They must have been anxious for weeks; waking up in the night worrying about some detail they might have forgotten. But the Oratory clergy have triumphed, for now Oxford is, although for less than 24 hours, a shrine of the Little Flower. The Oratory received the reliquary of S Therese of Lisieux this evening with enormous panache; rose petals descended as some hefty Sixth Formers carried her in; the organ pealed; we sang a vernacular hymn; then the Oratory clergy sang Solemn Vespers with what I take to be the local propers (proper hymns and all) of S Therese according to the old Breviary; First Vespers, so the booklet proclaimed, of a Double of the Second Class (so the bonus is that we go retro to the usages of Pius XII!). The occasion was really rather unEnglish ... the crowds, the fervour ... but at the heart of it was that very Anglican liturgical style which the Oratories of dear S Philip carry off so well.
I have just reread Mgr Ronnie Knox's translation of the History of a Soul, and I feel in no doubt that the decision to make S Therese a Doctor (Doctrix?) of the Church was inspired. She was such a joy-filled young woman - no Protestant preoccupation with sin - who writes in the most natural (not naive) way imaginable about the science of collaborating with Grace to show the World the Love of Christ.
I am skipping this evening's novus ordo communion service at the Oratory in favour of their EF Sung Mass tomorrow at 8.30 a.m. (after my own 7.30 Mass at S Thomas's). And I pray S Therese to excise my innate malevolence and help me to love God and neighbour in the details of my own life.
7 October 2009
6 October 2009
Beatification
As I write this, we do not yet know the arrangements for the Beatification of John Henry Newman. Will it be in Rome, as beatifications commonly were in recent pontificates, or will it happen in England? Will it be done by the Holy Father or by a local Archbishop? One of the most interesting changes made by Benedict XVI was the localising of many beatifications. And this is in itself a good example of Benedict's way of working and of his understanding of a hermeneutic of continuity.
Misunderstandings can arise from an assumption that beatification is just a step to canonisation, just as the diaconate is (in popular but mistaken understanding) just a step to the priesthood. Beatification is, on the contrary, a refinement of an arrangement always implicit in 'Saint-making': the distinction between a local cultus and a universal cultus. Often the movement from the former to the latter was a gradual process with popular input, as pilgrims and tourists transported reports of sanctity (and sometimes relics) around the Christian world. Most strikingly, a Middle Eastern Martyr of whom little is known became the Patron Saint of England.
Beatifications were the actions of the local Church until quite late. That erudite pontiff Benedict XIV wrote a classical work on Saint-making and recorded the beatification, in 1603, of Blessed (later Saint) Boniface of Lausanne by the Archbishop of Malines. Soon after this, beatification was restricted to the Roman Pontiff as part of that centralisation which followed the Counter-Reformation. But another fact which also might sound strange to us is the low-key informality of beatification in those days. Pronouncements were not made to a crowd of people at a fever pitch of pious excitement; the beatifying authority simply issued texts for Mass and Office of the new beatus. And originally this permission for cultus was commonly very limited; when S Philip Neri was beatified in 1615 the liturgical texts were only allowed to be used in the Oratorian Church of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome ... not even in other Oratories. The Pope reminded the Oratory of their obligation to celebrate their founder "with restraint". Not until the beatification of S Francis de Sales in 1662 was a beatification done in the modern sense of that word.
John Henry Newman, of course, is a rather special case. He is already a universal figure; and is regarded by many as one of the main sources of all that was good about Vatican II and its 'spirit'. And it would be good if the Holy Father were to perform the Beatification of Newman himself, breaking his own rule of leaving such events to a local Primate acting as his legate. Remember that the RC Church in England does not have a primate (see posts of July 18 and 21). And Newman is in many ways the property both of the English Ecclesial Community which nurtured him and which he transformed before 1845, and of the one he joined. Surely it would be sensible for the Bishop of Rome, who is the common Father of all Western Christians, to perform this act.
Misunderstandings can arise from an assumption that beatification is just a step to canonisation, just as the diaconate is (in popular but mistaken understanding) just a step to the priesthood. Beatification is, on the contrary, a refinement of an arrangement always implicit in 'Saint-making': the distinction between a local cultus and a universal cultus. Often the movement from the former to the latter was a gradual process with popular input, as pilgrims and tourists transported reports of sanctity (and sometimes relics) around the Christian world. Most strikingly, a Middle Eastern Martyr of whom little is known became the Patron Saint of England.
Beatifications were the actions of the local Church until quite late. That erudite pontiff Benedict XIV wrote a classical work on Saint-making and recorded the beatification, in 1603, of Blessed (later Saint) Boniface of Lausanne by the Archbishop of Malines. Soon after this, beatification was restricted to the Roman Pontiff as part of that centralisation which followed the Counter-Reformation. But another fact which also might sound strange to us is the low-key informality of beatification in those days. Pronouncements were not made to a crowd of people at a fever pitch of pious excitement; the beatifying authority simply issued texts for Mass and Office of the new beatus. And originally this permission for cultus was commonly very limited; when S Philip Neri was beatified in 1615 the liturgical texts were only allowed to be used in the Oratorian Church of the Chiesa Nuova in Rome ... not even in other Oratories. The Pope reminded the Oratory of their obligation to celebrate their founder "with restraint". Not until the beatification of S Francis de Sales in 1662 was a beatification done in the modern sense of that word.
John Henry Newman, of course, is a rather special case. He is already a universal figure; and is regarded by many as one of the main sources of all that was good about Vatican II and its 'spirit'. And it would be good if the Holy Father were to perform the Beatification of Newman himself, breaking his own rule of leaving such events to a local Primate acting as his legate. Remember that the RC Church in England does not have a primate (see posts of July 18 and 21). And Newman is in many ways the property both of the English Ecclesial Community which nurtured him and which he transformed before 1845, and of the one he joined. Surely it would be sensible for the Bishop of Rome, who is the common Father of all Western Christians, to perform this act.
5 October 2009
In the Goolies
Have you seen Dr Ratzinger's address to the African Synod? The bit where he refers to the spiritual toxic waste of the First World going to Africa and being a form of colonialism?
He really does have a gift for bowling his rhetoric straight into the goolies of his detractors, doesn't he? This Pontificate truly is fun, isn't it?
He really does have a gift for bowling his rhetoric straight into the goolies of his detractors, doesn't he? This Pontificate truly is fun, isn't it?
3 October 2009
What you want is the English Missal
Christine Mohrmann wanted the development of sacred, hieratic vernaculars; Aidan Nichols envisaged the diffusion of the EF Mass in just such 'high verbnacular'. Anglicans will be panting to point out that Anglicanism developed just such a sacral vernacular in the sixteenth century; and that the English Missal, the Altar Book of Anglican Catholics before they unwisely dumped it to follow slavishly post-conciliar RC liturgy, provides just what Fr Aidan says he wants.
The sixteenth century was a propitious age; liturgical Latin had owed a fair bit of its genius to the Roman passion for legal precision and completeness - and Tudor English had many of the same characteristics. So, if the Canon of the Mass could talk of haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrifucia illibata, Cranmer, a Protestant with a Protestant agenda, could write of a full perfect and sufficient sacrifice oblation and satisfaction. How distant was his theology from the patristic theology of the ancient Canon; yet how close his style! A great Anglican mystagogue, Dom Gregory Dix - let us hope that he is enjoying Chridstine Mohrmann's company on that further shore - who was an Anglican and yet said the ancient Latin words of the Missa Romana most of the days of his priestly life, hit the nail upon the the head when wrote about the Sunday collects of the Roman Rite that " they are lovely things, grave, melodious and thoughtful, and compact with evangelical doctrine - characteristic products of the liturgical genius of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries. Cranmer's reputation as a writer of english prose largely rests on his translations of some seventy of these prayers ... And rightly so, for his are among the very best translations ever made, and his products when he is not working on a Latin original are not always so happy". Only the occasional phrase from the Canon survived the Zwinglian prism of Cranmer's mind, but how those survivors whet one's appetite: not weighing our merits but pardoning our offences for "non aestimator meriti sed veniae ... largitor". And if It is very meet right and our bounden duty is not quite a literal translation of "Vere dignum et iustum est", how exquisitely it echoes the majestic syllables with which the Roman Rite begins the Great Eucharistic Prayer.
The sixteenth century was a propitious age; liturgical Latin had owed a fair bit of its genius to the Roman passion for legal precision and completeness - and Tudor English had many of the same characteristics. So, if the Canon of the Mass could talk of haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrifucia illibata, Cranmer, a Protestant with a Protestant agenda, could write of a full perfect and sufficient sacrifice oblation and satisfaction. How distant was his theology from the patristic theology of the ancient Canon; yet how close his style! A great Anglican mystagogue, Dom Gregory Dix - let us hope that he is enjoying Chridstine Mohrmann's company on that further shore - who was an Anglican and yet said the ancient Latin words of the Missa Romana most of the days of his priestly life, hit the nail upon the the head when wrote about the Sunday collects of the Roman Rite that " they are lovely things, grave, melodious and thoughtful, and compact with evangelical doctrine - characteristic products of the liturgical genius of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries. Cranmer's reputation as a writer of english prose largely rests on his translations of some seventy of these prayers ... And rightly so, for his are among the very best translations ever made, and his products when he is not working on a Latin original are not always so happy". Only the occasional phrase from the Canon survived the Zwinglian prism of Cranmer's mind, but how those survivors whet one's appetite: not weighing our merits but pardoning our offences for "non aestimator meriti sed veniae ... largitor". And if It is very meet right and our bounden duty is not quite a literal translation of "Vere dignum et iustum est", how exquisitely it echoes the majestic syllables with which the Roman Rite begins the Great Eucharistic Prayer.
2 October 2009
Frascati
I see that tomorrow Cardinal Bertone is to take possession of his Cathedral Church at Frascati.
Wasn't that the Church of the Cardinal King, where he conducted the funeral of Charles III?
Wasn't that the Church of the Cardinal King, where he conducted the funeral of Charles III?
30 September 2009
Greek lesson
In the Liturgy of the hours, today we have a hymn for S Jerome written by Dom Lentini himself. It is in a metre called variously the Second (sic my own Mods tutor, the fabulously erudite Margaret Hubbard; it was outside her study door as we queued up for a Homer Class - happiest of days - that I met Pam) or Fourth (sic Wickham) or Third (sic Page) Asclepiad. This consists of three asclepiads (tumtum tumtittytum tumtittytum tytum) followed by a glyconic (tumtum tumtittytum tytum). Those of you who did some Horace are most likely to remember it from Odes 1:33; where Horace frivolously tells the elegist Tibullus not to keep writing daft infatuated poems about Glycera, because she's going for a younger bloke; everybody always seems to go for someone unsuitable.
Like all of Horace's metres, this was used by the Greeks before him. An Oxyrrhynchus papyrus reveals that Alcaeus wrote at least a couple of (probably political) poems in the same metre. In Christian Latin, Rabanus Maurus, a Carolingian poet, may have written Sanctorum meritis and Bellarmine may be the author of Custodes hominum (which you will get in a few days time at Vespers of the Holy Guardianm Angels).
Why did Lentini select this metre? Because there's no other metre used in Christian Latin into which you can fit Jerome - Hieronymus. But it will go into the Second Asclepiad, EITHER (this is the clever bit) if you read the name as short-short-long-short-anceps and elide the e of 'laude' before it, OR, in medieval style, pronounce the Hi- as J- without elision.
Shame Lentini went to all this trouble when, in direct contravention of the explicit mandate of the Council, the use of Latin in the Office was, to all intents and purposes, about to disappear and no John Mason Neale was at hand to translate the Office Hymns into an English which preserved the flavour of the Latin originals.
Like all of Horace's metres, this was used by the Greeks before him. An Oxyrrhynchus papyrus reveals that Alcaeus wrote at least a couple of (probably political) poems in the same metre. In Christian Latin, Rabanus Maurus, a Carolingian poet, may have written Sanctorum meritis and Bellarmine may be the author of Custodes hominum (which you will get in a few days time at Vespers of the Holy Guardianm Angels).
Why did Lentini select this metre? Because there's no other metre used in Christian Latin into which you can fit Jerome - Hieronymus. But it will go into the Second Asclepiad, EITHER (this is the clever bit) if you read the name as short-short-long-short-anceps and elide the e of 'laude' before it, OR, in medieval style, pronounce the Hi- as J- without elision.
Shame Lentini went to all this trouble when, in direct contravention of the explicit mandate of the Council, the use of Latin in the Office was, to all intents and purposes, about to disappear and no John Mason Neale was at hand to translate the Office Hymns into an English which preserved the flavour of the Latin originals.
Did Christians ever worship inthe vernacular?
Writing in 1959, something like a decade before the Novus Ordo Mass was rendered into the impoverished English of Old ICEL, Christine Mohrmann showed that the very nature of Christian liturgical language, from the earliest times, had been sacral and hieratic. "Christians sought for prayer forms which were far removed, in their style and mode of expression, from the language of everyday life. This tendency was combined with a conscious striving after sacral forms of expression". Taking the Didache , that strange early text sometimes admired by liturgists unsympathetic to what were to be the classical forms of East and West, she shows "a linking up with the Old Testament sentence structure and parallelism - such as we find also in the New Testament Canticles and prayers, and ... the introduction of Aramaic and Hebrew elements which clearly indicate a striving after sacral stylisation. There is here an obvious differentiation from the language of everyday life ...". Moving on to the introduction of Latin into the worship of the Church, she demonstrates, as I showed in an earlier post, that the dialect deliberately constructed for this purpose was deliberately archaic and sacral; based upon those pagan Roman formulae of immemorial antiquity by which fields were lustrated or the gods of an enemy city persuaded to desert it. The "monumental verbosity coupled with juridical precision ... wealth of words ... parallelism, alliteration and rhyme ... " in the pagan formulae are to be found, above all, in the Canon of the Mass. " A sacral style has been created which links up with the old Roman prayer of the official Roman cult". One finds oneself idly wondering if the members of old ICEL were ignorant of Mohrmannn's weighty arguments, or whether for their own doctrinal-cultural reasons had decided deliberately to ignore her findings.
26 September 2009
ME!
I feel quite chuffed to see THREE photographs of myself on the NLM blog
See if you can identify me!
See if you can identify me!
24 September 2009
Pope Benedict
The blogosphere suggests that once again Diabolical forces are having a go at the Holy Father.
I've said before and I'll say it again: this is no time for "On the one hand .... on the other ...". The Enemy just loves those who say "Of course there is much good in what he does and says, but ...". It is so clear that Pope Benedict is the front guy whom the forces of Evil are attacking because he is to them the ultimate personal symbol in the world of Christ's Body the Church and of its Tradition; indeed, the representative of Christ himself in a very special way. As so often in the past, those who attack are very commonly motivated by their own sexual incontinence to attack those whose witness, whose very existence, seems a condemnation. Our support must be unambiguous, and our prayers - for example, to the Mother of God of Walsingham - must be real.
While I'm on about it, I'm not keen either on listening to attacks on Patriarch Cyril and his close assistants.
I've said before and I'll say it again: this is no time for "On the one hand .... on the other ...". The Enemy just loves those who say "Of course there is much good in what he does and says, but ...". It is so clear that Pope Benedict is the front guy whom the forces of Evil are attacking because he is to them the ultimate personal symbol in the world of Christ's Body the Church and of its Tradition; indeed, the representative of Christ himself in a very special way. As so often in the past, those who attack are very commonly motivated by their own sexual incontinence to attack those whose witness, whose very existence, seems a condemnation. Our support must be unambiguous, and our prayers - for example, to the Mother of God of Walsingham - must be real.
While I'm on about it, I'm not keen either on listening to attacks on Patriarch Cyril and his close assistants.
Meddling galore
Since Orders depend upon a valid episcopate, where does all this leave Anglicans? I prefer not to answer this question by drawing out the implications of the last two posts, or to investigate the politicking of Cardinal Vaughan in the last years of the nineteenth century. For more than a century we Anglicans had persecuted the heroic young clergy from the Seminaries and cheerfully connived at the horrors of their execution simply 'for priesthood'. The condemnation of our Orders in the Bull Apostolicae curae is our justly deserved punishment for our collaboration in this evil. The bull settles the juridical question of our Orders - Leo XIII described it as hoc caput disciplinae - and we have to live with that and with its consequences. I am prepared to do so and I consider it both charitable and dignified not to criticise those involved in the events of the 1890s. And I have a rooted disinclination to go around saying that Roman Pontiffs have 'got it wrong'.
But one can contextualise it. There has been a recurrent tendency throughout history for bad feeling between Christian groups or individuals to lead to hard words about the orders of other people, rather as when Pope Stephen VII 'annulled' the ordinations of his predecessor (and had his corpse exhumed and tried!). And an episode in Bede gives, in my view, a bit of a hint as to how we Anglicans might conduct ourselves. S Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, told S Chad that he was non rite consecratus; Chad had been consecrated by "Celtic" bishops according to "Celtic" rites. We do not know the rites used by "British" and "Irish" bishops when conveying orders or what S Theodore disliked about them; but Bede does not regard their orders as invalid and there has not been much of a tendency since then to consider that their orders were invalid. Current Roman praxis in Calendar and Martyrology certainly treats the "Celtic" episcopal Saints as truly bishops. But S Chad conducted himself with great humility; S Theodore then ordinationem eius denuo catholica ratione consummavit.
I think most Anglican Catholic priests will be more than happy, when received into Full Communion, to have their orders catholica ratione consummari, and their bishops to offer to recede from episcopal ministry. The Chad Solution!
But one can contextualise it. There has been a recurrent tendency throughout history for bad feeling between Christian groups or individuals to lead to hard words about the orders of other people, rather as when Pope Stephen VII 'annulled' the ordinations of his predecessor (and had his corpse exhumed and tried!). And an episode in Bede gives, in my view, a bit of a hint as to how we Anglicans might conduct ourselves. S Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, told S Chad that he was non rite consecratus; Chad had been consecrated by "Celtic" bishops according to "Celtic" rites. We do not know the rites used by "British" and "Irish" bishops when conveying orders or what S Theodore disliked about them; but Bede does not regard their orders as invalid and there has not been much of a tendency since then to consider that their orders were invalid. Current Roman praxis in Calendar and Martyrology certainly treats the "Celtic" episcopal Saints as truly bishops. But S Chad conducted himself with great humility; S Theodore then ordinationem eius denuo catholica ratione consummavit.
I think most Anglican Catholic priests will be more than happy, when received into Full Communion, to have their orders catholica ratione consummari, and their bishops to offer to recede from episcopal ministry. The Chad Solution!
23 September 2009
Do it yourself
Well, today, for Padre Pio, I used the old Mass of the Stigmata of S Francis, with the new collect for the Saint.
Tomorrow, following what was pre-Conciliar usage at the (Anglican) shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, for her feast I will say the old December Mass pro aliquibus locis of the Translation of the Holy House (omitting the words from the Collect about how it was miraculously placed in the midst of the Church). And I shall use the very beautiful Office for that festival.
Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone.
Tomorrow, following what was pre-Conciliar usage at the (Anglican) shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, for her feast I will say the old December Mass pro aliquibus locis of the Translation of the Holy House (omitting the words from the Collect about how it was miraculously placed in the midst of the Church). And I shall use the very beautiful Office for that festival.
Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone.
21 September 2009
Catullus and the Continuum
I don't keep in touch with the Continuum, whatever that may be, but could friends who do so let me know if it still attacks me? I don't want to know what, if anything, they say, just whether ...
It occurs to me that, for Latinists who have read Catullus (XXXII), the word Continuum might refer to a species of sexual athleticism which is now well beyond an old gentleman like me.
It occurs to me that, for Latinists who have read Catullus (XXXII), the word Continuum might refer to a species of sexual athleticism which is now well beyond an old gentleman like me.
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