprisonment of Catholic Priests for performing priestly functions.

I do not want to get into the question of whether or not it would in fact help to stamp out the sexual abuse of children for priests to break the seal of the confessional. That is a prudential matter; and, in purely prudential matters, what Oz does in none of my business. I simply wish to point out, as the Holy See has done, that this touches on Divine Law ... which, for Catholics everywhere, is not negotiable. When the Law of God and the Catholic Faith are attacked in any place on this planet, all Catholics are attacked.

The idea of a priest being imprisoned for three years for doing what God commissioned him to do is chilling. Not since the Catholic Relief Act of 1791, I think, have priests in my country been at risk of imprisonment for performing their sacramental duties. One hears of harsh forms of religious oppression in countries such as China; I wonder if some members of these Australian parliaments might even have hypocritically joined in protests. But the full extent of the current world-wide campaigns against Christianity is to me so much more vividly real when the persecution happens, not in Peking, but in English-speaking countries with a rule of law based on the Common Law and derived ultimately from our own legal system. It could even happen here! To me!

One can understand violent reactions occurring among angry people; after all, abused children can be, sometimes are, damaged, harmed, for life. Indeed, during the Irish troubles, when bombs were being exploded in Ulster and London and Birmingham, people were left dead ... and, indeed, living survivors were left harmed and damaged, in both mind and body. But I don't remember serious legislative proposals being taken forward in our legislatures based on the supposition that the answer to the problem lay in locking up Catholic Priests. I concede that we may be daft; but we are not quite as daft as the legislators of Queensland.

Mind you, the Queensland legislation could have hilarious results if the clergy were foolish enough to take it seriously, especially in a large cathedral before one of the major festivals. Imagine the scene ... raised voices in the confessional ... man (or woman) comes out and swiftly merges into the people kneeling in prayer, followed a moment later by the priest with his surplice fluttering and his stole awry, shouting "Where are you? Come back! The last person in my confessional! Come back! I need your name, address, email, twitter, and facebook details to give to the police!" Uncertain which of the kneeling people is the culprit, Father goes up to them one by one ... " Speak to me! If I hear your voice, I may be able to recognise it! Is it you? Or is it you? Or you? Do you want to make me spend Christmas in a police cell eating curried Kangaroo?".

The jolly swagmen, and the often even jollier swagwomen, in those potty little parliaments should be dragged away to the nearest billabong and humanely drowned.

No; I didn't mean that ... just jest ... no harm in the world ...

Woodpiles and ointment

I don't suppose, dear transpontine readers, that you keep up-to-date with our pettier news stories ... so let me explain that a member of our Current Governing House, Andrew, styled (as our Eminent King Henry IX once was) Duke of York, has been having a spot of bother. Sex comes into it. He was a chum of some wealthy American, but we can keep him out of this. We Brits can only take a limited number of wealthy Americans, sex or no sex. (But we do do a good line in wealthy Russkies.)

As a subsidiary issue: an accusation has been made that this same prince once vocalised the actual phrase "Nigger in the Woodpile", instead of resorting to politically correct Woke English displacement evasions such as "N****r in the Woodpile". I hasten to add that this accusation has been definitively denied by the Royal Household. That is why we definitively need to have a Royal Household. I bet you definitively wish you'd got one. It's millions of times more fun than having a Pelosi (is she a Trollope fan? Pelosi is an anagram of "I Slope", or "Slope the First".)

In our media, the 'f-word' and the 'c-word' are increasingly uttered ... aloud ... in full ... on TV. But apparently, the same liberal approach is not allowed to the 'n-word'. Quite right too. Any limitations placed upon Virtue Signalling would inflict an intolerable Conceptual Famine upon our Chattering Classes.

Some procedural and contingent questions:

(1) Would our cuddly liberal Gauleiters permit us vocally to utter this: "The n-word in the Woodpile"?

(2) There is an English phrase with a similar meaning: "The fly in the ointment". Would it be  reprehensible to use imitatio cum variatione and to allude to the Forbidden Formula by saying "The Fly in the Woodpile"?

(3) If one did so, would this in itself be 'speciesist', and thus in breach of the irreformable and rigidly irreversible dogmas of PF (Laudato si) and of papissa Greta?

More Vatican II limericks from Dom Hugh's book (Arouca Press)

 In 1965, a pathetically pompous English periodical informed its readers that "No Old Etonians or Harrovians figure in the [English Hierarchy which] is of uncompromisingly middle-class origins, and not by any means always from the upper middle-class. For example, the late Cardinal Hinsley was the son of a village carpenter ... Catholic priests were once described by an Anglican as 'a rather rough and tricky lot, notoriously deficient in taste and manners ... '"

(You'd have thought that the phrase 'son of a carpenter' might have suggested a train of thought to even the drippiest journalist.)

This libel upon the English Catholic Clergy is an exquisitely venerable Anglican trope. When Ronald Knox was weighing up the pros and cons of entering into full communion, his list included "Your fellow priests won't be married: but they'll be much more vulgar." (The list concludes Vade retro Satana.)

But in S John Henry Newman's semi-autobiographical 1848 novel Loss and Gain, an Anglican friend who is trying to dissuade the hero from poping, observes "An English clergyman is a gentleman; you may have more to bear than you reckon for, when you find yourself with men of rude minds and vulgar manners."

Well, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Not that I believe it was ever true. Were Dr Oliver and Canon Tierney and Dr Lingard really rudes? Mgr Gilby? But, be that as it may, the idea that an Anglican clergyman is likely to be a 'gentleman' is now the wildest, scifi, fantasy. Partly due to the financial collapse of the Church of England, the bulk of its clergy is now educated on a much tighter budget ... and it shows. The alumnae of the East Wessex Ministerial Training Course rarely demonstrate much evidence of that Fifth Essence which permeates those who have spent the few and fugitive years of their youth couching in the dewy mists which lie between the Isis and the Cherwell.

In the Arouca Press collection of Vatican II limericks, you will find Dr Wall, Bishop of Brentwood, commenting on these classist comments: Amid Fleet Street's bottles and jugs/ we Bishops are less than the bugs/ that climb up the seat on/ the scholar at Eton/ we're just lower middle-class thugs. Which he himself Latinised as Ubi potant ephemeridum scriptores,/ nos Episcopi aestimamur minores/ cimicibus obrepentibus/ Etoniensi et mordentibus:/ plebeii et infimi grassatores.

I like to imagine a paper dart on which these verses were scribbled sailing across the Conciliar aula and reaching Bishop Gordon Wheeler, later of Leeds, who, incidentally, in his Anglican days, was a predecessor of mine at Lancing. He buzzed back to Bishop Wall Hierarchical stratification/ is a hazard of human creation;/ But we middle-class thugs/ (e'en though less than the bugs)/ are the heart of the new dispensation. Unabashed, Wall put that into Latin and sent it back to Wheeler as Hierarchica saepe ordinatio/ in humanis fit aleae ratio;/ at nos plebeios grassatores/ etsi cimicibus minores,/ novi foederis cor signat dispensatio.

Happy days.  I wonder if limericks ... or anything else ... get passed around under the table while Vin is chairing the CBCEW.

 

 

 

Naming the Germans and the Jews

Today is the anniversary of the day, in 1348, when Pope Clement particularly named the Jews in one of his decrees.

During the Black Death, in many parts of Europe there were massacres of Jewish populations because of popular beliefs that they had poisoned the wells. Clement VI declared the Jews to be under his particular protection and pronounced excommunications against anybody who should molest them. He wellcomed them into the Papal States. Possibly ... I refer to a recent query of mine ... this is why there was to be a happy and clearly prosperous Hebrew congregation in Avignon (h/t to Dr Cotton). 

(Perhaps, off at a bit of a tangent, one might recall here the establishment by Benedict XIV of a  Commission which investigated the 'Blood Libel' and found the narratives to be foundationless.)

The question rumbles on about Pius XII and the Jews. Although he undoubtedly took vigorous practical steps to protect the Jewish population of Rome itself ... although through his diplomatic network he did his best to defend them elsewhere ... although he uttered loud condemnations of those who persecuted "others on no other ground than their racial identity" ... he never precisely named-and-shamed by saying "I condemn the German state apparatus for exterminating the Jews". 

I read the other day that PF is the only major "World Leader" who has not spoken out with specificity and  clarity about the persecution of China's Moslem populations.

Could this be because he knows that brave and heroic words on his part might have unfortunate impacts upon Catholics in China?

Plus ca change ...

Sn****ring in the Back Row

There they were, a couple of Japanese students, sitting together at the back, sn****ring as they passed notes back and forth. Without interrupting the unvaried tedium of my didactic monologue, I nonchalantly strolled past them and looked down as I did so. Their communications were in ideograms, but I knew instinctively that it was in moi that the outrageous pair ... the very nerve of it ...  saw a funny side.

Of course, I adjusted the seating arrangements. 

That is how the English bishops, naughty little fellows, behaved at Vatican II. Did I say English? Well, include Bishop O'Loughlin of Darwin, down under. Except that what they passed to and from each other was not ideograms but ... limericks. 

A fair number of these was collected and done into Latin by my fellow Essex Man, Bernard Wall, bishop of Brentwood. Archbishop Dwyer had the English and the Latin Versions typed up, and gave a copy to the Right Reverend Dame Felicitas Corrigan, OSB, Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey (why, O why, do modern misogynists not allow Benedictine women religious, especially superiors, to be given the style 'Dame', equivalent of the masculine 'Dom', and why are Lady Abbesses no longer accorded the same titular courtesies as bishops?) And Dom Hugh Knapman of Douai Abbey has done a service to us all by publishing these limericks: A Limerickal Commentary on the Second Vatican Council, Arouca Press ... a press, incidentally, which everybody ought to support enthusiastically.

So how do the 1960s 'English' bishops come out of this? One limerick dates itself: Of Rahner and Congar and Kueng/ the praises are everywhere sung;/ but one bello domani/ Lord Ottaviani/ will see all three of them hung. Clearly, this must date from the before the celebrated moment when, with a prescient prolepsis of Bergoglian praxis of Parrhesia, the Conciliar presidency switched off the mike while the almost-blind Cardinal Ottaviani was still speaking. But the limerick shows, surely, a sound underlying attitude. My own impression is that the English bishops were not among the heroes who stood with the Coetus Internationalis Patrum against the engineers of error; but neither were they among the plotters who kidnapped the Council and diverted the Rhine into the head-waters of the Tiber. 

They were decent and honourable pastors whose hearts were in the right place during a period when having a properly placed heart was, sadly, not quite enough.

Anyway, you get the book and make up your own mind. If you want a guide through the Conciliar years, I commend The Second Vatican Council by Roberto de Mattei.

 

hunc praeclarum calicem

Somebody has raised an old query about this phrase. I dealt with the question in August last year and reprinted the post on 7 Feb this year.

Westminster and Walsingham and Oxford

Ten years since Pope Benedict's Apostolic Visit!

The other day I watched the full video of his Mass in Westminster Cathedral. It really is fun unexpectedly spotting Good Eggs on screen. Among the concelebrants, the great Mgr Andrew Wadsworth (Yes!! I hear everyone's cries of Vescovo subito!!!); and a former Oxford friend, now much missed, Yakoub Banglash, nonchalantly poised in front of one of the cameras. And there is fun too in watching for the Bad Eggs ... not that I ever did spot the manly, photogenic features of Kieran Conry. But of more Bad Eggs, more in the next paragraph ...

The Mass was probably very close to being what most of the more moderately modernising Fathers of Vatican II imagined they were signing up to when they voted for Sacrosanctum concilium; Latin dominated, including the Roman Canon; but there were some Propers and Intercessions in English. In the Canon, it is always interesting to listen carefully to those senior concelebrants who have parts of the Great Prayer assigned to them to deliver individually. Cormac Murphy O'Connor, who had the good fortune of being ordained well before the Rupture and thus for more than a decade had experience of saying the Canon daily, was smooth and accurate. So, interestingly, was Cardinal Keith O'Brien (he had a couple of years of the old culture).

Archbishop Vincent Nichols (priested in December 1969), on the other hand, gave the impression of not being quite within his comfort zone.

There was just one slight whiff of overt dissatisfaction; the then Archbishop of Cardiff did not conceal that Welsh Catholics were rather disappointed that the Sovereign Pontiff's itinerary had not included the Principality. Hardly surprising. I didn't blame His Grace for giving everyone, in completely justified retaliation, an extensive experience of the Welsh Language! Served them right! I would have done exactly the same. 

And I had felt that Pope Benedict should have been allowed to go to Walsingham; I recall that his Predecessor had also wished to go there, and was irritated to be prohibited (you may remember that, as a consolation prize, S John Paul II was told that our Lady of Walsingham would be at his main Mass; he couldn't see her statue when he arrived to celebrate Mass, and gave peremptory instructions that she should at once be moved onto the Altar itself).

I expect the English Bishops felt a bit ashamed to show Roman Pontiffs the distinctly shabby 1960s Catholic shrine at Walsingham, especially as they would probably have had to allow them to peep inside the gloriously 1930s and Tridentine Anglican shrine. Happily, they subsequently took matters in hand by giving the Catholic Shrine to the admirable Mgr Armstrong as Administrator; now Philip Moger has the job. He is a Protonotary Apostolic, which guarantees that he must be a good thing. I trust that by the next time I get to the Vale of the Stiffkey, that great horrible barn will have been transformed by the addition of fifteen 'Rosary' altars for all the Vetus Ordo Masses that the younger generation of clergy will be queuing up to celebrate. Bagsie me, Fathers, the Annunciation. I will hope for a grand reredos with pillars of (at least) scagliola and a magnificent painting by (at least Studio of) Tiepolo.

And Oxford. I wonder why Pope Benedict didn't come here? Could it have anything to do with the aggressive secularism of so many in the modern University? Or were the English bishops opposed? When preaching the University Sermon in Latin in the University Church (the sort of thing that still happens once a year in Oxford) in the January after the papal visit to England, I lamented at some length on the sadness that so very erudite a Pontiff should not be able to visit this great shrine of all the scientiae, and to see Newman's Altar and Newman's Pulpit (which I was at that moment preaching from). I still think the same. And Benedict XVI would have been the first to understand that Saint John Henry belongs to  Anglicans as well as to Catholics, and that Oxford is the symbol of that.

Cardinal Manning might have agreed as well ... you remember his criticism of Newman ... "the old Oxford literary Patristic tone" ... 

Such crimes! ... such blessings ...

Plagiarism and Popery

Well, stone the crows. I published this post on August 15; and a book has just come out with collected limericks by Anglophone members of the bishops at Vatican II. It contains the first of the limericks below (bowdlerised), and the claim is made that it was written by an anonymous Council Father. It wasn't. It was in a volume published in 1959 by Dr Mascall. and, incidentally, copyrighted by him. The book was entitled Pi in the High because Mascall began his academic life as a Cambridge Mathematician, later becoming an Oxford Anglican Theologian.

This brings out the latent Anglican still within me ... bl**dy papists ... plagiarists ... can't even write their own limericks ... can't even give credit where credit is due  ... 

The new volume is from the admirable Arouca Press, in conjunction with Douai Abbey. A Limerickal Commentary on the Second Vatican Council. I cordially recommend it, but add a warning that it is not very tightly proof-read.  Despite the claim that it has been reproduced carefully from a typescript, there are typos which I suspect are not due to the original: e.g. page 35 suet and rues. Although three people are named as having helped with the Latin, there are peculiarities such as printing the Latin diphthong oe as a u with an acute accent over it (but not consistently): pp 15 and 37. And all the footnotes from 21 onwards are misnumbered. 

Now follows my original post of August 15.

 

There was an old priest of Dun Laoghaire
Who stood on his head for the Kaoghaire.
       When his people asked why
       He explained it all by
The latest liturgical thaoghaire.

What's that you say? That you're a Platonist rather than a liturgist? Excellent! You'll get into heaven far sooner. And perhaps you'll like this one better:

To Plato I said, "Tell me, P,
What are those pink rats that I see?"
       With a soupcon of pride
       He politely replied,
"Ta metaxu tou ontos kai me."

 Two limericks by the Reverend Canon Professor Dr E L Mascall, 1905-1993. In the first of them,  readers whose minds delight in impropriety will be easily able to devise varias lectiones, variant manuscript readings for the first five words of line 2.

I am not anti-Irish. Many of my best ... er ...  Of course, if one preferred to read 'Kingstown' the textual disturbance would be greater.

Mascall was ahead of his time in suggesting that liturgical improprieties may be more characteristic of elderly than of younger clergy.

Extra Ecclesiam ...

... nulla Salus. I am a little nervous about the emphasis laid upon this in some traddy circles, and about some of the stricter interpretations given to the phrase. It seems to me that some people may be a little over-anxious to exclude from heaven anybody who is not in full canonical communion with the See of S Peter.

I suppose that in an age suffused with Relativism and Indifferentism, it is inevitable that sensible and thoughtful people will want to resist anything that smells of these dangerous, pernicious, heresies. But, well, y'know, sometimes a pendulum does ... er ... swing ... er ... a bit far.

Well before the post-Conciliar catastrophes struck, 'Invincible Ignorance', and all that, was part of the Church's common teaching. In 1945, Evelyn Waugh, no Relativist, explains that if Lady Julia Flyte "apostatised now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her." And remember that one of Waugh's motives in writing Brideshead was to explain the Catholic Faith to his generation by novelistic means.

S John Henry Newman avowed, towards the end of his life, that he had spent it fighting against Liberalism. He, too, used novelistic means to explain the Faith.

Priest: Do you think [Anglicans] believe and practise all that is brought home to them as being in Scripture?
Reding: Certainly they do, as far as man can judge.
Priest: Then perhaps they may be practising the virtue of faith; if there are passages in it to which they are insensible, as about the sacraments, penance, and extreme unction, or about the See of Peter, I should in charity think that these passages had never been brought home or applied to their minds and consciences - just as a Pope's Bull may be for a time unknown in a distant part of the Church. They may be in involuntary ignorance.* Yet I fear that, taking the whole nation, they are few among many.

*At this point, Newman footnotes a sentence from de Lugo which I  translate thus:
Those who err invincibly about some articles, and believe others, are not formally heretics, but have supernatural faith, by which they believe the true articles; and acts of perfect contrition can proceed from that faith so that they be justified and saved. 

A couple more Avignon memories ...

 ... have just come back to me.

(1) We were there during a French presidential election, and much enjoyed seeing what was happening, and watching a few things on the TV in our hotel room.

We were particularly diverted by a speech made by one of the candidates, a Mme Segolene Royale. I think she was giving an explanation of the fact that the bloke with whom she was shacked up and who was the father of her children was not her husband. Neatly, she averred that this made her une femme libre pour une France libre.

Even greater diversion was afforded us, back in England, a few weeks later when the man concerned, the midget but perfectly formed Francois Hollande, dumped her.

As, giggling, we remarked to each other, this made her even more libre.

(2) The restaurants.

Avignon and Mme Pepinster

The former editor of The Tablet, a Mrs Pepinster, was on the Home Service a few weeks ago and spoke about the unfortunate way the Catholic Church had treated the Jews. I was not in a position to have a view about this, since I have never studied the subject. (I do, however, recall that when a recent Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, the son of a Rabbi, visited Israel, he was treated with some discourtesy.)

But ... hang on ... here is something with which perhaps readers can assist me.

When Pam and I had our 40th Wedding Anniversary (April 1 2007), the Family very generously sent us off to Avignon for a week. I have haunting memories ... The big square, where each evening a ?counter-tenor anxious to sell his compact disks sang in tones like nothing I have ever heard ... I reflected that must have been rather how castrati sounded. The exquisite rococo Chapel of the Black Penitents, used by the SSPX (who gave me as an Anglican priest a most hospitable welcome). The Art Gallery, blissfully empty and full of good stuff. The tomb of Pope John XXII, made by English craftsmen. The Cathedral Sacristy, with vestments used at the Coronation of Charles X.

And, yes, a fine eighteenth century Synagogue. At that time, such Hebrew ostentation was not permitted (so we were told) within France. But across the Rhone, in the Papal States, there were ... apparently ... no problems.

What the doctiores among you can explain to me is why this should have been so.

PATRONAL FESTIVALS

As the Solemnity of our Lady of Walsingham ... and S John Henry Newman ... start to appear over the horizon, here are some points which apply only to members of the three Ordinariates.

DIVINE WORSHIP MISSAL

Worthy folk may easily be confused about who a Patron is. The Table of Liturgical Days in the Divine Worship Missal is almost the same as that of the Novus Ordo Calendar (plus the Octave of Pentecost, Ember Days, and Rogation Days) with the following exceptions. In Section 4, this is added: (a) The Solemnity of the Title of the Ordinariate; and in 8 (a) Diocese is changed to Ordinariate.

So there is a distinction between the "Title" of the Ordinariate; and the "Patron". In the decrees of the Erections of the Ordinariates, section 14 indicates in each case who is the patron of each. In England: S John Henry Newman. In America: Our Lady of Walsingham. In Australia: S Augustine of Canterbury.

The Title is a Solemnity; the Patron is a Festum. So, in England, OLW is a Solemnity because she is the Title; in America, she is only a Festum because she is the Patron. And, in Englsnd, S JHN is only a Festum because he is the Patron

EXTRAORDINARY FORM.

But in the Missale Romanum of 1962, things are different. The Patron is to be "First Class", which is the MR1962 equivalent of the DWM "Solemnity" (MR1962 91/12/6 and 8).

So, in practical terms, S JHN is First Class and therefore has a First Vespers according to MR1962, but not according to DWM. And in the EF he gets the Creed at Mass, and the Horae minores of the Divine Office.