Bishop Richard Williamson

Yes, I obviously hadn't read enough of him when I wrote the first edition of that rash post. I had found myself in some sympathy with what he said about the risks of an attack on Iran precipitating a third world war; and it had occurred to me, before he wrote his piece on praying for the Jews, that excluding Jews from the preaching of the Gospel would itself be an act of antisemitism. I accept that my correspondents have been more careful than I was; that their accounts of his views are better researched than mine was; and that, to put it mildly, the gentleman has said some strange things. I should have been more specific in what I wrote. Although my words were not exactly an endorsement (I did use the terms iffy, dodgy, barmy) I do realise that the levity of my flippant tone was ill-advised. Sorry. I'll try to grow up.

ORDO UPDATE

It seems logical occasionally to use this blog for updates on the ORDO (Order for the Eucharist and for Morning and Evening Prayer) which I compile annually; which gives ample information for doing things in church - calendar, readings, exegesis - according to the modern Roman and Anglican rites, interpreted in a traditional way. (It is published by Tufton Press and the ISBN for the 2008 edition is 978-1-85311-796-1.)

The first ORDO UPDATE: yesterday I saw in Blackwells a volume (Anglican) called Common Worship: Festivals. Possible purchasers should be warned that it contains two types of material: (1) Stuff already authorised by the General Synod; so, if you've already got the basic Common Worship, you won't find any new authorised material. (2) Stuff composed by the Liturgical Commission and recommended by the bishops but not actually authorised for use. It is provided for the officiating minister to use in accordance with canonical his right to make, on his own authority, changes which are not of substantial importance. Thus, this stuff has no more legal authority than what a priest might draft himself or borrow from, for example, the Roman rite, the Syro Maklankara Rite, or whatever.

Frankly, I don't like the contents of this book. Modern Anglican Liturgical Commissions rarely provide material from such sources as the ancient Roman Sacramentaries; they have too much self-confidence to miss the chance of composing a lot of verbose and pretentious stuff themselves. For example: this volume provides a lot of Prayers At the Preparation of the Table. This could have been an opportunity to offer translations of Orationes super Oblata from the early centuries. But did they, hell? Even for Corpus Christi, they couldn't bring themselves to use or adapt that wonderful prayer by S Thomas A, in which we ask the Lord to grant his Church the gifts of unity and peace which are mystically designated under the eucharistic elements.

Best to wait for the new translation of the Roman Rite to be authorised.

CHARTA AND TENEBRAE

More about the Charta (see previous blog) in Fire and light in the Western Triduum: their use at Tenebrae and at the Paschal Vigil; by A J Macgregor; pub The Liturgical Press; ISBN 0-8146-2066-3.

END OF THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

Hooray for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith! I used to say that quite often, but this is the first time I've said it since my favourite dicastery came under new management. Baptism 'conferred' with any other formula than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is to be deemed, not doubtfully valid, but certainly invalid. CDF has said so.

The reasons for this decision are, of course, obvious to students of the New Testament. As the 'Name' of the First Person is Father (witness most of the New Testament and especially John 17), and his Son is his Son, non-gender-specific substitutions ('Creator, Redeemer ...' or whatever) clearly represent indicate initiation into something other than Christianity. But the ecumenical implications of this are enormously important and need to be taken account of immediately.

Not that the CDF was trespassing on the territory of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity. The decision was necessary because errant clergy within the RC Church have been messing around with this feminist bilge. But if Fr Naughty O'Sullivan cannot validly confer the sacrament by such a formula, neither, obviously, can non-RC ministers. And my suspicion is that such hanky panky has been going on for some time in some Anglican circles and, probably, all the more so among non-conformists. It is also obvious that although, predictably, some RC clergy have been doing it, it is likely that the disciplinary structures of the RC Church will be more able to restrain such abuses within the Roman Communion than outside it. A decade ago it was reported that the woman dean of an Anglican cathedral 'baptised' using some such formula; a couple of months ago, television appeared to show a (male) priest in Sussex baptising 'in the name of the Spirit'. And, while we're on the subject of baptismal validity, I supect that protestant ministers cannot be relied on to use adequate matter; I have seen on television a presbyterian minister 'baptising' by marking the forehead of a baby with her damp thumb.

Two implications. Firstly, I imagine it would now be prudent praxis when people enter the RC Church not to assume that non-Catholic baptism is valid. Either inquiries could be made into how baptism was conferred at a given time by a particular minister, or given the practical problems involved in that, Baptism could be conferred sub conditione, just as it used to be before the ecumenical movement. Perhaps this is even more necessary with regard to baptisms since, say, 1990 ( before when protestants were more inclined to operate on the endearing old protestant principle that if our Lord commanded something in the text of Scripture he should be obeyed). Secondly, and more broadly, we should remember that the Ecumenical Movement is based on the notion that all Christians share a common baptism. That assumption cannot now be made. Just as adherents of the New Religion insisted on Women Priests although this created doubt about the ordination of a great percentage of those in the Anglican ministry and accordingly ruptured communion within the Anglican family and soured relations with the ancient churches, so they are now introducing the same doubts into the practice of Baptism. Their attitude, in the latter as well as in the former case, is that their novel dogmas are so peremptorily important that they must be given immediate effect however grave the effect is on what used to be considered the imperative of Christan Unity.

Has an important moment of truth now arrived? I do hope so.

THE EVEN MORE EXTRAORDINARY FORM

It has been pointed out by several experts that our Holy Father pulled a neat dodge by making the Tridentine Rite an extraordinary form of the Roman Rite rather than a separate rite. Had he made it a separate rite, it would have been necessary for priests of the Latin Church to be given special permission to celebrate it; just as they need special permission to celebrate, say, the Syro Malankara Rite. By making it clear that there are two forms of the Roman Rite, he cut through all the red tape which would have impeded clergy from using it.

But there is a third form of the Roman Rite: the Anglican use of the Roman Rite, used in the US by former Anglican parishes. This was set up with massive encouragement by ... no less a figure than Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. It uses The Book of Divine Worship, which is in effect the Anglican Book of Common Prayer with Dr Cranmer's heterodox Eucharistic prayers replaced by, for example, a 'Tudor English' translation of the Roman Canon familiar from its use in Anglo-Catholic Altar missals of the pre-Concilar period (incidentally, it is not Coverdale's translation).

This form of the Roman Rite, of course, overlaps intriguingly with the Tridentine Rite. Most of its Mass Popers, being taken from the medieval English Sarum Rite, have the same Collects, Epistles, and Gospels as the Tridentine Rite - although in the period post Trinitatem there is some dislocation, inherited from Sarum. Earlier generations of Catholic Anglicans supplemented the Prayer Book by adding Introits, Secrets, etc., from the Roman Missal and the'English Missal, still in print, represents the final flowering of this tradition and offers a splendid means of saying the Tridentine Masss in superb English.

So, if my Devon friend Fr Peter Morgan, ordained in the SSPX and latterly offering a dual ministry, one to an Anglican Papalist congregation and the other to a Tridentinist group, invited me to preach at the latter celebration, a sermon written for my BCP congregation at Broadwood Widger 20 miles to the north, would fit. In this blog, I can kill two birds with one stone by commenting on the Tridentine propers: bird 1 being adherents of SSPX or FSSP; bird 2 being the Prayer Book Society. I used to explain to the probably bemused folks of Broadwood Widger that their closest allies were SSPX, and that Benedict XVI was the first pope ever to be a Prayer Book enthusiast.

I very much hope that both of the minority forms of of the Roman Rite will have a great future. As far as the Book of Divine Worship is concerned, it has one problem in its present form. It assumes as its base an American version of the Prayer Book. For the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite to spread, I would suggest the following methodology: a decree providing (1) that certain specified versions of the Prayer Book (and Common Worship and English Missal) authorised in particular Anglican provinces were hereby authorised but (2) with their Euchristic prayers replaced by the formulae herein provided and (3) with certain supplementary provisions (e.g. for December 8; August 15, etc. etc.).

Such a provision would not only be useful for Anglican groups entering into full communion with the Holy See, but would undoubtedly influence the worship of those whose unity with Rome was still impaired.

Oxfordblogging

The Oxford Newman Society's colloquium on blogging was great fun; indeed, what a splendid body that society is. How fortunate the Catholic Chaplaincy is to have such a strong, intelligent group with praiseworthy views on everything; one of two bright beacons (the Pusey House congregation is of course the other) in the University (or am I being unfair to leave out the Oratory and Blackfriars?). And how fortunate Oxford is to be so rich in Catholic blogs. I learn a lot from that highly literate and engaging blog, massinformation, run by three Catholic Anglican seminarians. And, of course, there is the New Liturgical Movement to keep us updated on everything truly progressive in liturgical matters; and that's not all. Those with an interest in Dominican liturgy and/or the Anglican Book of Common Prayer can this week hear the great chant Media Vita , sung during Lenten Compline in the Dominican and Sarum (medieval English) rites and incorporated by Dr Cranmer into the Anglican funeral service (it is to be sung by the clerks, or else said, while the body is made ready to be laid into the earth). It can be heard on another great blog, Godzdogz. I wonder if anybody has ever thought of using this Dominican version and melody at Anglican funerals? It would make a lovely change from that nonsense from Scott-Holland about how Death is Nothing, which so many of the bereaved have heard at other funerals that the officiating priest is repeatedly persuaded into allowing it again ... thereby compounding the problem.

It was good to hear Fr Zed; knowledgeable about the Inside liturgical history of the last couple of decades and with his fingers on many pulses internationally. He left us with a strong sense of the grip Pope Benedict has on the cultural life of the Church: in the last year we really have turned a corner. As an Anglican, I found myself thinking: in the late 1960s and thereafter, as the RC Church lurched in the wrong direction in so many areas but especially the liturgical, Anglicans, and not least Catholic Anglicans, deemed it the proper thing slavishly to adopt each newly minted absurdity. Now that things are getting back on the rails in Rome, will the Anglican faith-community follow healthy leadership as readily as then it did the unhealthy? Many of our younger Catholic Anglican clergy are already doing so; but what about the dominant gerontocracy?

A jolly good supper, too, cooked by Mr President Yaqoub himself.

Prayers for Jews: new and old

So, of course, the Holy Father has resisted the clamour to rewrite the Good Friday prayer for the Jews according to a racist agenda; those who believe that the Jews alone among all the races of the world should be excluded as a matter of principle from the saving grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ will find little comfort in the prayer he has composed. If omnes homines are called to recognise Christ as Saviour, it would be preposterous if that privilege were denied to His own race. And, happily, the Pontiff has introduced a reference to S Paul's teaching in Romans that, as the fulness of the Gentiles is gathered in, so that people also, to whom God promised that his Covenant would not fail, will turn back to Him.

From an Anglican perspective, perhaps two points can be made. The Anglican equivalent of the 'Tridentine' Rite is the the Prayer Book of 1662, which is still the normative rite of the Church of England, especially in the doctrinal sense. It has been amended since 1662 (one recent change is the removal of the ban on ordaining ordinands who don't know Latin), but its Good Friday prayer, summarising the last three of the old Orationes sollemnes, has been left unchanged. It runs: O merciful God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, and willest not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live: have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, and take away from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd ... I wonder why those who made such a kerfuffle about the 'antisemitic' nature of the Tridentine Rite have never turned their catterwauling attention to the Anglican Rite. What a shame it is that Anglicanism is now not even held in enough regard to be unfairly attacked.

My other point is a trifle more literary. The ancient Solemn Prayers were, as the great Anglican student of the classical Romamn Rite G G Willis pointed out, composed with careful attention to cursus: the system whereby the final words of clauses bore rhythms, derived from pagan Roman rhetoric, designed to make their public declamation sonorous and elegant (Willis used this discovery to date the prayers). In the 'Benedictine' prayer, the first clause-end has the rhythm veritatis veniant - which is not a recognised clausula. The final clause, salvus fiat, is also irregular; unless one 'scans' it Israel salvus fiat ... hurrying over the word salvus ... which would allow us a respectable velox.

I am unsure what dogmatic conclusion to draw from this.

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.