Will he never stop ... (1) Pope Francis and the Our Father

PF thinks the traditional translations of the Oratio Dominica need to be changed. Lead us not into temptation displeases him. Why should God lead people into temptation to sin? Obviously, this must be a Bad Translation. Would May we not be led into temptation be better?

Fundamentalist traddies are likely to be outraged. Changing the Our Father!!!!!

Although of course I am a Rigid Pharisee, I am not that sort of fundamentalist. The Lord's Prayer contains a number of mysteries. Let me go off at a tangent and give you an example from elsewhere in the Prayer. Let me tell you about Give us this day our Daily Bread. The Greek word translated Daily is particularly mysterious. Epiousion is pretty well a hapax legomenon (a Greek word occurring only once) and Origen remarked that you never heard it used in his time. It looks as though it should be related to epiouse, which means coming. Put that together with hemera (day) and it would mean our bread of the coming day, and S Jerome knew of a Hebrew Gospel which did indeed render it by mahar, of tomorrow. Might it mean the Bread of the Kingdom? Might it mean the eschatological Food, tomorrow's Bread which we are allowed to receive today ... i.e. the Blessed Sacrament? Or might epiousion mean supersubstantial? Etymologically, it could do so. And so on. Far from finding my Faith disturbed, I find such questions exhilarating. If you wanted to go further, you could compare the Lucan version of the Our Father with S Matthew's. TheTradition, in all its breadth, gives us such riches upon which to meditate ...

Despite the different possible interpretations of parts of this Prayer, if I were a person of immense authority, I would not choose to use my power to change one single inherited rendering. My first reason for not doing so would be that I am profoundly aware that I am not infallible. And that a rendering which appealed to me 100% today might no longer do so in a year's time. And it is worth remembering that the Church has got along for two millennia without prescribing to us what meaning we should each attach to the words of this prayer. Two Millennia of hermeneutical freedom ... until we reached the Age of Mercy, the Aetas Bergogliana. Now, it seems, we need to be tied down to those particular interpretations and meanings which appeal to this particular, all-wise, pope.

It's almost as if PF has decided to give a big plug to the recent e-book, The Dictator Pope by Professor Marcantonio Colonna, about which I wrote a few days ago.

And let me make this clear: the Greek original and its Latin version do not mean what PF wants them to mean. Anybody who claims that they do, is either ignorant or dishonest. PF's proposal is not a translation, but an alteration. But I'll return, D v, to that tomorrow. (I'm afraid it has occurred to me that all this might be a ploy to provoke yet another disagreement with Cardinal Sarah, with the intention of finally getting rid of him. After all, PF is suggesting that a change be made in liturgical texts which involves eliminating the actual words of what the Greek and Latin and Syrian bibles say the Lord actually said, and replacing them with what a twenty-first century Roman Bishop says he prefers. It is Cardinal Sarah's job, quite frankly, to resist the imposition of a gratuitous mistranslation of an authorised original.)

My second reason for making no change is pastoral. Back in the 1970s, we in the Church of England did indeed experiment with 'modern' translations of the Pater noster. Those experimental forms are now, I think, rarely used. The reason is: the clergy discovered that among infrequent church-goers, including the house-bound sick and elderly, and those attending Baptisms, Weddings, and Funerals, and the Midnight Mass brigade, the Lord's Prayer was the only formula they knew. Any other liturgical memories they had lingering from their childhoods had been rendered out-of-date by the liturgical revolutions of the 1960s. Was it 'pastoral' to deprive such people of the only remaining bit of a worship-experience which was in the least familiar to them ... which had any sort of purchase upon their memories? So most of us just changed Our Father which ... into Our Father who ... , and left it at that.

Incidentally, the 'modern language' Anglican version ... in case you were wondering ...  finds no problems whatsoever in the phrase which makes PF and, we gather, some French and Italian bishops, lose so much sleep.

We were right not to meddle.

(Concludes tomorrow, by examining Lead us not into temptation.)

Appeal for information

A kind friend has sent me an interesting text: the oath fidelitatis that (?) newly consecrated or translated bishops have to swear in the Latin Church (how about the sui iuris Oriental Churches?).

My first impetuous reaction was to feel that no man with any sense of his dignity would sign such a grovelling formula (vide praesertim verba atque consilia prope finem) . Then I recollected that, over the last thirty years, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bishops may have signed this piece of paper with no intention (exempli gratia) of doing anything to implement Canon 249 (seminarians being taught to be fluent in Latin). Or of doing anything to repress liturgical abuses. So I expect this 'oath' is just an empty formality that one performs and then has a good laugh about. As when we Anglican clergy used to swear an oath to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Ha Ha Ha. Indeed. Ha Ha Ha.

I would be interested, nevertheless, to know the history of this formula, and to what extent its wording is recent. Quite a bit of it seems to me to be redolent of the catch-phrases of Vatican II.

Litany to a Lady ...

Stella orientalis,
Fulgidum lumen,
Libertatis propugnatrix invicta,
Exemplum fortitudinis,

... no; good guess; but you're wrong. This is not a recently discovered fragment of a medieval Litany to the Theotokos. Just some of the phrases lavished in this University by Mr Orator Jenkyns and my lord Chancellor upon Aung San Suu Kyi on the emotionally highly wrought occasion when she received the degree of Doctor of Civil Law honoris causa in 2012.

She seems to have been less than successful in teaching Civil Law to her own military. So here is my proposal for succouring the Burmese refugees who have fled to Bengal. Let every institution which has showered honours on Aung San Suu Kyi, from the exquisite heights of Oxford University all the way right down to those risible idiots the Nobel Peace Prize Trustees, chip in with, say, £5 million each.

As a penance for infringing the prerogatives of the Mother of God.

Terminological inexactitudes? UPDATED

This morning on the BBC Home Service the Mayor of Jerusalem told us that Jerusalem has been the Capital of Israel for 3,000 years.

UPDATE: Motu proprio most kindly supplied a great deal of information about what Jerusalem was capital of for three thousand years. Unfortunately, my aging and moribund computer seemed to have endless trouble showing the Comments on screen. I hop they are now all 'up'.

Magisterial??

So PF's letter to a bishop in Argentina has been published in the AAS. Naturally, people are worried about the status which this might confer on it. Does it turn the letter concerned into a Magisterial document to which we are obliged to exhibit respect (obsequium)? And all that.

I am not going to get into questions such as the different weight to be accorded to different levels of papal documents; or how to construe a papal document which either obviously or apparently contradicts another document of the same Magisterial level. You can find that sort of stuff elsewhere. And the great Father Zed has done the Church Militant another immense service by printing a detailed analysis of the situation by a noted canonist. The gist is: even an Apostolic Letter printed in AAS does not cancel Canon 915 (unless it explicitly and in due form says that it does).

We are in a new situation under PF, and new hermeneutical methods are both needed and implied. I offer some thoughts ... you might call them the tentative reactions of a Plain Simple Man.

It is an objective and undeniable fact that Amoris laetitia has been interpreted in diametrically  contradictory ways. Some bishops, some conferences, take the view that it has changed nothing of the teaching contained in previous Magisterial documents. Some bishops, some conferences, believe that it has opened up the possibility of giving the Sacraments to unrepentant public adulterers. A sound and common sense principle is A doubtful Law is no Law.  As Cardinal Mueller has pointed out, in a very grave matter a change can only be made in law or doctrine by an explicit statement, with accompanying reasoning, making clear beyond all doubt that a change is being made. Sending Von Schoenborn down to a Vatican News Conference to smile sweetly at Diane Montagna and say "It's a Development!! Read Newman!!!" hardly meets this criterion.

If Amoris laetitia itself is of no effect, clearly a letter (even if it subsequently appropriates to itself the grandiose term 'Magisterial') which purports to interpret AL, can hardly rise much above the level of nugacitas.

Vatican I defined that ex cathedra statements of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable ex sese and not e consensu Ecclesiae. By implication: it has not been defined that lesser papal statements are ex sese irreformable. Thus, it is lawful to take into account what conferences and individual bishops say in interpreting Amoris laetitia. That document is reformable and any force it may eventually after a few decades acquire will depend on the consensus of the Church.

A fortiori, the same is true of the note that Cardinal Parolin has so unwisely attached to the text of "the Argentine letter" in AAS. One of the cheapest and nastiest tricks of the current regime is its facile habit of plastering labels reading "Holy Spirit" or "Magisterium" onto any ill-considered novelty it wants to force down the throats of its unwilling fellow Christians.

Another objective and undeniable fact: although instructed by his Employer to "strengthen your brethren", PF has not replied to Dubia, even when submitted by patres purpurati. Quite obviously, it cannot be argued that he has taught, clearly, explicitly, and as definitive tenendum, any of those contents of the document Amoris laetitia which have caused such puzzlement.

In other words, the Petrine Ministry appears currently to be in the state which Blessed John Henry Newman neatly described as Suspense. I suggest that a general pastoral conclusion to be drawn from all this is that ordinary straightforward Christians have better things to do with their time than worrying about the precise status of ambiguous statements. Better, richer, more God-given things. Qualia essent ...


Open a bottle of wine.

Compose a limerick in English about Cardinal Kasper.

Do the Times Latin Crossword in under five minutes.

Play forfeits with your wife/husband.

Incorporate into a 'Vergilian' eclogue (with goats and shepherdesses galore) Cardinal Mueller's recent brilliant apercu that the Church is not a Field Hospital but a Silicon Valley.

Recite the Quicunque vult and make an Act of Faith.

Cram yourself full of baklava and/or halva.

Listen to the Kyries of the Missa Papae Marcelli.

Go to Ashmole and commune with Menander or Benedict XIV or both.

Walk down the river from Sandford Lock to Abingdon and count the species of waterfowl.

Convert the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis into Homeric hexameters.

Shoot a magpie or two or three or four.

Find a priest who will take a stipend to offer the Mass Salus populi for the Ecclesia Dei adflicta.

Kai, as Aristotle might have put it, ta loipa panta.

Is he still Pope?

I sympathise with dear and conflicted layfolk who wonder, in view of the preposterous publication in AAS of a certain letter, whether PF has finally stepped across a certain line and through manifest heresy forfeited the Petrine See.

The answer is
(1) No;
(2) No; and
(3) No.

To suffer canonical consequences for formal heresy, formal canonical procedures, including formal pertinacity after formal warnings, would be necessary.

There is nowhere you can buy a DIY 'deposeapope' kit.

If God spares me until tomorrow morning, I shall as usual say una cum famulo tuo papa nostro Francisco in the Te igitur, bowing my head as I do so.

Sedevacantist comments are never, you will remember, enabled on this blog.

Talk about PF no longer being pope is an easy way out of a very horrible problem. It is a characteristic temptation of the Enemy. You must realise that the Enemy is terribly active at the moment.

I beg you in the Holy Name of our Redeemer to forget it.

Cardinal Parolin on Episcopal Conferences

In his recent paper read to the Catholic University of America, Cardinal Parolin, Secretary of State, urged upon us a policy first suggested by PF in Evangelii gaudium: the increasing of the competences of Episcopal Conferences. He appeared to be unaware of the reasons for Apostolos suos of S John Paul II; but he did acknowledge the existence of that document. He proceded to tell us that it should "be understood not as a final destination, but as the basis for a renewed reflection".

This hermeneutical principle seems to me subversive of the whole structure of Catholic doctrine. Consider "[Christ] rose on the third day according to the Scriptures". Well, you can if you like call this a basis for a renewed reflection ... our Faith is always something upon which we should reflect further. But our reflection should always preserve the whole content of the original doctrine, so that the new reflection is eodem sensu eademque sententia.

Parolin then went on to claim that Conferences are "really episcopal" because "they have their reason for being not in a sociological principle of collaboration, but in the implementation of the ministry conferred upon each bishop with episcopal consecration". Thus an attempt is being made to give episcopal conferences a basis, a toe-hold, in the Church's Tradition and Dogma.

Whoever drafted this section for his Eminence seems to be ignorant of, or to have ignored, the Magisterium of the last three decades. The Ecclesiology of the Catholic Church sees only two institutions as definitive by Divine Institution: the Universal Church, in communion with the Roman Church; and the local Particular Church, in communion with its Bishop. These are in fact, theologically if not geographically, the same thing; the Universal Church is manifested and made present in the Particular Church. The phrase 'local Church' does not mean a quasi-National 'church', such as "the English Church", which is an aggregation of dioceses. That phrase itself is common, useful, but imprecise slang. But, to be precise, there is the Universal Church and there is the Diocese of Portsmouth.

Groupings of Particular Churches, as Vatican II taught, may for practical and prudential reasons be highly valuable or of venerable antiquity, such as the Patriarchates. But they are not by Divine Law essential. See Communionis notio AAS 85 (1992).

This is why our Holy Mother the Church has been circumspect with regard to Episcopal Conferences. In Apostolos suos she allowed Conferences to have a doctrinal competence, but only if (1) a vote is unanimous (in which case the teaching is the teaching of each individual bishop) or (2) where a vote is not unanimous but is confirmed by the Holy See (in which case the teaching is that of the Universal Church). She is apprehensive about the weakening of the Magisterium of the Bishop in his own Particular Church (i.e. his diocese), and the influence of bureaucracies.

The duty of a local bishop is to ask himself whether a particular idea is in accordance with what has been handed down to him by his predecessors in his See and coheres with the Magisterium of the Church. It is not to ask "Is this a brilliant idea of an amazingly fantastic theologian?", or "Is this roughly in line with what my colleagues bishops X, Y, and Z thought last time we had a chat about it?", or "Can I really go against this when the the Episcopal Conference's ABCDEF Commission has considered it long and hard and come to a definite conclusion expressed in a big Document impressively supported by innumerable footnotes?"

I have throughout this pontificate been afraid that "autonomy and doctrinal Competence for Episcopal Conferences" may be the next major error to assault the whole State of Christ's Church Militant here in Earth. It is the very self-same principle which has corrupted and destroyed the Anglican Communion. It is a Diabolical threat with which those of us with 'Anglican Previous' lived and suffered for decades. Believe me, we know all about it. This is a problem which matters. It is most clearly a strategy elaborated at the very depths of the Lowerarchy.


Here are some remarks, very revealing, made a couple of years ago by a German bishop, Bishop Voderholzer of Regensburg, who seems to have his head screwed on the right way. He speaks of a document of the German Episcopal Conference which
"was released in the name of the Conference of Bishops, of which I am a member, without my having seen its contents, much less having approved it". He goes on to speak of his having "accepted the torch of belief and pastoral responsibility from his forerunners, including S Wolfgang." In other words, not from Cardinal Marx or the Episcopal Conference. And not even from PF. A Bishop and his diocese are not a department of a National Organisation, nor is a bishop Romani pontificis vicarius.

S Irenaeus, with his clear exposition of the handing down of the Faith from bishop to bishop in each Church, would have shaken Bishop Voderholzer warmly by the hand.

Provincial Autonomy (the crisp title by which all this unpleasant stuff is known among Anglicans) is perfectly designed to become a forum within which innovating and unscrupulous bullies will be endowed with the procedural and personal mechanisms to subjugate an orthodox Bishop. And do not underestimate the danger that good and orthodox men may be worn down by a sense that they have a duty of solidarity with their episcopal colleagues. In English English, we call this "clubbing somebody". I am not sure whether this means 'hitting them with a big stick' or 'making them feel warm and comfortable members of a cosy club whose consensus they dread to break'. The practical consequences of each are much the same.

The apparent policy of reversing the teaching elegantly and concisely expressed by Wojtyla and Ratzinger is another major threat to the integrity of the Catholic Faith. 

Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, Priest

Today is the Year's Mind, as we say within the Anglican Patrimony, of Fr Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton. He died in 1959.

Father was, for decades, a leader ... no; the leader ... of the 'papalist' part of the Church of England. Papalist Anglicans were people who believed in the whole Catholic Faith, including the decrees of Vatican I on the Primacy and Infallibility of the Successor of S Peter. They remained in communion with the See of Canterbury because they believed that, just as the schism of 1559 had been corporate, so the renewal of full communion should also be corporate: after all, the corporate schism of 1533/4 had been corporately absolved by Cardinal Pole on S Andrew's Day in 1554. (It is our view that the erection of our Ordinariate did in fact fulfil the same striving for corporate unity which animated the whole life of Fr FC and of so many like him.)

There is much that one could say about him; not least about his foundation of the Catholic League, which still continues, now as a society for both Anglicans and Roman Catholics. And about his role in the restoration of the [Anglican] Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham. But I will pluck from the record (The Anglican Papalist: A Personal Portrait of Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, A T John Slater, Anglo-Catholic History Society, 2012) his role in the 1933 Centenary Manifesto, put out to honour the centenary of the 'Oxford Movement', the Catholic Revival in the Church of England.

This anniversary happened at a time when many 'Catholic' externals had bedded down in the Church of England, but there were worrying signs of doctrinal modernism and of an accommodation to the Spirit of the Age in matters of sexual morality. The Manifesto stood out against disorders such as 'modernistic teaching', a 'novel comprehensiveness and mutual toleration of opposed teaching', 'the recent readiness to compromise on unpopular doctrines and moral standards'; its authors 'utterly reject[ed] Modernism and reprobate[d] all theories and accommodations of a modernistic character which impugn or innovate upon the Faith ... '. It wholly rejected departures from 'Catholic standards in faith, practice or morals. As a grave instance of the last-named, it is incumbent upon us to reprobate the toleration and even positive support ... of the immoral sanction of artificial contraception given by many Bishops at Lambeth'. Does any of this strike you as resembling any modern goings-on in the Catholic Church?

I put it to you that in this Manifesto we find the authentic tones of S Pius X (Pascendi Dominici gregis) and of the affirmation of Christian sexual mores by Pius XI (Casti connubii) and Paul VI (Humanae vitae), not to mention S John Paul II (Veritatis splendor and Familiaris consortio).

I was received as a teenager into the Catholic League by Father Fynes-Clinton in the 1950s. Recently, as I subscribed to the Correctio filialis, I did so in a vivid awareness that I was partaking in yet another skirmish in that same great conflict which in 1933 had elicited the Centenary Manifesto. Same War, same Enemy, same methods.


Eius animae propitietur Deus.

ORDO; and Pope Francis

I notice that other blogs are recommending ORDOs for next year. For those who are Ordinary Form chaps and chappesses, but would enjoy something which somewhat elevates bog-standard Bugnini, I commend the ORDO which I still compile, Order for the Eucharist and for Morning and Evening prayer in the Church of England 2018. It gives full information both for the Novus Ordo Roman Rite (Third Typical Edition of the Roman Missal) and for the Church of England (Common Worship). Tufton Books. (By the way, it starts with Advent.)

For those who would like something unusual and really quite exciting, I recommend (if you haven't tried it already) the ORDO done by the St Lawrence Press. It will remind you of the days before Ven Pius XII and Hannibal Bugnini started out on their career of liturgical 'reform'. In other words, it offers you the Roman Rite as it was in 1939. You will discover an exotic world in which feasts always had a First Vespers; greater feasts had Vigils; greatest ones had Octaves. You will be surprised to realise how much of what we label 'Bugnini' was really imposed before the Council and before S John XXIII.

It is in abbreviated Latin; but that's how ORDOs were before the 1960s. However, the abbreviations are all very simple and obvious and most people with a dash of liturgical know-how will have no trouble spotting what most of them mean.

Of course, its actual use today would be totally illegal. I am not encouraging anything so improper. No way could you possibly atually put it in your sacristy and ... er ... um ... er ...

... ah ... a thought has just occurred to me ...

PF, by word and example, has insistently made clear his dislike of Rigid Pharisaical people who make a fuss about sticking to Rules and Law and think they are better than everybody else because they do so. Yes! In this pontificate, you need not be legalistic pedants! Get up out of the Seat of Moses! Use this ORDO now, quickly, in case PF is succeeded by someone pharisaical! Could be your last chance!

Pope Francis

I think the current Roman pontiff deserves great credit for uttering the R-word, after meeting some of the Burmese refugees in Bengal. I write this in complete sincerity and without irony.

I also applaud him for his recent words about the policy of nuclear deterrence. He thus aligned himself with the judgement on this matter of the late, great, Cardinal Ottaviani, the greatest of the Council Fathers, a living martyr for Tradition during the dark days of the 1960s; as well as of Finnis, Grisez, and other more modern very seriously competent and Traditionalist Catholic moralists.

'The Dictator Pope' ... the latest

It appears that some spoiling is going on in order to blunt the impact of this important book. I urge readers to react accordingly. (It appears on Monday in English and can be prebooked.)

No passaran!

An odd address by Cardinal Parolin?

Speaking at an organisation called the Catholic University of America, Cardinal Parolin, Secretary of State, recently gave a lecture which seemed to me to have some distinctly dubious implications ... to which I hope to return later in the week. Just for today, however, a couple of weeny details.

His Eminence based the mission of Episcopal Conferences in the sacramental origin of the episcopal ministry; "in other words, these conferences are really 'episcopal': they have their raison d'etre not in a sociological principle of collaboration, but in the implementation of the ministry conferred on each bishop with episcopal consecration".

Interestingly, this appears to run contrary to PF's 'ecumenical' practice. PF meets ministers which are called 'bishops' but who belong to sects which do not possess or claim the Apostolic Succession and do not regard episcopal (or any) ordination as a sacrament. And he makes clear that he regards them as truly bishops. "We bishops", PF pointedly says to them in between the hugs. Clearly, Parolin is on a divergence course from PF in this matter. It is remarkable that he has chosen to make his disagreement so public, especially considering the symptoms of paranoia in PF revealed recently in an interview given by Cardinal Mueller (PF: "they tell me you're my enemy").

Secondly: Latin Catholicism has tended to have an immensely juridical style to it. Sacramental 'consecration' is not enough; a man must also have a missio canonica before he (lawfully) goes bishopping. He needs to have been given jurisdiction in a canonical way which may accompany, but is distinct from, his Consecration. This attitude lay behind the insistence that when Pope Ratzinger remitted the excommunications incurred latae sententiae by the SSPX bishops, they still possessed no licit ministry whatsoever in the Church Militant.

Parolin, in so exclusively emphasising the sacramental rather than the canonical or juridical, clearly implies that if his Excellency Bishop Fellay were to knock on the door of the Swiss Episcopal Conference, their excellencies would welcome him warmly. "My dear fellow", una voce they would cry, "do come in and implement together with us the ministry conferred on you in your episcopal consecration".

Furthermore, if Cardinal Mueller is right in his fear that PF might be leading the Church Militant into schism and division, it will, given Cardinal Parolin's ecclesiology, be pretty unproblematic if, a decade or two down the road, some orthodox bishops consecrate more bishops sine mandato Apostolico. So there may come a time when this ... von Schoenborn would call it "this development" ... might come in useful.

Could it be that Cardinal Parolin is be one of these crypto-Lefebvreists whom we are sometimes warned to avoid?