In Amoris laetitia, in the English translation of the authoritative but non-existent Latin, such phrases as "Irregular Relationships" are always printed thus, i.e. within inverted commas. I decided to demonstrate this blog's loyalty and subservience to the current regime by always printing the words "Pope Francis" or "Holy Father" (etc.) within inverted commas.
But then I realised that such a convention would make it appear, to those who do not regularly read this blog, that I espoused the silly but also disastrously dangerous heresy of Sedevacantism. Which I most certainly do not.
Can some intelligent reader suggest a way in which, without creating such a misunderstanding, I could emulate the Holy Father's new and exciting typographical usage?
Just a moment: I've had a brilliant idea: could we not commission a Revised Standard Version Even-More-Catholic-Edition lectionary in which, within the Decalogue, the terms "Kill", "Adultery", "Steal", "False Witness", "Covet" will all be printed within inverted commas?
And how about a new liturgical convention: whenever the priest, or deacon or subdeacon, has to read/sing some unBergoglian judgmental term in the silly old Scriptures, he will (first having made a moderate inclination to the crucifix) turn towards the people and make the conventional "inverted commas" sign (putting both his hands up by his ears and waggling the index and middle fingers) ... Ecclesia Dei must lose no time issuing a formal decree to this effect ... we shall need a new edition of Fortescue O'Connell ... preachers will need to get into the habit of doing the same thing during homilies ... perhaps the entire congregation should do it during the Pater noster when we get to the word "Evil" at the end ...
There! I bet some of you doubters out there never thought this pope would usher in a great new era of ritual innovation and pedantic rubricism!!!
Viva il Papa!!
7 June 2016
6 June 2016
Ecumenism!! Vivat! Vivat!!
What a wonderful picture last Saturday on Fr Zed's blog! A Macedonian legislator giving our Holy Father a Triregnum, a triple papal Tiara! Made by Orthodox nuns! Covered with fresh water pearls from the lake near their Convent! Long live the nuns! Long live the true (if wounded) Particular Churches of Macedonian Orthodoxy, Sister Churches of the Church of Rome! (Vide Dominus Iesus para 17; Communionis notio para 17.) Sadly, there are historical factors which mar the unity of the Macedonian Churches, not only with the See of S Peter, but also with other Orthodox Churches. May the Lord gather us all into unity.
If you google Rajcica, and Manastir Rajcica, you will find charming little videos of the Convent; the Sisters (who seem all to be young); the Church with its fantastic late Byzantine murals; its ikons; and its major relic of the hand of S George, its Titular, in a splendid slver reliquary. You will also be able to see the Sisters hard at work producing ... mitres! I mean, those Byzantine crown-shaped mitres which bishops of that rite wear. How fortunate Papa Bergoglio is to be able, now, at long last, to prove his ecumenical credentials by wearing headgear of authentic Byzantine provenance! And what can Bergoglio, what can we all, learn from this charming episode? This is how it seems to me:
We all need to be reminded (in that beautiful old phrase) to Become, to Be what we Are. To live, in God's Grace, the life of the Baptism which incorporated us into Christ; life in the power of the Holy Spirit which came upon us when we received the sphragis. And even the Bishop of Rome needs to be reminded to Be what he Is: the Bishop who builds up and expresses the unity of the Church Militant here on earth; the one whose particular task it is as a remora to repel any 'new doctrine' and to guard and faithfully to expound the Tradition he has received through the Apostles; the Deposit of the Faith.
Any Pope can only truly manifest his unique charism by being Pope in eodem sensu eademque sententia as his predecessors in so august an office. There can never be a 'new' papacy; only the office instituted of old by the Lord in Blessed Peter.
The Triregnum, in its gradually and organically evolved form, as reproduced by these nuns, is a beautiful piece of workmanship and a perfectly exquisite reminder of all those truths; basically, of all those continuities.
Realistically, it may be improbable that Pope Francis will ever wear it (it is a shame that he was not big and generous, human and humble enough a man, to pop it on his head for a tiny moment just for the official photographer; think of the simple but immense pleasure such an impulsive gesture would have given to the women who laboured upon it). But it will still be a gracious mark of respect to the admirable nuns and to the noble Churches of Macedonia if he has it sent to the Sacristies of S Peter's with instructions that it be set upon the head of the statue of S Peter (the seated one cast from the metal secured when they melted down Capitoline Juppiter) when his feast is celebrated later this month.
I wonder if that thought has occurred to Francis or to the circle that surrounds him.
Lux ex Oriente!
If you google Rajcica, and Manastir Rajcica, you will find charming little videos of the Convent; the Sisters (who seem all to be young); the Church with its fantastic late Byzantine murals; its ikons; and its major relic of the hand of S George, its Titular, in a splendid slver reliquary. You will also be able to see the Sisters hard at work producing ... mitres! I mean, those Byzantine crown-shaped mitres which bishops of that rite wear. How fortunate Papa Bergoglio is to be able, now, at long last, to prove his ecumenical credentials by wearing headgear of authentic Byzantine provenance! And what can Bergoglio, what can we all, learn from this charming episode? This is how it seems to me:
We all need to be reminded (in that beautiful old phrase) to Become, to Be what we Are. To live, in God's Grace, the life of the Baptism which incorporated us into Christ; life in the power of the Holy Spirit which came upon us when we received the sphragis. And even the Bishop of Rome needs to be reminded to Be what he Is: the Bishop who builds up and expresses the unity of the Church Militant here on earth; the one whose particular task it is as a remora to repel any 'new doctrine' and to guard and faithfully to expound the Tradition he has received through the Apostles; the Deposit of the Faith.
Any Pope can only truly manifest his unique charism by being Pope in eodem sensu eademque sententia as his predecessors in so august an office. There can never be a 'new' papacy; only the office instituted of old by the Lord in Blessed Peter.
The Triregnum, in its gradually and organically evolved form, as reproduced by these nuns, is a beautiful piece of workmanship and a perfectly exquisite reminder of all those truths; basically, of all those continuities.
Realistically, it may be improbable that Pope Francis will ever wear it (it is a shame that he was not big and generous, human and humble enough a man, to pop it on his head for a tiny moment just for the official photographer; think of the simple but immense pleasure such an impulsive gesture would have given to the women who laboured upon it). But it will still be a gracious mark of respect to the admirable nuns and to the noble Churches of Macedonia if he has it sent to the Sacristies of S Peter's with instructions that it be set upon the head of the statue of S Peter (the seated one cast from the metal secured when they melted down Capitoline Juppiter) when his feast is celebrated later this month.
I wonder if that thought has occurred to Francis or to the circle that surrounds him.
Lux ex Oriente!
5 June 2016
British and Catholic? (2)
But there is a way in which Waugh does harmonise his Catholicism and his Britishness. He is at pains to present a picture of Catholicism which is comfortable with the English mindset. This he does partly by putting less comfortable manifestations of Catholicism upon the lips of characters from whom the author is clearly to a degree distancing himself, culturally although not theologically. "Mr Goodall was [in church on All Souls' Day], popping in and down and up and out and in again assiduously, releasing toties quoties soul after soul from Purgatory. 'Twenty-eight so far', he said. 'I always try and do fifty'". Perhaps most significantly, in Brideshead Charles Ryder says "D'you know, Bridey, if ever I felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense." One of the intriguing aspects of Brideshead is that Waugh gives the non-Catholic characters all the best arguments against Catholicism, and, at the end, while allusively making clear that Ryder has now become a Catholic, he never gives the 'answers' to all those earlier descriptions of the case against Catholicism.
There are two very minor details which Potter seems to me to have got wrong. (1) Waugh makes it clear that the priest, working as a German spy, who tried to extract military information from Crouchback, made this attempt, not "in confession", but after Absolution, when the Sacrament is complete, and the priest is no longer bound by the Seal. A priest would hardly put "extra questions ... in confession" to a penitent with the intention of reporting the answers to the Abwehr! (2) Julia Flyte's 'marriage' to Rex Mottram was invalid; it would not have been difficult to establish that she was canonically free to marry as a Catholic. The problem was that Charles Ryder was not free to marry while his wife Celia, whom he had validly married as a non-Catholic, still lived. That is why Julia has to "give up this one thing I want so much".
There are two very minor details which Potter seems to me to have got wrong. (1) Waugh makes it clear that the priest, working as a German spy, who tried to extract military information from Crouchback, made this attempt, not "in confession", but after Absolution, when the Sacrament is complete, and the priest is no longer bound by the Seal. A priest would hardly put "extra questions ... in confession" to a penitent with the intention of reporting the answers to the Abwehr! (2) Julia Flyte's 'marriage' to Rex Mottram was invalid; it would not have been difficult to establish that she was canonically free to marry as a Catholic. The problem was that Charles Ryder was not free to marry while his wife Celia, whom he had validly married as a non-Catholic, still lived. That is why Julia has to "give up this one thing I want so much".
3 June 2016
Sacred Heart Sermon
The picture beside the blog shows me preaching the following sermon at an Extraordinary Form Sung Latin Mass for the Sacred Heart, back in 2010 when I was still pp of S Thomas the Martyr.
As I read the prayer Iesu dulcissime, prescribed by Pius XI in 1928 to be said in all parish churches, I wondered if my neighbour at S Ebbe's was remembering to do the same. That prayer is an act of Reparation ordered to be offered to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, for all the insults and blasphemies against that Sacred Heart. Pius XI, you will remember, was the pope who revised the propers for Mass and Office and endowed the Feast of the Sacred Heart with a (short-lived) Octave. And, in this Act of Reparation, one of the offenses to be expiated is: immodest and unbecoming dress.
Immodest dress in 1928! I rather think that 1928 means we were moving towards the era of the Flappers; slinky dresses; jazz; cocktails; the Charleston. Pius XI was also the pope who ordered the feast of Christ the King to be observed, as a marker against the Age of the Great Dictators and of the overmighty state. What a combative pontiff Papa Ratti must have been, despite his dusty decades as Prefect in the Vatican Libraries. He was a veritable Pope of the Church Militant, with one hand swiping at the Dictators of Left and Right; with the other, administering a firm smack to the Flappers.
But is there really an equivalence between Stalin and the Flappers? The Flappers may have been a trifle naughty, but they surely weren't murderous? They didn't send you to gulags or contrive a genocidal famine in the Ukraine. Yet ... I wonder. This age of ours, an age of sexual license, of which the Thirties were perhaps the first care-free dawn, has led to a new Holocaust: of the unborn. I don't think you have to be over-imaginative to join up a line of dots between the flirty skirts of the Thirties and the era of the overmighty abortionists. Which may serve to remind us that it was Pius XI who also, in his Encyclical Casti connubii, defended the principles of Christian Marriage.
I suspect one could draw conclusions about the prophetic role of the Papacy from all this. But today, in conclusion, I want simply to underline Pius XI's promotion of the cult of the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is an iconographical topos only too easy to ridicule. You remember how that acute liturgical commentator, Professor Richard Dawkins, not long ago, evoked a wonderful picture of the Church tumbling around Pope Benedict's ears "amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch Sacred Hearts": rhetoric almost worthy of the great Goebbels himself. Indeed. The World does not admire those who find refuge in the widely-opened Sacred Heart of Jesus; our idols, our 'celebrities', are only too often the shallow and the promiscuous and the foul-mouthed, not the quiet contemplative rapt in adoring and intercessory prayer before the pierced Heart of our Saviour. But God has chosen what the World calls Foolish to shame the Clevers; what the World calls weak, to confound the Macho; because in the opened Heart of Christ crucified, what the World calls foolishness and weakness is made to be the strength and the wisdom of God.
As I read the prayer Iesu dulcissime, prescribed by Pius XI in 1928 to be said in all parish churches, I wondered if my neighbour at S Ebbe's was remembering to do the same. That prayer is an act of Reparation ordered to be offered to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, for all the insults and blasphemies against that Sacred Heart. Pius XI, you will remember, was the pope who revised the propers for Mass and Office and endowed the Feast of the Sacred Heart with a (short-lived) Octave. And, in this Act of Reparation, one of the offenses to be expiated is: immodest and unbecoming dress.
Immodest dress in 1928! I rather think that 1928 means we were moving towards the era of the Flappers; slinky dresses; jazz; cocktails; the Charleston. Pius XI was also the pope who ordered the feast of Christ the King to be observed, as a marker against the Age of the Great Dictators and of the overmighty state. What a combative pontiff Papa Ratti must have been, despite his dusty decades as Prefect in the Vatican Libraries. He was a veritable Pope of the Church Militant, with one hand swiping at the Dictators of Left and Right; with the other, administering a firm smack to the Flappers.
But is there really an equivalence between Stalin and the Flappers? The Flappers may have been a trifle naughty, but they surely weren't murderous? They didn't send you to gulags or contrive a genocidal famine in the Ukraine. Yet ... I wonder. This age of ours, an age of sexual license, of which the Thirties were perhaps the first care-free dawn, has led to a new Holocaust: of the unborn. I don't think you have to be over-imaginative to join up a line of dots between the flirty skirts of the Thirties and the era of the overmighty abortionists. Which may serve to remind us that it was Pius XI who also, in his Encyclical Casti connubii, defended the principles of Christian Marriage.
I suspect one could draw conclusions about the prophetic role of the Papacy from all this. But today, in conclusion, I want simply to underline Pius XI's promotion of the cult of the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart is an iconographical topos only too easy to ridicule. You remember how that acute liturgical commentator, Professor Richard Dawkins, not long ago, evoked a wonderful picture of the Church tumbling around Pope Benedict's ears "amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch Sacred Hearts": rhetoric almost worthy of the great Goebbels himself. Indeed. The World does not admire those who find refuge in the widely-opened Sacred Heart of Jesus; our idols, our 'celebrities', are only too often the shallow and the promiscuous and the foul-mouthed, not the quiet contemplative rapt in adoring and intercessory prayer before the pierced Heart of our Saviour. But God has chosen what the World calls Foolish to shame the Clevers; what the World calls weak, to confound the Macho; because in the opened Heart of Christ crucified, what the World calls foolishness and weakness is made to be the strength and the wisdom of God.
2 June 2016
British and Catholic (1)
Martin Potter has written a most thought-provoking book with this title, and the subtitle National and Religious Identity in the Work of David Jones, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. It is published by Peter Lang in their "Cultural Identity Studies" series (ISBN 978-3-0343-0860-1). His thesis is that these three writers develop a theory of British Catholic identity which emphasises harmony and transcends the potential conflict; which stresses harmonisation between disparate elements rather than conflict; an approach based upon a philosophy of integration.
I am not sure that this is the complete picture, at least as far as Waugh is concerned. I will give later some considerations which do indeed converge with Potter's approach; but I feel that we should also remember Waugh's profound personal dissociation from the British national enterprise in WW2 ... a dissociation which radically severs Waugh from the comfortable self-congratulatory narrative which pervaded this country towards the end of the War in and the years that followed. It is clear that Waugh does not share the view of his character Box-Bender who commends Cardinal Hinsley on the ground that he is an Englishman before he is a Catholic. And in Scott King Waugh opines that the War has become just a tug of war between two teams of indistinguishable louts. Waugh, like his characters, began the War seeing it as a crusade in defence of what, with Aidan Nichols, we will call Christendom; but he ended up condemning it as the Modern World in Arms. The cynicism with which he writes about The Sword of Stalingrad, surely, says it all, and must be seen as the reaction of a traditional Catholic who had been compelled to be personally complicit in the persecution by Tito's partisans of Royalists, Catholics, and Jews. This is not a man whose Catholic identity sets him comfortably in the national mainstream.
Continues on June 5.
I am not sure that this is the complete picture, at least as far as Waugh is concerned. I will give later some considerations which do indeed converge with Potter's approach; but I feel that we should also remember Waugh's profound personal dissociation from the British national enterprise in WW2 ... a dissociation which radically severs Waugh from the comfortable self-congratulatory narrative which pervaded this country towards the end of the War in and the years that followed. It is clear that Waugh does not share the view of his character Box-Bender who commends Cardinal Hinsley on the ground that he is an Englishman before he is a Catholic. And in Scott King Waugh opines that the War has become just a tug of war between two teams of indistinguishable louts. Waugh, like his characters, began the War seeing it as a crusade in defence of what, with Aidan Nichols, we will call Christendom; but he ended up condemning it as the Modern World in Arms. The cynicism with which he writes about The Sword of Stalingrad, surely, says it all, and must be seen as the reaction of a traditional Catholic who had been compelled to be personally complicit in the persecution by Tito's partisans of Royalists, Catholics, and Jews. This is not a man whose Catholic identity sets him comfortably in the national mainstream.
Continues on June 5.
1 June 2016
The Power of the Spirit
We who spent most of our lives in the Church of England have had much more experience of the Power of the Spirit than most cradle Catholics. I like to think that we have benefited from this experience.
For the first part of my life, the Spirit was urging the 'churches' towards unity. A pedant might suspect that He was sometimes a little one-sided. In His enthusiasm for the C of E to unite with all sorts of Protestant denominations, He urged Anglicans to go easy on those things they had received which obstructed such 'reunion', such as the sacramental and ministerial structures and doctrines of Catholic Christendom. While maintaining, verbally and formally, His desire for the unity of the Church of England with all Christians, even with "the Great Latin Church of the West", it was clear that what He was in a particular hurry about was getting it into bed with the Methodists next door, the Congregationalists in India, the Moravians, the ... you-name-it. He was consistent in His guidance that we should never make a fetich of the old things which we had received. Although organic unity has not yet been actually achieved as such, He was successful in clearing the ground of any so-called 'principles' which might stand in its way.
Accordingly, some three decades ago, His priorities changed. Unity went on to His back-burner. What the Spirit now saw as the urgent priority was the "justice issue" of the admission of women to Holy Orders. Mightily, yet gently and graciously, He led Anglicans to accept this. Even more recently, openness to and acceptance of "Diversity" in every area of sexuality has become His latest priority. With restless persuasiveness, He pleads in Anglican hearts the needs of the poor and the broken, such as Trans people (although He does not yet deem it quite opportune to advance the cause of pedophiles).
Always the Spirit has been faithfully there, reliably and unfailingly present, urging the Anglican Communion on to that Newness which, in every age, is His real purpose; powerfully calling all Anglicans to be docile to His urgings; leading them away from the old and on to the New Thing; His Great Surprise.
I was rereading the other day the epic narrative of C S Lewis's Perelandra [aka 'Voyage to Venus'], where, in a memorable agon, this very same Spirit urges the Woman on to the great New Adventure of turning away from Maleldil's known command so as, paradoxically, to please him all the more by "doing what he really wants".
May God mercifully preserve his Catholic Church Militant from all the promptings of this Spirit.
For the first part of my life, the Spirit was urging the 'churches' towards unity. A pedant might suspect that He was sometimes a little one-sided. In His enthusiasm for the C of E to unite with all sorts of Protestant denominations, He urged Anglicans to go easy on those things they had received which obstructed such 'reunion', such as the sacramental and ministerial structures and doctrines of Catholic Christendom. While maintaining, verbally and formally, His desire for the unity of the Church of England with all Christians, even with "the Great Latin Church of the West", it was clear that what He was in a particular hurry about was getting it into bed with the Methodists next door, the Congregationalists in India, the Moravians, the ... you-name-it. He was consistent in His guidance that we should never make a fetich of the old things which we had received. Although organic unity has not yet been actually achieved as such, He was successful in clearing the ground of any so-called 'principles' which might stand in its way.
Accordingly, some three decades ago, His priorities changed. Unity went on to His back-burner. What the Spirit now saw as the urgent priority was the "justice issue" of the admission of women to Holy Orders. Mightily, yet gently and graciously, He led Anglicans to accept this. Even more recently, openness to and acceptance of "Diversity" in every area of sexuality has become His latest priority. With restless persuasiveness, He pleads in Anglican hearts the needs of the poor and the broken, such as Trans people (although He does not yet deem it quite opportune to advance the cause of pedophiles).
Always the Spirit has been faithfully there, reliably and unfailingly present, urging the Anglican Communion on to that Newness which, in every age, is His real purpose; powerfully calling all Anglicans to be docile to His urgings; leading them away from the old and on to the New Thing; His Great Surprise.
I was rereading the other day the epic narrative of C S Lewis's Perelandra [aka 'Voyage to Venus'], where, in a memorable agon, this very same Spirit urges the Woman on to the great New Adventure of turning away from Maleldil's known command so as, paradoxically, to please him all the more by "doing what he really wants".
May God mercifully preserve his Catholic Church Militant from all the promptings of this Spirit.
31 May 2016
The Pope and the Spirit
Mgr Pinto, Dean of the Roman Rota, claimed last year that "The Jubilee Year of Mercy expects this sign of humble obedience (on the part of the Church's shepherds) to the Spirit who speaks to them through Francis". There had, you will recall, just been a "synod" at which some of the Synodal Fathers had, er, actually started shouting! Good gracious me! Shouting, when the Spirit Himself was just the other side of that microphone! Naughty! Naughty!
Oh dear, I thought. Here we go again. Here it is again, that dreadful old 1860s and 1960s-style maximalising view of the Papacy ... against which both Newman and Ratzinger in turn, in their respective contexts, wrote so sensibly. Wasn't it that daft Wilfrid Ward who wanted to have a new papal pronouncement to read as he ate his breakfast egg each morning? What a mercy for the poor chap that he didn't live in the Age of the Domus Sanctae Marthae Papacy. He would soon have grown sick of his breakfast eggs.
Of course, the Holy Father himself would not subscribe to this preposterous sententia Pintiana.
But I do sometimes feel a trifle nervous that his modes of expression could, by a critic less favourable than myself, be misread as Pintian. What generates this uneasy apprehension is incessant talk about the Spirit which links Him with a Newness which seems to be involved in unspecified but explosive changes in the Church's settled Doctrine and Praxis.
"... they were closed off to these signs of the Spirit and resisted the Spirit. They were seeking to justify this resistance with a so-called fidelity to the Law, that is, to the letter of the Law".
(Interesting stuff. "Letter of the Law!" Indeed! We've just had a Rescriptum ex audientia which declares that the erection by a diocesan bishop of an Institute of Religion will be invalid if the Bishop has not consulted the Congregation for Religious. So ... if a Bishop ignored this Rescriptum and ignored the Congregation and just went ahead on his own, Bergoglio would pat him on the head and praise him for ignoring the letter of the Law? Hold him up to the world as a splendid example of being Surprised by the Spirit? Do you really think so?)
"Being docile to the Spirit, this docility is the Yes that the Spirit may act and move forward to build up the Church ... instruments of the Spirit so that the church can move forward ..." [Homily of 14/04/2016]
"The sin is a closed heart that does not hear the voice of the Lord, that is not open to the newness of the Lord, to the Spirit that always surprises us ... the sin of divination ... obstinacy is the sin of idolatry ... obstinacy is the sin of idolatry: the Christian who is obstinate sins! The sin of idolatry ... the sin of idolatry ... the newness of the Spirit ... " [Homily of 18/01/2016].
In my more depressed moments, I feel uneasy about how to reconcile all this frantic, angry, aggressive, obsessive, repetitive, rhetoric with the calm and wise words of the First Vatican Council, which so admirably and so tersely described the essential and vital, but limited, role of the Roman Pontiff:
"The Holy Spirit was not promised to the Successors of Peter so that by His revelation they might make new teaching public, but so that, by His assistance, they might devoutly guard and faithfully set forth the revelation handed down through the Apostles; i.e. the Deposit of Faith"!!
Oh dear, I thought. Here we go again. Here it is again, that dreadful old 1860s and 1960s-style maximalising view of the Papacy ... against which both Newman and Ratzinger in turn, in their respective contexts, wrote so sensibly. Wasn't it that daft Wilfrid Ward who wanted to have a new papal pronouncement to read as he ate his breakfast egg each morning? What a mercy for the poor chap that he didn't live in the Age of the Domus Sanctae Marthae Papacy. He would soon have grown sick of his breakfast eggs.
Of course, the Holy Father himself would not subscribe to this preposterous sententia Pintiana.
But I do sometimes feel a trifle nervous that his modes of expression could, by a critic less favourable than myself, be misread as Pintian. What generates this uneasy apprehension is incessant talk about the Spirit which links Him with a Newness which seems to be involved in unspecified but explosive changes in the Church's settled Doctrine and Praxis.
"... they were closed off to these signs of the Spirit and resisted the Spirit. They were seeking to justify this resistance with a so-called fidelity to the Law, that is, to the letter of the Law".
(Interesting stuff. "Letter of the Law!" Indeed! We've just had a Rescriptum ex audientia which declares that the erection by a diocesan bishop of an Institute of Religion will be invalid if the Bishop has not consulted the Congregation for Religious. So ... if a Bishop ignored this Rescriptum and ignored the Congregation and just went ahead on his own, Bergoglio would pat him on the head and praise him for ignoring the letter of the Law? Hold him up to the world as a splendid example of being Surprised by the Spirit? Do you really think so?)
"Being docile to the Spirit, this docility is the Yes that the Spirit may act and move forward to build up the Church ... instruments of the Spirit so that the church can move forward ..." [Homily of 14/04/2016]
"The sin is a closed heart that does not hear the voice of the Lord, that is not open to the newness of the Lord, to the Spirit that always surprises us ... the sin of divination ... obstinacy is the sin of idolatry ... obstinacy is the sin of idolatry: the Christian who is obstinate sins! The sin of idolatry ... the sin of idolatry ... the newness of the Spirit ... " [Homily of 18/01/2016].
In my more depressed moments, I feel uneasy about how to reconcile all this frantic, angry, aggressive, obsessive, repetitive, rhetoric with the calm and wise words of the First Vatican Council, which so admirably and so tersely described the essential and vital, but limited, role of the Roman Pontiff:
"The Holy Spirit was not promised to the Successors of Peter so that by His revelation they might make new teaching public, but so that, by His assistance, they might devoutly guard and faithfully set forth the revelation handed down through the Apostles; i.e. the Deposit of Faith"!!
30 May 2016
Fr Zed and Cardinal Burke
I have just seen Fr Zed's post quoting a theologian friend quoting Cardinal Burke. All three write splendidly and are making exactly a point I made in my earlier post, just today.
It is so true that the heterodox are very much better at organising than the orthodox. Remember how the Rhine Confederacy sprang its early coup at Vatican II, and how long it was before the Coetus Internationalis Patrum got organised. And with what results.
Orthodox Catholics do need to get noisy. Like you all did during the Arian Crisis, when so many of the Bishops, good Company Men, needed a bit of prodding. Do it again now. You are the Plebs Sancta Dei, and you each have the Anointing (Chrisma) of the Holy Spirit (See First Letter of S John 2:18-27).
Not long ago, a priest working in the Roman Curia told me how it is that poor bishops get nominated. Enquiries are sent out asking about priests who are on the lists for consideration. Orthodox people send conscientious and honest assessments. Heterodox people decide which hopeful is their best 'party candidate', and then give him a totally glowing, completely uncritical, write-up.
The heterodox know exactly what they want, and they are ruthless in going for it. They are driven by a very determined Spirit whose name you know.
When did you last write to your Bishop? When did you last encourage a friend to do so?
It is so true that the heterodox are very much better at organising than the orthodox. Remember how the Rhine Confederacy sprang its early coup at Vatican II, and how long it was before the Coetus Internationalis Patrum got organised. And with what results.
Orthodox Catholics do need to get noisy. Like you all did during the Arian Crisis, when so many of the Bishops, good Company Men, needed a bit of prodding. Do it again now. You are the Plebs Sancta Dei, and you each have the Anointing (Chrisma) of the Holy Spirit (See First Letter of S John 2:18-27).
Not long ago, a priest working in the Roman Curia told me how it is that poor bishops get nominated. Enquiries are sent out asking about priests who are on the lists for consideration. Orthodox people send conscientious and honest assessments. Heterodox people decide which hopeful is their best 'party candidate', and then give him a totally glowing, completely uncritical, write-up.
The heterodox know exactly what they want, and they are ruthless in going for it. They are driven by a very determined Spirit whose name you know.
When did you last write to your Bishop? When did you last encourage a friend to do so?
NOTES
I am not currently enabling Sedevacantist contributions. Sorry; but I don't want my blog to be any sort of encouragement to that sort of profoundly wrong approach.
My previous piece mentioning Archbishop Gaenswein was not designed to suggest that he is a traddy; but because I feared that some of his words might be seized upon by distressed traddies clutching at straws. My very firm conviction is that "Bipapalism" is very nearly as grave a disorder as Sedevacantantism and the currently fashionable Papolatry.
In my own, personal and fallible, judgement, this is a Pontificate which has some dysfunctional characteristics. This leads to good, conscientious Catholics being at risk of accepting some silly idea which appears to offer them a silver lining. But there is naught for your (or my) comfort except the very wise words of Cardinal Pell, drawing our attention to the fact that the history of the Papacy offers examples of previous extremely questionable pontificates. And Cardinal Burke's gentle, insistent, reminders that we need to look carefully at papal pronouncements and weigh up carefully the evidence for and against the conclusion that they are magisterial or non-magisterial.
My own personal guideline here is that when our Holy Father says something which is eodem sensu eademque sententia with the repeated assertions of Scriptures, Fathers, Roman Pontiffs, Roman dicasteries, and Ecumenical Councils over many centuries, he is bearing authentic witness to the Magisterium. When he says things which have a strong prima facie appearance of lacking this coherence, then ... the jury is out on the question, and (for all I know) may well continue to be so for several more pontificates. In these circumstances, every Catholic may carefully weigh up the matter concerned, and has the liberty to express both positive and negative views. By doing this, the entire plebs sancta Dei will be playing its part in the evolution of the eventual answers to contraverted questions. It would be edifying if the Bishops took part in this process, rather than leaving it to presbyters, deacons, and layfolk.
Vatican I made clear that ex cathedra pronouncements of the Roman Pontiff are infallible and irreformable ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae. This leaves it arguable (on different grounds) whether a particular pronouncement not ex cathedra is or may be reformable by the reception or non-reception of the Church.
My previous piece mentioning Archbishop Gaenswein was not designed to suggest that he is a traddy; but because I feared that some of his words might be seized upon by distressed traddies clutching at straws. My very firm conviction is that "Bipapalism" is very nearly as grave a disorder as Sedevacantantism and the currently fashionable Papolatry.
In my own, personal and fallible, judgement, this is a Pontificate which has some dysfunctional characteristics. This leads to good, conscientious Catholics being at risk of accepting some silly idea which appears to offer them a silver lining. But there is naught for your (or my) comfort except the very wise words of Cardinal Pell, drawing our attention to the fact that the history of the Papacy offers examples of previous extremely questionable pontificates. And Cardinal Burke's gentle, insistent, reminders that we need to look carefully at papal pronouncements and weigh up carefully the evidence for and against the conclusion that they are magisterial or non-magisterial.
My own personal guideline here is that when our Holy Father says something which is eodem sensu eademque sententia with the repeated assertions of Scriptures, Fathers, Roman Pontiffs, Roman dicasteries, and Ecumenical Councils over many centuries, he is bearing authentic witness to the Magisterium. When he says things which have a strong prima facie appearance of lacking this coherence, then ... the jury is out on the question, and (for all I know) may well continue to be so for several more pontificates. In these circumstances, every Catholic may carefully weigh up the matter concerned, and has the liberty to express both positive and negative views. By doing this, the entire plebs sancta Dei will be playing its part in the evolution of the eventual answers to contraverted questions. It would be edifying if the Bishops took part in this process, rather than leaving it to presbyters, deacons, and layfolk.
Vatican I made clear that ex cathedra pronouncements of the Roman Pontiff are infallible and irreformable ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae. This leaves it arguable (on different grounds) whether a particular pronouncement not ex cathedra is or may be reformable by the reception or non-reception of the Church.
29 May 2016
Two popes? More UPDATE
More Update: Perhaps I should have been more explicit about the complete wrongheadedness of the sort of speculations which could be triggered by Archbishop Gaenswein's piece.
We believe in the Monarchia of "the one God and Father". That is to say: the Father is the arkhe, pege theotetos ... the source and fount of the Godhead which He shares with Son (by filiation) and Spirit (by procession). All Fatherhood derives its "Name" from him. So the Fatherhood expressed in each particular Church by the one Bishop is the One imaging and embodiment of the One Fatherhood of the One Father. This is as true of the Roman Church as it is of every other particular Church.
A literate Byzantine might be forgiven for wondering whether we Latins are really Dyotheists who believe in two Principia Deitatis.
Vide Ephesians 3:14 and 4:6 and the Epistles of S Ignatius.
We have quite enough doctrinal disorders floating around at the moment without 'traditionalists' inventing new heresies of their own.
ORIGINAL POST: Since someone has asked me, I will express the view that Archbishop Gaenswein did not mean to say that there were two popes; nor to say that the papacy subsists in two individuals.
There can only be one Pope, and that pope is Francis. There can only be one Bishop of any diocese, but when a Coadjutor is appointed, he does acquire a close relationship with the One, Single, diocesan whom he is assisting. But, at least until recently, coadjutors retained the titular see in partibus which they already had. Perhaps having an emeritus pope is a bit like being a coadjutor bishop. By the way, 'emeritus' does mean 'having given up the job'.
As I said at the time of the Abdication, I felt it would have been more appropriate for Joseph Ratzinger to be given some such style as episcopus ad Sanctum Petrum, rather like the auxiliaries to the Saxon Archbishops of Canterbury who had their Cathedra in the old church of S Martin and were styled episcopus ad Sanctum Martinum.
I am a little uneasy, frankly, about anything that gives any impression whatsoever that the Papacy is anything other than the bishopric of Rome. As Fr Eric Mascall pointed out, the Papacy is not a sacramental rank in the Church such as to confer an indelible character. The purely administrative act of electing a man Pope does not change him in the same way as the ordination of a man to the diaconate, presbyterate, or episcopate changes him. Being elected pope does not mean that through all eternity you will be, in some mystical mysterious sort of way, a pope. When you die or abdicate, you cease being a pope.
Joseph Ratzinger is not Pope; nor a Pope; not half a Pope; not in any sort of way whatsoever.
We believe in the Monarchia of "the one God and Father". That is to say: the Father is the arkhe, pege theotetos ... the source and fount of the Godhead which He shares with Son (by filiation) and Spirit (by procession). All Fatherhood derives its "Name" from him. So the Fatherhood expressed in each particular Church by the one Bishop is the One imaging and embodiment of the One Fatherhood of the One Father. This is as true of the Roman Church as it is of every other particular Church.
A literate Byzantine might be forgiven for wondering whether we Latins are really Dyotheists who believe in two Principia Deitatis.
Vide Ephesians 3:14 and 4:6 and the Epistles of S Ignatius.
We have quite enough doctrinal disorders floating around at the moment without 'traditionalists' inventing new heresies of their own.
ORIGINAL POST: Since someone has asked me, I will express the view that Archbishop Gaenswein did not mean to say that there were two popes; nor to say that the papacy subsists in two individuals.
There can only be one Pope, and that pope is Francis. There can only be one Bishop of any diocese, but when a Coadjutor is appointed, he does acquire a close relationship with the One, Single, diocesan whom he is assisting. But, at least until recently, coadjutors retained the titular see in partibus which they already had. Perhaps having an emeritus pope is a bit like being a coadjutor bishop. By the way, 'emeritus' does mean 'having given up the job'.
As I said at the time of the Abdication, I felt it would have been more appropriate for Joseph Ratzinger to be given some such style as episcopus ad Sanctum Petrum, rather like the auxiliaries to the Saxon Archbishops of Canterbury who had their Cathedra in the old church of S Martin and were styled episcopus ad Sanctum Martinum.
I am a little uneasy, frankly, about anything that gives any impression whatsoever that the Papacy is anything other than the bishopric of Rome. As Fr Eric Mascall pointed out, the Papacy is not a sacramental rank in the Church such as to confer an indelible character. The purely administrative act of electing a man Pope does not change him in the same way as the ordination of a man to the diaconate, presbyterate, or episcopate changes him. Being elected pope does not mean that through all eternity you will be, in some mystical mysterious sort of way, a pope. When you die or abdicate, you cease being a pope.
Joseph Ratzinger is not Pope; nor a Pope; not half a Pope; not in any sort of way whatsoever.
Oakapple Day
Best wishes to readers on this annual commemoration of the (formal) end of the Great Rebellion and the Return of our late Sovereign Lord King Charles II. Today, however, not inappropriately, I wish to 'Remember' his Father.
In 2010 there was a small but perfectly formed exhibition about the relics of Blessed Charles Stuart. It is interesting, I think, that the cult of his relics began immediately after his martyrdom in 1648. When we come to the regularisation of his status with the Holy See, the length of the cultus may be canonically significant in establishing beatification by equipollence.
Everything very touching. The pearl earring taken from his ear after his execution and passed on to his daughter (you can see it in the Vandyke triple portrait done for Bernini); relics of his blood; secondary and tertiary relics of which the most moving is the Chalice from which he received the Most Precious Blood on the morning of his execution. Reliquaries containing his hair.
The Royal Martyr shares with Blessed John Henry Newman (though for quite different reasons) the characteristic that there are (I think?) no primary relics in the form of bones.
_________________________________________________________________
Old Style. Caught you there.
In 2010 there was a small but perfectly formed exhibition about the relics of Blessed Charles Stuart. It is interesting, I think, that the cult of his relics began immediately after his martyrdom in 1648. When we come to the regularisation of his status with the Holy See, the length of the cultus may be canonically significant in establishing beatification by equipollence.
Everything very touching. The pearl earring taken from his ear after his execution and passed on to his daughter (you can see it in the Vandyke triple portrait done for Bernini); relics of his blood; secondary and tertiary relics of which the most moving is the Chalice from which he received the Most Precious Blood on the morning of his execution. Reliquaries containing his hair.
The Royal Martyr shares with Blessed John Henry Newman (though for quite different reasons) the characteristic that there are (I think?) no primary relics in the form of bones.
_________________________________________________________________
Old Style. Caught you there.
26 May 2016
EPHESIANS
The greatest of the Greek poets, Callimachus, opined that a Big Book was a Big Evil (mega kakon). But Dr Thomas M Winger has written a very big book about S Paul's most important Epistle, the one to the Ephesians, and his Commentary is definitely a mega kalon (a Big Good). (Concordia Commentary A theological Exposition of Sacred Scripture Ephesians by Thomass M Winger ISBN 978-0-570-06313-1.)
Curious readers may wonder why I should name Callimachus as the greatest of the Greek poets. What ... er .... about Homer? But such judgements surely take their bearings from where the person making the assertion is standing. If I desire to consider Callimachus greater than Homer because of the densely and humorously learned way in which the later poet performs the games of imitatio cum variatione upon the earlier, who are you to judge?
And if I or anybody asserts that Ephesians is S Paul's most important Epistle, there is no reason why we should be bullied into submission simply because some chappies in Tubingen, a long time ago, decided that Romans, Galatians, and the Corinthian Epistles are a sort of 'canon within the canon' by the standard of which the other letters bearing S Paul's name have their worth, and even their authenticity, discerned.
It will be no secret to readers that Ephesians is regarded, by many within 'Modern Biblical Scholarship', as 'deuteropauline'. Winger's Commentary demonstrates that the reasons commonly adduced for denying the Pauline authorship of Ephesians are comprehensively unconvincing. This is a book with 895 (biggish) pages, so I am, you will understand, uncertain to what sort of readerships I am commending it; but anybody who takes Pauline Studies seriously should have it on their shelves.
There are many insights within this book which are either new; or, at least, represent recent scholarly findings which have not yet fought their way through to become commonplaces. One area in which this is true concerns the ministry. Our own Colin Podmore has ably dissected the new dogma in the American Episcopal Church whereby all the baptised are ministers. Winger makes clear that such notions are unattested until the twentieth century. And he also explains the new understanding of diakonos/diakonia which we have had since John Collins exploded the old 1960s superstition, i.e. the idea that these terms refer to the performance of humble acts of service to the needy. This sad nonsense is still sometimes churned out when people are asked to preach sermons at diaconal ordinations. Perhaps, if Papa Bergoglio is going to ask Cardinal Mueller to explain to him about the question of Women in the Diaconate, we might all find diakonia a topical subject to revisit.
Winger is a Lutheran. In Britain, we have little experience of Lutherans. So British readers need to understand that there are are different types of Lutherans: surprise, surprise, there are Liberal Lutherans and Orthodox Lutherans! As we approach the 500th anniversary of Luther's revolution, it is a good idea for us to remember this; for Catholics, in particular, to understand how close we are to Orthodox Lutherans. I would go so far as to say that Orthodox Lutheranism ought to be upon our ecumenical agenda. Just as we in the Ordinariates have learned to read our own Anglican Patrimony through the lense of Catholic orthodoxy, might not a portion of the Lutheran family be able to discern a path similar to that which we have taken?
For some Catholics, it might be a useful start to read the fine passage from Luther himself with which Winger concludes his exposition. It is a well-expressed exposition of the authority of the Ministry and, indeed, of the Catholic principle of ex opere operato.
And, at precisely the time when silly people ... and profoundly silly Episcopal Conferences such as those of Germany and England ... are saying silly things about Judaism, Winger provides sound reading: " ... neither Paul nor our Lord questions the legitimacy of the temple under the terms of the old covenant. Yet it is obsolete because Christ has come and the old has passed away. So Israel of the flesh is replaced by Israel of the Spirit, a church incorporating children of Abraham who believe as he believed in the Messiah to come".
Ephesians is topical! Read Ephesians! Read Winger!
Just to prove that I am still a waspish pedant ... I will comment on Winger's page 81 footnote 260, which rightly queries the text-crit assumption that lectio brevior potior; the comfortable but absurd rule of thumb adopted by Westcott and Hort et omnis grex illa. This was exploded in Oxford more than half a century ago by the mighty George Kilpatrick, Winger's fellow Canadian, who shared with me one-to-one his text-crit knowledge and techniques back in the mid-1960s. I explain this out of pietas towards a great scholar and a very dear friend.
Curious readers may wonder why I should name Callimachus as the greatest of the Greek poets. What ... er .... about Homer? But such judgements surely take their bearings from where the person making the assertion is standing. If I desire to consider Callimachus greater than Homer because of the densely and humorously learned way in which the later poet performs the games of imitatio cum variatione upon the earlier, who are you to judge?
And if I or anybody asserts that Ephesians is S Paul's most important Epistle, there is no reason why we should be bullied into submission simply because some chappies in Tubingen, a long time ago, decided that Romans, Galatians, and the Corinthian Epistles are a sort of 'canon within the canon' by the standard of which the other letters bearing S Paul's name have their worth, and even their authenticity, discerned.
It will be no secret to readers that Ephesians is regarded, by many within 'Modern Biblical Scholarship', as 'deuteropauline'. Winger's Commentary demonstrates that the reasons commonly adduced for denying the Pauline authorship of Ephesians are comprehensively unconvincing. This is a book with 895 (biggish) pages, so I am, you will understand, uncertain to what sort of readerships I am commending it; but anybody who takes Pauline Studies seriously should have it on their shelves.
There are many insights within this book which are either new; or, at least, represent recent scholarly findings which have not yet fought their way through to become commonplaces. One area in which this is true concerns the ministry. Our own Colin Podmore has ably dissected the new dogma in the American Episcopal Church whereby all the baptised are ministers. Winger makes clear that such notions are unattested until the twentieth century. And he also explains the new understanding of diakonos/diakonia which we have had since John Collins exploded the old 1960s superstition, i.e. the idea that these terms refer to the performance of humble acts of service to the needy. This sad nonsense is still sometimes churned out when people are asked to preach sermons at diaconal ordinations. Perhaps, if Papa Bergoglio is going to ask Cardinal Mueller to explain to him about the question of Women in the Diaconate, we might all find diakonia a topical subject to revisit.
Winger is a Lutheran. In Britain, we have little experience of Lutherans. So British readers need to understand that there are are different types of Lutherans: surprise, surprise, there are Liberal Lutherans and Orthodox Lutherans! As we approach the 500th anniversary of Luther's revolution, it is a good idea for us to remember this; for Catholics, in particular, to understand how close we are to Orthodox Lutherans. I would go so far as to say that Orthodox Lutheranism ought to be upon our ecumenical agenda. Just as we in the Ordinariates have learned to read our own Anglican Patrimony through the lense of Catholic orthodoxy, might not a portion of the Lutheran family be able to discern a path similar to that which we have taken?
For some Catholics, it might be a useful start to read the fine passage from Luther himself with which Winger concludes his exposition. It is a well-expressed exposition of the authority of the Ministry and, indeed, of the Catholic principle of ex opere operato.
And, at precisely the time when silly people ... and profoundly silly Episcopal Conferences such as those of Germany and England ... are saying silly things about Judaism, Winger provides sound reading: " ... neither Paul nor our Lord questions the legitimacy of the temple under the terms of the old covenant. Yet it is obsolete because Christ has come and the old has passed away. So Israel of the flesh is replaced by Israel of the Spirit, a church incorporating children of Abraham who believe as he believed in the Messiah to come".
Ephesians is topical! Read Ephesians! Read Winger!
Just to prove that I am still a waspish pedant ... I will comment on Winger's page 81 footnote 260, which rightly queries the text-crit assumption that lectio brevior potior; the comfortable but absurd rule of thumb adopted by Westcott and Hort et omnis grex illa. This was exploded in Oxford more than half a century ago by the mighty George Kilpatrick, Winger's fellow Canadian, who shared with me one-to-one his text-crit knowledge and techniques back in the mid-1960s. I explain this out of pietas towards a great scholar and a very dear friend.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
