Yes! The canonisations have been completed!! What superb examples to the least of the Faithful these modern post-Conciliar Roman Pontiffs are, every single man-jack of them!!! Thank goodness we no longer have to bother with the Piuses, the Leos, the Benedicts, and all that unholy crowd with their Rigid Magisterium! However can they have dared to be pre-Conciliar? There can, surely, be few greater failings in a pope than that being pre-Conciliar.
I do, however, foresee two problems about the inevitable, exspectatissima, canonisation of PF.
(1) A number of (apparently) theologically competent people have moved the dread H-word [Heresy] rather close to PF. Tricky. This will, surely, have to be neutralised.
The obstacle could be dealt with by instantly (equipollently?) canonising Pope Honorius I (reigned 625-638). This would mean that, whatever future generations decide about PF's orthodoxy or lack of it, there will still be a precedent for canonising him. Perhaps it might even occur to Cardinal Sarah to give the two of them a joint feast day and a combined invocation in the Litaniae Sanctorum. Sancti Honori et Francisce, Orate pro nobis could ring out henceforth at every Ordination in the Catholic Church
(2) There seems to be no general consensus about what, during the Argie Military Dictatorship, PF did or did not do to help and to save threatened people, or, contrariwise, to delate them. But he does not seem to have delivered great thundering public condemnations against the murderous tyrants (as he fearlessly does qua pope when he daily denounces his 'clericalist' brother clergy).
However, one of the arguments deployed to block the canonisation of Pope Pacelli is that, although he crammed thousands of Roman Jews into Vatican properties and encouraged others to do the same sort of thing, he never explicitly and specifically denounced the unspeakably ghastly Nazi holocaust of European Jewry.
Pius XII is not one of my heroes; but if he also were to be instantly canonised, this would finally clear the way for PF also to be raised to the altars, whatever differing historians may in the future conclude about his complicity (or otherwise) in the crimes of the Military Dictatorship.
Gotta get everything in place, y'know. Santo subito, if not sooner!!! You never know ... er ...
23 October 2018
22 October 2018
The Beevy Emm, alive and well at Queens
Well, I went to the Queen's College Conference and was rather underwhelmed!
There was one outstanding lecture: a real tour de force by John Caldwell on the Psalter. He made clear that the Masoretic traditions are entitled to no assumed priority over those of Greek or Latin Christianity, particularly with regard to the numeration of the Psalms. (There sometimes appears to be a rather shamefaced attitude to the Vulgate (and Septuagint) numeration; this is completely unnecessary. 'Christianity' and 'Jamnian' Judaism are both descended from a first-century rupture; the unconscious assumption that the Masoretic texts are 'authentic' in a way that Christian texts are not fails to remember the Dead Sea scrolls, not to mention Margaret Barker. This is not a pedantic detail; it goes right to the essential point of difference between Synagogue Judaism and Sacrificial Christianity.)
During the next papers, the person sitting to my left felt it quite possible to do her emails' while still, I am sure, paying full attention to the lecturers. Contrary to my every normal instinct, I sympathised.
One paper which looked as though it might contribute to study of the fascinating interface between Orality and Literacy did a little (but not much) more than demonstrating how many of the misprints in printed liturgical books are those arising from that most boringly mechanical cause of error in textual transmission: parablepsis arising from homoeoteleuton ... what a distinguished Professorial Fellow of Queen's in the 1960s, who was never boring, economically called Hom.
Most irritating of all: one lecturer told us that he would not use terms like 'Ladymass' for that period in which the use of that term is not evidenced. So he referred to it as 'The Commemorative Mass of the Beevy Emm'. And he kept on doing so all through his lecture!!! Did the junior clergy of the forteenth century really saunter out of their Vicars' Halls each morning cheefully discussing "Who's going to celebrate the Commemorative Mass of the Beevy Emm this morning?" The crass old English phobia about calling the Theotokos 'our Lady' still seems alive and well. The Beevy Emm, pray for us! Does that speaker imagine the Incarnate Word emerging from His Mother's womb, looking up, and politely saying "Buona Sera: the Beevy Emm I presume"?
In the afternoon, a celebration of the Sarum Ladymass in Queens' Chapel. Or was it a celebration? The celebrant and deacon, so they coyly told us, could not have been ordained in the Church of England before 1992. But their 'celebration' although 'inauthentic' in many details, drew its authenticity - they explained - from the fact that it was 'the Mass'.
Well, invisibly, such a 'celebration' is inauthentic if the 'celebrant' does not have the character of priesthood marked on her soul; visibly, it is inauthentic if there is no glistening bald pate to assure us that she has been tonsured (I fear none of the participants had been). Above all, to have female voices chanting fifteenth century presbyteral and diaconal texts is historically and, surely, musically inauthentic. How many more inauthenticities qualiacunque could anybody possibly want? But the schola undoubtedly did very nicely.
The young woan looked to me as if she might have been wearing the ('Roman') chasuble back-to-front. But the cataracts in my eyes grow larger each day. Perhaps I do her catwalk instincts an injustice.
I sat for the Gospel and left well before the 'consecration', since it was made clear that we were expected to show formal ecclesial communio with these jolly japes by joining in the Pax.
There was one outstanding lecture: a real tour de force by John Caldwell on the Psalter. He made clear that the Masoretic traditions are entitled to no assumed priority over those of Greek or Latin Christianity, particularly with regard to the numeration of the Psalms. (There sometimes appears to be a rather shamefaced attitude to the Vulgate (and Septuagint) numeration; this is completely unnecessary. 'Christianity' and 'Jamnian' Judaism are both descended from a first-century rupture; the unconscious assumption that the Masoretic texts are 'authentic' in a way that Christian texts are not fails to remember the Dead Sea scrolls, not to mention Margaret Barker. This is not a pedantic detail; it goes right to the essential point of difference between Synagogue Judaism and Sacrificial Christianity.)
During the next papers, the person sitting to my left felt it quite possible to do her emails' while still, I am sure, paying full attention to the lecturers. Contrary to my every normal instinct, I sympathised.
One paper which looked as though it might contribute to study of the fascinating interface between Orality and Literacy did a little (but not much) more than demonstrating how many of the misprints in printed liturgical books are those arising from that most boringly mechanical cause of error in textual transmission: parablepsis arising from homoeoteleuton ... what a distinguished Professorial Fellow of Queen's in the 1960s, who was never boring, economically called Hom.
Most irritating of all: one lecturer told us that he would not use terms like 'Ladymass' for that period in which the use of that term is not evidenced. So he referred to it as 'The Commemorative Mass of the Beevy Emm'. And he kept on doing so all through his lecture!!! Did the junior clergy of the forteenth century really saunter out of their Vicars' Halls each morning cheefully discussing "Who's going to celebrate the Commemorative Mass of the Beevy Emm this morning?" The crass old English phobia about calling the Theotokos 'our Lady' still seems alive and well. The Beevy Emm, pray for us! Does that speaker imagine the Incarnate Word emerging from His Mother's womb, looking up, and politely saying "Buona Sera: the Beevy Emm I presume"?
In the afternoon, a celebration of the Sarum Ladymass in Queens' Chapel. Or was it a celebration? The celebrant and deacon, so they coyly told us, could not have been ordained in the Church of England before 1992. But their 'celebration' although 'inauthentic' in many details, drew its authenticity - they explained - from the fact that it was 'the Mass'.
Well, invisibly, such a 'celebration' is inauthentic if the 'celebrant' does not have the character of priesthood marked on her soul; visibly, it is inauthentic if there is no glistening bald pate to assure us that she has been tonsured (I fear none of the participants had been). Above all, to have female voices chanting fifteenth century presbyteral and diaconal texts is historically and, surely, musically inauthentic. How many more inauthenticities qualiacunque could anybody possibly want? But the schola undoubtedly did very nicely.
The young woan looked to me as if she might have been wearing the ('Roman') chasuble back-to-front. But the cataracts in my eyes grow larger each day. Perhaps I do her catwalk instincts an injustice.
I sat for the Gospel and left well before the 'consecration', since it was made clear that we were expected to show formal ecclesial communio with these jolly japes by joining in the Pax.
21 October 2018
Dixit Veritatem
In 1933, when the centenary of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England was being celebrated, a Dr N P Williams edited a volume entitled Northern Catholicism ..., in which he himself contributed a preface on 'Northern Catholicism'. Dom Gregory Dix wrote a review of this piece in the Nashdom Abbey periodical Laudate (which has long been out of print).
Dix, without much evidence, regarded himself as being of French origin, and very definitely as a 'Latin' Christian. The idea that, in Scandinavia, one might find a version of Catholicism which was manly and masculine and free of the superstitions of flabby feminine 'Mediterranean' Catholicism, filled Dix with that combination of fury and satirical wit which so often resulted in his best writing. Sometimes he would quip that there once was a Nordic Catholicism; and that its decadence was one of the things that made a reformation necessary in the sixteenth century.
After a few witticisms about Nazi Racism, the Call of the Blood, and Heil Hitler, Dix in his review quotes Williams:
"the essential religious genius of the Northern peoples, where it finds unfettered expression ...[is] of a mystical and soaring quality appropriate to dwellers amidst the less genial aspects of Nature and beneath 'grey and weeping skies' - a quality which urges it to pierce straight upwards to the ineffable Godhead itself, and forbids it to take over-much delight in symbols, or to rest with satisfaction in material objects of devotion".
This risible tosh inspired Dix to comment: "It is a vivid and sympathetic picture. One can almost see these mystical and polygamous freemen at their simple devotions, and catch the rustle of their golden beards as they bend forward to breathe unsuperstitious prayers into their winged casques, seated on damp logs beneath the grey and weeping dome of heaven". In conclusion, Dix, referring to Horace's XVIth Epode, needles Williams with the suggestion that he might situate his Northern Catholicism in the non-existent Happy Happy Isles ... if only he will be prepared to take advice from a Dago poet (History does not record that Horace was a Swede).
Perhaps I ought not to be too hard on Nippy Williams; after all, he was a theologian of distinction. I believe he was so upset by Gregory's tour de force that he never spoke to him again. But the plain fact is that Dix exploded what was in reality just one more among the endless Anglican attempts to dream up some alibi for declining to accept the 'claims of the Roman See'. In this futile search, Nippy fell victim, in that decidedly nasty decade, to a whiff of the very nasty 'Aryan' myth. Not nearly as badly as did some of the great names of up-to-the-minute German New Testament Scholarship, with swastikas framing their Fuehrer-worship and their Aryan Jesus in his Gentile Galilee. But even in 1933, when the Extermination Camps were nothing more than a perverted gleam in the Fuehrer's eye, Dix saw through it all. Because he was a papalist.
Dix's summary? "Truth will be held most entirely and in due proportion in a Church which is truly 'Universal', supra-racial, and unaffected by the transient spirit of a particular age".
Dix, without much evidence, regarded himself as being of French origin, and very definitely as a 'Latin' Christian. The idea that, in Scandinavia, one might find a version of Catholicism which was manly and masculine and free of the superstitions of flabby feminine 'Mediterranean' Catholicism, filled Dix with that combination of fury and satirical wit which so often resulted in his best writing. Sometimes he would quip that there once was a Nordic Catholicism; and that its decadence was one of the things that made a reformation necessary in the sixteenth century.
After a few witticisms about Nazi Racism, the Call of the Blood, and Heil Hitler, Dix in his review quotes Williams:
"the essential religious genius of the Northern peoples, where it finds unfettered expression ...[is] of a mystical and soaring quality appropriate to dwellers amidst the less genial aspects of Nature and beneath 'grey and weeping skies' - a quality which urges it to pierce straight upwards to the ineffable Godhead itself, and forbids it to take over-much delight in symbols, or to rest with satisfaction in material objects of devotion".
This risible tosh inspired Dix to comment: "It is a vivid and sympathetic picture. One can almost see these mystical and polygamous freemen at their simple devotions, and catch the rustle of their golden beards as they bend forward to breathe unsuperstitious prayers into their winged casques, seated on damp logs beneath the grey and weeping dome of heaven". In conclusion, Dix, referring to Horace's XVIth Epode, needles Williams with the suggestion that he might situate his Northern Catholicism in the non-existent Happy Happy Isles ... if only he will be prepared to take advice from a Dago poet (History does not record that Horace was a Swede).
Perhaps I ought not to be too hard on Nippy Williams; after all, he was a theologian of distinction. I believe he was so upset by Gregory's tour de force that he never spoke to him again. But the plain fact is that Dix exploded what was in reality just one more among the endless Anglican attempts to dream up some alibi for declining to accept the 'claims of the Roman See'. In this futile search, Nippy fell victim, in that decidedly nasty decade, to a whiff of the very nasty 'Aryan' myth. Not nearly as badly as did some of the great names of up-to-the-minute German New Testament Scholarship, with swastikas framing their Fuehrer-worship and their Aryan Jesus in his Gentile Galilee. But even in 1933, when the Extermination Camps were nothing more than a perverted gleam in the Fuehrer's eye, Dix saw through it all. Because he was a papalist.
Dix's summary? "Truth will be held most entirely and in due proportion in a Church which is truly 'Universal', supra-racial, and unaffected by the transient spirit of a particular age".
19 October 2018
Bishops Irresponsible
The names of the Bishops in each of the synodical groups is to be witheld "to show forth the spirit of the Synod, which is a spirit of communion".
The duty of bishops when they are gathered together in councils or synods is, above all, to bear open witness to the Deposit of Faith which, handed openly down through the Apostles, they and their respective churches have each received, so as to teach it authoritatively and openly, each of them from his own cathedra. By these means, the world will know, from the open harmony of all the successors of the Apostles, what Christ's truth is.
When the Bergoglianists tried a dodge like this once before, Cardinal Mueller protested. He declared, so very rightly, that the People of God had the right to know what their Bishop was teaching.
I am having trouble thinking of anything more corrupt and corrupting than this crude attempt so to manage gatherings of bishops that they can be manipulated into consenting to error, or appearing to do so.
The history of Councils established criteria by which it could be known whether conciliar deliberations and decisions are to be regarded as valid. Blessed John Henry Newman, characteristically, visited this area of historical theology in the nervous aftermath of Vatican I (Ker pp 654sqq).
Since a 'synod', even if backed by a pope, clearly has less authority than an Ecumenical Council, we need to revisit this topic now. All the more so because of the preposterous recent Bergoglianist claim that synodical statements, provided the pope likes them, come to us with the guarantee of the Petrine Magisterium.
Has Newman's phrase for the ultrapapalists of his own time "an aggressive insolent faction" ever been more true than it is in the context of today's realities? But Newman also wrote "We have come to a climax of tyranny". I find this both sobering and curiously comforting. Today, with its woes, is not the first time that the Catholic Faith has been under lethal attack from a corrupt hyperpapalist establishment. God has always sent an Athanasius or a Newman.
The duty of bishops when they are gathered together in councils or synods is, above all, to bear open witness to the Deposit of Faith which, handed openly down through the Apostles, they and their respective churches have each received, so as to teach it authoritatively and openly, each of them from his own cathedra. By these means, the world will know, from the open harmony of all the successors of the Apostles, what Christ's truth is.
When the Bergoglianists tried a dodge like this once before, Cardinal Mueller protested. He declared, so very rightly, that the People of God had the right to know what their Bishop was teaching.
I am having trouble thinking of anything more corrupt and corrupting than this crude attempt so to manage gatherings of bishops that they can be manipulated into consenting to error, or appearing to do so.
The history of Councils established criteria by which it could be known whether conciliar deliberations and decisions are to be regarded as valid. Blessed John Henry Newman, characteristically, visited this area of historical theology in the nervous aftermath of Vatican I (Ker pp 654sqq).
Since a 'synod', even if backed by a pope, clearly has less authority than an Ecumenical Council, we need to revisit this topic now. All the more so because of the preposterous recent Bergoglianist claim that synodical statements, provided the pope likes them, come to us with the guarantee of the Petrine Magisterium.
Has Newman's phrase for the ultrapapalists of his own time "an aggressive insolent faction" ever been more true than it is in the context of today's realities? But Newman also wrote "We have come to a climax of tyranny". I find this both sobering and curiously comforting. Today, with its woes, is not the first time that the Catholic Faith has been under lethal attack from a corrupt hyperpapalist establishment. God has always sent an Athanasius or a Newman.
18 October 2018
SARUM
I gather that, this coming Saturday, October 20, there is a free Conference in the Queen's College about the Sarum rite, and particularly the Lady Mass. Coffee 10.15; Opening 10.50.
3-4.30: a performance of the Lady Mass (including Nicholas Ludford's Saturday Lady Mass). The publicity does not make clear whether this is an actual Eucharistic celebration; nor, if it is, what the status of the 'celebrant' is!
Those planning to attend should have emailed owen.rees@queens.ox.ac.uk by last Saturday, but I expect ...
3-4.30: a performance of the Lady Mass (including Nicholas Ludford's Saturday Lady Mass). The publicity does not make clear whether this is an actual Eucharistic celebration; nor, if it is, what the status of the 'celebrant' is!
Those planning to attend should have emailed owen.rees@queens.ox.ac.uk by last Saturday, but I expect ...
17 October 2018
23 October
The admirable Lord Bishop of the diocese in which I am domiciled (although, of course, I am incardinated in the Ordinariate) has asked his priests and people to observe October 23 as a day of Reparation for the babies killed since the Abortion Act was passed in this country on that day in the year 1967. He asks clergy to use the Votive (NO) for the Progress of Peoples and to wear the purple vestments of penance.
He suggests, for that day, fasting since midnight the night before Communion and making use of silence at Mass. He particularly suggests that the Offertory Prayers be said secreto. Nice points.
Admirable. I feel strongly inclined to clamber on board his initiative. I wonder which EF Votive one might use ... Salus Populi, perhaps?
He suggests, for that day, fasting since midnight the night before Communion and making use of silence at Mass. He particularly suggests that the Offertory Prayers be said secreto. Nice points.
Admirable. I feel strongly inclined to clamber on board his initiative. I wonder which EF Votive one might use ... Salus Populi, perhaps?
16 October 2018
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey is, essentially, the Sacring Place of English Kings and - since the invention of the 'United Kingdom' - of the monarchs of that protean political institution. It is rendered suitable for the former purpose by the presence of the shrine of S Edward the Confessor ... whose joyful festival we kept last Saturday.
There was, at the beginning of the modern era, an attempt to make the Abbey something more. In 1485, one Henry Tudor had, with very scant title, seized the throne of England. Marrying a Yorkist heiress did nothing to suppress agitation by those who wanted a Sovereign of the Blood Royal (indeed, his new mother-in-law joined those who were plotting against him); and, since Nature abhors a vacuum, whenever he executed Plantagenets, low-born Pretenders emerged from the woodwork. Foreign monarchs were cautious about betrothing daughters to the family of such a parvenu and unstable 'monarch'.
So he attempted to embellish his tenuous claim in two ways. By calling his son Arthur, he attempted to cast over his dodgy dynasty the mantle of the Once and Future King. And another name with incantatory potential was that of 'Henry'. Accordingly, the old Lady Chapel of the Abbey was demolished so as to be replaced by a new spectacular perpendicular chapel, where Tudor and his family were to be buried, but which, technically, was to be the shrine of a great royal saint who would match the S Edward who was enshrined nearby. Pope Julius issued bulls authorising the introduction of the cause for the canonisation of Henry VI (just as 'the divorce' was to be Henry VIII's Great Matter, so the canonisation was the Great Matter of Henry VII), and for the translation of his body from Windsor to this new chapel. Henry VII was seeking to cloak himself in the aura of the saintly Lancastrian, 'our Uncle of blessed memory', whose name, and whose descent from Catherine de Valois, he shared; and the very steps up to the chapel were to be endowed with indulgences. The building was adorned with all that was most sumptuous in the decorative arts of medieval England and of renaissance Italy.
In the twentieth century, there were admirers of Henry VI, especially Old Etonians, who revived the aim of securing his canonisation. However, so far ... perhaps PF ...
It is perhaps amusing that the last heir of the House of Stuart to prefer a claim de jure to the Three Crowns should have been His Most Eminent Majesty King Henry IX Cardinal Bishop of Frascati.
Hindsight informs us that there never was to be a Tudor King Arthur I. Nor did the politically-motivated campaign come to fruition of a canonised Saint Henry VI who would swell the pilgrim numbers in the Abbey. In fact, that England of popes, pardons and chantries had less than forty years to run before the Great Plunder.
But things seemed quite different at the start of the sixteenth century.
After all, the principal truth that the Muse of History teaches us is how very often the utterly unexpected is what happens.
A comforting thought during this present pontificate.
There was, at the beginning of the modern era, an attempt to make the Abbey something more. In 1485, one Henry Tudor had, with very scant title, seized the throne of England. Marrying a Yorkist heiress did nothing to suppress agitation by those who wanted a Sovereign of the Blood Royal (indeed, his new mother-in-law joined those who were plotting against him); and, since Nature abhors a vacuum, whenever he executed Plantagenets, low-born Pretenders emerged from the woodwork. Foreign monarchs were cautious about betrothing daughters to the family of such a parvenu and unstable 'monarch'.
So he attempted to embellish his tenuous claim in two ways. By calling his son Arthur, he attempted to cast over his dodgy dynasty the mantle of the Once and Future King. And another name with incantatory potential was that of 'Henry'. Accordingly, the old Lady Chapel of the Abbey was demolished so as to be replaced by a new spectacular perpendicular chapel, where Tudor and his family were to be buried, but which, technically, was to be the shrine of a great royal saint who would match the S Edward who was enshrined nearby. Pope Julius issued bulls authorising the introduction of the cause for the canonisation of Henry VI (just as 'the divorce' was to be Henry VIII's Great Matter, so the canonisation was the Great Matter of Henry VII), and for the translation of his body from Windsor to this new chapel. Henry VII was seeking to cloak himself in the aura of the saintly Lancastrian, 'our Uncle of blessed memory', whose name, and whose descent from Catherine de Valois, he shared; and the very steps up to the chapel were to be endowed with indulgences. The building was adorned with all that was most sumptuous in the decorative arts of medieval England and of renaissance Italy.
In the twentieth century, there were admirers of Henry VI, especially Old Etonians, who revived the aim of securing his canonisation. However, so far ... perhaps PF ...
It is perhaps amusing that the last heir of the House of Stuart to prefer a claim de jure to the Three Crowns should have been His Most Eminent Majesty King Henry IX Cardinal Bishop of Frascati.
Hindsight informs us that there never was to be a Tudor King Arthur I. Nor did the politically-motivated campaign come to fruition of a canonised Saint Henry VI who would swell the pilgrim numbers in the Abbey. In fact, that England of popes, pardons and chantries had less than forty years to run before the Great Plunder.
But things seemed quite different at the start of the sixteenth century.
After all, the principal truth that the Muse of History teaches us is how very often the utterly unexpected is what happens.
A comforting thought during this present pontificate.
15 October 2018
Home Schooling
Apparently critical remarks have been made about home-schooling by some participants in the Synod.
I spent most of my adult life working in a college which was part of a corporation of colleges devoted to providing a middle-class education in the Catholic Tradition as this was understood within the Church of England. It was known as the Woodard Corporation, and contained about thirty colleges.
You might suppose that Canon Nathaniel Woodard, the Founder, must have entertained an uncritical devotion to the project of educating the young in colleges.
Not so.
He once described the practice of the mass education of the young as like trying o get one's hands clean by washing them in filth. His provision of so many establishments resulted simply from his conviction that, since the system existed, its worst features should be mitigated.
It was his view that the ratio of priests to pupils should be 1:10; and he did his best to secure that every member of his colleges should make a sacramental confession (the Victorians used the phrase Auricular Confession to make it sound sinister and unEnglish) on every occasion before receiving the Blessed Sacrament. The Chaplain was to be senior to the head master.
For this, he was mercilessly and endlessly persecuted.
Perhaps today's Catholic Church needs a dose of Woodardian 'Clericalism'.
I spent most of my adult life working in a college which was part of a corporation of colleges devoted to providing a middle-class education in the Catholic Tradition as this was understood within the Church of England. It was known as the Woodard Corporation, and contained about thirty colleges.
You might suppose that Canon Nathaniel Woodard, the Founder, must have entertained an uncritical devotion to the project of educating the young in colleges.
Not so.
He once described the practice of the mass education of the young as like trying o get one's hands clean by washing them in filth. His provision of so many establishments resulted simply from his conviction that, since the system existed, its worst features should be mitigated.
It was his view that the ratio of priests to pupils should be 1:10; and he did his best to secure that every member of his colleges should make a sacramental confession (the Victorians used the phrase Auricular Confession to make it sound sinister and unEnglish) on every occasion before receiving the Blessed Sacrament. The Chaplain was to be senior to the head master.
For this, he was mercilessly and endlessly persecuted.
Perhaps today's Catholic Church needs a dose of Woodardian 'Clericalism'.
14 October 2018
S Frideswide
Presumably, before 1962 the Birmingham Supplement of the Breviary had the Nocturn 2 lections for S Frideswide on October 19.
I'd be grateful if ...
I'd be grateful if ...
Oratiuncula hodierna
Saint Paul VI, pray that the smoke of Satan which entered the Church may, by your intercession, be driven back. Pray that the the whole Church may hear with docile obedience the moral teachings which, handed down by your predecessors, you handed down to our generations. Pray especially for your successor Pope Francis, that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, he may devoutly, powerfully, and joyfully set forth the tradition received through the Apostles, the Deposit of Faith.
13 October 2018
Cardinal Wuerl ...
... has finally had his resignation accepted. Many a blameless cleric would be delighted to receive as extravagant a send-off as PF has given Wuerl. What do we all have to do to earn ...
My own unease concerning Wuerl began with a story I heard the veracity of which I cannot guarantee. So, if I've got this wrong, apologies to the clerics concerned; apologies to my readers for misleading them. I welcome any corrections from anybody who knows the facts more accurately than I do. I would not wish the record to be anything other than straight! The following account is, therefore, provisional. It may well be totally withdrawn, with apologies.
It relates to North America and to the Ordinariate of the Chair of S Peter in the time of the previous Ordinary, Mgr Steenson..
My recollection is of being told that a parish in that Ordinariate had started an Extraordinary Form Mass on a weekday, which attracted quite a congregation. A stop was put to this by Cardinal Wuerl, who instructed Mgr Steenson to explain to his subjects that the EF was not part of the Anglican Patrimony, and should not be celebrated in Ordinariate churches.
If true, this is preposterous. The Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus says that Ordinariate clergy may use either the Roman Rite or the Ordinariate Rite. It does not distinguish between the two forms of the Roman Rite, the Ordinary and the Extraordinary. By decreeing that Ordinariate clergy can celebrate the Roman Rite, and making no distinction between its two forms, those Ordinariate clergy are placed in exactly the same position as every other presbyter of the Latin Church, by virtue of Summorum pontificum.
Is the EF "part of our Patrimony"? In one sense, clearly not. The provinces of the Anglican Communion never authorised the Missal of S Pius V.
But, equally, those provinces never authorised the Novus Ordo of B Paul VI. So, by the "not part of our Patrimony" argument, Cardinal Wuerl would prevent us from using that too.
In another sense, the EF clearly is part of our Patrimony. It has been in use by our clegy and Laity for roughly a century. When I was in the Diocese of Oxford in the Province of Canterbury, I used it, in Latin, most weekday mornings. It was also used in various Missals such as the English Missal, which provided it partly in Latin and partly in English and with the possibility of interpolating some formulae from the Book of Common Prayer. I knew it as a schoolboy in the 1950s and as an undergraduate in the early 1960s.
The same is not true of the Novus Ordo! That is totally alien both to the elegant but Zwinglian formulae in the 'official' Book of Common Prayer, and also to the de facto liturgical culture which prevailed in 'Anglo-Catholic' circles.
The old Mass is very much an integral part of our liturgical history. Our greatest liturgist and mystagogue, Dom Gregory Dix, used it daily, in Latin, in his monastery at Nashdom, and insisted on doing so in the Lutheran Churches during a lecture tour in Sweden! In the Anglican shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, there still are dozens of examples of the Missale Romanum (well, there were last time I said Mass there about ten years ago), and of the English Missal, surviving in storage from the happy days when the twenty or so altars in the Shrine Church would have been in constant use, during the pilgrimage season, by priests saying their private masses according to what, in those happy days, we called "the Western Rite"!
So ... can anybody fill me in with regard to this American business?
My own unease concerning Wuerl began with a story I heard the veracity of which I cannot guarantee. So, if I've got this wrong, apologies to the clerics concerned; apologies to my readers for misleading them. I welcome any corrections from anybody who knows the facts more accurately than I do. I would not wish the record to be anything other than straight! The following account is, therefore, provisional. It may well be totally withdrawn, with apologies.
It relates to North America and to the Ordinariate of the Chair of S Peter in the time of the previous Ordinary, Mgr Steenson..
My recollection is of being told that a parish in that Ordinariate had started an Extraordinary Form Mass on a weekday, which attracted quite a congregation. A stop was put to this by Cardinal Wuerl, who instructed Mgr Steenson to explain to his subjects that the EF was not part of the Anglican Patrimony, and should not be celebrated in Ordinariate churches.
If true, this is preposterous. The Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus says that Ordinariate clergy may use either the Roman Rite or the Ordinariate Rite. It does not distinguish between the two forms of the Roman Rite, the Ordinary and the Extraordinary. By decreeing that Ordinariate clergy can celebrate the Roman Rite, and making no distinction between its two forms, those Ordinariate clergy are placed in exactly the same position as every other presbyter of the Latin Church, by virtue of Summorum pontificum.
Is the EF "part of our Patrimony"? In one sense, clearly not. The provinces of the Anglican Communion never authorised the Missal of S Pius V.
But, equally, those provinces never authorised the Novus Ordo of B Paul VI. So, by the "not part of our Patrimony" argument, Cardinal Wuerl would prevent us from using that too.
In another sense, the EF clearly is part of our Patrimony. It has been in use by our clegy and Laity for roughly a century. When I was in the Diocese of Oxford in the Province of Canterbury, I used it, in Latin, most weekday mornings. It was also used in various Missals such as the English Missal, which provided it partly in Latin and partly in English and with the possibility of interpolating some formulae from the Book of Common Prayer. I knew it as a schoolboy in the 1950s and as an undergraduate in the early 1960s.
The same is not true of the Novus Ordo! That is totally alien both to the elegant but Zwinglian formulae in the 'official' Book of Common Prayer, and also to the de facto liturgical culture which prevailed in 'Anglo-Catholic' circles.
The old Mass is very much an integral part of our liturgical history. Our greatest liturgist and mystagogue, Dom Gregory Dix, used it daily, in Latin, in his monastery at Nashdom, and insisted on doing so in the Lutheran Churches during a lecture tour in Sweden! In the Anglican shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, there still are dozens of examples of the Missale Romanum (well, there were last time I said Mass there about ten years ago), and of the English Missal, surviving in storage from the happy days when the twenty or so altars in the Shrine Church would have been in constant use, during the pilgrimage season, by priests saying their private masses according to what, in those happy days, we called "the Western Rite"!
So ... can anybody fill me in with regard to this American business?
12 October 2018
Dr Jalland and the Ordinariate Missal
Over the last few days, I have shown how Dr T G Jalland, my erudite predecessor as pp of S Thomas's By The Railway Station in Oxford, was one of those Anglo-Catholics in the middle of the twentieth century who transformed for thoughtful Anglicans the question of the Papacy; he used the prestigious Bampton Lectures here in Oxford to open up the subject of 'Rome' to a great and much-needed hurricane of historical truth. I have not abandoned my sense of pietas towards him. He was one of the Grandfathers of our Ordinariate.
He used the occasion of the fourth centenary of the First English Prayer Book to preach a sermon which concluded with the summary that Archbishop Cranmer was
"always, from first to last, dependant on an imperfect text of Scripture, on a narrow range of Patristic material, as yet but partially understood in relation to its true historical character, and above all on 'the latest thing from Germany'. It is hardly surprising that his laboriously fashioned structure proved to be, doctrinally and liturgically speaking, a house of cards. But it is ever to his credit that in his command of English and above all of the rhythm and melody of words, he bequeathed to us a treasury out of which may be fashioned in the end 'a manner of the holy communion' far more 'agreeable with the institution of Christ, St Paul and the old primitive and apostolic church' than ever was his own".
"May be fashioned in the end"! A prophetic vision of our admirable Ordinariate Missal!!
(Thanks to Professor Tighe for unearthing this text for me some years ago.)
Concluded.
He used the occasion of the fourth centenary of the First English Prayer Book to preach a sermon which concluded with the summary that Archbishop Cranmer was
"always, from first to last, dependant on an imperfect text of Scripture, on a narrow range of Patristic material, as yet but partially understood in relation to its true historical character, and above all on 'the latest thing from Germany'. It is hardly surprising that his laboriously fashioned structure proved to be, doctrinally and liturgically speaking, a house of cards. But it is ever to his credit that in his command of English and above all of the rhythm and melody of words, he bequeathed to us a treasury out of which may be fashioned in the end 'a manner of the holy communion' far more 'agreeable with the institution of Christ, St Paul and the old primitive and apostolic church' than ever was his own".
"May be fashioned in the end"! A prophetic vision of our admirable Ordinariate Missal!!
(Thanks to Professor Tighe for unearthing this text for me some years ago.)
Concluded.
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