Ordination Season

Trinity Sunday, according to the tradition of the Latin Church, used to be the main day for Ordinations in the West: prepared for by the Pentecost Ember Week. Or, to be pedantic, ordinations happened at the Mass of the Ember Saturday, when the various orders were conferred after each of the lections.

Before both the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion fiddled with their respective rites, the same words appeared in both the Roman Pontifical and the Prayer Book Ordinal as the Bishop laid hands upon the ordinandi: the Lord's own paschal and pentecostal words Accipe Spiritum Sanctum to his disciples, pointing to the Gift of the Spirit in a New Creation of a New Man, transcending even that of Genesis 2:7. Fittingly; because the priesthood we are given to share is at the heart of the Paschal Mystery. And the First Reading at Mattins, in both ecclesial traditions, used to be that unforgettable passage from Isaias (6) about the Divine Glory: Et audivi vocem Domini dicentis: Quem mittam? Et dixi: Ecce ego. Mitte me. "And I said: here am I; send me". Gratias tibi, Deus, gratias tibi, vera et una Trinitas, una et summa Deitas, sancta et una Unitas.

Sacrosanctum Concilium (23) decreed that "innovations should not happen unless a true and certain usefulness for the Church demands it". I still wonder why the Liturgia Horarum rejected that chapter from Isaias about the Glory of God in the Temple of God ... I wonder what true and certain usefulness it was that (so the Experts decided) demanded its elimination. Strangely, the Church of England revisers have remained unaware of the doubtless profound reasons which compelled the post-Conciliar 'Catholic' "reformers" to make this unhappy deletion: Isaiah 6 retains its place in Anglican lectionaries, and in the Ordinariate lectionary for Trinity Sunday. 

What a wonderful feast, how full of joy, today's solemnity is. I find it difficult to to feel sympatheia with PF when he grudgingly utters sour words about "the rigidity of abstract doctrine", as if dogma, which by definition must imply an abstractio from particularity and materiality, lacks the ability to thrill and to enchant and to be entered into and to be lived and to be shared with others. Poor chap ... what an impoverished life he must lead. Perhaps that's why he always looks so miserable (oops: the other day I saw on the Internet a picture of him laughing ... it was dated 2014 ... so perhaps I ought to have written 'often' rather than 'always').

A particular pleasure is praying in the Divine Office that great paean of praise, the Quicumque vult. Our Patron Saint John Henry Newman had described it as "The most simple and sublime, the most devotional formulary, to which Christianity has given birth". I wonder what he would have said could he have known that, in a century, the Latin Church to all intents and purposes would have eliminated it from her worship!

Its loss among both priests and people in the Catholic Church is probably one of the reasons for the doctrinal collapses in the Latin Church. The poor robbed clergy are no longer shaped by its pin-point orthodoxy as well as its beautiful cadences. A shame, too, that in the OF the profoundly beautiful Preface of the Most Holy Trinity is no longer heard Sunday by Sunday during the 'green' season. It is no wonder that, deep down and instinctively, so few people now really believe in the Holy Trinity. You hear both homilists and laity talking about "God and Jesus". I sometimes have a naughty feeling that only Byzantine Christians really believe in the Trinity. But, to give credit where credit is due, I've read several things by Vincent Nichols teaching the Godhead of the Son with great clarity.

On June 9 1968, which is when Trinity Sunday fell that year, Harry Carpenter laid his hands on me, on exactly the same spot as a previous Bishop of Oxford did the same thing on a Trinity Sunday to Saint John Henry Newman ... just a few yards from the bones of Oxford's Saxon Patron S Frideswide and those of Dr Pusey and the tomb of the last Abbot of Oseney, first Bishop of Oxford and the only one to have been in full communion with the See of S Peter.

My warmest good wishes to all brother priests who were ordained on a Trinity Sunday.

"All this West part of the world is apostate"

Merlinus Ambrosius was struck to silence when Ransom told him that there was no Emperor to be called upon for help, even in Mankind's uttermost peril. Ransom explained:

"The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from the Earth their mother and from the Father in heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.".

I wonder if, in 1945, there were those who thought that Lewis had overstated his case. We know now how vastly he understated it. But he was a true prophet of the generations that were to follow, and not least in his description of "the Spirit of the Age ... like one of the stone giants, the size of a mountain, with its eyes shut ... They saw some of the guard coming towards them leading a great black stallion, and in it was seated a figure ... a woman in the flower of her age: she was so tall that she seemed to him like a Titaness, a sun-bright virgin clad in complete steel, with a sword naked in her hand. The giant bent forward in his chair and looked at her.

"'Who are you?' he said.

"'My name is Reason,' said the virgin.

"'Make out her passport quickly,' said the giant in a low voice. 'And let her go through our dominions and be off with all the speed she wishes.'

"'Not yet,' said Reason ... and set spurs in her stallion and it leaped up on to the giant's mossy knees and galloped up his foreleg, till she plunged her sword into his heart. Then there was a noise and a crumbling like a landslide and the huge carcass settled down: and the Spirit of the Age became what he had seemed to be at first, a sprawling hummock of rock."

I ask not whether the Woke know that they are part of the Zeitgeist ... simply whether they even know that there is such a thing as a Zeitgeist.

 

 

And now ...

... the passion for giving singular subjects plural verbs.

I just heard the Beeb's Diplomatic Correspondent say "One of those are ...". 

One does, of course, get irrational attractions in Ancient Greek. But (to return to I's last posting), I don't think this latest nastiness in we's vernacular is a symptom of they spending too many hours studying Abbot and Mansfield.

By the wee: I do not sense any awkwardness in genuinely regional usages. I love the sound of Scouse and of Jameecan. But regional vowels can sound arresting. Scotland's First Minister pronounces the vowel in 'main' as if it were the vowel in 'mean'. So, to I's Essex Ear, she seems to be be seeing things like "We are peeing off ..." and "We need to find the wee  ...".

I expect a real Professor Higgins would be able to detect from this exactly where she's origin is.

I's patria is Colchester in Essex, the Colonia Claudia Victricensis. Could you's linguistic instincts have detected that?

.... and again ... and again ...

Here is something I read quite recently, sent out from the Head of House of an Oxford college .... indeed, what makes it even worse, my own college:

"[X] was married in the Chapel just before Christmas. I know everyone will join me in wishing he and Ann the very best.".

That the Head of an Oxford college should be unable to write simple, grammatical English, leaves me speechless. (Before you ask: the man is a historian.)

And, even more recently, I was informed that ... just for a week ... I could access the Catholic Herald  without a paywall. So I dipped in. 

I shan't dip into that wretched periodical again, not within this millennium, whether it's free or unfree. In it, I found Antonia Fraser writing:

"The cinema was another Oxford pleasure throughout the year -- slightly more complicated by my brother Thomas and I wanting to watch films which needed an adult to accompany a child.".

Fraser has written books; she came from a literate and literary family ... her father would have been ashamed of her ... and, indeed, she had a lengthy extra-marital affair with a notable playwright. His name was Pinter, and I bet he wouldn't have written English with such miserable illiteracy (but then, he had the advantage of being Jewish).

I suppose the once great but now failing Catholic Herald is so strapped for cash nowadays that they can't afford to employ subeditors.

Yes, I know that in 'language' matters, usage is overriding. I remember, at school, the French Master ending any argument by saying "Seventy million Frenchmen disagree". However much I may squirm and whinge, I can't get round this simple fact. It applies and always has applied to every known human language.

Mind you, I think this usage is very unfair to foreigners trying to learn a language which is already as difficult as English is. Hence, it is xenophobic or even racist. In my view, those ideologues who are trying to ram this irrational construction down our throats are pretty well guilty of Hate Speech (and should be locked up). As they win their philological victory, poor Johnny Foreigner will be faced by an ultrapedantic grammatical rule which will have to go something like this:

When a pronoun is linked by a conjunction with a noun (or another pronoun), that pronoun must always be placed in the nominative case, without any regard to the syntax of the sentence or clause. 

Or can you think of a snappier way of saying it? So the poor students will have to memorise such useless and pompous twaddle and try to remember to obey it. Latin and Greek grammar, as traditionally taught to tiny boys in English Prep Schools, tends to be thought of nowadays as having been obscurantist, but I don't think it knew any complexities as arcane and ridiculous, as purely useless, as contra-utilitarian, as this.

It's not new. Back in the Seventies, I heard a collegue ... a Wykehamist!! ... referring to "Paul and I's study". And I remember another colleague having a mighty argument with a girl student who, poor child, had been indoctrinated by her parents (I infer that they must have been of the Aspirant Peasant Classes like Trollope's Mrs Lookaloft) to believe that saying "I" when the grammar requires "me" was the very height of conversational gentility.

I always, if I spot it, delete from my blog all comments which include this disgusting usage.

After all, this is my blog.

Cardinal Mueller

(1) CARDINAL MUELLER

 There is a fine piece by his Eminence in First Things. 

It makes me feel a little bit like a schoolboy learning a new language who turns to the key at the back of the book and discovers that he has got an exercise right ...

... because on Tuesday of last week, I suggested that current events in Germany recalled nothing so much as the German Christianity of the 1930s. Mueller explains this point.

It is, I hear you murmur, rather more powerful a point when it is made by an erudite German than it is when made by me!

And I keep suggesting that, following the analyses of S John Henry Newman, we might think of PF as having placed his Magisterium "in Suspense". Mueller devotes his final three paragraphs to saying what it is the duty of the Roman Pontiff to do ... rather as Bishop Philip Egan listed, a couple of weeks ago, which of his duties PF appears to be failing to perform.

Newman's terminology seems to me to get more and more compelling as the only viable orthodox narrative for understanding this pontificate. I suggest that the exact moment when PF put his Magisterium into Suspense was when he decided to refuse to answer the Dubia of the Four Cardinals.

(2) SUMMORUM PONTIFICUM

I can see no reason to get panicky. I imagine PF felt he had to say something to the Italian Bishops, who are not, as we say, One of Us.

My own impression is that the English Bishops, after initial hysterics on the part of poor Cormack, settled down to peaceful coexistence with the Traddy Community. I very much doubt if they will want to disturb comfortable practical arrangements which they have (in many places) set up in their dioceses themselves. In any case, crisis time is not here yet. Probably it never will be. Make yourselves a soothing cocktail. "White Lady" = 25% lemon juice, 25% Cointreau, 50% gin.

(3)  De Sublimitatibus usque ad Iocosiora ... Ecclesandbosco is distinctly jolly this week ... Ubi Eccles ibi Ecclesia ...

 

 

PASCHAL AND PENTECOSTAL OCTAVES

Today is, of course, the Feast of S Philip Neri, and so of great consequence to clergy and laity throughout the world who love the old gentleman and have been influenced, as I have, by the marvellous charism of his Sons. They are so potent in spreading Catholicism within the Church!

But stay. What about the Octave of Pentecost? Should S Philip be made to tranfer from today to some time next week?

There is a real problem here which could have a solution, involving a development in Tradition.

Until Pius XII and his henchman Bugnini started galumphing around all over the Roman Rite, the days in the Octaves of Easter and of Pentecost were not uniform in status throughout the week. As in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Monday and Tuesday had a very special status, and excluded any other feast or commemoration that tried to elbow its way in. But the same was not so true of the Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays within those Octaves. As your St Lawrence Press Ordo makes clear, those days were susceptible to the intrusion of mere commemorations (not of Festivals; the really important days had to be transferred out of the Octave so as to get a full liturgical expression).

I think both Tradition and Pastoral Utility urge a return to something a bit like the pre-Pius XII system.

So, where S Philip (or anybody else who is a Double of the First Class qua Patron) finds himself within the Octave, he might be allowed to intrude, and be observed on his proper Day..

When a Curate in the 1960s, I seemed often to be troubled by the determination of S George to pop up in the Octave of Easter. The Scouts, or some other organisation, seemed to want a service in Church. Ordinary Christians found it hard to understand why the Church seemed so anxious to prevent him from being observed on his proper day.

My Modest Proposition: Where a Patron, a First Class Festival, occurs on the Wednesday etc. of the Pentecost Octave, (s)he should be allowed in. This is not what the Pre-Pacelli rules prescribed, but ...

... we should not be entirely deaf to lay instincts!

No? ... I suppose you're right ...

Letter to an ORDINANDUS

Dear soon-to-be Father 

As we approach the traditional date of the Trinity-tide ordinations, when I myself received the gifts of Diaconia and of Sacerdotium, I cannot help hoping soon to receive a First Blessing from you. In spirit, I kneel and kiss your anointed hands. In a spirit of immense humility, I offer you my congratulations, and beg the charity of your Reverence's prayers and Masses.

May I offer you just the humblest smidgeon of priestly experience?

A brother priest in the Ordinariate once found himself lending a hand in a 'diocesan' parish. Since they did not always have a handy priest around, on most weekday evenings there was a service of the Word followed by Holy Communion from the Tabernacle, all done by layfolk. Naturally (if naively) this priest did the decent thing and offered the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for them during the period he was there. The very touching gratitude of the entire parish community for this daily privilege ...

Gratitude be d****d! There was uproar! How outrageous that he should arrogantly impose 'his' Mass on them! He was depriving X, Y, and Z of their own particular ministries ... the charisms they had exercised for years! Clericalism!! Self-aggrandisement!!! The horrible man should have stayed in the Church of England!!!!

Dom Gregory Dix criticised the old Anglican 'Prayer Book Catholic' practice, particularly common in Cathedrals, whereby, after Cranmer's rather truncated 'Prayer of Consecration', the Agnus Dei was immediately sung. Dix's complaint was that this made it look as if the only purpose of Consecration was to confect the Eucharistic Presence*. This resulted in the people ... or the best learners among them ... cottoning on to the Real Presence of the Lord in His true Body and Blood ... but having very little awareness that the Eucharist is a ... no; not a but the ... sacrifice.

I wonder if we now have a very similar problem, lack of awareness of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, in the Catholic Church. And, if we do, I blame it upon the last half century; upon the almost universal use, within a dumbed-down ritual ambience, of the pseudo-Hippolytan-dewfall-Botte-Bouyer "we-made-it-up-at-a-trattoria-in-the-Trastevere" "shall-we-order-another-bottle?" Eucharistic-Prayer.

Are most modern Catholics aware that at the altar they are present at the august sacrifice of Christ himself at Calvary and within eternity? Has anybody explained to them that at Mass heaven and earth are made one and our altar is united with the altar of the Lamb slain in sacrifice before all the ages? Do they understand that at the Consecration their church is filled with the adoring and wondering hosts of Angels and Archangels and the whole company of Christ's Church?

Happily, the Catholic Church now has yourself and a splendid young generation of seminarians and newly-ordained priests coming through the system. Men who understand what Christ's Priesthood is, because they understand what His Oblation is. 

And here is the advice which, very humbly, and diffidently, I presume to offer you.

Don't assume that when you've explained things once, you've done it. However well you put it! Layfolk don't assimilate things the first time they hear them. They even sometimes assume (if it's something they haven't heard before) that they can't really be hearing what you seem to be saying. (A typesetter once, in kindly good faith, seeing "Sacrifice of the Eucharist" in a piece I had drafted, took it be a typo for "Sacrament of the Eucharist" and 'corrected' it for me!) 

You just have to keep on dishing out the same truths ... of course, in different ways and in different words ... year after year. And even then, only a minority of them will get it. Honest. 

Your task, of building up again the ruined places, will still be barely started when your ministry comes to its end.

In Domino

John indignus sacerdos

*In fact, precisely this point had been made earlier, in 1933, in a book entitled This our sacrifice, written by my distinguished predecessor at S Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, Dr Trevor Jalland. I owe my possession of this elegant and erudite work to my friend and benefactor Professor William Tighe. A sign of degenerate times: it had been sold off by the library of Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Monsignore Basil Loftus

Oh dear! A terrible day! Pope Francis, of all people, has let down Fr Basil Loftus, a former Catholic Times columnist, and let him down megabigway! 

Today, Whit Monday, is now, in the Novus Ordo, the feast of our Lady Mother of the Church. And this feast was recently instituted by the present pope. "Mother of the Church" is the very same title which S Paul VI proclaimed in what Father Loftus once called a "private document", but was really the Conciliar Allocution addressed to the Conciliar Fathers of Vatican II by the Roman Pontiff at the solemn end of their Third Session. And now even PF has joined in, has become complicit in, the perpetration of that "cheat"! 

But there is a solution at hand. Whit Monday, in the Extraordinary Form and in the Ordinariate Rite, is still Whit Monday and the status of that day excludes the Feast of our Lady Mother of the Church.

I hope the following doesn't sound negative or 'uninclusive' ... but I think it would require a special Vatican dispensation for Father Basil lawfully to use the Ordinariate Rite. Narrow and negative, I agree. Indeed, I think what the Church really needs is the availability of the Ordinariate Rite, Divine Worship, to all clergy whose English is just about good enough (idonei is the technical term we use). 

Passing thought: What 'Anglican tradition' really favours is not so much English as the Vernacular. I wonder if our Dean for Scotland could provide a Scots Gaelic version of the Rite? And how about Welsh and Cornish? Latin, for the Colleges of Oxford, Cambridge, Winchester, and Eton?

I've just remembered: Old Norman French for the Channel Islands, part of the Diocese of Portsmouth.

Manx ...

Urdu ...

However, there is another and much easier answer. According to Summorum Pontificum of Good Pope Benedict XVI, nobody can prevent Fr Basil (I assume he is idoneus) from using the 1962 Extraordinary Form Latin Missal. This would enable him to avoid today's 'Cheat' Feast.

Welcome on board, Father! And sincere good wishes!

_________________________________________________________________________________ "Pope Paul VI cheated and referred to Mary as Mother of the Church during one of his private documents during the Council". Those are the precise words which Fr Loftus actually wrote, as published. For the facts of what the Holy Pontiff actually did and said when he solemnly proclaimed this title of the Mother of God, see Acta Synodalia III/8 909-918 et praesertim 916.

A Birthday!

Bob Dylan is eighty! 

Felicitations!

Although, mind you, the charism of Being Eighty seems to me a trifle exaggerated ...

Of course (dear Bishop John Richards used to say 'of course' before sharing the most recondite and/or controversial pieces of information) according to the old Calendar of the Diocese of Menevia ... sounds so Mediterranean, doesn't it?  ... obviously, a See tucked away in some particularly backwoods part of Calabria ... May 24 is the Feast of our Lady Help of Christians, Double of the First Class with Octave.

This year, I suppose, it would have to be transferred out of the Octave of Pentecost? I had better ask Rubricarius ...

 

BENEDICT XVI on PENTECOST and the errors of "GERMAN CATHOLICISM"

I have just reread a 2010 Pentecost homily of the Holy Father emeritus; to be embarrassingly personal, it brought tears to my eyes to be reminded of the elegance, the clarity, the Biblical insight with which Benedict XVI spoke and wrote; rereading it was like drinking, after a hot and dry and dusty and sweaty and tiring day, a glass-full of limpidly pure and refreshingly cold water. Here is part of it, translated by Zenit. (In the literal sense of the words, this was uttered ex cathedra!)

[The highlighting in red is my doing. How uncannily this passage points to Bishop Baetzing and the Mandatory Synodal Way!]

"This is the effect of God's work: unity; thus unity is the sign of recognition, the 'business-card' of the Church in the course of her universal history. From the very beginning, from the Day of Pentecost, she speaks all languages. The universal Church precedes the particular Churches, and the latter must always conform to the former according to a criterion of unity and universality. The Church never remains a prisoner within political, racial and cultural confines; she cannot be confused with states nor with federations of states, because her unity is of a different type and aspires to transcend every human frontier.

"From this, dear brothers, there derives a practical criterion of discernment for Christian life: When a person or a community limits itself to its own way of thinking and acting, it is a sign that it has distanced itself from the Holy Spirit. The path of Christians and of the particular Churches must always conform itself with the path of the One and Catholic Church, and harmonise with it. This does not mean that the unity created by the Holy Spirit is a kind of homogenisation. On the contrary, that is rather the model of Babel, that is, the imposition of a culture of unity that we would call 'technological'. The Bible, in fact, tells us that in Babel everyone spoke the same language. At Pentecost, however, the Apostles speak different languages in such a way that everyone understands the message in his own tongue. The unity of the Spirit is manifested in the plurality of understanding. The Church is one and multiple by her nature, destined as she is to live among all nations, all peoples, and in the most diverse social contexts. She responds to her vocation to be the sign and instrument of unity of the human race only if she remains free from every state and every particular culture. Always and in every place the Church must truly be Catholic and universal, the house of all in which each one can find a place."

PASTORAL LETTERS

A (dubious) anecdote told of Mgr R A Knox, M.A., Protonotary Apostolic:

"On one of the first occasions when as a Catholic he preached coram episcopo, the Bishop said: 'An interesting sermon, Father, but it was a pity you had to read it.' To which Ronald answered: 'I am bitterly conscious of my disability, my lord. Only the other day a friend remarked, "When I saw you go into the pulpit with a sheaf of papers I thought we were in for another of those dreadful Pastorals."'"

(From Waugh's biography of Knox.) 

Paschaltide?

[Happily, in more and more places the old Roman Vigil Service of Pentecost is being restored. I published this piece in 2009. The Collect to which I referred, Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui paschale sacramentum ... , was in the 'Gregorian' Sacramentary.]

"Almighty everlasting God, who didst will that the Paschal Sacrament should be contained in the mystery of fifty days [paschale sacramentum ... voluisti contineri] ... ". This is an ancient Roman collect associated with the Pentecost Vigil at which Christian initiation took place, not least for those who should have been Done at Easter but somehow missed it. Bugnini moved it to the First Evensong of Pentecost, and also used it to support his notion that Pascha is one Great Day which lasts for fifty days. 

This idea was the basis of a whole series of liturgical alterations made by both Roman and Anglican liturgists in the post-Conciliar period, not least the describing of Sundays as "of", not "after", Easter; the ditching of the old collects for those Sundays and their replacement by a new set some of which were newly composed; and the abolition of the Pentecost Octave. I am increasingly unsure that this whole business is soundly based. [The Ordinariate Divine Worship Missal restored the Octave.]

Tentatively, I propose to those competent in such matters that the sense of that collect could be paraphrased as "God, you wanted Christian Initiation to be confined to the fifty days of Pentecost". Cognoscenti will remember that in many places those who, for reasons of emergency or whatever, were baptised at some time other than during those fifty days could be subject to life-long canonical incapacities.