WONDER WEEK!!! CAECUBUM DEPROMITE!!!

Here is something which has probably lurked at least in the the subconscious mind of each reader who is daily concerned to live the daily liturgy of our Latin Church.

The imminent week has a unique and glorious characteristic. It is, for those following the Gregorian Calendar, always part of Eastertide. However late Easter is (April 25?), it is never so late that the Abstinences of Lent and Passiontide can thrust their austere requirements forward into May. However early Easter is (March 22?), it is never so early that Red (or even dreader thought, Green) vestments can claw their way back into early May. Simplifying a bit (details of course in Cheney): this one week of the year is always clear of pre-Eastertide, always clear of post-Eastertide, and generally clear even of the pressures of the Easter and Pentecost Octaves.

The Week that is never unEaster!

So you might expect that the special Providence which looks after ecclesiastical calendars would have made this unique week very distinctly special.

It did! It did!

Whooppee!

Tomorrow, for example, May 1, is in many diverse cultures special. I don't know that I believe all the stuff so beloved of anti-Christians ("old pagan festivals Christianised ... Beltane ... "), but May Day is a happy celebration of Spring (apologies to the Antipodes) and not least here in Oxford (Covid permitting). For us, it is the glorious English Festival of Ss Philip and James. 

Then, at least this year, Sunday brings us the Julian Easter with its own special joy, followed by Bright Week. Christos anesti! Alethos anesti! Don't forget the Zoodochos Pege!

And Monday, May 3, is pure genius. The festival of the Finding of the Holy Cross ... a Double of the Second Class ... shows us the Cross of Salvation suffused now with the light of the Resurrection. Eng-lit enthusiasts will recall the splendid old English poem about the Glorious Rood, but for all of us, important as is the Cross of the Dolours, the Cross of Pathos, our crucial focus should be on the Cross of Triumph. Qualiter Redemptor Orbis/ immolatus vicerit! Io Triumphe!

May 4, for the English, brings another Triumph, that of our beloved English Martyrs. A 'Festum' in the Novus Ordo and the Ordinariate; in a revised Trad Calendar for England, it must surely be made at least a Greater Double ... or a Double of the Second Class.

Wednesday commemorates the great pontiff S Pius V, whose statue is so reassuringly at our Lady's side in the Brompton Oratory. Regnans in excelsis!

Thursday, May 6, S John at the Latin Gate, celebrates in our Ordinariate the beginning of the secret, underground meetings by which we responded to the gracious call to Unity of Pope Benedict XVI. 

And May 8, the Apparition of S Michael, the Protector of Cornwall, calls to our minds the Cornish S Michael's Mount and the story of the Wedged Bull between the theves (see blogpost of this time last year); the old Cornish Language Mystery plays with their cheerful peasant Catholic humour; the splendour of the late Medieval Churches with their iconography of the Five Wound; and the ever-present memory of those Catholics, gentry and peasantry, who were slaughtered in the proddy genocide of 1549. Not to mention Fr Bernard Walke and Fr Sandys Wason and Athelstan Riley and all the heroes, laic and cleric, Confessores Domini, of the distant but glorious days when Truro was the most Catholic Diocese in the C of E. Sed transivit gloria istius mundi.

This is not a week to be sniffed at! Not a Week for stuffy sobriety!!

Nothing and nobody can take these glories from us!! Well, Pius XII and Bugnini tried to, but Christendom in its long memory knows, with Benedict XVI, that what has been sacred cannot be trashed for ever. 

So Fathers, Mothers, Sister, Brothers ... untrash it! Grab it all! Take it back! Or, if you wish to plan ahead circumspectly, why not work out this week how you will celebrate WONDER WEEK next year!

The "Appeal to Antiquity"

Everybody appeals to Antiquity: whether S Pius V (bull  Quod a nobis " ... ad pristinam orandi regulam conformata revocaretur ...")  or Archbishop Cranmer ("these many years passed, this godly and decent order of the ancient fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected ..."). And Vatican II, quoted by S Paul VI ("restituuntur ad pristinam sanctorum Patrum  normam nonnulla quae temporum iniuria deciderunt ...").

Smart chaps sometimes point out the problems here: Dom Gregory Dix loved to explain how little the 'reformers' actually knew about the worship of the 'Primitive Church' because relevant texts had not been published, but earlier (1904) Wickam Legg acknowledged that "Appeal to Antiquity may from imperfect knowledge of antiquity fail here and there". He comforted himself, however, with the thought that Antiquity "is a better principle than that which approves every abuse that has grown up in the Church ...". Legg footnotes the contrary opinion of Henry Manning: "But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine".

But the problem tends to be "Which Antiquity?" In Manning's time, the 'Antiquity' to which men appealed might often be the medieval usages of English Catholicism. Legg quotes a 'remarkable letter written to Cardinal Manning in 1866 by Mgr Talbot, who was in the household of Pius IX' "Your rule ought to be the Bullariun Romanum, and not the opinions of Dr Rock". 

But Rock (and Pugin and the Medievalist Anglican Ritualists) are not the only people whose mirage of a normative Antiquity is open to question. In the 1960s, the authentic early Roman liturgical Apostolic Tradition of Pope S Hippolytus was immensely influential. It supplied the Eucharistic Prayer which, in our post-Conciliar Church, is used in the overwhelming number of Eucharistic celebrations. And the Consecratory Prayer by which Latin Rite bishops are consecrated. Magnificent stuff.

But ... oops-a-daisy ... unfortunately, the document concerned is now universally realised to be neither authentically early Roman nor to have anything whatsoever to do with anybody called Hippolytus or, indeed, with any pope. The tectonic plates in Academe can shift a frightfully long way in a generation or two. Doesn't that make life fun?

And dodgy operatives may use the siren call of "Antiquity" in less than honest ways. S Paul VI (Missale Romanum) tried to palm off on us the idea that the Penitential Rite at the beginning of Mass was one of the Patristic features which had sadly slipped out of the Liturgy and ought to be restored. (Even more slippery was his attempt to attribute this opinion to the Conciliar Fathers of Vatican II: whatever you my think of the decree Sacrosanctum concilium, it did not make this claim.)

I am immensely grateful to the Archibibliopola of Oxford, the erudite Mr Christopher Zealley, MA., for sending me Legg's monograph on Cardinal Tommasi, from which I have plagiarised much of the first part of the above. Learned strangers visiting Oxford may need to be told that "St Philip's Books Ltd." is down St Aldates, more or less opposite the entrance to the Meadow. It is full of Catholic things and all fine literature, and has a rather good plaster ?Stuart ceiling.

S Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort

Chaps who possess a copy of the 1962 Missal inform me that it contains de Montfort in its Appendix pro aliquibus locis; and the SSPX ORDO (the Francophone one) lists him for April 28 "en certes lieux". Chaps who use the Novus Ordo tell me that he has now entered (optionally) the Novus Ordo  Calendar! We aged chaps do try to keep-up-to-date, and depend so much upon you Bright Young Things to keep us informed. In return I can tell you that he is in the Ordinariate Calendar. How could he not be?

I have long had a high regard for this Breton priest; hence he is gummed into my (1955) Altar Missal, available always when the rubrics allow a Votive. This regard was shared by S John Paul II, who took his motto, totus tuus, from the Saint's writings. 

I first met S Louis Marie in the 1950s when I was a little boy, in the Catholic Church in Clacton-on-Sea, where, most suitably, a fine statue, very movimento as the Saint strides forward, stands right beside the culturally very Breton shrine of our Lady of Light. There's not much else that's Breton about Clacton! I wonder if the Confraternity of our Lady of Light still survives in that parish; if the Rosary is still said daily at that Shrine. (Regular readers will recall my series on the history of this superb devotion, involving the eccentic Cornish convert baronet the Reverend Sir Harry Trelawny, which I published in January 2020. Stuff you just couldn't make up! I beg readers who are new to this blog to go back to it.)

De Montfort comes from a Baroque devotional milieu which has been an object of criticism. Particularly out of favour has been the wholehearted style of his devotion to our Lady, which involves a consecration of servitus [slavery] to Mary. In fact, it wasn't too popular in his own time: there were unwholesome people around called "Jansenists" who sniffed at such things. 

Promise me that you will run a mile if you ever meet one.

Grounds for snooty disdain are obvious: granted that the word doulos [slave] occurs frequently in Scripture, surely, so the condescending will remark, it is Jesus whose doulos, slave, S Paul so often proclaims himself to be. So is the douleia of Mary just another example of popery putting the Mother of God into the place reserved for her divine Son?

But no reader will have forgotten the biblical verb hypotassesthai: to submit oneself, to order, to arrange, to subject oneself hypo, beneath, another, be that 'other' a master, a spouse, a ruler, or whatever. New Testament religion is a million miles from the individualistic Protestantism which knows only a relationship between the one and the One. S Paul in fact calls upon us to submit ourselves in this way one to another: not just to Jesus (although all must be en Christoi). And since Mary alone is unflawed by Original Sin, she is the one to whom a Christian can be hypotassesthai without that relationship being flawed (as all other hypotaxeis except that to her Divine Son can run the risk of being) by unchristlike traits in the other.

S Louis Marie is far from being the first Christian to have practised and promoted this Slavery of Mary. In his True Devotion to Mary he lists many predecessors in both East and West; to whom I would add my own favourite Bishop of Exeter, John de Grandisson. He concluded a life of servitus to Mary by having himself described on his lead coffin as Matris Misericordiae miserrimus servus. So clearly this devotion is authentic Anglican Patrimony! Since the terms kyrios(a) and doulos(e) are correlative, the terms domina and kuria [Lady], common in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity (not to mention the more archaic Greek despoina and the English phrase our Lady in the Book of Common Prayer), imply a Montfortian devotional attitude.

I think you should make the Montfortian consecration today.

Essay Questions and Austro-Hungarian Bankers

C S Lewis describes Mark Studdock as "a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge" who "always does well in Essays and General Papers". 

As I have observed before, there must have been times when Lewis was a less than comfortable college tutor.

I will dangerously generalise: in writing 'general' essays, women are often businesslike, hate to waste time, and are incisive without being flashy. They get to the point. Substance means more to them than stylish woffle. We chaps, on the other hand, are adept at concealing our chronic idleness behind a facade of mannered, or even dilettante, glibness. Readers may feel that this is a temptation from which I have not yet entirely, er, struggled free.

Back in those sun-lit days of Harold Macmillan and General Papers, the Spoof Quotation figured large. It was followed by the peremptory instruction Discuss. You could tell that the quotations were mostly Spoof, because no amount of detergent can entirely wash away an aroma of donnishness. 

But I have recently spotted, in a Times obituary, a genuine quotation ... I'm sure of it ... which could give candidates, all sorts of them, scope galore to spread themselves in innumerable different ways. And how revealing their answers might be! Perhaps every girl to whom Marriage has been proposed should require of her suitor(s) a response to this question (write only on one side of the paper and use only alternate lines).

The subject of the obituary was a wealthy bachelor, of Jewish, Austro-Hungarian, background but whose forebears on becoming Catholics had sacrificed the euphonious name of 'Guttmann' for the bathos of 'de Gelsey'. He was extremely generous to the Brompton Oratory (indeed, one of the most deserving causes in all the Three Kingdoms). Like me, he enriched his own life with Caviare and White Lady cocktails. He led an agreeable social life ... surrounded, often, so reports have it, by glamorous women. He evidently enjoyed their company, and they his. 

Somebody once enquired of him (a disgustingly impertinent question but that's Third Millennium degeneracy for you) why he had never got married. Here is his (unspoof) reply:

"Why buy a book when you can go to the library?"

Orate pro anima Gulielmi de Gelsey, 1921-2021, qui obiit die 28 Februarii. C A P D.

Hell Mell in Clubland (3)

Screwtape summoned a Club servant to fill his glass. He shifted in his chair, animated by the recollection of his own triumphs. "The master stroke was my brilliant idea for an entire Papacy in which "teaching" would be structured around ambiguity ... the beauty of this was that it introduced into the teaching of the Church just that primacy of imprecision, of self-contradiction, of deliberately cultivated vagueness, of programmed disintegration and fissiparous confusion, which is the essence of our own rules and traditions down here in the Pandaemonium Club. It also has the strategic advantage of making it very hard for mortals to pinpoint explicit error in a text which eschews the heresy of explicitness." He waited as the glass was filled, and raised it to his nose. The dogmatisms, perhaps, of Savonarola and of Bertrand Russell excitingly blended? With deeper hints of Martin Luther and Bishop Baetzing?

"At the next War Cabinet meeting Sodgrope, iniquitous careerist, claimed as his own a brilliant cultural transformation which was in fact a construct of mine ... I cannot wait to welcome, to embrace him ... to draw him in ... to make make him one with myself ... ouroborinda ... ... ... You see, in the bad old days, Roman Pontiffs passed on to their successors what they had themselves received. This rendered most difficult all our hopes for reconstructing their religion upon lines which reflect the luminous realism of Hell. The human means by which such continuity was achieved included often the successive elections of men who had been closely associated with a previous Pope. This used to be done by, for example, the election of senior deacons in those days when the deacons were the pope's first ministers. Or by the election of a Ratzinger after a Wojtila ... and what a tragedy that was ... the waste of nearly three decades when we could only achieve our ends by oblique means ... My new policy (and, whatever Sodgrope may claim, it was mine) helped the Cardinal Electors to understand the need for Fresh Blood and a Wind of Change and a Radically New Approach ... and for the election of a man from the most distant place on earth ..."

Wormwood interjected: "And a narcissist of limited intelligence"; Screwtape gave a weary sigh. Would this simpleton of a supposed tempter never grasp the objective realism of Hell? "Well, there may be those who consider him somewhat self-obsessed, but, my dear nephew, as I have grown tired of explaining to you, what the Infernal Actuaries demand of us is not abuse of the Enemy and his associates, however satisfying, but concrete results. Remind me to send you a leaflet about the new Correctional Training Techniques being developed for unsuccessful tempters ... it is most copiously illustrated ... What is truly to our purpose is that Bergoglio is certainly a man with a contempt for what he inherited and found in Rome, and that this gives us rich opportunities to contrive rupture ... opportunities which have already yielded results ... fine piece of work ... crucial consolidation of my own position in the current power structure ... decanter ... Sodgrope ... Daemoniorum laetitia ... Me ... ambiguities ... Snodgrove ... Ted McCarrick ... drink ... peripheries ... Kasper ... want ..."

The effort of his exposition had clearly been tiring work for the aging Spirit. Ignoring his nephew, Screwtape drained the decanter into his glass, grasped it with crackling  knuckles, and buried his nose in the fumes. What was this? H G Wells matured in barrels impregnated with Lloyd George? Or Simone de Beauvoir with an aftertaste of Major Hardcastle? John Wither blended with ... with ... After a minute or two, the glass slipped from his fingers, unloading its ambiguous contents over the dreaming tempter.

On tiptoe, still fearing the wrath of the mendacious old bore, Wormwood crept away.
Ended.

The Pandaemonium Club (2)

"You must understand the brilliance of our strategy with Bergoglio. When he was elected, there was a real danger that he might do a great deal of what the Enemy calls 'good'". Screwtape's fine old eyes moved meditatively along the bound leather volumes of The Wisdom of Aleister Crowley in the Club Library. " He had a Latin American background; the risk was that he would develop the concepts of Liberation Theology and devote his Pontificate to the poor: both to the state of those economically poor and to those our Enemy calls the Anawim; the righteous Poor whose poverty results from their adherence to the Enemy's Law. The very moment after Bergoglio was elected Pope, his friend Cardinal Hummes ..."

Wormwood has gone so far as to open his mouth in order to share a tired witticism about Cardinals Hummous, Tzatziki, and Taramasalata. He saw the red gleam of hungry malevolence in his uncle's eye, and shut his mouth again.

" ... said to him 'Do not forget the poor.' That was the moment at which our Father Below summoned his War Cabinet to crisis session. You see, Gerhardt Mueller is, most unfortunately, an expert on Liberation Theology ... Bergoglio and Mueller in collaboration might have done immense damage to our cause ... Bergoglio providing the the enthusiasm, the boldness, and Mueller the theological control ... some, indeed, quite deep among the Lowerarchy showed signs of panic.

"But Our Father Below simply and calmly asked each Cabinet Member in turn how we might avert this threatened catastrophe. Happily, I suggested that we should work on Bergoglio's liking for empty ritual. And it worked! Bergoglio was childishly keen on making a great parade of Favouring the Poor while actually taking no action whatsoever on their behalf. It suited him to a ... whatsoever ...

"I also suggested backing this policy up by contriving a personal breach between the two of them. Here again, Bergoglio's love for ritual without content provided us with a winner. The tactic I adumbrated involved letting him prose on endlessly about dealing with paedophile priests ... in the land of Airliner Rhetoric, while actually protecting them ... in the real world. So we lured Bergoglio into sacking some of the experts on paedophilia who were working under Mueller. And, again, my plan worked to our Father's great satisfaction. Two ends were served: quite a number of very fine paedophiles were preserved, unmolested, in the full-time, full-hearted, ministerial service of Our Father Below. And Mueller himself was personally affronted by the radical realism (or 'manifest injustice', as humans call it) of Bergoglio's actions. 

"Just to make matters the more sure, we contrived that the the breach was sealed by another dramatic public humiliation of Mueller by Bergoglio. He demanded that Mueller be summoned to trot from the altar to the telephone while he was actually celebrating Mass in order to be instructed ... with peremptory discourtesy ... to drop a particular canonical investigation ... "

A long pause followed. Wormwood, whose curiosity had been fostered, eventually broke the silence by enquiring what that investigation had involved. Screwtape glared at him, but could not resist the temptation to boast. about his own master-stroke. "It involved one particular Anglo-Saxon Cardinal ... indeed, a leading member of the group of Cardinals which, under close infernal control, had organised Bergoglio's election to the Roman See. Mueller had to drop that Investigation ... naturally, this rankled.

"With Mueller out of the way, we put into place the brilliant strategy whereby Bergoglio's sympathies were transferred to the monied classes of libertine North European and North American societies, instead of dangerously engaging with the Righteous Poor, faithful servants of the Enemy. Absolutely any disaster could have occurred if we had allowed him to continue fantasising about the really poor.

"Bergoglio's imaginative identification was secured to those who had formally and decisively rejected the Enemy's call to sexual continence by remarrying after divorce. He never even noticed the substitution! In addition, Gropepope, Bergoglio's own personal tempter, put in some good work by reminding him of the immense and tempting wealth of the German Church. We soon had the poor old peronist safely in our bag."

To continue.

Clubland in Pell Mell (1)

Mr Under-Secretary Screwtape felt confused. He savoured the liqueur in his glass ... was it Annibale Bugnini blended with Jimmy Saville? Or Augustin Bea with fine aftertastes of Freddy Ayer? The concoction was, in either case, superb; but he had an uneasy feeling that the failure of his palate to make those really precise distinctions ... a malady he felt all too often nowadays ... might be the first sign of that disintegration, that dissolution, which he had always known he would ultimately experience. But so soon? After so few millennia? When he felt still at the height of his powers?

He was woken from his reveries by the grating voice of his most detested nephew, Wormwood. "Uncle! Wake up! Uncle! Isn't it marvellous news? Uncle!! Wake up!".

It had been a great mistake to allow this callow junior tempter to be elected to Club membership; he should have been whiteballed. Too late, however to complain about that now. Screwtape opened one eye. "And what, precisely, is this news?"

"Germany!! yelped the whippersnapper. "It looks as though the German Church is going to split from the other churches so as to advocate Adultery, more Sodomy, more and better dodgy financial dealings! It's all actually happening!" 

Again, the old gentledevil winced. Such obvious, such adolescent light-headedness. No style. No finesse. A put-down had become necessary. "If you stop shouting silly jargon and jolting my arm and spilling my drink and demonstrating your total incapacity for strategic forward thinking, I will tell you precisely how the trick was worked. And I strongly advise you to avoid a tendency to anthropomorphic analyses ... you have been in trouble about that before ... Our Father Below regards the adoption of human pseudo-rationalism as a sign that a Tempter is going native ... we must always remember to put and to maintain a proper distance between ourselves and our patients."

To continue.

NOTICE

I may need some eye treatment. This may mean that I might not read comments, let alone enable them. I cannot say when the status quo ante might return. I would be very grateful for prayers.

I have set up some posts which should, Deo volente, pop up automatically every day without my further agency.

I thought I had answered the Benedicentist position in my recent piece about how to behave when one is offerred two alternative popes. Or three. Or even four. Or, indeed, as many as Providence sends you.

If people want to practise DIY popemaking, let them take into Westminster Cathedral a reliable checklist of popes and antipopes. And a pencil. And lots of paper. Work through the lists on the left-hand wall. Pay special attention to amusing little details like which archbishops apparently received a pallium from which papal claimant, and whether that claimant was, er, indeed alive at the relevant time. And which papal claimant inherits his claim from which predecessor and why not. 

Hours of fun! Try not to get infuriated. If you do get infuriated, avoid (1) shouting; (2) attempting to correct the lists with your chisel.

In fact, probably best not to take the chisel after all.

Amusing additional questions: Why is the mighty Cardinal Allen not on the list? Who sez that the Vicars Apostolic of the London District were chief pastors of the Catholic Church in England?

Not I.

Post Scriptum: Why is Mr Biden wearing a British Brigade of Guards tie today? Was he a MI5 agent during the Troubles?

An Answer to ********, *******, ****, and *********.

Dear ****************************************

I was deeply moved by the tone and content of the comments you offered me. I did not feel able to publish them, but I offer you, in return, the following.

During the Great Schism of the Western Church, there were, at one time, as many as three competing 'popes'! (Even nowadays, there has been no watertight magisterial defintion about which of those ancient claimants were authentic, and which were "antipopes". The big bronze list of popes in Westminster Cathedral contradicts itself and is a pompous nonsense mainly designed to humiliate Anglicans.) Which 'pope' you were in communion with depended on your monarch. In effect, he chose, within the context of international politics. For example, an Englishman would be in communion with the 'Urbanist' 'pope' in Rome; a Scotsman would be in communion with the 'Clementine' 'pope' in Avignon. (When you walked across the border ... ...!)

There were no doctrinal differences between these different competing lines of 'popes'; but it remains true that, if your king did choose the wrong one, he would be dragging you into schism together with himself because he would be dragging you into communion with a spurious anti-pope. The fact that everybody thought they were doing the right thing does not change the fact that you would find yourself not in communion with the true pope if your king had got things wrong. Only God, of course, would know who was right! No wonder the Devil laughed!

So now ...

If you act in communion with "Pope Francis" because your bishop, and the other bishops of your land, accept him as pope and you are in communion with them, then I cannot believe that you are in some way separated from God our loving Father. He accepts you, whatever nonsenses your bishops get up to. That will have to be on their consciences. Medieval Christians were convinced that lots and lots both of bishops and of popes (and kings) went to Hell!! Whether these inferences were based upon sound data, God has not revealed to me.

Even if it transpires subsequently that your bishop has got things wrong, and  PF is not really pope, I do not think that your allegiance to him will be regarded by God as having been grounds for sending you to Hell. In fact, people who were on both opposing sides during the Great Schism were subsequently canonised.

So ... in practical terms ... find out whether your own bishop names PF in the Te igitur and ... bob's your uncle! ... if he does so, it will be safe for you to regard him as pope too. Let His Lordship take the rap! He has broad shoulders! It will do him good!

Even if it turns out that you are right in your suspicions that PF may not be pope!

THE YEAR OF S JOESPH! S Joseph should have his proper, pre-Pius XII, respect.

(1) S Joseph's Feast on March 19 got under way in the 15th century and gradually spread. It celebrated S Joseph, Spouse of the Theotokos.
(2) Then his Feast as Guardian of the Universal Church was added (universal in the Latin Church from 1847), fixed on the Second Sunday (EF) after Easter (='Third Sunday of Eastertide' in the OF).
(3) Then, when S Pius X liberated Sundays from feasts which perpetually occurred upon them, this feast moved from the Sunday to the subsequent Wednesday. But for some decades clergy were allowed to celebrate External Solemnities of S Joseph on the Sunday, in places where their people had become attached to the custom.
(4) During the Cold War, Pius XII had the clever-clever idea (1955; in the decade when his minions had already set to work to vandalise the Easter Vigil) of making the Workers' Day, May 1, the Feast of S Joseph the Worker as a witness against Marxism. Ss Philip and James, who hasd been the ancient (570) celebration on May 1, were ... er ... kicked unceremoniously into the long grass.
(5) For a variety of reasons, S Joseph the Worker (happily!) never caught on and is now, in the OF, merely an optional memoria. (In the official EF it is still, sadly, in situ as a top-class festival on May 1, though I find it hard to imagine that traddidom really wants it.)

(6) But S Joseph the Guardian (see 2) had been abolished in order to make space for this new substantial Josephine celebration within Eastertide (see 4). His title of Guardian of the Universal Church had been amalgamated with his March 19 festival.
(7) But the old Mass texts of S Joseph the Guardian survived and survive still as the Votive of S Joseph in the Weekday Votives of the pre-Conciliar Missal.
(8) S Joseph's Guardianship of the Universal Church is, in this pontificate, a theme just begging for revival.
(9) Episcopal Conferences (did you know this?) have the faculty (in the OF) of moving S Joseph out of Lent.

Although some traddies get nervous about ideas like the following, I believe that a judicious, careful, gentle realignment of the EF and the OF is a good idea, as long as it is not made a cheap excuse for rubbishing the EF. The relegation of S Joseph the Workman to being merely an Optional Memorial in the OF sets a general example which the EF should follow, restoring S Joseph the Patron to his S Pius X date as described in (3) supra. 

Indeed, where a date in the OF coincides with a date in the Missal of S Pius V, or in a pre-Pacelli edition of the Roman Missal, I think that, prima facie, the earlier date witnessed by both the Missal of S Pius V and the OF should be preferred. (Have a look, for example, at S Irenaeus, where the OF restores him to the date he had before Pius XII+Bugnini.)

I think the relevant department in the CDF should relegate S Joseph the Workman to Pro aliquibus locis (and among the Votives) and restore SS Pip and Jim to May 1. If they made clear that they were doing this as a mark of respect for the Anglican Communion, how could critics possibly complain?!

Quite apart from anything else, it would be nice again to see the churches and the Sacred Ministers garbed in deepest red on May Day ... for the martyred Apostles, of course, rather than for Karl Marx. And in some places ... such as Oxford ... May Day still has a historic memory.

NOTICE

(1) I do not enable comments which suggest that Jorge Bergoglio is not pope. Having examined, over and over again, historical analogies and reliable  authors, I have no doubt that the correct analysis is that this disordered and uncharitable individual is pope. I know no evidence of it being suggested, in the past, that any pope had "lost" his office through heresy or any other crime. Tradition makes it clear that subsequent magisterial anathematisation is the correct procedure.

Being a Traditionalist means taking Tradition seriously, not making it up as one goes along to suit one's own fads and passions.

S John Henry Newman spoke of unworthy shepherds having voluntarily placed their authority in SUSPENSE. Precisely. That fits the facts, the precedents, and the realities of the situation. And, given the status of JHN, makes it difficult for anybody to be taken to task for employing this analysis.

And it also means ... since none of us is infallible ... that, if I am wrong, when I go to my account I shall not have to face charges of having seduced Christ's people from Communion with the Successor of S Peter. But, believe me, I am not wrong!

(2) Because bloggers do, apparently, bear some responsibility for what occurs on their threads, I do not, I very much regret, enable comments in languages of which I have not an adequate knowledge. Sorry!

God save New Zealand!! And the Pays Basque! And Kurdistan!

God bless and keep you all in the 'One Fold of the Redeemer'.

Flower power: our Holy Father and his Aspidistra

I wrote not long ago about the CDF prohibition of the 'blessing' of 'gay marriages'; I pointed out that PF, instead of "approving it and ordering its publication", was simply informed of it and permitted its publication. I can't help feeling that the way is being left open for Cardinal Ladaria ... when the time is right ... to be hung out to dry. Or "thrown under a 'bus"? Which phrase would be preferable?

But this timorous approach of PF is not matched by that of the Patriarchate of Moskow. Metropolitan Hilarion, of this University, 'Foreign Minister of the Russian Church', made clear that the Third Rome backs the prohibition. He even went so far as to explain the prohibition rather more neatly than Rome has done, emphasising the difference between blessing someone who comes for a blessing; and blessing a sinful relationship. 

As PF continues nervously to maintain the SUSPENSE of his Petrine Ministry, perhaps we should be thankful that the "true but wounded Sister Churches" [confer Communionis notio and Dominus Iesus] of the Moskow Patriarchate are prepared to open their mouths.

Strange, though, isn't it? PF is the Successor of S Peter, yet he prefers to be mute. He is the current occupant of the See made, if possible, yet more glorious by S Leo and S Gregory; by Papa Hildebrand (he knew how to deal with Germans!!) and Papa Lambertini and Papa Pecci. But this present ritual-mad pontiff prefers to wallow in his beloved but empty outward gestures ... meeting Orientals ... hugging them ... rather than to join them in robust affirmation of what we and they hold in common as we confront together the Spirit of the Age.

PF feels happiest ... safest ... hiding behind his Aspidistra. God bless it.