John Haycroft.

John Haycroft lived and worshipped within my former Anglican parish of S Thomas the Martyr. He was a college servant - what in Oxford we call a scout. He was the scout of Sanctus Ioannes Henricus Newman. You see, my poor working-class parish was the behind-the-green-baize-door part of gentlemanly, academic Oxford. 

Haycroft never followed his master into full communion with the Holy See. But he also never forgot the lessons he had learned from ... whom? from Newman or from Canon Thomas Chamberlain (my distinguished predecessor who brought Catholicism out of the Common-rooms of Victorian Oxford into the ordinary parish church of a slum district)? Or from both? 

As an old man, when Communion had to be brought to him in his own home (a Victorian terrace house which, mercifully, survived the slum clearances of the last two decades), he insisted on observing the Eucharistic Fast, and on having his little table arranged so the the priest who brought him God's Body was ... facing East! 

I shan't forget the little manservant who felt so privileged to be able to listen to the discussions of Newman and his august friends.

NOTICES

I am now resuming normal service with regard to the reading and enabling of proffered comments; and personal emails. I have been through all the comments which had arrived before last night; and enabled most of them. I just began going through the hundred or so personal emails; for some reason, my computer won't operate normally. I may have to abandon all those the emails.

Autumn, and Mortality (NOT FOR ANTIPODEANS)

Oh dear! The ORDO says "INCIPIT PARS AUTUMNALIS BREVIARII". (I recall that back in the fifties, when as a schoolboy I took up the use of a diurnale Romanum, some ORDOs were a bit more chatty about it: "Seposita parte aestiva Breviarii Romani, sumitur pars Autumnalis")***. Will this last summer prove indeed to have been the last summer of my life? Four times a year, one is reminded of one's mortality in the dry, deadpan, matter-of-fact, sort of way that rubricians do have. I find it far more chilling than revivalist sermons or even warnings about imminent asteroids.

Mind you, things could have been worse. Summer could have been even shorter. The great John Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter in the fourteenth century, notes on August 21 **Estas finitur. Autumpnus oritur. Incidentally, he also reminds us on September 5 that Dies caniculares finiuntur. How interesting. This is just the sort of information last-year seminarians should be given when they are being prepared to hear confessions. For you will remember the sage warning of Hesiod, that during the Dog Days women are at their most lustful (makhlotatai) while men are at their most feak and weeble (aphaurotatoi) because Sirius parches the head and knees.

Thinking along very much the same lines, the Use of Sarum has an interesting piece of doggerel advice for August. Quisque sub augusto vivat medicamine iusto. Raro dormitet **estum coitum quoque* vitet. Balnea non curet nec multa comestio duret. Nemo laxari debet vel phlebotomari. Quite uncanny, isn't it, in its proleptic description, and condemnation, of the modern popular package holiday: going somewhere hot; sunbathing; hopping in and out of the pool; overeating and overdrinking; pursuing venerem et scortilla. Hesiod, likewise, goes on for several lines about hezomenos en skiei and eating boos hulophagoio kreas.
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* I assume this should be punctuated estum, coitum quoque, vitet.
** In medieval Latin, ae is pronounced and written e.
*** Reminders to clerics to put aside the Summer Volume of the Breviary and to get out the Autumn Volume.

Prefaces

I reprint this piece from 2014 because of its relevance to the Feast today of my Patron S John Baptist. The 2020 CDF Decree on Prefaces renders this slightly out of date.

I am moved by the great fear that many traddies have of the slightest change to the Missal of 1962. 

Truly, people have been wounded.

But:
(1) S John Baptist, whom we celebrate today, is at least as great a Saint as S Joseph. One could even argue that, in popular devotion, recent centuries have seen S John Baptist overshadowed in the Western Church by S Joseph. Now ... if it was OK to give S Joseph a preface in 1919, why would it be completely beyond the pale for S John Baptist to be given a Preface in 2019?
(2) In fact, this has been done already. There already is a "Gallican" preface for S John Baptist, authorised before 1962. In the SSPX French language ORDO, it is marked as ad libitum. Are those who oppose any change to '1962' arguing that somebody should go round and tear this preface out of all the SSPX missals in France?
(3) Why, in any case, is '1962' so sacrosanct? It is at least arguable that the 'Conciliar period' began with the election of Pius XII, who commissioned Annibale Bugnini and others to effect the extremely radical 'reforms' which came on stream in the 1950s. And feasts galore of our Lady were added in that Pontificate on impulse, rather as if a child were randomly playing with a rubix cube. Before Pius XII, for example, May 31 was in very many places the Feast of our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces; a fine and edifying Mass which would benefit us all by being brought back and made universal. This feast was displaced by our Lady, Queen ... which would be very suitably observed on the Octave of the Assumption ... etc etc..
(4) After S Pius V promulgated his recension of the Roman Missal, in every generation the feasts of 'new' Saints were added to the Calendar and the Sanctorale. Every pontiff did it. Just have a look at any pre-1962 Altar Missal preserved in any Sacristy throughout the world: you'll discover the 'new' masses glued in by the parish priest as they arrived hot off the press from Rome. Glue was an essential liturgical accessory in the pre-Conciliar period. The fact that no addition has been made since 1962 is thus, in itself, paradoxically, very profoundly untraditional. This does not mean, by the way, that every saint canonised was promptly added to the Universal Calendar. Quite the contrary. Accretions were gradual and cautious.

I feel that informed traddies do have a duty gently and sensitively to educate the more fearful. Complete, rigid, preservation of the very unsatisfactory Missal of 1962 is far from ideal. It would be best for a representative commission to take the status quo of 1939 as its starting point and then, very very gently, discern the sort of extremely light and gradual and organic developments which could have occurred if Pius XII had not ushered in an era of violent 'reform'.

Waddesdon and Publius Ovidius Naso

Readers who are still wondering how to celebrate the re-opening of the country's old stately homes could do worse than to visit Waddesdon; a 'French chateau' built by Ferdinand de Rothschild to house his immense collection of Bourbon French goodies. Surely, Publius Ovidius Naso, with his love of the intricate joke, his frivolity, his sensuality, was the presiding numen of the arts and crafts of Bourbon France.

So what fun Waddesdon is; as good as the Wallace Collection or the Burrell (my favourite venue in my favourite Scottish city). Better than those, if you include the fountains, reconstructed after being bought from the duke of Parma [was it a Duke of Parma who congratulated Archbishop Lefebvre after the Econe Consecrations?]. What superb taste Baron Ferdinand had. The Spirit of Ovid lives; long live the Spirit of Ovid.

I feel so much more at home there than among the heavy splendours of nearby Blenheim, a monument to the career Johnny Churchill secured by his treachery to James II, and now cluttered up with memorabilia of some Brit politician who allied himself with Uncle Joe Stalin during some war we fought in the last century. If I have to choose between Jewish bankers and the traitorous clique that kept the Head of the House of Stuart off the throne, then give me the Jewish bankers any day of the week.

The only feature of a genuine French chateau of the seventeenth century which is missing at Waddesdon may be ... er ... a chapel ... Curiously, Baron Ferdinand did collect quite a bit of 'Christian' stuff, but he never provided it with a proper setting; so most of it is propped up on window sills in the Bachelors' Wing. Were Edwardian bachelors invariably Christians?

There is a 'chapel' at Blenheim, but it is never clear to me who or what is supposed to be worshipped there. Most of it is cluttered up with some great thing Rysbrack cobbled together in honour of ... Johnny Churchill. Sometimes they have exhibitions there which show scant respect for its nominal status as a Christian place of worship.

Typical of the Spirit of Blenheim.

If it's beautiful, kill it

My generous friend, Professor William Tighe, once sent me a fascinating little book (Roman and uncondemned) published in 1959 (remember the date!) by one Canon Dudley Symon. Symon was, in fact, a predecessor of mine at Lancing College, a papalist writer but not an unreflecting admirer of the Roman Catholicism of his day. A snippet: "A Pontifical High Mass, as it is celebrated today, with all the adjuncts of light, colour, scent, movement and music, is one of greatest artistic achievements of the human mind, worthy to be set beside a Symphony by Beethoven, or the Parthenon in Athens, or the frescoes of Michael Angelo. The Liturgical Reformers, like all other Reformers, will need watching lest their zeal leads them 'to root up the wheat also'."

How right he was. And these words seem almost uncanny in their prescience: "... since the Church [of England] makes a special appeal to primitive antiquity, since its reference is to the ancient Fathers and the age of the Great Councils, since its own ethos is in many ways so akin to the Roman, it needs also the Mass which is the purest expression of the faith and worship of that whole period ... the Mass restored to us would not only be the deepening of our knowledge and appreciation of the Divine Mysteries but a proclamation of our unity with the true source of our being, the rock whence we were hewed."

My motive for presenting Dudley's thinking is, of course, PF's new initiative with regard to Catholic Worship. I can see no harm in  reminding one and all of the conviction reached by so many thoughtful and informed Anglicans about the Roman Rite as it was before the wreckers got to it. There is instruction for all of us in this. Ab Anglicanis fas est doceri.

I never fail to be moved as I say those words Te igitur ... by which in the classical Roman Rite one seems to enter silently as through a secret gate into the very heart of the divine mystery of the self-oblation of the Eternal Son.

Cardinal Hume

People criticise Cardinal Basil Hume. They tell me that he was responsible for a collapse in English Catholicism. To which I would reply that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a flawed logical assumption. As well as a massively simplistic way of doing history.

I rather admired him and certainly found him easy to respect, as well as downright lovable. But I do think it can be argued that, faced with bullies, he lacked gumption. Two examples of which I had knowledge.

One Thursday, in Archbishop's House in the 1990s (how many readers remember those Irish Country Dancing Classes?), vested in his elderly black cardigan, he revealed to the assembled Anglican clergy that the Anglican episcopate had requested that, when Anglican clergy had entered the priesthood of the English Catholic Church, they should renounce their Church of England pension entitlements. A noisy rumble of anger echoed round the room. Basil looked awkward. "You would not be prepared to do this?", he nervously enquired. There was an even louder, even angrier, rumble. "Very well", he said. He did not look to me like a man who relished carrying this negative answer back to his Ecumenical Partners in Dialogue.

Not only his Anglican episcopal 'friends', but also his fellow Catholic bishops, were prepared to bully him. His first reaction to the attempt in the mid-1990s to find a corporate solution for Anglican Catholics was to say "Perhaps this is the Conversion of England for which we have always prayed". First thoughts are so very often the best thoughts! But it wasn't long before this grace-filled openness to a movement of the Spirit was knocked out of him by some of his colleagues, and replaced by their cautious and hostile negativity. This, of course, is why Benedict XVI, when the same question arrived on his desk fifteen years later, decided to play his cards rather close to his chest. Cuius laus in aeternum manebit!

Basil Hume was kind and gentle and holy, a true Father Abbot. There must be thousands whom he helped to find their way to the Lord Jesus. May he rest in peace.

Bad Taste.

So was it bad taste for me to write the other day with insouciance about the burning of Archbishop Cranmer? Very probably. I have never had much good taste. But I recall Dix's imagination of Cranmer's last musings ... 

" ... for this [the Royal Supremacy] he had shed blood, or consented to its shedding, in case after case where, rightly or wrongly, he believed the victims innocent  ... Zwinglian and papist, he had burned them both at different times, along with miscellaneous Arians and Eutychians and Anabaptists, for their creeds -- reluctantly (for he was by nature gentle) but persistently enough -- right down to Van Morey, not long before King Edward died. And now he was coming to join them himself. One wonders if the thought of them all passed through the old man's mind as he hurried of his own accord out of S Mary's along the Turl to where the stake stood in the Broad outside Balliol -- Lambert the Zwinglian and Friar Forrest -- and the gentle Fisher, and More the witty chancellor, and old abbot Whiting -- but they were in King Henry's time, and for a matter of treason, like the Carthusians -- whether the Boleyn girl were a lawful queen or a whore -- Both! -- That would have ruined him if he had not condemned her, though he had almost thought her innocent -- and Seymour the Admiral, and his brother and murderer Seymour the Protector -- he had abandoned them both in turn, though he had thought them innocent too -- but their cases were desperate, and his own mission could not be compromised in fighting lost battles -- and those hundreds of yokels strung up in 1549 -- and little Jane Grey and that ruffianly Northumberland -- the cur professed himself a papist on the the scaffold, that had been the ravingest protestant in England!-- A safer religion for a bad man to die in? -- ..."

Jobs (Officia)

In the Treasury of Canterbury Cathedral are a Chalice and Paten which were buried with Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury 1193-1205. The paten bears an inscription which perfectly exemplifies the attitude Latin Christians had towards the Blessed Sacramnent before the Eucharistic Enlightenment for which Pope John XXII was responsible: they believed that the Sacrament is the Body and Blood of Christ ... the dead Body and blood of Christ.

Ara crucis, tumulique calix, lapidisque patena,

     Sindonis officium candida byssus habet.

As your knowledge of Latin grows, you will find it helpful to try to translate Latin which you may come across. People who think they can get a 'sort of general sense', perhaps by looking up a word or two in a dictionary, are ... let me be brutally frank ... complete fools. Latin word-order and grammar mean that the words will be in a word-order totally different from English. If you don't know grammar, you will be unable to work out  whether the cat bit the dog, or the dog bit the cat. 

And word order is even more (to the Anglophone eye) problematic in verse than it is in prose.

What I have printed above is an elegiac couplet, which is a verse form. One way of suspecting this is: if the even-numbered lines are shorter and end in the rhythm tumtitty tumtitty tum. 

First you need to spot the verb. Here it is habet. Next, what is the subject? When you have got your declensions learned off by heart, you will probably cotton on to the fact that Ara, calix, patena, byssus, are all subjects, in what is called the Nominative Case. Crucis, tumuli, lapidis, sindonis, are genitives (meaning "of").

Next ... if the verb has an object, what is it?

Officium!

So, with English-style word-order, we can rearrange the two lines into 

Ara habet officium crucis, calix habet officium tumuli, patena habet officium lapidis, candida byssus habet officium sindonis. 

Which is, in English

The Altar has the job of the Cross, and the Chalice has the job of the Tomb, and the Paten has the job of the Stone, and white linen has the job of the Shroud.

Alluding, all of it, to the dead and buried Jesus. And to the Altar, Chalice, Paten, and Purificator at Mass.

Hey, er, presto ...

Bishop Grandisson and his heretic

Ralph de Tremur, a Cornish-speaking heretic with a distinguished academic record and a fluent tongue, was unimpressed by the newly burnished devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, encouraged by Pope John XXII and brought to Exeter by Bishop Grandisson. Tremur was so off-message as to argue that bread and wine did not turn substantialiter by virtue of the words of consecration into the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. And he spread his heresies among common, simple folk. Rather vividly, he observed "You are worshipping the work of your own hands! How absurd! What else does a priest do apart from gaping and breathing over a bit of bread!" He was reported to have dramatised his views by secretly carrying off from a church the pyx containing Christ's Body, taking out the Sacrament, and throwing it into the fire. .

Perhaps Tremur should be considered less a precursor of bibliolatrous Reformation Protestantism than of modern Liberalism: he took the view that S Peter was a bad hollow rustic ...

... or did he? I feel tempted, in my wild Enlightenment way, to emend the word (in Grandisson's Register) cavus to calvus ... in which case he was calling the Prince of the Apostles "a nasty old bald peasant"....

He also called S John a lying perjurer. Why? I suspect he had the Eucharistic teaching of John chapter  6 in mind. Grandisson certainly referred to this passage in his own explanation of why Tremur's heresy "undoubtedly and obviously subverts the whole Catholic Faith, empties each of the sacraments individually, and completely destroys the truth of the gospels". 

Did everything end happily for the Bishop, with Grandisson burning Tremur. Sadly, we have no evidence of this. But it is worth noting that in 1549 the Western peasantry were prepared to risk their own deaths for the practice of worshipping the Blessed Sacrament, and demanded that those who opposed this worship should "dye like heretykes against the holy Catholyque fayth". And it is likely that their laudable rebellion was sparked off by Protestant interference during an illegal Corpus Christi celebration at Clyst St Mary in Devon. 

In the two centuries between Grandisson and Cranmer, it was Grandisson's orthodoxy and piety that had entered the devout souls of the people of the English West, God bless and rest them.

And, if Tremur didn't burn, Cranmer did.

Taking leave

As we conclude the old Octave of the Assumption - I like the old Byzantine habit of "taking leave" of great festivals - I invite readers to engage with the question of what we are celebrating today ... and to begin by tracing the history of one particular hymn.

The post-conciliar revisers, in their first draft of the Hymnarium, proposed to offer a ninth century hymn, O quam glorifica, on Assumption day. It did not make it to the final cut, but it does appear in the new Office Book on August 22, the old Octave day, to which the 'reformers' transferred the Feast of Mary, Queen (at the same time ejecting the Immaculate Heart from that day onto the Saturday after the Sacred Heart). Interestingly, that hymn was, in the first millennium, a Proper hymn for the Assumption.

I can see that combining the Queenship of Mary with her Octave day does have a lot to be said for it. Long before gentlemen in liturgy offices in Rome started shifting Marian feasts around like counters on a Ludo board, Dom Gueranger saw the Octave day of the Assumption in terms of our Lady's Queenship. I hope I am not too puritanical about the Marian frenzy of the pontificate of Pius XII - that sort of thing is rather fun from time to time - but his liturgists never had an over-all, holistic look at the arrangement of the new feasts he showered upon the calendar. Even if Vatican II had never happened, a bit of sorting and sifting would have been in order in the next pontificate. 

They might have decided to make the old feast pro [multis] aliquibus locis of our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces, on May 31, a Feast of the Universal Church. And to have left the Visitation where they found it. And to have adopted a neat eighteenth century idea of putting the Most Pure [aka Immaculate] Heart of Mary onto the Saturday after the Sacred Heart. 

And, come to think of it, they might have encouraged Octave Days to survive.

That would have been an organic and gradual evolution of the data emerging from the 'baroque' period of the history of the Calendar.

A Model Diocesan Bishop

It would be interesting to know exactly what the Dean and Chapter of Exeter had heard about their new bishop in August 1327. They certainly knew that he had been 'supplied' by the Holy See in place of the man they had themselves elected and whom the King had already confirmed. Presumably they knew he was a favourite of Pope John XXII. I suspect they had also heard that he was a micromanager, because they immediately put in hand the creation of a new Cathedral inventory.

John de Grandisson (pronounced Grahns'n), member of a top-flight international family, certainly turned out to be a man who devoted scrupulous attention, and considerable funds, to worship. A decade or two ago, more than six centuries and one 'reformation' after his death, he still merited an entire section on himself in a major London exhibition of Gothic art ... and some vestments with his arms embroidered on them still repose in a sacristy in ... the Azores! After his enthronement (which as a devotee of the Mater Misericordiae he fixed for the Octave Day of the Assumption in 1328; he decreed that the day should be a top-ranking feast for ever) his first decree endeavoured to raise the level of devotion among the unreformed rabble of Cathedral clergy by granting ample indulgences to those who devoutly attended choir and bowed their heads at the Names of Jesus and Mary. (It didn't work; hearing a few weeks later that the junior clergy were still behaving like naughty third-formers, he sent the Dean a stinker: 'Someone has failed to take measures ...').

As the first of his many benefactions, he gave a sumptuous monstrance to the Cathedral so that Corpus Christi, recently (yes; don't believe all that Transiturus stuff) instituted by John XXII, could be properly observed with a procession. He began his great masterpiece, the Ordinale Exoniense, codifying and modernising the usages of his Cathedral (not, as some Art Historian nutter has written, of the Diocese; in a time of manuscript altar-books the concept of Diocesan Regulations is anachronistic). It was probably he who suppressed some dreadful old lyrics which had previously been sung in the Exeter Procession of Relics: Grandisson preferred the new cult of the Blessed Sacrament (and devotion to our Lady) to tall tales about dubious miracles performed by obscure relics. He dealt expeditiously with a false claim of a miracle, and suppressed a phony shrine of our Lady which enabled fortune-tellers to exploit the gullible. 

We have a couple of pages from a Mary Missal, for daily use in the Lady Chapel either at Exeter or at his collegiate foundation at Ottery, in which the bishop in his own handwriting has painstakingly corrected scribal errors. He completed the building of his Cathedral in great splendour. He went after a Cornish heretic who, as heretics sometimes do, had stolen a Host specifically in order to commit sacrilege ... more on him in a day or two. Grandisson sent his own private army to prevent the Primate of All England, his own metropolitan Archbishop and Legatus natus Apostolicae Sedis, from entering Exeter on Visitation. He complained to his Patron in Avignon about the Cornish weather. But he did his duty even in the wind-swept extremities of the Dumnonian peninsula, consecrating altars and composing conflicts and seeing to it that in Cornubiphone parishes the clergy could preach in Cornish.

Even though he did not die at this time of the year, he ordered that his obit be kept on the day after the Octave of the Assumption; that is, today. I can't think of a more suitable day.

He was a devout old bully and a most magnificently cosmopolitan pontiff and a gigantic credit to the much-maligned, unjustly maligned, Avignon papacy. What a mercy that a wise Providence in its eternal decrees did not call upon him to exercise his episcopal ministry in the Age of Bishops' Conferences; I can't imagine him ... er ... sitting quietly at a table ... and ... er ... just ... er ...

I said Mass for him this morning. They don't make them like him nowadays. Or do they?

Cuius animae intercedente Matre Misericordiae propitietur Deus.