NOTES AND QUERIES

1. St Alfred the Great ... have you ever met him? Liturgy and Worship(1932), commenting on the abortive 1928 Anglican Prayer Book, says 'No precedent for including in a Calendar of Saints ... The proposed insertion of Alfred may be ... showing a desire for (quasi-)canonisation on the part of the post-Reformation Church of England'. Common Worship now authorises him on October 26. I was therefore amazed to find this 'saint' also accorded an optional memorial on October 26 by the local calendar (2002) of the Roman Catholic diocese of Northampton. Comments?!? Implications?


2. We are told that the Holy Father is going to revise the Good Friday prayer for the Jews in the 1962 Missal. Since a pope wrote that prayer, it can hardly (whatever SSPX may say) be beyond the competence of a pope to rewrite it. And because of ecumenical tactfulness the term 'blindness' (obcaecatione) has long been regarded with suspicion. But there do seem to me to be big questions here. It is definitely the teaching of the NT that Jews who do not accept Christ are blinded (Romans 11:25; Ephesians 4:18(caecitatem); and see 2 Corinthians 3:7-18). Do critics of traditional liturgy dislike it because, as they sometimes seem to say, it is insufficiently biblical, or because it is too biblical? I think we should be told.


3. My post on liturgical confusions ... last night I went to the very decent Evensong they do at the Oxford Oratory ... all from the old breviary; so that, for example, it being Sexagesima, we did not say alleluia after the opening versicles. But the celebrant wore green! And did I do very wrong to celebrate in S Thomas's on Monday morning an extraordinary form Mass ... but of S Thomas Aquinas? Is the question of Calendar for birituals not a priority for the Ecclesia Dei Commission?



4. My post on the Mystery of Faith ... yes, I know I should not make unilateral changes in the Mass. My rather unconvincing plea can only be that there is currently a lot of confusion about what the priest says before the Acclamation in the Church of England, for the reasons I explained, and going for what Rome has said will be in its new translation seemed one way of cutting a Gordian knot. But ...



5. Gregory of Langres knows he's got it wrong (http://massinformation.blogspot.com/). It is wearing a maniple that kills kittens. A pity Alcuin Reid forgot to mention this in his revision of The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite. I am redrafting the Latin vesting prayer said while donning the maniple so that all will be clear for future generations of neo-ordinati.

Conflicting Calendars

I suspect I am not the only priest now with a calendar problem; not least since the motu proprio. Take the Gesimas; these Sundays have lovely masses, all of them; Septuagesima has its papal statio at S Lawrence; Sexagesima at S Paul; Quinquagesima at S Peter. (There is a fun game anyone can play; look through the old masses in the old Roman Missal or in the Book of Common Prayer and try to spot covert allusions to these Saints in the details of the texts.) Scholars are not agreed who composed the Masses concerned; was it S Gregory the Great or a predecessor of his in the previous generation? But whoever is responsible, we clearly have here a coherent liturgical season in which, faced with tribulations internal and external (including barbarian invasions; again, it is fun to spot references to Affliction in the texts) the people of Rome led by their pontiff trooped along the continuous porticoes which lined their streets to visit, on the edge of the old City, the three great basilicas of the City's three great patrons to seek succour in tribulation. We have tribulations enough in our time; perhaps these Masses do deserve to be dusted off and brought back into use.

The problem? Well, are we really to bury Alleluia on the eve of Septuagesima? To tell the organist not to schedule hymns with A-word until Easter? To tell the sacristan to put away the green vestments? We can do this if the old calendar is the only calendar followed in the particular church. But what if some masses there are old usage (John XXIII or Thomas Cranmer) and others are new (Paul VI or Common Worship)? Similar probems occur throughout the year. For example, if I celebrate a P6 mass on January 13, I will observe S Hilary. If the following day pastoral imperatives or personal preference incline me to say a J23 Mass, I will find myself again 'doing' S Hilary ... because that rite displaced him from the 13th so that he did not collide with the Octave of Epiphany. But such duplication hardly seems very tidy. What solution should the Ecclesia Dei Commission make available? Anglicans have had a problem like this for generations; now that Rome has it too, perhaps we might get an answer!

VIVAT PAPA

The whole round world exulteth, this morning, at the news that the successor of S Peter, our holy father Pope Benedict, celebrated Mass yesterday facing in the same direction as his people, in his Sistine Chapel in Rome. What a wonderful ecumenical gesture, that the Bishop of Rome should revert to the ancient practice of undivided Christendom which is still the custom of the Eastern Churches, and a practice, of course, which we still follow here at S Thomas's in distant Oxford. (Not that S Thomas's really seems very far from eternal Rome; as I offered the holy sacrifice of the Mass at the same time as the Pope was doing so in Rome, I had before me, at the centre of our great baroque reredos with its six lovely candlesticks, a rather fine copy of Raffaello's Madonna di Foligno: its original once graced the high altar of the church of Sancta Maria in Ara Coeli on the Capitoline hill.)

Traditionalist Roman Catholics sometimes tend to dismiss Ecumenism as a game only for trendies and liberals. I beseech them to realise that there is Ecumenism, and there is Ecumenism. Ecumenism, in my view, certainly does not mean cosying up to the Trautmans (Trautmen? Trautpersons?) with their apparent message of dumping the Great Tradition so as to be indistinguishable liturgically or doctrinally from liberal Protestantism. Longum abest quin ... And in this matter of Mass-versus-whatever, the academic groundwork was done by our fathers of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England 150 years ago; at a time when (I won't bore you with the reasons) the Anglican custom was to stand at the North End of the altar. The Tractarians demonstrated that the custom of ancient Christendom was to face East.

In the 1970s versus populum took over the RC Church, and unfortunately quite a lot of Catholic Anglicans slavishly followed the flawed notion that this had been proved to be 'primitive'. But one of the first scholars to call out that this particular emperor had no clothes was the distinguished Exeter liturgist Fr Michael Moreton in a 1982 paper (read at the Oxford Patristic Conference and published in its papers) called Eis Anatolas Blepsate: Orientation as a Liturgical Principle. This was a couple of decades before Fr Lang of the Brompton Oratory wrote his deservedly best-selling book with the same message.

Fr Moreton is still going strong; last year he celebrated his ninetieth birthday and many of us felt close to tears as this much-loved figure, facing ad Orientem, slowly and with immense reverence uttered the venerable words of the ancient Canon Romanus.

That's what I call real Ecumenism.

OUR UNCHANGING FATHER

Should the Lord's Prayer (LP) be modernized? It is, of course, translations that we are considering; Common Worship and ICEL each offer (different) new versions of the original Greek, neither, incidentally, bold enough anyway to satisfy modem scholarly opinion about the meaning of the original. Rome says a firm No; ordinary people can say the old form even when semiconscious! And Rome has a policy aim here; to maintain continuities and prevent modern committee liturgists from slicing through the collective memories that link different generations. Worship, in Rome's view, is not something to be constantly and abruptly Improved by Experts. The Roman pendulum has now swung very firmly back to the principle enunciated by Vatican II and then promptly forgotten by those who claimed to be enacting the Council's wishes: liturgies should evolve organically.

"For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen" (the Doxology). The C of E and its cultural derivatives in English Protestantism stand alone in treating these words as part of the LP. Modern textual critics have no doubt that they formed no part of the original text of the Gospels. And the worshipping tradition of the Church has not usually regarded them as part of LP. In the Byzantine Rite, the people say LP and the priest then 'caps' it with the Doxology, in a Trinitarian version (For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and for ever and world without end). In the Roman Rite the Doxology was originally unknown, LP was followed by an elaboration of its final clause (Deliver us Lord, we beseech thee from all evils ... ), known as the Embolism, and said by the priest alone. After Vatican II this prayer was abbreviated and eschatologized; and, at its conclusion, the people (not priest and people together) acclaim (ICEL gives a modem translation) the Doxology. In BCP the shorter form of LP is normal, although in services in which LP occurs twice, one of them is in the longer form. Common Worship, curiously, flies in the face both of modern Biblical scholarship and of liturgical tradition by attempting to persuade us to use the longer form, the one with the Doxology, on all occasions.

parishpriestspostbag

Christmass mail builds up; so many nice letters and cards from our dear parishioners in Devon, and, from even further back, parishioners in our first parish, Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, where we served in the 1960s. It could make one dangerously conceited if one didn't from time to time wonder how many there are who not only don't write but even open a weekly bottle of wine to celebrate the fact that I moved on. Ah, well ...

And a letter from Fr Michael Moreton of Exeter, who became such a close friend during our six years in that diocese. Fr Michael was a junior collaborator of Dr Jalland [the Revd T G Jalland DD, Vicar of St Thomas the Martyr Oxford 1933-45] when J moved from S Thomas's to found what became the Theology Faculty of Exeter University. They also founded a priestly society for study, called the Society of S Boniface. We met monthly for mass, study of the Greek Testament, and to read and discuss papers. While I was secretary, I looked through the old minute books, in which J features as the Great Man with the Big Contacts in the National Church. Repeatedly, he gave members up-to-the-minute accounts of how Big Issues like the liturgical revisions of the 1960s were going.

Fr Michael reminisced in his letter about J's funeral at S Thomas's, at which he said the mass. The then bishop of Dorchester was there, and Bishop David Silk, and Archbishop Michael Ramsey. Fr Michael writes 'I was determined that, as a patristic scholar, he [J] should have a patristic Eucharistic Prayer'. By this he means that he used the 'Roman Canon'; the First Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman Rite, the oldest eucharistic prayer in Christendom still in regular use. Fr Moreton (who celebrated his 90th birthday this year) belongs to a generation of Catholic Anglican scholars who, in the 1960s, had great hopes for the authorisation of a satisfactory English eucharistic prayer. But General Synod eliminated from the draft the words (taken from the prayers of the early Church) about offering God Bread and Cup, and many as well as Moreton came to despair of committee-produced liturgy. He reverted to the old Roman Canon, which for a century had been used by 'ritualist' clergy (who, in using the 1662 Prayer Book rite said the Canon sotto voce before and after Cranmer's prayer of consecration). Despite his advanced years, Fr Michael still uses this prayer every Sunday - but, nowadays, aloud - at the little Exeter church of S Mary Steps (which is in many ways curiously like S Thomas's). Incidentally, Fr Michael was one of the first scholars to publish evidence that, in the 'Early Church' the priest faced east and did not stand behind the altar to face the people - this is yet another thing the 1960s got wrong! Up-to-date liturgists agree that Moreton was right, and his work is quoted in the newer books that are coming out especially in the RC Church.

Another memory of Dr Jalland in the post this morning! A generous American friend, Professor Tighe of Mullenburg University, has found and sent me a secondhand copy of a book J wrote in 1944 on the Church of South India scheme (the flawed idea of setting up a church in which Anglican priests and protestant ministers were treated as equivalent). That whole controversy, of course, is now more than fifty years in the past, and browsing through the book is a strangely 'retro' experience. But 'South India' is in a funny way very much like the 'WomenPriests' controversy, particularly in this: in both cases those pushing for uncatholic innovation start off with the conclusion - they know what they want - and then they fudge, twist, distort, suppress, invent evidence (historical and theological) in order to prop up the idea they were determined to promote in the first place. Even worse than the fact that Catholic theology goes out of the window is the fact that a plain respect for truth gets ditched.

A Sermon preached at the Licensing of Fr John Hunwicke as Priest in Charge of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford

Bishop Andrew's sermon can be accessed via the See of Ebbsfleet website

My version

O quam grata per quam data nova mundo praemia
et aperta fide certa regna sunt caelestia;

Quos dolores et angores tua sensit anima
cum in crucem suum ducem gens levavit pessima!

Corde tristi suscepisti passionis gladium
cum irrisum et occisum aspexisti filium;

Sed quam laeta es effecta die statim tertia
rex cum fortis victae mortis protulit indicia:

Nec narrare quivis clare tuum possit gaudium
quando maestis tulit testis fratribus solatium...

(1)

Like all right-thinking people, I hope well of the deliberations between members of certain dikasteries, and representatives of the SSPX. Anything they can do to throw light on the conciliar texts, and especially upon the odder among them, will be a gift to the Universal Church. Though mind you, if the SSPX had had the benefit of our waspish Anglo-Catholic sense of humour, they would have put on the table the Question of the Implementation of Sacrosanctum Concilium. They would have demanded a time-table for the putting into effect of what the council actually did mandate in the field of Liturgy. For example: the Council required that all clergy (except for a few individual cases individually dispensed by their bishops) say the Office in Latin. When, SSPX could have asked, is that to be enforced?

But there is a broader question than that of textual minutiae which, sooner or later, will have to be grasped: the matter of discerning between Councils. Because a view of history suggests that not all councils have been equally significant, either in their treatment of the problems of their own days, or in the value of the legacy they have bequeathed to subsequent generations.

This is a difficult time to go in with all guns blazing on that topic. Two quite different motives exist for the over-estimation of councils: firstly, the view of some Orthodox that it is in councils that the Magisterium of the Church is uniquely discerned. Orthodox might forgive us Latins for an occasional suspicion that the prominence assigned to councils in some Orthodox ecclesiologies has something to do with needing an alternative to set against the Papacy. And Anglicans will recall Gregory Dix's insistence that, compared with the operation of the Roman Primacy, councils are johnny-come-latelies which have a slightly sinister connection with the growth of Caesaro-papism. We also tend to wonder why, if Orthodoxy is the Church and councils are so important, Orthodoxy itself seems to do so superbly well, in bad times and in good, without councils, and has done for so many centuries. I might go further: the glory days of Byzantine Christianity lie, at least arguably, in the period since it ceased to hold or receive 'Ecumenical' Councils. Don't accuse me of a crude attack on Orthodoxy: I am perfectly aware of Orthodox articulations of the Faith which avoid all the arrows that I have just let loose. But I think some more reflective Orthodox might concede to me that there are Orthodox polemicists, just as there certainly are Western apologists, who do promote over-simplifications.

The second factor which has led to an excessive estimate of Councils is the modern superstition that there is something God-given about Democracy. While many Orthodox may be conciliarists, they are conciliarists because they see councils as bulwarks of Tradition and of orthopraxy. But the Modern Churchperson is likely to see councils as an admirable simulation of secular democracy and as a way of making the Church vulnerable to the infections and corruptions of the Zeitgeist: in other words, the Modernist is likely to favour councils for a reason diametrically opposed to that which makes them attractive to some Orthodox.

But it is not my intention to attack Orthodox - I'm truly sorry if I have made any Orthodox irritable - or even Modernism, but to have a look at some characteristics of councils (particularly Western councils) and to suggest a discernment between councils ... not all of which, I may suggest, have been particularly beneficial either to their own age or to posterity, or have had a long-term effect upon the Church. One can obediently agree that those councils deemed Ecumenical by the Magisterium really were ecumenical, and that any de fide propositions they imposed under anathema are to be accepted with divine and catholic faith ... without seeing each and every council as a particularly good thing or as a particularly significant thing for the future life of theChurch.

And such a hermeneutic of councils must, in the broadest sense, have a relevance to our estimation of the place Vatican II has in the Church of 2011.

(2)

Councils have, like popes, have included some rum individuals among themselves. But perhaps I should begin by distinguishing between Dogmatic Councils and those whose dogmatic pretensions have been rather limited. So: as a Latin, I would see something normative about the first Seven Councils, which established orthodox belief with regard to the Blessed Trinity and the Hypostatic Union. But even here, the closer up you bring the microscope, the more some ragged edges tend to appear. Did Nicaea I end in 325 ... or was there another session in 327? Are we sure that its requirement of Standing as the posture for prayer in Eastertide has always been regarded as binding? How edifying were the proceedings of ... e.g. ... the Fifth Ecumenical Council?

Again, as a Latin, I would see the Councils of Trent and Vatican I as similarly dogmatic councils, laudably addressing the errors of their times, defining the truth for their own time in a way that is also definitive for all time. But when you look at some of the earlier Western medieval councils ... well, it can't be denied that they did address the issues of their day. But not all those issues are of lasting value to the Church. Medieval Councils were often, obsessively, concerned with the recovery of the Holy Land. Even if we disregard the mere details of their enactments and fall back on a rather generalising acceptance of [Anglican jargon] "the trajectories" which they suggested, or, to use a different phrase [RC jargon] "the Spirit of the Councils", we are in trouble: who now advocates ... even in theory ... the recovery of the Holy Land from the Jews and the Moslems by the military powers of Christian Europe (whoever they may be)? How important did the Deposition of the Emperor remain to the Church after Lyons I ... at which council, incidentally, there were fewer than 150 bishops, and those mainly from Italy, Spain, and France?

In 1308, the Council of Vienne concerned itself with the Templars. Historians are far from agreed that these gentry were guilty of sodomy and of the other crimes of which they were accused. But even if they were, would even the most doctrinaire supporters of the 'Spirit of the Council (of Vatican II)' give whole-hearted backing to the 'Spirit of the Council (of Vienne)': which would have to include the desireability of burning sodomites at the stake? How genuinely and permanently useful to the Universal Church was the commissioning of Philip IV to go on Crusade - a Crusade which he never discharged, although he did retain the tithe raised for that Crusade, as well as most of the Templars' property?

Perhaps a Council which lurched around Europe in the fifteenth century raises the most interesting questions. Convoked at Basle, how many of its sessions are 'ecumenical'? Theological historians disagree. It is best known for its sessions at Forence which resulted in unity (1439) with Byzantium. But this unity did not survive the Fall of the Great City in 1453 ... so it was a union even briefer than the Union which was 'secured' at Lyons II in 1274. Finally, this Council was transferred to Rome, where little is known of its activities. How rubustly central to the life of the Church is a Council with regard to which the experts cannot agree which of its sessions were authentic, the date of whose conclusion is unrecorded, and whose final decrees, if there were any passed in its later sessions, have been lost?

Those whose conciliarist enthusiasms lead them to an exaggerated regard for Vatican II seem blithely, absurdly, unaware of the preposterous historical conclusions to which their views would lead them ... were they but consistent.

Let me be blunt about this. There are strictly dogmatic Councils, the texts of which are admirably punctuated by anathemas. These are permanently, objectively, a part of the church's fundamental dogmatic structure, so that those exercising a teaching ministry should be able to give the most willing, enthusiastic, assent to them. But the other Councils ... they, I suggest, gradually merge into the background and, largely forgotten even by theologians, become simply part of the General Mind of the Church; a process which invoves a degree of weeding-out and corporate forgetting, as what is less valuable in their enactments is quietly, sometimes mercifully, erased from the record. Not that I exclude the possibility that they may include in their texts elements which will be permanently fruitful for the Church; elements which in a process of Reception the Church will discern.

(3)

Vatican II met for the first time in 1962. It set out to address the 'issues', 'concerns', of 1962. It did not ... pray forgive me for stating something so obvious ... get to work on what had been the needs of fifty years before: the year, say, of 1912.

So it did not deal with the Modernist Crisis or the question of the Papal States. Of course not. Vatican II is situated in the aftermath of two major wars which happened after 1912; in the period when Europe was just recovering its self-confidence after the disasters, (plural) holocausts, privations, of the period 1914-1945. It attempted to deal with the agenda of its own period: whatever else could it have done? Had it attempted to revisit and relive the controversies and talking-points, the problems and anguishes, of 1912, it would have been laughed out of court before it even began its deliberations. Both those who welcomed its convocation with exuberant joy, and most of those whose reaction was more guarded, would have combined in 1962 to describe the agenda of 1912 as a time-wasting irrelevance.

I again venture to test your patience with another statement of the obvious: I have pointed out that the world of 1962 was a very different world from that of 1912; that the Church of 1962 was a very different Church from that of 50 years before. And, in 2012, we shall be 50 years later than 1962. And I do not think that the changes, both in the World and in the Church, will have been any less significant in these fifty years than they were in the fifty years between 1912 and 1962.

Quite apart from minor details such as resurgent Islam, the Church now faces, at least in "the West", an aggressively secularised World. And this secularism is much more inimical than the secularism of the century after the French Revolution. That earlier secularism left largely intact certain ethical and social assumptions inherited from the Judaeo-Christian past. It has been well - and often - said that Western Society was living off the moral capital of its past. But the world of 1962 was a world which was on the cusp of passing from this sub-Christian culture to an aggressively Anti-Christian ideology. And Vatican II seems to have been totally unaware of this significant fact. Moreover, we were on the very edge of a precipice in matters of sexual ethics. The Pill was posing its questions; was presenting itself as a modest advance which, without even corrupting the structure of the sexual act in itself, would enable nice and responsible married people to Plan their Families in a convenient way. Of course we cannot blame the Council Fathers for not realising that in fact this was the beginning of an era in which the entire structure of sexual morality, as shared by Christians, adherents of most other major religions, and even the great bulk of the post-Christian citizens of Western Europe and North America, was about to become the victim of a lethal and very successful onslaught. The Fathers did not come to Rome equipped with crystal balls; I am not in the blame-game. But it remains a fact of history that they did not, in any of their teaching or any of their enactments, prepare the Church for the cultural onslaught which it was about to face. The Pill itself was relegated to a footnote explaining that this question was being left to the Holy See. Whether this happened because the Fathers lacked the courage to face the problem, or because the Roman Pontiff did not trust them to do so (I think each of those narratives could be made to stand up and run), the fact is that the Council gave no guidance.

And the Fathers had no inkling of the Paedophile Priest crisis. If one takes "Spirit of Vatican II" in its usual sense of something which, neither mandated nor envisaged by the Council, resulted from the fashions of the conciliar milieu (Benedict XVI has pointed out the plausibility of connecting it with the systems of relative and situational 'non-absolute' ethics taught at the time), then that crisis is very much actually a part of the Spirit of Vatican II.

And, as we know only too well, the next item on the Enemy's agenda was to be the confusion of the whole subject of gender. Questions of 'same-sex unions', and of the 'ordination' of women, are among the most obvious symptoms of this revolution. Again - and it is fact, not blame, that concerns me - the Second Vatican Council did absolutely nothing to prepare and to arm the Church for what lay ahead of her.

(4)

Vatican II was a validly convoked Ecumenical Council, a Sacrosanctum Concilium of the Whole Church. If it had chosen to do so, it could have defined dogmas de fide to which (Papal assent having been given) any and every Catholic would have been obliged to give the complete assent of Divine Faith. Laws, canons, which it enacted ... if it did ... bind the faithful for a long as they remain unrepealed by lawful authority or, through desuetude, cease to bind. Its pronouncements command respect, religiosum obsequium, just as those enacted by the Council of Vienne in 1311, did in 1361 and, for that matter ... I presume ... still do.

All this is compatible with certain other propositions. For example: that it would have been better unconvoked; that it did no good; that it encouraged, unwittingly, heterodox tendencies which have had a baleful effect upon the Church ever since. I do NOT wish, in this piece, to advance, attack, or defend, any of those propositions. The proposition which I now have in mind is a little different: that Vatican II is History; that its relevance is Not For Our Time, fifty years later, any more than its relevance was for fifty years previously. Vatican II itself claimed to speak to the World of its own time: fair enough; that time was not our time, is not our time.

Vatican II, like so many of its predecessor councils, is obsolete or, at the very least, obsolescent. Yes, there are elements in its texts which are well put and will have continuing value and use. But it did not foresee many of the the major problems of our age and, therefore, did not give us guidance for getting through them. Its silly optimisms are no more relevant to our very different, much harsher, age than is the proccupation of so many medieval councils with "Just-One-More-Crusade". The notion that it was some sort of super-council which displaced and replaced  - or even simply relativised - the Councils which preceded it is, in my view, a heresy: because it disregards Councils which did, dogmatically, bind, in favour of a council which did not even claim to bind. Worse even than heresy, it is historical twaddle.

Emphasis on Vatican II has a number of unfortunate side-effects. It means that other, worthier, councils are ignored; and, in saying this I am not only thinking of Trent ... and not even of the Synod of Bethlehem. I wonder if you remember the striking ... mind-blowing ... assertion of Cardinal Ratzinger that the West needs to receive the "fundamental lines of the theology" of the Council of Moskow in 1551. And I am far from sure that the Latin Church would come to much harm if it humbly, prayerfully, set itself to assess the teachings of the 'Palamite' councils of the fourteenth century as they bear on the central Christian mystery of theosis.

And the fetichising of Vatican II distracts attention from the real and significant and valuable actions of the Roman Magisterium, which deserve so very much better than the sneers directed at them by illiterate fools. Humanae vitae and Ordinatio sacerdotalis, slender volumes, are worth more than all the paper wasted at Vatican II. Documents of the CDF, keeping up with the errors proposed in areas of ethics by the World's agenda, represent the locus to which perplexed modern Catholics should turn for teaching and guidance.

Byzantine Christians have an elegant custom of keeping, a few days after a major festival, a Leave Taking of that feast. I rather think that 2012 would be a good year for an official Leave Taking of Vatican II (with either a solemn EF Requiem or a patriarchal concelebration of the Liturgy of S John Chrysostom - propers as on Orthodoxy Sunday - in S Peter's?). In practical terms, it is high time that we all stopped seeking help in the yellowing pages of Abbot's not-particularly-good translation of its documents. "Leave taking" would of course include a prudent discernment and recovery of what is continuingly valuable in the texts of the Council.

It is in this context that I view the dialogue between the Vatican and SSPX. I wish it well, very well. But it is really a little bit like the old ARCIC dialogues between Rome and Anglicans ... painstakingly and painfully going over the old controversies of a moribund past in purblind ignorance of the actual problems in the world outside the seminar-room windows. It is all thoroughly worthy and admirable; it is even quite fun to contemplate their lengthy verbal convolutions; for the people who like this sort of thing, this is precisely the sort of thing that they like. But it is of rapidly diminishing relevance to anything real.

If I had any influence with either the Roman dikasteries, or the SSPX, which I don't, I would advise both sides to stop taking this whole business so painfully seriously; to give each other a broad wink across the negotiating table; to drink deep together in whatever vintages the dikasteries keep in their cellars; and to sign up to some cheerful ARCIC-like semantic fudge which would enable the Holy See to get on with the urgent and joyful task of erecting SSPX Ordinariates all over the world. Droves of them. Ordinariates is the Future. Fresh Expressions of Church, as the dear old C of E used to say.

Where have the Gesimas gone?

Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium, Paragraph 107:

The liturgical year is to be revised so that the traditional customs and discipline of the sacred seasons can be preserved

Well, the pre-Lent Season of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima somehow seems to have missed out on that.

or restored to meet the conditions of modern times; their specific character is to be retained

The pre-Lent Season certainly had a specific character. It entered the Liturgy at a time when Rome had been sacked ... have I got this right ... some seven times; catastrophic floods had, as they still do in some parts of the world today, led to typhoid; the Lombards were relocating the population of Latium to the slave-markets of the North. So the Bishop and people of Rome resorted to penitential supplication in the three basilicas of the three patrons of Rome, Ss Lawrence, Paul, and Peter, which stood like fortresses at the approaches to the city. They prayed in penitence, seeing their calamities as the punishment fo their offences, begging deliverance. As Dr Cranmer translated the ancient Septuagesima collect:

O Lord, we beseech thee favourably to hear the prayers of thy people: that we, who are justly punished for our offences; may be mercifully delivered by thy goodness for the glory of thy Name.

Has the world changed much? Has the theme of the Gesimas lost any of its topicality? Is there any reason for the Roman Rite to continue to deny its worshippers these instructive and relevant Sundays, which it would be so easy to restore

so that they may duly nourish the piety of the faithful.