Can Fr Zed be right?

Fr Zed refers to an occasion when S Augustine "left the pulpit". Well, Fr Zed's doctoral subject was S Augustine, so I ought not to tangle with him. But ... er ... um ... did S Augustine preach from a pulpit???

Exactly

With regard to my post about how the Bishop of Rome is not a Patriarch ... it has been pointed out to me that as long ago as 1961 one Ratzinger demonstrated that
The principle of Patriarchy is post-Constantinian; it has an administrative sense ... the Roman claim understands itself from the original theological motive of the sedes apostolica ...To the same extent that the "New Rome" made unclear the old idea of sedes apostolica in favour of the notion of patriarchy, the "Old Rome"strengthened the reference to the totally different origin and character of its own authority. This authority is in fact totally different from a primacy of honour among patriarchs, because it is situated on a different level, which is completely independent from such administrative concepts.

This is an interesting demonstration of the continuity of Ratzinger's basic theology, contra those who see him as a one-time 'liberal' who Lost The Faith and Sold Out To Conservatism.

As an Anglican, what particularly strikes me is the similarity between all this and the conclusions, as long ago as the 1930s, of Dom Gregory Dix.

Some time ago now, before JP2 became really sick, Cardinal Ratzinger had promised to write, in his then apparently imminent retirement, a preface to an edition I then hoped to produce of Dix's writings on the papacy ...

Ebbsfleet.

Fr Tim Fin(n)e/igan has taken a train from Ebbsfleet to Avignon.

There must be, in this, either a sermon or a joke or both.

Ecumenism

I have just been directed to an Orthodox blog which is refreshingly free from old-fashioned "Orthodox" Romophobia [Romaphobia?]. Try PadreTex.

Other blogs

In response to enquiries: the blogs which I recommended, for those really interested in the evolution of the Roman Rite, were the "St Lawrence's Press blog", which gives you the Roman Rite as it was just before Pius XII's protegee Bugnini began his wrecking career. Then there is "The Tridentine Rite", which gives you what the Missal of S Pius V provides. As you look at the latter blog, you will have to remember that - if the dates appear a trifle strange - this is because they relate to the Julian Calendar. That will explain to you how it could be that last Sunday's First Vespers had to be reconciled with the Second Vespers of S James.

Go for it. The writer has at the finger tips of his mind a body of expertise which is possessed, I suspect, by nobody else in the world. And so many of the misunderstandings of the present age arise from an oversimplified understanding of the evolution of the Roman Rite since the sixteenth century.

I agree with the author of these blogs on most things, and where I don't, it's probably my own ignorance that's in the way. Just one thing ... it's a matter where I get the impression that I have not been able to persuade him of a conviction of my own ... the first modern' and objectionable intrusion into Tradition, long before Pius X corrupted the disposition of the Psalter, was the corruption of the texts of the hymns by Urban VIII in the 1620s. This was symptomatic of the root problem: if a liturgical tinkerer has the weapon of printing at his disposal, it enables him, be he Papa Barberini or Thomas Cranmer or Hannibal himself, to impose his own fads on a whole ecclesial community almost overnight. It is subversive of the whole principle of organic development.

Ash Wednesday is being moved to Tuesday

You don't believe me? Well, pick up your copies of the Editio Tertia Missalis Romani and turn to the tables on page 117 giving the dates for major days over the next few decades. And check the dates of Ash Wednesday in 2012, 2016 ...etc.. You will discover that in the mad, bad world of Novus Ordo liturgical periti, in Leap Years Ash Wednesday occurs on Tuesday. I thought of saving this up on my blog for next April 1 ... but, well, it's not funny, is it?

This piece of daftness first impinged on me when I was compiling my ORDO for 2008, but I thought the mistake there was a one-off misprint. (We are all fallible. The first thing that happens when I open a nice newly printed copy of my own ORDO is that I spot three misprints.) It was only recently, as I did my first Year's Plan for the 2012 ORDO, that it dawned on me that there was a structural error in the tables in Missale Romanum, probably relating to somebody's incapacity to handle the mathematical subtleties of bissextilitas. Silly me. I should have realised that the illatinate incompetents who staff CDW would be innumerate as well ... after all, such people seem to have trouble counting forty days from Easter so as find Ascension Day. (Have I uncovered the real reason why Papa Ratzinger, crafty fellow, put the Ecclesia Dei Commission under CDF rather than CDW? What a mercy it is that Ordinariates also will come under CDF - thanks to the wisdom of the Holy Father.)

This sort of thing is not peculiar to the RCC. When the Anglican Liturgical Commission, under the influence of the self-confident Bubbles Stancliffe*, tried to do some fancy innovatory footwork with the "Epiphany Season", making it like the Easter Season by calling the Sundays of rather than after Epiphany, nobody realised that when January 6 was itself a Sunday, their whole silly game would collapse into lectionary chaos. To be philosophical about all this, it's the result in practical terms of a liturgical culture of discontinuity. When years just roll comfortably on, changing liturgically, if at all, only slowly and organically, problems only rarely crop up and when they do there are seasoned experts in charge with eagle eyes who spot them and make early and accurate provision. When a lot of not-very-clever people with an exaggerated idea of their own capacity for brilliant innovation get their hands on a tiller after redrawing all the maps, the next thing that is going to happen is that they will start trying to navigate their beautifully designed boat across the broad and deep waters of the Sahara.

There was an early example of this in 1955, when the first Bugnini Commission put together a decree 'simplifying' the rubrics. They made such an appalling hash of their job that when those humble, despised, practicioners and workers in the Lord's vineyard, the Compilers of ORDOs worldwide, started trying to give effect to what the Great Men had decided, Rome was inundated with hundreds of puzzled enquiries (dubia). One lot of answers in AAS (47, 1955, 418-419) failed to hold back the avalanche, and they tried then to save face by hiding their next load of corrections away in the pages of Ephemerides Liturgicae instead (70, 1956, 44-49). The entire episode was a foretaste of horrors to come.

As I've explained to you so often before, printing+committees=liturgical disaster.

___________________________________________________________________

*Bubbles Stancliffe is soi-disant Bishop of Salisbury. I put it like that because I am, as far as the See of Salisbury is concerned, a sedevacantist. He was originally one of us; got a mitre after deserting us; then turned nasty against us. In the last General Synod, when the archbishops were making their flawed but well-meaning attempt to create a Canterbury Ordinariate by stealing the Holy Father's idea of shared jurisdiction, Bubbles' contribution was to propose that bishops serving traditionalist parishes should be restricted to solely liturgical functions (he failed ignominiously). He's incredibly High Church in the very worst sense of those words.

Commendation

A very good comment ... if you are interested in the history and process of Liturgy ... in what Joshua has written about the Trinity Preface. Do read it if you haven't already. Come to think of it, this blog owes quite a lot to Joshua's comments. They're usually better than the posts.

Daily daily sing to Mary

There seem to be two translations circulating of Omni die dic Mariae; one attributed to Fr Faber (printed in The Westminster Hymnal and The English Catholic Hymn Book) and one to Fr Henry Eddingston. There is a great similarity in phraseology; any student of the Synoptic Problem will see that there must be a close a relationship between them. Does anyone know what has gone on?

Apostolicae curae: flies in the ointment

Oh dear. The Dutch Tutch plot went wrong.

Firstly, the formula Accipe Spiritum Sanctum which the Dutch Tutchers used, was indeed once regarded as the Form universally among Roman commentators. This was because, by analogy with Baptism, people expected the Form to be words uttered simultaneously with the Matter. And Accipe ... is what the Consecrator actually said while imposing hands. But Accipe is itself quite a late addition to the rite. The true Form should historically be sought in words of the Eucharistic-style Preface sung separately from the Imposition of Hands. In 1947, Pius XII made that clear. And the Tutchers had not say that Preface.

(There is a masterly example of Sod's Law here. Accipe was the Anglican Form for Episcopal Consecration from 1550. Leo regarded it as inadequate qua Form, despite the fact that Roman writers regarded it as the Form of the Sacrament. However, because of the theological consensus that it was the Form, the Tutchers used it (what else, they wondered, were they supposed to use?) in the Remedy-Apostolicae-curae plot. It was then ruled out of court as the Form by Pius XII, not on the grounds of any inherent inadequacy but because the consensus among liturgists had shifted to the belief that the Form should be sought in the words of the venerable and ancient Consecratory Prayer of the Roman Rite. This ancient Prayer was itself subsequently unceremoniously ejected from the Roman Pontifical by Bugnini after the Council because he thought - get this - that it signified the grace of Episcopal Order so much less well than some old oriental Prayer he found under a hedge somewhere and dragged in instead. You couldn't have made all that up, could you?)

The next Fly in this Woodpile arises from the failure of the Anglican bishops who were supposed to be passing on the Tutch to do so in accordance with the protocols. It seems that some of them stopped saying anything out aloud. Thus, even were Accipe to be regarded as adequate, these gentlemen were not dishing out the full works. An element here, too, was that Anglican ecclesiastical lawyers apparently know no Latin. After every Dutch intervention they filled out the Latin protocols with gibberish ... operating on the Lower Third principle that if you make nearly every Latin word end in -i, half of them will be right. I have seen Eric Kemp's set of the Protocols; one of them is made out to say that the Archbishop of Utrecht was himself consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1974 and that he himself on the same day simultaneously consecrated Bishop Eric!

This may very possibly be the reason why the CDF, when Bishop Graham Leonard showed them photocopies of the documents, were underwhelmed. They decided that they could not give his Orders a clean bill of health, but they did concede that there was an element of uncertainty about the application to his situation of Apostolicae curae. So they ordered his ordination to the presbyterate to be sub conditione. However, Bishop Graham used to like to remind people that CDF had not considered the question of his Episcopal Orders but only of his priesthood; he was convinced that the reason for this was that they foresaw that if they considered his episcopal Orders they would find them valid and then be embarrassed by finding that they were in possession of a perfectly formed married bishop with a perfectly formed wife!

Continues.

Anglicans submit to Apostolicae curae

Leo XIII, as a caput disciplinae, required that Anglican Orders be regarded as completely null and absolutely void. Has the Anglican Church submitted to this ruling?

Of course it hasn't; not in a public and formal way. But actions speak louder than words. In a curious sort of way, it has. In the secret Archives of Pusey House here in Oxford are the documents relating to the setting up of the scheme whereby Dutch schismatics, called Old Catholics, whose orders have always in Roman praxis been treated as valid, take part in Anglican episcopal consecrations. And those documents make absolutely and unmistakeably clear that the intention of the scheme was to circumvent Apostolicae curae, so that "the most severe Roman Catholic will find it hard to question the validity of Anglican Orders". The reason why this motive was not made public at the time is fairly obvious. But those documents make it clear. The Dutchman was to act as an Equal Principal Consecrator (not a coconsecrator), imposing both hands together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and to say, aloud in Latin, the words from the Tridentine Pontificale which Roman Catholic theologians at that time universally regarded as being the Form of Episcopal Consecration. The Dutch Tutch was then to be transmitted by the same process until the Dutch Succession had completely permeated the Anglican Communion (as far as England is concerned, it has pretty well done so). Each stage was to be documented by the signing of elaborate Latin protocols. The existence of these complex legal documents, with witnesses attesting that they had seen the details of what was done, are themselves significant; you don't bother with all that sort of thing when somebody is just a coconsecrator.

In a funny old, ramshackle old, entirely Anglican, rather seedy, sort of way, this does constitute a compliance with the disciplinary requirements of Apostolicae curae, doesn't it?

But something then went wrong. Continues.

Apostolicae curae and Benedict XIV

What, you may wonder, happened to the Decree to the Armenians of Eugene IV? Try looking in the index of the CCC; you will not find it. It has been buried. There is a lesson for us here; magisterial documents, even if issued by a Pope with the consent of an Ecumenical Council in a context of making sure that dissidents returning to Full Communion, really do understand the Faith, can quietly evaporate (if you think I'm pulling a fast one there, go and check up how many of the canons of Nicaea are still in situ today).

Eugene IV remained a problem for Latin theologians, not least when historical studies revealed how late the invention of the Porrection of the Instruments was. If it is necessary jure divino, then there are no valid orders anywhere in Christendom. Some theologians resorted to suggesting that the Church, which has the charge of the Sacraments, may have changed the Form and Matter at some time, to make the Porrection into the Matter instead of the ancient Imposition of Hands. The most learned pope of the last half-millennium, Papa Lambertini, aka Benedict XIV, would have none of this theory. He quoted Trent (sessio 21 capitulum 2) against it, and went on "Then, even granted that the Church had the ability to do what we are talking about, it is a completely empty and arbitrary claim that the Church used that ability. Let [those theologians] say where and when, in which century, in which council, by which pontiff, the change of this sort was done. ... But since all the elements, which were contained in the ancient rituals, survive intact, and even now are performed in their holy integrity, nobody will easily believe that those things which formerly were sufficient [i.e. ordination by imposition of hands], nowadays are insufficient to complete the Sacrament of Order".

That was in the middle of the eighteenth century. You may well wonder why the rules requiring the complete reordination of any westerner who missed the Porrection of the Instruments survived more than two hundred years after a learned pontiff, albeit writing as a private theologian, had spoken so frankly.

Some conclusions.
>>Magisterial documents are not set immutably in stone. Ad Armenios is no more.
>>Benedict XIV, like Benedict XVI, did not believe that popes and councils had unlimited power; he denied they could change the Matter and Form of the Sacraments.
>>But Rome is immensely careful. Since the validity of the Sacraments is so crucially important, it took two centuries - until the whole scholarly establishment had agreed that Benedict XIV was right - before his conclusion became, under Pius XII, the law of the Church. But even then, Pius XII covered all the possibilities by adding "If, at any time by the will and decree of the Church the Porrection of the Instruments has also been necessary for validity, everyone knows that the Church has the power to change and abrogate what she has decreed".
>>How much sounder this care with the things of God is than the cheerful Anglican irresponsibility which introduces doubt into the Sacraments of our Redemption in accordance with the transient fancy or whimsy of a particular period; whether of the mid-sixteenth century or the late twentieth. It is of that irresponsibility that modern Anglican Catholics have to pay the price when their Orders are regarded by some as invalid. Blame, not Pope Leo XIII; not even Cardinal Vaughan; but Cranmer and - in our own time - the General Synod

Apostolicae curae and the Armenians

At the last session of the Council of Florence, Pope Eugene IV issued a Decree to the Armenians who were seeking unity with the Holy See. "We have considered it expedient, lest in future there be any hesitation among the Armenians about the truth of the Faith, and so that they might believe in all things with the Apostolic See, and that the union itself may last, stable and perpetual without any scruple ... to hand over, with the approval of this Council of Florence, the truth of the orthodox Faith in a brief compendio." In what followed, he defined the matter of Order as "the Porrection [handing by the bishop to the ordinand] of the chalice with wine and of the paten with bread".

It was common belief among medieval Latins that this ceremony was indeed the "matter", the essential ceremony, for conferring the Sacrament. It is, of course, not ancient; the Western Churches themselves lacked it during the first millennium. What is even stranger is that there were Armenians - and Greeks - at Florence, who had been ordained without this ceremony; and there was no suggestion that they should be reordained. Strangest of all, when in subsequent centuries groups of Orientals (such as the Ukrainians and the Melkites) sought unity with the Holy See, there was never any suggestion that there was any flaw in their orders, or even that they should add the Porrection of the Instruments to their rites for the future.

Did I say strangest of all? Wrongly; because even stranger was the fact that this rule, that priestly ordination is conveyed by the Porrection of the Chalice and Paten, a rule given to Orientals but then ignored both by them and by the Holy See in its dealings with them, was actually applied ruthlessly within the Western Church. In fact, it continued to be the rule in the West until the Apostolic Constitution Sacramentum Ordinis of Pope Pius XII in 1947. Let us be quite clear what this means.

In big pontifical rites of the pre-modern period, things were by no means as tidy and rehearsed as they are now. It was, apparently, possible for ordinations to happen in which some ordinands got missed out during some parts of the rite. A series of Roman decrees dealt with the question of what happened if an ordinand received the laying on of hands but missed the Porrection of the Chalice and Paten. The rule was that the ordination was invalid and must be repeated in toto and unconditionally. (It even had to be repeated conditionally if an ordinand had touched the wrong bits of the vessels, or if some clumsy fool in the sacristy had put more water than wine into the Chalice.)

Imagine yourself in London in 1946. A young man, let us imagine, at an ordination in Westminster Cathedral, by accident receives the laying-on of hands but not the Porrection of the Instruments. Across the city, an Anglican youth receives the Anglican rite of ordination, in which, at that time, the Porrection of the Instruments was not included. In the eyes of Rome, both young men equally have failed validly to receive the Sacrament of Order, the Catholic just as much as the Anglican.

It is not difficult to see why Roman praxis, from Cardinal Pole until the 1890s, routinely treated Anglican Orders as invalid.

To continue.