STATUS

 The burden of old age ... I can actually remember the far off days of 'Good Pope John' ... and his curial reforms!

He laid it down that senior members of the Curia should be bishops; the reason he gave was that they were so intimately associated with the Roman Pontiff in the government of the Universal Church that they should possess the munus episcopale. Poor old Cardinal Ottaviani, I recall, was made to undergo episcopal Consecration. (If the same rule had existed in the days of S John Henry Newman, they would have forced him to be a bishop, too.)

Clearly, the once 'Good Pope John' has lost his cred in this Age of Bergoglianity ... PF respects his views on the Curia no more than he respects the detailed regulations he laid down in Veterum Sapientia for the reinforcement of Latin (the Vatican recently published texts for the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine in, I think, 32 languages ... which, by failing to include Latin, put it on a level with  Cornish).

I do not subscribe to the view of S John XXIII that curial bosses should all be bishops, nor with that of PF that they need not be in Holy Orders at all. I suspect that the Bergoglian change is more to do with increasing the power of PF even further by sweeping away any restriction of whom he can appoint to what.

In my view, the Roman Church, like any other Particular Church, consists of a Bishop, his Presbyterate, his Diaconate, and the plebs sancta Dei. In addition, Rome historically also has the Suburbicarian bishoprics. The executive branches of the Roman Church should be the Suburbicarian Bishops, the Presbyterate and the Diaconate.

Most Curial bosses should normally be presbyters or deacons. Just as the official titles of Cardinals ("X Cardinal Y Cardinal priest of S Z") still historically recall. 

It would be marvellous if we could get away from all this nonsense of Eminences and Excellencies in Rome. Even better if, at the same time, the entire un Christian concept of Career Structures could be binned.

And what about the Diplomatic Service? Why do they all have to be Archbishops? Particularly since they are Archbishops of absolutely nowhere real. PF wouldn't have needed fanfares heralding 'reforming' enactments in order to abolish this absurdity.

All the present rubbish is about status, so that even such a person Roche needs to be called an "Archbishop". We sha'n't be rid of all that stuff ... one staff officer jumping over another staff officer's back* ... until we we escape from the idea that episcopacy is a risible nonsense like the God-Calls-Me-God and the Kindly-Call-Me-God system of the British Civil Service.

*O What a Lovely War? They were only playing leapfrog.

Pope, Liturgy, and Authority (4) GIVE US BACK PETER!

 The idea that Liturgy rests upon papal diktat, and upon the personal fads of each passing pontiff, is not just rubbish; it is poisonous rubbish.

Cardinal Ratzinger listed Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople. And he pointed out that 'Rites' "are forms of the apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places of the Tradition". The great Apostolic liturgical traditions are part of the Apostolic datum; the Depositum fidei; the Tradition which comes through the Apostles; they sit beside the Canon of Scripture, the Creeds, and the Ministry. The Lex orandi which takes pride of place over the Lex credendi ranks beside ... perhaps even above ... the doctrinal  Decrees of the great, dogmatic, Ecumenical Councils. It lies far beyond the whimsies, prejudices, and personal antipathies of each pope.

In concluding this four-part survey, I remind readers that we have met no examples of liturgically-preoccupied popes hunched over desks in Rome, micromanaging what every insignificant curate anywhere in the World can be allowed to do at the Altar. 

We have met no pope who believed that doctrinal unity could only be secured or expressed by rigid uniformity of worship.

But there is an even broader point to be made than the merely liturgical question: the 'papacy' which at this moment we are so painfully enduring is a Novelty; it is not found in Antiquity and no more is it found in the admirable teaching of Vatican I (or the subsequent clarifications by Blessed Pius IX) nor in the texts of Vatican II. In the sometimes-derided high baroque period of the Roman Primacy, the writings of that admirable pontiff, Prospero Lambertini, Benedict XIV, give no countenance to it. 

It is because this style of papacy is a Novelty that it needs to be unambiguously rejected. 

Catholicism with Novelty is not Catholicism with something exotic added. One you embark upon nailing alien matter onto the Faith, what you get is not Catholicism-plus. Catholicism, with the authentic Papal Ministry subtracted from it, has ceased to be Catholicism at all.

The authentic Petrine Ministry is neatly exemplified by Sixtus III (Pope 432--441) "Let nothing further be permitted to Novitas because it is appropriate that nothing be added to Vetustas; let the transparent Faith and Belief of our forebears be disturbed by no admixture of filth." And by Pope Caelestine (422-432) "Let Novitas cease to attack Vetustas." Pope Honorius I, the First Heretic Pope, was condemned by an Ecumenical Council and his own Successors in the See of S Peter for heresy by being listed among the "novi erroris inventores". More about him later.

WE WANT OUR PAPACY BACK!

WHERE HAVE THEY HIDDEN PETER? 

 

Popes, Liturgy, and Authority (3): S PIUS V compared with S PAUL VI and PF

We are sometimes told that the imposition of a new rite by S Paul VI is precisely what S Pius V did in 1570.

It is not.

What S Paul VI did is precisely the opposite of what S Pius V did..

People who tell you anything different either have not read Quo primum ... or cannot understand Latin ... or have a regrettably fugitive grasp upon Truth.

S Pius V dealt with the question of churches with a Use of more than 200 years (i.e., going back to before the invention of printing made life so easy for liturgical tinkerers and innovators) in the following way. 

He said "nequaquam auferimus" -- in no way whatsoever do we take it (their old rite) off them. 

It is true that he added a  "permittimus" -- we permit that, if they like my edition of the Missal better, they can adopt it "de episcopi vel praelati capitulique universi consensu" -- provided that the bishop and the unanimous Chapter are in agreement.

If S Paul VI ... or PF ... had really wished to behave like S Pius V, they would have needed to decree something like this:

"We do not take away the right to use a Missal with more than 200 (or 600? Or 1200?) years of lawful use; but if a Bishop and his entire Chapter really do want to use my Novus Ordo instead, I will permit them to do so." 

The Household Cavalry

Our British Household Cavalry have horses which are immaculately  trained ... except for one detail.

Accordingly, after every major event, they are followed by little men with brooms and buckets.

 

First, Mr Biden said that, if the Russkies used illegal weapons, the Land Of The Free would do the same.

Secondly: he assured his troops that they would soon be personally witnessing the heroism of the Ukrainian military.

And now, thirdly, he has explicitly called for Regime Change in Russkiland.

 

I most devoutly hope that the U S of A have a good reserve supply of brooms and buckets, and plenty of coprophiliac Blinkens.

Popes, Liturgy, and Authority (2): A SINGLE (unicus) FORM OF THE ROMAN RITE?

 So what did the Emperor Charlemagne do, given the impossible situation he was landed in by Pope Hadrian's lack of interest in Liturgical Uniformity? And the by fact that the book the pope had eventually sent him seemed unusable?

He got his scholars to provide an Appendix to Pope Hadrian's book. You see, that book didn't even contain liturgical provision for what we would call the 'Green Sundays' of the year! Or the Exsultet!

And this Appendix was mightily long! In the HBS edition, the basic papal part of the book runs to 143 pages; but the Appendix is considerably longer, with 177 pages! The two parts are divided by a Praefatiuncula usually referred to (from its first word) as the Praefatiuncula hucusque. In this, the Editors explain that 'we' velut flores pratorum vernantes had plucked, brought together, corrected ... etc.. the material in the Appendix from other sources.

They go on to make clear that they expect there to be two classes of user: those (si cui placent  ... suscipere) who will use the Appendix; and (Si vero superflua vel non necessaria sibi illa iudicaverit) those who will use only the first section and will ignore the Appendix.

If this doesn't mean that there were to be two forms of the Rite, I don't know what would!

The two categories of users were expected to behave "placabiliter"1

 

Ever since Summorum Pontificum, there have been pompous know-alls who have paraded around ridiculing the canonical determination of Benedict XVI that there could be two 'Forms' of the Roman Rite.

In fact, there always have been plural forms of the Roman Rite ... Archbishop Cranmer listed what there was in England alone: "some folowyng Salisbury use, some Herford use, some the use of Bangor, some of Yorke, and some of Lincolne". When I was an undergraduate, one could go to Blackfriars for the Dominican Rite, or to the (then nearly extinct) Jesuits of Alyoggers for the edition of S Pius V. 

It was Pope Francis himself who actually promulgated the Ordinariate Missal as being a lawful use of the Roman Rite.

The present, 'momentous'  'discovery' of PF that there can only be an unicus usus of the Roman Rite is as unhistorical as it is unpastoral.

It is ridiculous. It is ultra vires. Barmy.

IMPORTANT

I keep on writing about the terminology elaborated by S John Henry Newman: which he termed 'the Suspense in the function of the Ecclesia Docens': a way of looking at things which arose from Newman's own detailed sudy of the period of the Arian Controversy. I last did this, I think, on March 16. Nobody ever seems to take much interest in my one-man campaign, although I think that it is an essential hermeneutic for living in the Church at this present moment. Go on ... sneer ... raise one of your many expressive eyebrows and then move on ... see if I care ...

But now somebody else has just said something which you cannot as easily ignore.

Gerhard Cardinal Mueller.  

"Whoever wants to prescribe to the faithful other sources of revelation besides the Holy Scriptures and the Apostolic Tradition, has fallen away from the Catholic faith (cf. Vatican II, Dei Verbum 9f). Heretical bishops must not be obeyed, and every Catholic is called upon to bear witness to the truth against them, even if they enforce their power with brute force, just as the Arian and Donatist bishops once persecuted true Catholics".

MUST NOT BE OBEYED ... EVERY CATHOLIC ... BRUTE FORCE ...

Hooray! At last!

Read it again! 

The Gospel Canticles

 The priest of the Roman Rite mentions Abraham on three significant occasions each day: most importantly, at Mass, when he refers to the Sacrifice of Abraham; the Sacrifice on Mount Moriah which is the type of the Lord's Sacrifice upon His Cross. 

But, already, at Dawn, the priest has mentioned Abraham in the Benedictus: the song of Zacharias father of S John Baptist. This song begins with (what classicists sometimes call) a 'motto'; a quotation from an earlier piece of literature, which establishes a prescriptive resonance between the two. Here, we notice Psalm 40 (MT 41); Psalm 71 (MT 72); 105 (MT 106): "Blessed be YHWH  the God of Israel". I mentioned recently the close linkage between the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) and the assertion that He is exclusively the God of His people, and associated with Jerusalem, Sion, and the Temple where His Name dwells. I think we are not to miss the fact that Zacharias is a priest of that Temple. And that in the psalms I have just listed, the phrase comes almost at the end of the text, as a kind of doxology. The Ministry of the Forerunner takes up, and elevates to a new level, the Covenant Mercy and Salvation which is the message of the psalmist. In accordance with God's oath to Abraham, this child will be a New Dawn for His People.

The Magnificat also begins with a 'motto'; this time, alluding to I Samuel = I Kings 2: 1-10. Hannah has conceived her longed-for child: so, in the House of YHWH, she offers sacrifice and prays "My heart exults in YHWH". Like our blessed Lady, she associates herself with the anawim: the devout poor who, against the high and the mighty, remain faithful to YHWH. And, as the evening lights illumine our Churches, and Magnificat is sung, incense swirls up around the Altar as once it did (Exodus 30) on the Temple Mount; "a perpetual incense before YHWH throughout your generations".

The 'Lucan Infancy narratives' demonstrate the fidelity of Mary and her spouse to her Covenant God; a fidelity expressed by their scrupulous adherence to the Torah ... "as it is written in the Torah of YHWH". But, in the Christian Tradition, Western and Eastern, there is also a happy liturgical conviction that the great Lady was herself presented in the Temple as a baby, and was maintained there, being fed by angels with paradisal food from the Tree of Life, as befits her prelapsarian status. Readers will recall Byzantine icons of this event ... up in the corner, there is that small image of Mary lodged a in a pinnacle of God's Temple and receiving the divine sustenance ... food, so S Gregory Palamas explains, "which Adam had not tasted, because, if he had, he would not have fallen from life".

Byzantine 'Palamite' Councils of the 14th century enthusiastically anathematised those (probably proto-Enlightenment Western 'rationalists') who rejected these laudable narratives ...

Quite right too! We could do with a lot more anathemas!

Mary, poor and redeemed, whose heart is truly Immaculate, sings the Mercies of YHWH which He spoke to our Fathers and to Abraham and his Seed for ever. And her immaculate heel will crush His enemies because she has alone put down all the heresies in all the world!

Fr Melrose of Reading

Father Zed has a good piece about the Ratisbon (Pustet) prayer book for priests. I possess an earlier edition, about which I wrote on 17 October 2010. Here is what I wrote.

Pray for the people of S Giles', Reading, that they may receive a priest, a good priest, soon, to succeed Fr Michael Melrose, who died more than a year ago now. And, for that matter, a worthy successor to Blessed John Eynon, Vicar of S Giles', martyred in the time of the second Henry Tudor. 

Among the liturgical books left by Fr Melrose, which I am now fortunate enough to possess and use daily, is a very slender volume: Preces ante et post Missam. It consists of the prayers to be said "According to the opportunity of the priest", found in the old Missal and also included, for convenience, in old Breviaries. But this separate edition (Pustet, 1913) is interestingly augmented. Firstly, it includes two lists, of the quick and of the dead, whom a priest should remember in the Mementos of the Canon. Among the rather chilling categories listed are "all to whom I have been a burden (gravamen), a scandal, and an occasion of sin". And, inter mortuos, "souls who, because of me, are suffering in Purgatory". 

I think it is a very good idea to be reminded, day by day, what a very great opportunity for doing evil, and provoking others into disbelief or sin, we priests have. I wonder when and why these lists disappeared. They appear in nineteenth century breviaries in my possession, and apparently survived until at least 1913. So ...? 

The booklet also includes "Actus virtutum", from the writings of S Francis de Sales. I invite comments on a detail that made me pause for thought. The Act of Adoration begins: "O God in three persons ... and thou, Lord Jesus Christ, I adore from my whole heart ... And because my adoration is exceedingly slight and weak, I offer to thee those adorations which continually thy most holy Humanity offers to thee ... " What surprised me was the idea of praying to Our Lord Jesus Christ's Godhead separately and as divisible from his Sacred Humanity. Isn't this, I wondered, something a tadge more in the spirit of Nestorius than of S Cyril? What, I thought, becomes of akhoristos and all that? But S Francis de Sales is a Doctor of the Church, and I am not ... er ...

Pope Naaman and Fatima?

 Silly old fuddy duddy that I am, I just wish that Roman Pontiffs had more of an instinct to do just as they are told.

Why can't they simply do ad litteram what the Theotokos is reported to have asked for at Fatima, and leave it at that?

Of course, their advisers give them advice, and, of course, they themselves think about all the ecclesial and political implications of what they are proposing to do. But ...

In 4 Kingdoms (=2 Kings) 5, Naaman was a man with commendably well-developed liturgico-theological instincts: he assumed that Eliseus (Elishah) would wave his hand over the Leprous Spot and intone YHWH. 

Er ... No.

Very reverently, Naaman felt that he himself could nominate a couple of rivers in Damascus more worthy to be favoured by a spectacular exercise of Divine Power than the Jordan. (I would criticise him only for not considering the Cherwell or the Stiffkey.)

For all I know, he might even have wondered whether eight dippings ... or fourteen ... or twenty one ... would be even more devout and respectful towards the Hebrew god than a mere, grudging, seven.

"Fourteen", he might plausibly have observed, "does include seven. So I would still be fulfilling the command."

It was when he just did just what the Prophetic Voice had so boringly instructed him to do, without any attempt to nuance it or to improve upon it, that he was just healed.

PSALMS

 Dear me; the room was warm and I was tired and, in mid-psalm, my breviary (Burns Oates and Washbourne 1946; nice engravings by Reynolds Stone) slipped from my fingers ...

Worse: I have been saying the Divine Office since the 1950s, and there have been previous occasions when the loving arms of Morpheus etc. etc..

There are dodges one can employ to combat this weakness of our ... well; mine, anyway ... fallen Flesh. Arrogantly (for my clerical readers are undoubtedly holier men than I am) I venture to suggest one dodge which has been useful to me. I apologise if it appears more Academic than Devotional. That is another of my failings ...

In the Psalms, there is often a distinction between Dominus when it represents the tetragrammaton YHWH; and, on the other hand, the quite distinct term Deus. 

Dominus-YHWH is precise and delimited and even, one might dare to say, local. It refers to my God, the God of Israel. It does not refer to any old god like the unreal impostures or demons which the Gentiles worship. It excludes any syncretistic nonsense about all gods being really, underneath it all, essentially the same. It is not a friendly term for such present-day syncretists as Freemasons or Bergoglians (vide Aslan and Tash in The Last Battle).

So one will quite often find Dominus-YHWH closely associated with the Temple, with Sion; with Jerusalem.

And, linked with it or not very far away in the text, one will very often find references to His Name. Because, of course, that Name is YHWH=Dominus. Perhaps we may even be informed that His Name dwells in Sion or in His Temple.

We know Who is the New Temple replacing the old. That is a piece of typology which (even in terms of the crudest 'Enlightenment' historicism) seems reliably to go back to the words of the Word Himself (compare Mark 14:57-59 and John 2:19-22). The Breviary Office for the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, with elegant associative confusion, takes up Old Testament texts referring to the Tetragrammaton and makes them refer to the Name Yesh-wah.

And is quite right to do so!

NAME

Missing helpful papal teaching? Tired of reading about PF's most recent obsessive rant and becoming either upset or angry? Here is an antidote (which, sadly, is not available on the NHS). Joseph Ratzinger alias Pope Benedict XVI in his Jesus of Nazareth.

For Lent and Holy Week, you need "Part Two". Pure gold. Based on encyclopedic reading by one of the very finest minds of our time. Academically up-to-date, but based on a humbly Catholic submission to God's biblical revelation, rather than on 'Enlightenment' arrogance or the latest twaddle from German synodal-way adulterifiers and homosexualisers. Ratzinger is as likely to pluck out of his pudding a radical Proddy plum as he is a Rabbinic Jewish plum, and, in either case, he will turn it inside out and make more of it.

Quoting an Engelberg Benedictine called Studer, Ratzinger observes that the first generation of Christians "developed a special 'name-Christology' ... Name, Law, Covenant, Beginning, and Day" now became Christological titles. 

I'm going to pick out of that: Name. 

On the following page, Ratzinger quotes John 17:11: Holy Father, keep them in your Name, which you have given me.

God the Father ... has given His Name ... to Jesus of Nazareth. 

 Really? 

Is that what your Bible says?

The Vulgate and the Greek Textus Receptus and their dependant translations will offer you Holy Father, keep them in your Name, whom you have given me.  

In other words, does the relative clause wh** you have given me refer to the Disciples, or to the Name?

I follow the view of Benedict XVI and most textcrit specialists (including both the NeoVulgate and my own mentor, the brilliant Canadian Oxford professor George Kilpatrick) and read which; so ... the Father did give His Name ... YHWH, the LORD ... to Jesus! [This involves agreeing with those Greek manuscripts which read hoi rather than with those which read hous, and perhaps being fortified by the textcrit maxim difficilior lectio potior.]

But ... the attentive among you are jostling to point out to me ... isn't that exactly what S Paul said at Philippians 2:9-11: "God gave Him, Jesus, the Name which is above every name ... LORD=KYRIOS=YHWH"!

Indeed it is. 'Modern Biblical Studies', which is mostly bunkum, tends to dislike the idea that the same teaching might be found in the different strands and traditions within Holy Scripture. They prefer dissonance. Moi, since I am a Catholic, I am more than happy to discover that S John and S Paul were not locked in a mutual death struggle.

But let me share with you what Mgr Knox does with this crux interpretum. He writes in a footnote: "Some of the Greek Manuscripts refer this to the Father's name, some to the disciples." OK. That's fact. But now look back up the page at his translation: "Holy Father, keep them true to thy name, thy gift to me ..."

Isn't that just wonderfully deft? Deft to the point of being cunning? The intelligent reader can read 'thy gift to me' as referring either to 'them' or she can refer it to 'name'. A lovely fence to sit on!

Nice one, Ronnie!

Finally ... back to Ratzinger. What does it mean to say that Jesus has the Father's Name?

" ... name was more than a word. It meant that God allowed himself to be invoked, that he had entered into communion with Israel ... 'God's name' means: God present among men. It is said of the Temple in Jerusalem that God "made his name dwell there" ... Israel would never have dared to say simply: God lives there. Israel knew that God is infinitely great, that he surpasses and embraces the whole world. And yet he was tuly present: he himself. That is what is meant by saying: 'He made his name dwell there.' He is truly present, yet always remains infinitely greater and beyond our reach. 'God's name' is God himself insofar as he gives himself to us; however certain we are of his closeness and however much we rejoice over it, he always remains infinitely greater. ... In Jesus, God gives himself entirely into the world of mankind: whoever sees Jesus sees the Father."

Translations of dead languages

If one does not read Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, how is one to handle the task, encouraged by Holy Mother Church, of getting immersed in the Scriptures?

Is an Anglophone able to access the Douay Rheims translation of the Bible? I doubt it. Offers of this version usually seem to turn out to be copies of Dr Challoner's revised version.

In 1954, Cardinal Griffin very warmly encouraged use of the translation by Mgr R A Knox; New Testament 1945; Old Testament 1949. I would commend it to those who can benefit from such a thing. It is in a dignified, 'timeless' register of English ... which has the advantage of not sounding Elizabethan. So one feels one is reading something fresh.

And, believe me, Knox's erudition was profound. As a Biblicist, he was not one of those callow youths or youthesses chasing after a DPhil who pontificate iconoclastically about the Bible while they themselves are a bit vague about the more exciting recesses of such Greek verbs as histemi. 

Knox knew his stuff. And his translation was more reliable than those of lesser beings. One example. 

In both the Usus Authenticus and the Usus Deterior of the Roman Rite, the Mass of a Doctor starts with the Introit In medio Ecclesiae aperuit os eius, et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiae ... In the current English translation, that is given as In the midst of the Church he opened his mouth, and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom ...

This makes it sound as if the Saint opened his mouth; and then the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom. But this is a false rendering of the Latin; which means that In the midst of the Church the Lord opened his mouth and filled him with the spirit of wisdom ... 

In 1949, Burns Oates and Washbourne published The Missal in Latin and English. If you notice a copy going cheap in a second hand book shop, I would advise you to snaffle it up. It is a class product. And the English translations of Scripture are from Knox.

So here is Knox's version of that same Introit; more free in word-order but without howlers in the  understanding of the Latin:

The Lord moved him to speak before the assembled people, filling him with the spirit of wisdom ... 

In a couple of days, I'll weave Benedict XVI and Knox together with interesting results.