Claw-back time?

The BBC website has an interview about Anglicanorum Coetibus with a Mgr Andrew Faley. If this man's attitudes and views have been accurately reported and accurately represent those of his masters ...

SSPP

(This carries on from my recent post on the S Thomas's High Altar.)

There can be no doubt that all right-thinking people regard Fr Jeremy Hummerstone, Vicar of the small Devon town of Torrington, as not only a good thing but a very good thing. He is the epitome of the old-style Anglican Catholic Parish Priest: literate, well-read, acute, and with a laugh never far away. Merton College Oxford was the stable that trained him (and Somerville College produced Clarissa: happy days, when Clergy Wives were good quality girls). I was fortunate enough to get to know him when, during my short six years in Devon, we were members of the clerical society for Catholic Anglicans in the diocese of Exeter, the Society of S Boniface (Mass; exegesis of the Greek NT; lunch; Paper; chat. It is still going strong and still blessed with the sempiternal Fr Michael Moreton). The months we went to Torrington afforded the opportunity, in Torrington church, of praying before the shrine of our Lady of Czenstochowa.

Fr Jeremy has kindly shown me a copy of what I take to be* the elusive first Edition of the English Missal, published with the date 1912 by W Knott, Brooke Street, Holborn. And bound into that volume - in between Holy Saturday and the Ordinary of the Mass - is a quite different volume published the same year, The Music of the Mass, published by the SSPP. The insertion, unlike the rest of the Knott Missal, is in the characteristically and sumptuously Baroque style of SSPP - woodcuts; borders; large print. It is not just the sung bits of the Mass with the chants, but a collection of the1549 rite, the Asperges, the Nuptial Mass, the 1662 rite (with, in what looks to me rather like a joke, under "Canon of the Mass" Dr Cranmer's Prayer of Humble Access interpolated with the rubrics from the Tridentine Missal that go with Te igitur). At the start of the missal, inserted just before the Knott's title page, an additional frontispiece reads just "Missal", with a badge for the SSPP (curiously, not their usual one).

In other words, SSPP piggybacked their material onto the Knott Missal. And the designs embossed on the front and back covers are from the Music (which I last met in Lancing Chapel's Sacristy). I wonder what the relationship was between SSPP and Knott.

Has anybody else come across anything like this?

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*Unlike all other English Missals, it doesn't say which edition it is. So that means it must be the first?

The Western Catholic World

NLM had, yesterday, a pretty feature showing blue vestments - that delightful Spanish custom - in use "in the Western Catholic World". I was afflicted by an ineluctable fantasy that one of the figures portrayed had a curious but striking resemblance to the luxuriantly, exquisitely, Hispanic figure of the Principal of an Anglican seminary not a million miles from here. Nice to know that NLM, unlike some people I could mention, regard us people as authentically Catholic.

Incidentally, the chasuble showed just before the picky of Fr Robin looked, to my untutored eye, distinctly like an example of opus Anglicanum. Does anyone know where it comes from?

Canonists

At the recent meeting in the University Church about Anglicanorum coetibus, a jesuit canonist (I think his name may have been something like Orsy) said that he had searched and searched - but had been unable to discover another example of an ecclesiastical structure such as the "Ordinariates" being subject to a Roman dikastery.

Notoriously, we Anglicans know nothing about canon law. I don't, for example. And since I have a disinclination to be a laughing-stock, I tend to steer clear of subjects in which I do not feel confident ... such as canon law.

But I can't get it out of my mind that the bloke was wrong; because there is a very obvious ... and distinctly interesting ... example, of just such a phenomenon. Isn't there?

Before the "Restoration of the Hierarchy" in 1850, is it not true that the "Vicars Apostolic" who presided over the "Districts" of England were subject to the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide?

Vatican Information Service ...

... carries two interesting pieces preached by our Holy Father on December 8. In one he talks about "the City" with considerable penetration. In the other he speaks about Rupert of Deutz; he says that it was he that first applied the texts about the Bride of the Song of Songs to our Lady.

Presumably this means that the antiphons of Vespers of our Lady are subsequent to Rupert? Anybody out there got more on this?

Feeneyism: I looked at Vatican documents via a link on the Wikipedia article.

More traditionalist than Tradition?

A brief post about a phenomenon that I find a little bit worrying; although perhaps it is inevitable in a situation in which there were fracturings of many continuities in the 1970s which many very admirable people are trying to repair: Being More Traditionalist Than Tradition; making up our 'Traditionalism' as we go along on the basis of insecure or even erroneous foundations. Sometimes, this ubertraditionalism is itself, paradoxically, actually heresy (vide five paragraphs down).

It seems to be part of a new quasi-Orthodoxy that Mass must be celebrated with the priest facing in the same way as his people. It is my own distinct preference. I opposed, in the 1980s, the reordering of Lancing Chapel so that the riddels of the "English" altar were removed. BUT the rubrics of the Missal of S Pius V provide very fully for Mass versus populum. And the Patristic evidence is not in favour of Mass facing away from the people except incidentally as that is a product of saying Mass facing East. Which is what the first millennium really was sold on.

Earlier this year, two very fine blogs, far better than mine, gave totally erroneous guidance on how to say the EF Mass if no-one else is present; and how loud the secreto parts of the EF Mass should be. O'Connell, a painstaking author who reproduces the wisdom of generations of rubricists and, more important, the innumerable decrees of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, gives full information to anyone who takes the trouble to read him. [Ad primum: omit nothing; ad secundum: so as not to be heard by those nearby.]

And Concelebration: on which, this year, I have done two long series because a very interesting author, in a stimulating book (of which I provided a very positive review in New Directions), includes a throw-away footnote in which he dismisses the whole notion of concelebration in the Roman Rite, even in the Rite of Presbyteral Ordination. He gives no evidence and appears to be totally unaware that the magisterium of two popes - both of whom had a reputation for erudition and both of whom wrote centuries before our post-Conciliar ruptures - is perfectly clear about the matter (see my posts). Not to mention S Thomas Aquinas. My posts will also reveal, if you look back at them, my own disquiet about a number of practical aspects as Concelebration has evolved in the last half century. But to deny that the Western Church has any real tradition of Concelebration at all is poppy-cock. Whatever that is.

And some of our Ubertraditionalists also have a very unTraditional view of certain ecumenical matters; they appear, for example, to be unaware of the easy relationships between Latins and Byzantines, especially in the Levant and up to the end of the eighteenth century. It included frequent and unselfconscious "Intercommunion". And when fragments of the Byzantine community sought unity with Rome, it was granted on the basis of acceptance, even, in the 1720s, of the Patriarch of Antioch and his clergy and bishops corporately. Their jurisdiction was confirmed.

A few days ago, a correspondent on this blog brusquely advanced the view that outside the (Roman) Catholic Church valid orders simply do not exist. This may be a terribly satisfying position for a certain sort of mentality, but it goes contrary to the practice of the Church for sixteen centuries. It means that when Roman praxis has, for so many years, allowed an Orthodox priest ... or Coptic ... or an Old Catholic .... who comes into full unity, to be permitted to exercise priestly ministry in communion with Rome, it has been deliberately allowing Christ's Faithful to be deceived with pseudosacraments. It means that when Pope Eugene IV, at the Council of Florence, accepted into unity the whole Byzantine East (except of course those who themselves refused the union), he was deliberately and wickedly accepting as bishops and priests those who in reality were nothing of the sort. This is not Traditionalism; it is either dangerous ignorance or a deliberate repudiation of many centuries of Roman teaching. It is quite simply and unambiguously heresy. Like all heretics, the gentleman concerned should inform himself of what our Holy Mother the Church does teach, and then submit himself penitently to it.

Readers with good memories may remember the tragic figure of the Boston priest Fr Leonard Feeney, who in 1949, did get himself condemned by the Holy Office for a similar heresy involving just this sort of attempt to be more traditionalist than Tradition. He maintained, citing the bull Unam sanctam, that no one would be saved who was not in full visible communion with the Catholic Church ... no nonsense about 'invincible ignorance' or anything like that. He refused to submit himself to what the Magisterium - in the person of Pius XII - actually taught on this point, and eventually incarnated his own paradox by being excommunicated.

And in the next day or two I hope to say a few words about a recent Post by Bishop Williamson of the SSPX.

More on ALL THAT

Recently I wrote about the unpopularity of Nathaniel Woodard. In fact, it has to be admitted that we Anglican Catholics are, like the early Christians, among the most disliked of humanity. The visceral English hatred of Catholicism (if you haven't, despite my urgings, read Dr Dawkins' diatribe against Catholicism - in the Washington Post - you should do so) provides one reason. Englishmen, brainwashed for centuries about Popery, very naturally did not take kindly to walking into their Parish Church and find that the new Vicar had apparently introduced it there. Probably the clergyman concerned showed them the Ornaments Rubric of the Book of Common Prayer, which, if taken plainly and literally, says that the ornaments of the Church and the Minister should be as they were in 1548 - the year before the first Prayer Book came in. They couldn't see the flaw in his logic, although they were convinced that there must be one since what he was saying and doing flew in the face of everything they thought they knew. So another element came into play: the dislike that the Plain Englishman has for the Cleverclogs. Victorian parishes were flooded with rumours that the new 'Ritualist' parson was a "Jesuit in disguise", since, as everyone knew, Jesuits were as amazingly clever as they were totally unprincipled.

And the RC church just up the road didn't like what was going on close by, either. The simple distinction between Catholic and Protestant had suited them very well. A lot of churches became indistinguishable from RC churches; and there were even some in which the entirety of the worship was in Latin and according to the Roman rules. (There were clergy of the C of E who had never said Mass in any other rite that of the Latin Missal; if you spent the first two thirds of your priestly life working up the long cursus honorum from most junior curate to most senior curate and then some years as incumbent in a like-minded church before retiring to a chaplain's cottage attached to some congenial convent, you could do this.) Not a little of the persecution such clergy endured had a lot to do with the local RC bishop complaining to his Anglican opposite number about the "confusion" such churches engendered. Perhaps here we find the genesis of the ease with which the Anglican elite and some of the English RC establishment collude in antipathy towards us.

And now there is yet another gang of jokers on the block: liberal RCs. They can see that we are so much more the real thing than they are; that all the beliefs and practices they are so proud to have jettisoned in the 1960s are alive and well with us. It is not surprising that the Tablet was so cross about Anglicanorum coetibus. This fact is what makes the views of the SSPX clergyman, whose problems with our lack of orthodoxy I quoted recently, so off-centre. Incidentally, I am glad to read that Mgr Fellay entertains quite a different view from that of 'Fr Scott'.

Could it be that at long last we Anglican Catholics have a friend? The old Bavarian gentleman? Let's try to treat him well. We are so unused to having friends that there is the risk of our being somewhat unpractised in our handling of them.

Bulverism

A correspondent wisely reminds us of C S Lewis's essay on 'Bulverism'. You can get to Lewis's original paper via Wikipedia. Bulverism is a phenomenon of which every person should be aware who finds themself* rebutting the logical incoherence of the Zeitgeist.

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*I make no apology for this curious usage.

Anglicanorum coetibus and SSPX

The views of a Fr Scott of the SSPX are brought to my attention by a reader. I agree with most of what he actually says. Where he is off-centre is in simply knowing nothing whatsoever about us. His doctrinal comments are particularly inapposite. We are not heretics. Unlike the Orthodox, whom Fr Scott interestingly thinks are hardly heretics at all, we fully accept all that the Magisterium of the Church has defined de fide, including the decrees of Trent, Vatican I (and Vatican II where it is de fide ... mind you, I think there would be no harm in having one or two clarifications about the Vatican II decree on Religious Freedom; I hope Fr Scott will not condemn me out of hand as a dangerous liberal for this). Is it so wrong for us to accept the Catechism CC as a useful popular compendium of what is taught authoritatively as de fide in the primary Conciliar and Pontifical dogmatic documents and by the Ordinary Universal Magisterium, and to treat things in it which are not so based with the appropriate obedient respect (obsequium) that falls short of acceptance by divine Faith?

I know SSPX has resolutely defended the use of Latin in the Worship of the Western Church, and I admire them for their long and often lonely act of witness. I myself say the Tridentine Mass, in Latin, several times a week. I am aware of other Anglican clergy who are learning it and will use it with enthusiasm. But - just suppose the Holy See authorises for us a version of the Tridentine Rite in 'Tudor' English. Would this really be so terrible? There are examples from before the twentieth century of the Roman Rite being allowed in East European languages. However glorious the Latin language is, is it doctrinally unthinkable for the 'aloud' bits of the rite to be vernacular? Did not the admirable Mgr Lefebvre sign the Conciliar decree on Liturgy which allowed the possibility of some use of the vernacular?

As far as Orders are concerned, Fr Scott may not be aware that since the 1930s, schismatic Dutchmen called 'Old Catholics', whose orders Vatican praxis has always accepted, have been taking part "as aequi-principal consecrators" in Anglican episcopal consecrations. Secret archives which I have seen make clear that this practice was introduced precisely in order to ensure that "even the strictest RC" would not be able to question Anglican Orders in the future (a fact not made public at the time out of a desire not to give RC controversialists evidence for saying "even the Anglicans are doubtful about their own orders"). The Dutch, as they did the Touch, have said, in Latin, that formula from the Tridentine Pontifical which, before the twentieth century, was regarded among commentators and manualists as the form (Fr Scott can rest assured that the Bugninified post-Conciliar Roman Pontifical has not been involved in this process). But in any case, I do not know of any Anglican Catholic bishop or priest who would not be willing to have any doubts about his status set aside by a new 'ordination'. This is what happened, decades even before the Dutch Touch began, when Newman (whom Fr Scott appears to view with approval) went to Rome; he was not convinced that Anglican Orders were invalid - and he records that nobody else in Rome was either - but he submitted to a 'reordination' when he was assured that it was, in the mind of the Church, conditional, although its liturgical form did not make this conditionality explicit.

If we can make the Apostolic Constitution work ... and if SSPX sorts itself out with our Holy Father ... I will be very happy to recommend to my PCC that we welcome SSPX to our altars. Especially Fr Scott. He will not find much evidence of Dr Bugnini in S Thomas's.

Masturbation and all that.

During the happy three decades during which I taught Greek and Latin and Theology at Lancing College in Sussex, and offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass each morning in those most exquisite of surroundings, I did quite a lot of work in the Archives. Our Founder, Nathaniel Woodard, had a most satisfactory habit, not only of keeping every letter he received, but also of preserving the drafts of his replies - so that one could actually follow the workings of his mind as he drafted, added, scratched out, and rethought.

Woodard was one of the most unpopular religious figures of Victorian England. His unpopularity came not, as in the case of the Ritualists, from cultic exoticism. In fact, the College still retains the black stole which represented the limit of his advance in matters of liturgical vesture. No; his problem was that he thought that everybody needed to go to Confession, and he was constantly attacked for the structures by which he attempted to ensure that every pupil did so. And it is clear from the Archives what his reason was: that the sexual urge is immensely strong and can only be controlled by the means of Grace offered in the Catholic Sacramental system. Without it, he clearly believed, pretty well every male, at least if unmarried, was likely to be a habitual masturbater.

In one of his writings, the metaphorical comes perilously close to the physical; he wrote of Victorian culture as drenched in a sea of uncleanness. And herein lay the reason for the loathing he inspired. He called the bluff of the Victorian Gentleman's comfortable (and Pelagian?) self-construction. Victorian culture regarded Masturbation as a very disgusting and sinful thing to do; believed that only the weakest and most contemptible would fall so low. I, of course, so everyone implied, would never sink so far. But as a Victorian gentleman looked into Nathaniel Woodard's eyes, he knew ... that Woodard knew ...

How times change. Woodard knew that the sexual temptation was very strong and that self-abuse was humanly inevitable. They hated him for it, persisting in the delusional cultural conspiracy of the assumption that nice people with clean collars ... like oneself ... did not do it. Now, our culture knows that sexuality is powerful and itself now proclaims that masturbation is very common - and it hates the Christian Tradition for suggesting that there is anything disordered about it.

The one constant is that the children of the Zeitgeist loath Catholic Truth. If we say "X is common but sinful", one century will spit its hatred at us for the first half of the statement, and the next will turn on us in fury for suggesting the second part.

It's none of my business but ...

I expect many of you will have read on Fr Zed about the RC bishop of Calgary and his clever dodge for making trouble with the FSSP about Holy Communion in the mouth. What price 'subsidiarity'!

Didn't the Holy Father, when he issued his motu proprio, assure his Venerable Brethren that there would be a review in three years' time of any problems that arose?

Could it be that this crafty b****r in Calgary is trying to get ammo by deliberately provoking a confrontation in the hope of getting an angry or 'disobedient' response?

BTW, the photo' makes him look just like the moustachioed Low Church Clergyman in Eric Mascall's poem.

Bishop Margot

Apparently the German Lutherans, or some such body, and the Russian Orthodox, were going to have a big Do to celebrate the 50th (or 500th? I neither know nor care) anniversary of their Dialogue, or something. Then the Germans elected a female presiding "bishop", or whatever. Then Archbishop Hilarion said that protocol prevented him from attending. Then the Prods got all huffy and called the whole thing off, or something.

They just don't get it, do they? German Lutherans or English liberals; however much the representatives of the ancient Churches spell things it out to them, they cheerfully go their own (ever so highly principled) way and expect to get away with it. Doubtless the Germans are even now busily blaming the Moscow Patriarchate for welching on ecumenical dialogue and poaching and poor communications and discourtesy and heaven knows what. "Does Moscow any longer take Ecumenism seriously?", I can just hear them whingeing. "This raises serious concerns about whether there is any point in Dialogue". I can just imagine it. Pathetic lot, all of them.

Vivat Cyrillus, sez I. Eis polla ete, Despota.