S Andrew's Day ...

... is not only the Patronal Festival of Scotland and of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, but also the felicitous and significant day upon which Cardinal Pole absolved this realm of England from schism in 1554. Moreover, it is the anniversary of a marvellous scene on S Andrew's Day in 1569: the Absolution of the Diocese of Durham from Heresy and Schism. (Also a day to reread Eamon Duffy's Fires of Faith?)

It is, moreover, if we gaze back at the Protohistory of the Ordinariate, the anniversary of the Consecration of Andrew Burnham as Bishop of Ebbsfleet (it was to be Bishop Andrew who appealed to Pope Benedict for help; thus formally setting in motion the process that led to the Ordinariate). In those days, the old Anglican system persisted in the Province of Canterbury of consecrating all bishops in London, and Andrew was 'done' in S Paul's Cathedral. My three main memories (apart from George Carey's dismal liturgical instincts) are of someone trying to die in the pew behind me in the South transept; of a remarkably inapposite sermon in which the preacher appeared to be making fun of the Orthodox (which is also the Catholic) practice of the Veneration of Relics; and of the scene, afterwards, on the steps outside.

As the custom used to be, the Consecration had been of two pontiffs for the price of one. The other consecrand was being provided to be a new suffragan for that illiberal liberal bishop, Selby of Worcester. Afterwards, at one end of the steps, a large queue formed up to kiss Bishop Andrew's ring and to receive his episcopal blessing. At the other end, the Worcester consecrand seemed to be doing a strange little ritual dance amid a small group of friends and family, intermittently yanking up his trousers to show off his Socks Of Many Colours (Diversity Socks?). Perhaps he was a Mason, or an animist, or a cryptoBergoglian, or a reincarnation of Pachamama.

The Ebbsfleet years were fun. And fine preparation for the real fun: the Ordinariate!

Zucchini or Zucchetti?

 Apparently, after goodness knows how many proud years as the High Street's living, most vibrant, eyesore, the Mitre is reopening as ... an Italian 'chain' restaurant.

How depressing. Can anyone really imagine Peter Wimsey breakfasting Reggie Pomfret in an Eye-tie chain? Bad enough to live with the reality that Fuller's, home of coffee-and-walnut cake, is now a Burger King. That the Luna Caprese and the Elizabeth have gone oriental (not to mention most of Soho). 

And have you seen what the merciless Welsh hordes have done to the Cornmarket?

But now this.

Come friendly bombs and ... er ... Slough is no longer worthy of your attentions  ...

I have just one aspiration: that people will remember that I was the first to suggest ... in the interests of economy and concision ... that the old Mitre might be accorded the High Church nickname of Il Zucchetto.

Yes ... I do know that ...

INDIETRISM and the Bull

PF is not averse to defending his new dogma-of-condemnation 'Indietrism' by citing ... exempli gratia ... earlier writers.

Such as S Vincent of Lerins, poor chap.

Is there a technical term for a theological or philosophical doctrine which carries within itself its own refutation?

Such as our old playmate the story of the Cretan intellectual who asserted that all Cretans were liars.

(Moi, I suspect S Paul of having a sense of humour.)

I commend PF for having ... if he truly has ... abandoned his former extensive lexicon of hate-filled abuse in favour of a nice shiny new one. (Entre nous, I never did understand what 'Neo-pelagian' meant.)

Was Epimenides married to Pasiphae? Moo Moo! Pull the other one!

Dom Gregory Dix and current management

In these two snippets, the great, if occasionally waspish, Patrimonial mystagogue is actually talking, not about a pope, but about the Church of England's bishops of the 1940s. I leave it to readers to discern whether there is any relevance here for our own decade.

"Old men in a hurry to realise their dearest dreams can be very short-sighted".

" ... even the best and most energetic of bishops will one day have rest from his labours, and ... the lance of his successor often delivers the diocese from the menace of some different windmill". (Perhaps an appropriate Coat of Arms for an episcopal admirer of Bergoglio might have been Sable semee of windmills rouge. Yes, I do know that ... )

Given the spirited enthusiasm, the erudition and wit with which Dom Gregory explained and defended the Decrees of Vatican I on the Primacy and Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, it is a shame that he is not around today to resume his defence of Pastor aeternus at a time when it is under such insistent implicit attacks from circles so very close to the Pontiff himself..

Fr Aidan Nichols on Episcopal appointments

In August 2017, the finest theologian of the Anglophone world gave a lecture which was partially published in the Catholic Herald. The fact that the full text was not subsequently available gives rise to an inevitable suspicion that Father was pressurised.

Today, I would like simply to point out that, more than a year before Cardinal Mueller's disturbing  words about the sort of questionable individuals, theological illiterates signed up to Bergoglianism, who are being appointed to senior positions in the hierarchy; and before His Excellency Archbishop Vigano's revelations about the same subject, Fr Aidan had spoken with great clarity. His antennae must be very sensitive!

"[The pope's] programme would not have got as far as it has were it not the case that theological liberals, generally of the closet variety, have in the fairly recent past been appointed to high positions both in the world episcopate and in the ranks of the Roman Curia."

"Of the closet variety" is an entertainingly old-fashioned phrase!

It was a few months before Dr Nichols' lecture that, on 19 November 2016, Cupich and Tobin were made cardinals.

The testimony of Archbishop Vigano asserted that the appointments of Cupich to Chicago (November 18 2014) and of Tobin to Newark (November 7 2016) "were orchestrated by McCarrick, Maradiaga, and Wuerl ... their names were not among those presented by the Nunciature for Chicago and Newark".

It would be a good thing if, henceforth, the terna of names submitted by Nuncios to the Holy See for a vacant bishopric were to be published. 

God's people should not have to wait for a Vigano (God bless him) to come along before they can know what is being proposed for their own Particular Church. They should not be deprived of the liberty to form their own minds both about the proposed three names, and ... if this occurs ... why all three have been set aside so that the job can be given to another.

They should be treated as Grown Ups.

This is what, in the Anglo-Saxon cultural world, is often known as ACCOUNTABILITY.

"NOTES FROM THE ABBEY"

 That's what it says at the top.

The third 'Note' goes like this: "We were very glad to welcome at the Monastery the exiled Metropolitan of Kieff, Anthony, and his chaplain, Fr.Theodosios. They stayed with us several days on the occasion of the Metropolitan's visit to England to consecrate the Archimandrite Nikolai as Russian Bishop in England."

And over the page: "The Father Abbot, accompanied by Fr. Dom Martin Collett, was present at this consecration, which took place in St Philip's Church, Buckingham Palace Road, and by special request of the Metropolitan and with the approval of the Bishop of London, Fr. Abbot wore cope and mitre.

"Bishop Nikolai subsequently paid a visit to Nashdom and was present at the Pontifical Mass on the Solemnity of St Benedict."

All that Orthodoxery ... Kieff ... fugitive Eastern European hierarchs ... ideological military units galumphing around Eastern Europe ... well, you will have guessed: this Magazine from the [Anglican] Benedictine Community at Nashdom is dated September 1929.

Tempora mutantur ... which is also why the formerly Anglican church of S Philip was later demolished to enable the expansion, of course, of the Coach Station. Wikipaedia takes up the story: "On 28 November [1918], Archbishop Anthony was raised tto the rank of metropolitan ... in January 1916, Metropolitan Anthony was present at the All-Ukrainian Church Council in Kiev. He then fled the city before the Bolshevik invasion. Following the killing of Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev, Metropolitan Anthony was elected to the Kiev cathedra, and returned when the city was occupied by the imperial German Army. However, his election was not approved by the authorities because of his opposition to Ukrainian autocephaly.   

"... in Sepember 1920, he was invited by General Pyotr Wrangel to Crimea, then controlled by Wrangel's anti-Bolshevik forces. After the latter's defeat in November 1920, Anthony left Russia for good."

He went on to be one of the founders of ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

The Anglican papalist movement which led finally to the Ordinariates was, rather surprisingly, very pro-Orthodox. You will not find it difficult to discover pictures of Fr Hope Patten and Fr Fynes Clinton hitting it off together with Russky hierarchs at Walsingham during the interbellum. 

I most heartily approve; it was a practical working out of the Ecclesiology espoused at that time by the Papacy, and explained in our own time by Cardinal Ratzinger in Communionis notio and Dominus Iesus.

 

Peter Parsons, obiit 16 November 2022; Dix; and Lewis.

The inter-war years were a happy hunting ground for a particular type of Anglo-Saxon 'Biblical Scholar'. He [there were not so many shes] felt certain that, if he possessed a tiny number of pieces of evidence, all he needed to do was string them together correctly, and he would have a neat and convincing chronological model. S Mark's Gospel must be the earliest to have been written because it is so much simpler than other gospels; and its rough, primitive lack of sophistication ... blah blah ... You get the method. 

Promise me you will never use it.

Lack of formal structure also helped to keep this ship afloat. It stood to reason that simple, fluid structures must come earlier than complex rigidities. The complex, whether grammatical or philosophical or theological, must come later than (what seems to us to be) the unsophisticated. 

And we don't like Rigidity, do we?

The certainties of those interbellum years (Jazz, Tennis, Flappers and Cocktails) still survive, particularly in discussions about the Christian Ministry. And, not least, the Papacy. Even Eamon Duffy, no wide-eyed berserker, can begin his enquiries with the comfortable assumption that "To begin with indeed, there was no pope, no bishop as such. For the Roman Church was slow to develop ... " et cetera.

Divertingly, much of this culture had already shown its hand in 1929. A leading Anglican liberal, a Canon B H Streeter, had written an account of the 'Primitive' Church especially from the point of view of its Ministry. But ... poor old gent ... he had chosen just the moment when Dom Gregory Dix, Anglican Benedictine monk and historian ... wit ... gadly ... tormenter of liberals and exploder of easy and convenient simplifications ... mocker of bishops ... was just ... let's say, 'coming on stream'. He demolished Streeter's assumptions and crucified with his humour Streeter's solemn 'conclusions'.

Dix, then merely a youthful whippersnapper and iconoclast, had him for breakfast. Dix's paper was the first in his long, brilliant series of brilliant interventions. The Anglican bishops came to fear him. 

R A Knox was hardly any less merciless, despite having an episcopal father.

Please may I now draw you from 1929 to a period a little closer to our own time ...

Or rather, I would like, after a few preliminaries, to bring Professor Peter Parsons to your attention. This great scholar and unique Oxford classicist died a few days ago, 16 November 2022.

I have remarked that old presuppositions still survive among 'liberal' Christian academics. This fact, so it seems to me, is an example of the intellectual naivite of such writers and of their chronic inability to keep up with advances in the secular study of the ancient world. Greater men than me have pointed this out: here is a passage, written in 1998 by Peter Parsons, Regius Professor of Greek in this University and a very great papyrologist. He is surveying, in The Times Literary Supplement,  the large number of  'new' ancient Greek texts which the sands of Egypt had yielded in the couple of decades before he wrote. (It is worth adding that further papyrological discoveries in the two decades since, have done nothing to weaken his argument.)

" ... the new texts test the categories and structures of scholarship, the faible convenue which nineteenth century positivists based on the assumption that the texts then surviving were typical and to be explained simply in relation to one another. As usual, aesthetic prejudices and unquestioned categories lie below the scientific surface. 

"Scholars used to regard Aeschylus' Suppliants as the earliest of his plays; it has a simple plot, little action, and long choruses. Now a papyrus has dated it, less than ten years earlier than the Oresteia. False assumption: that artists develop in linear mode, from simple to complex, irrespective of theme. 

"Now that we have Simonides' celebration of the Battle of Plataea, the great patriotic war of classical Greece, we see how he reinvented epic in elegy, the Trojan war in the Persian war, Homer in himself.  Standard literary histories had put such generic mutations and complex intertextualities two centuries later. Another false assumption: that classical poets were all genius without artifice (and that their successors [of the 'Hellenistic' period] were all artifice without genius."

You might care also to consider this alongside C S Lewis's masterly demolition of 'Modern Biblical Scholarship' in Fern-seed and Elephants  ... And, as for  Q ...

The Noble Savage has truly fallen. Let us enjoy to the full the mightiness of his disintegration. 

 

Mueller on That Flag

"In the Old Testament, the rainbow is considered  a sign of God's covenant and peace with mankind (Gen 9:11-17). However, the original religious meaning was transformed into a symbol for the peace movement. Since the 1970s the rainbow flag, in a reversal of the natural colour sequence, has been considered the the banner of the international LGBT ideology, which pretends to stand up against discrimination against homoerotically-inclined people, but is, in reality, the antithesis of natural and revealed anthropology."

I go along with his Eminence's analysis. And I am convinced that many of those who flaunt this flag are decent, well-meaning individuals deceived by forces deeper and darker than themselves. That does not change the fact that I (and many like me) are made to feel excluded, judged, and condemned when this flag is intruded into my (physical or moral) space. 

I have had it explained to me that the flag simply means that all are included; that nobody is excluded.

Nobody?

So, to apply the test which I apply to all such claims, we are required to believe that paedophiles are to be 'included'? That the acts which define their life-style must be accepted "inclusively" together with every other sexual life-style? That I am to be condemned if I decline to signify (both internally and in external gesture) my own acceptance of, and my own submission to, the ideology demonstrated by this flag?

I refuse and I decline and I repudiate this tyranny.

I have a private suspicion that the Enemy are not actually playing quite fair in this matter. I suspect that many of them are not actually campaigning for the 'inclusion' of paedophilia and those who practise it; and might even feel upset to have this suspected of them.

Just as I suspect that many of those who wear those multi-coloured tapes round their necks do not really mean to campaign (for example) for the 'inclusion' of Nazis and of Nazism.

But they are, poor poppets, gullible people who, without being able to hum even a bar of the Horst Wessel song, think they are adhering to something clean and noble and honourable in wearing the livery of 'inclusion'.

STIR UP SOME EXCITING COLLECTS

The collects we use at the beginning of Mass, and in the Divine Office, quite often have the pattern 'O God, who ...., mercifully grant that...' Thus, in the rather legalistic manner which is characteristic of the ancient Roman rite and of pre-Christian Greek and Latin poetry, some characteristic or deed of the Deity is cited as an appropriate precedent for the grace which is now sought of Him. Many of Cranmer's collects in the Prayer Book reproduce this style, either because they are translations from collects in the old Roman Sacramentaries (most of his Sunday collects are) or because he was so used to the pattern that he automatically reproduced it in his own compositions.

But the ancient liturgical books of the Roman Church often abandon this style during Advent. Out goes the sonorous descriptive relative clause ('who......'); instead, in comes an almost breathless opening imperative, demanding of God immediate and decisive action. Many of them take off from a phrase in Psalm 80 (Vulgate 79) ‘Stir up [Excita in Latin] thy power, and come and help us'. (This suits Advent: that psalm calls in the name of oppressed Israel upon her Covenant with God for help against her enemies: why not read it as an Advent devotion!)

In the pre-Reformation service books, Cranmer found four of these Excita collects appointed for Sundays and some more on the weekdays of the Ember Week. He kept two of them; and so does the Ordinariate Missal (which also admirably provides the old Collects for Advent II and the Ember Friday). Those two are:
(1) The collect for the last Sunday (and its week) before Advent. Sadly, this collect is rarely heard nowadays on Sundays because it is displaced by the proper collect for Christ the King. It used popularly to be associated by English tradition with the start of work upon the Christmass pudding. The references to stirring and fruit helped here!
(2) Advent 4. Unfortunately (there is evidence that when he did this work in 1548-9 he was working fast and not going back over his drafts with a revising hand) Cranmer obscured in translation the Biblical origin of the original by writing 'O Lord, raise up...' instead of retaining - as he did for Trinity 25 - the vivid 'Stir up...'. And the end misses a point in the Latin, which could literally be translated ‘..that what our sins get in the way of, the forgiveness of thy mercy may accelerate.’ I suspect that this may go back to an early Christian and Pauline notion that whether the parousia comes later or earlier may to a degree depend upon the actions of Christians.

This collect survived into the English Anglican Common Worship for use on Advent 2. In the revised post-Vatican II Roman rite it is relegated to the relative obscurity of a weekday. Indeed, modern Roman liturgical tinkerers seem even more hostile than do Anglican ones to these superb and virile old collects. They replace them with other collects which may be taken from old Roman sacramentaries, but which are more pedestrian in their syntax and shy away from mention of Sin. The pre-Vatican II liturgy had a fair bit to say about human sinfulness and its disastrous consequences. Post-Vatican II, the ethos seems too often to be 'God, because of your grace, we are not really too bad; a bit more of your grace will make us even better’. Pure Pelagianism.

For Advent I, Cranmer composed a stately expression of the Advent themes - indeed, some of its phrases are reminiscent of parts of the post-Conciliar Roman Advent prefaces. It is preserved in the Ordinariate Missal. When it used to be said at least twice daily all through Advent, it must have provided a superb catechesis of the meaning of the season. Nowadays it usually only gets a showing on the Sunday, and I rather wonder whether it says too much for one collect used once (of course, those poor clerics who are stuck with using the Novus Ordo could use it throughout Advent to conclude the Intercession). The old Roman Sacramentaries, in my view, were right to be terse and thematically tight. Renaissance writers such as Cranmer found it hard to resist the temptation to greater verbosity, and later practitioners were to become far worse: see, for example the BCP collect for Epiphany 6, where the writer (Cosin?) seems actually to forget, by the time he gets to the end of the collect, that he started off by addressing the Father.

My views will be clear: few people have written better collects than popes Leo, Damasus, Gelasius or Gregory; and if Cranmer has provided an English Version, why look a gift-horse in the mouth? Christian people whose Latin is rusty, whether or not they originate in the Anglican Patrimony, can do worse than to keep the Ordinariate Missal or the Book of Common Prayer on their desks.

THE RIDICULOUS GAME

"The beautiful Game" is how prissy and pompous English addicts have described 'Association Football'. But the present nonsenses in Qatar suggest ... I put it to you ... that "The Ridiculous Game" would be a far more appropriate title.

Apparently, 'England' teams want to begin their 'games' by 'Taking The Knee'. This, I am told, honours a dead American, described in some sources as a petty criminal, who was murdered by a vicious Plod (who, very justly as far as I am aware, has been convicted and locked away). This rather medieval ritual observance is included in something called 'Black Lives Matter', to which I strongly object. All lives matter. 

Mine, for example.

And I have yet to see a banner proclaiming Unborn Lives Matter. 

And our footy ballers in Qatar, acute moral theologians the lot of them, have manifested a desire to wear armbands based on that objectionable rag, the Diversity Flag, and with the slogan 'One Love'. I don't quite understand this; but I suspect that it attempts to subsume under one and the same heading all the different versions of human sexuality.

'One Love', therefore, presumably affirms Paedophilia, just as it also affirms all the rest of those jolly philias. Ours, surely, must be the Philiaphile species!

Godda be inclusive, y'know. 

Free The Maxwell One.

And what about Bestially Orientated Folk? 

Godda be inclusive.

Woof Woof. Sniff sniff.

"AVE"

 I have enjoyed a piece in AVE, the newsletter of the [Anglican] Society of Mary, about the Pilgrimage to Lourdes which, nearly fifteen yeats ago, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, led; and at which he preached during the International Mass over which Cardinal Kasper presided. 

Rowan recently said:

"I have never on any other occasion in my entire life preached to more people about Jesus than on that day. And just think -- it was Our Lady that made that possible."

Yes. That's rather how I felt, soon after we entered into Full Communion, when I led the annual Rosary Procession from Westminster to Brompton, and preached there from that lovely 20th Century baroque pulpit.

What a privilege! How kind so many people have been to me!

The Brompton and Birmingham Oratories must be within the half-dozen ... No; fewer ... finest Catholic churches in Great Britain. Fitting settings, you will be thinking on this Feast of our Lady's Presentation, to celebrate our Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Light! [Readers will be aware how, in Byzantine iconography, Light is such an important element in the celebration of this festival.] You could visit her shrine in Clacton-on-Sea (although the fine neo-Romanesque church there was horribly vandalised by ... er ... )

Ave Regina Caelorum! Ave Domina Angelorum!!

The See of Westminster; Episcopal Conferences; and Cardinal Mueller again.

This piece was originally posted in March 2015. Subsequently, I refined and strengthened and shortened it using information supplied by kind readers.  In my view, the most important parts of this are the two passages from Cardinal Mueller.

I would like to emphasise that this is not some attack on any current Archbishop of Westminster. I have simply taken the English situation as an example of a very important ecclesiological point which relates equally to every part of the Latin Church. I just happen to know a little more about the ecclesiatical history of England than I do about that of Portugal or Poland or Peru.



Non-Catholics often misunderstand the position of the Archiepiscopal See of Westminster; and this can lead to unfairness towards its occupant. I think this whole question is of importance because it bears on matters of ecclesiological doctrine which, in fact, are the real basis of many of the Church's current upheavals. Which is how Cardinal Mueller will, nearer the end of this piece, come into the question.

The Archbishop of Westminster is not, as journalists and others often appear to assume, a sort of Catholic equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Independant Inquiry Child Sexual Abuse ... Case Study the Archdiocese of Birmingham worked this out (June 2019 paragraph 5): "A cardinal does not have authority over an archbishop or bishop and so it is a misconception to refer to Cardinal Nichols as the 'head' of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales" (et vide infra).

The common notion that 'primate' and 'archbishop' and 'metropolitan' are interchangeable terms is historically false. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a Primate. And he is Primate of All England (totius Angliae), with certain powers (of a legatus natus sanctae Sedis continued to him by Parliamentary Statute after the Schism) even within the Province of York. When he visitatorially enters another diocese, the Diocesan Bishop automatically if temporarily loses his diocesan jurisdiction. He was known sometimes colloquially as alterius orbis papa, and his primatial dignity, remarkably, is sustained by the possession of an episcopal Curia comprising a Provincial Dean (the Bishop of London), Chancellor (Bishop of Winchester), Vice-Chancellor (Bishop of Lincoln), Precentor (Bishop of Salisbury), Chaplain (Bishop of Worcester), and Cross-bearer (Bishop of Rochester).Whatever you may think about the theological or sacramental status of a modern Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury ... and you are probably right ... these structural and legal arrangements are, substantially, in continuity with the very grand position and considerable primatial authority held by medieval Archbishops of Canterbury, as the holders of an office that historically went far back before the time when there was a King or a Kingdom or even a concept of England.

Archbishops of Canterbury have behaved accordingly ... as when a medieval ABC attempted (unsuccessfully) to enter the Diocese of Exeter on Visitation, accompanied by his private army; and when Archbishop Fisher summoned John Robinson Bishop of Woolwich to see him after the publication of Honest to God. Robinson was an auxiliary bishop of another diocesan; but Fisher greeted him with "Now look here, Woolwich, you just can't do this sort of thing" vel sim.. (But even Fisher, I suspect, might not have behaved thus towards a bishop within the Province of York.)

The See of Westminster has never been constituted or recognised by the Holy See as a Primatial See. An obvious moment to have given it that dignity would have been in 1911, when the Sees of Birmingham and Liverpool were raised to metropolitan status. There was indeed at that time a desire (see the thread) to preserve a national position for Westminster; its Archbishop was made the permanent chairman (Praeses perpetuus) of episcopal meetings and given the right to represent the national Catholic community to the Civil Power (as long as he said only what his fellow-bishops had by a majority vote agreed). But he was given no jurisdiction and the only dignities conferred were the purely ritual ones of using pallium and cathedra and cross throughout England and Wales. This falls far short of the old 'primatial' conception. Indeed, it shows a very laudable determination on the part of the pre-Bergoglian Holy See to preserve the rights and status of diocesan bishops.

And, in any case, under the current CIC, primacy would be purely nominal dignity.

The position of the Archbishop of Westminster is thus simply as it is described in the front of my Breviary in a decree signed by Cardinal Griffin: Coetus episcopalis totius Angliae et Cambriae Praeses Perpetuus (by contrast, in another Breviary I possess, the corresponding part of a parallel decree from the Archbishop of Malines describes him as Primas Belgii). He is, additionally, Metropolitan of his own province [comprising the dioceses of Brentwood, East Anglia, Northampton, and Nottingham], with the distinctly tenuous and limited metropolitical powers described in Canon 436. He has no metropolitical relationship with the four totally independant metropolitical provinces of Birmingham, Liverpool, Cardiff and Southwark, or with four extra-provincial and extra-diocesan entities, the Ukrainian Eparchy, the South Indian Eparchy, the Military Ordinariate, and the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham (all four of which, incidentally, extend beyond the boundaries of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales).

What this means is that an Archbishop of Westminster has no substantive jurisdiction whatsoever outside his own diocese of Westminster ... which is, roughly, London North of the Thames and Hertfordshire. But, even if not a primate, does he perhaps have authority by virtue of being a Cardinal? No more than Raymond Cardinal Burke does. Or because of his Presidency of the Episcopal Conference? Not in Canon Law and not in dogma. And see my remarks at the beginning of this piece.

I will, in conclusion, illustrate this by quoting  Cardinal Mueller, speaking when he was head of the CDF.

"An episcopal conference is not a particular council, even less so an ecumenical council. The president of an episcopal conference is nothing more than a technical moderator, and he does not have any particular magisterial authority due to his title ... dioceses are not branches of the secretariate of a bishops conference either, nor of the diocese whose bishop presides over the episcopal conference. This kind of attitude risks in fact the reawakening of a certain polarisation between the local Churches and the Church universal, out of date since the Vatican I and Vatican II councils. The Church is not a sum of national churches ... ".  

This continues the strong teaching Cardinal Mueller has given before; in 2013, for example, "the Roman Pontiff and the individual bishops are of divine right, instituted by Jesus Christ. ... But the patriarchates and episcopal conferences, historically and today, belong solely to human ecclesiastical right. The presidents of the episcopal conferences, although important, are coordinators, nothing more, not some vicepopes! Every bishop has a direct and immediate relationship with the Pope. We cannot have a decentralisation in the conferences; there would be the danger of a new centralism, with the presidency that has all the information and the bishops submerged in documents without the time to get ready ..." 

And the same erudite Cardinal repeated the same teaching in a 2017 book-interview. 

For some reason, there seems at the moment to be a great appetite for sound teaching.