A National Treasure?

There is much grief among the luvvy classes about the death of one of their own, a woman who acted under the name Barbara Windsor.

She never did me any harm, and I have no motive to disparage her. However, she did sleep with a great many men; they did include murderous members of London East End gangs; and she had five abortions.

I am a sinner who have probably misused the graces offered me much more than she misused the graces offered by God to her. And I cannot know what transactions occurred between herself and God before she breathed her last.

But is she really so exemplary? 

Some years ago, the Moors Murderer, Myra Hindley, was reconciled to the Church. For some reason, this infuriated the Meejah classes. I remember one of them writing about how preposterous was the idea that if a man with a purple ribbon round his neck murmured some words, sins as heinous as those committed by Hindley could be washed away. He opined (I quote) that she should rot for ever in Hell. Because there are people, sensitive and thoughtful folk, who do not believe that a loving God could ever shut somebody up for ever in Hell, but who ... if helped along by a few leading questions ... are very happy to supply names of some who are most certainly in the Hell which a loving God could never allow to exist.

Such opinions as that about Hindley were not expressed by stuffy old moralists. We stuffy old moralists believed, and believe, that Sin is awe-fully offensive to a loving God; and yet that any sin, however horrible, can be washed away with a liitle water and a few words in Baptism; or a murmured admission and an Absolution in a Confessional.

I suspect that, for luvvies, for the Meejah, sins like the sins which they cheerfully commit or might commit themselves cannot really matter so very much ... cannot even require Baptism or Absolution ... indeed, that it is thoroughly bad manners even to call them 'sins' ... but that the sins of a Hindley or a Hitler are unforgiveable.

In my view, Barbara Windsor was no more, and no less, a National Treasure than were the five children she killed. I shall pray for the repose of her soul.

The Mikado?

 I just love the phrase "President Elect". It has such a very English, GilbertandSullivan, feel to it. I think our transpontine friends are very lucky to have one. And he says such divinely funny things ... "Steel your Spines", for example. He is a poppet. 

You will guess, rightly, that I have been watching him a bit on video clips. Let me explain why.

Not along ago, I did rather join in with those other wicked souls who were laughing about the fact that the President Elect, "A devout Catholic", thought Psalmist was pronounced Palmist (instead of Sah-mist, as the rest of us, and our dictionaries, believe). One reader rebuked me for mocking somebody who had a speech impediment. So, I watched ... and listened ... to find any evidence that he cannot pronounce words with an initial S sound. I have to say that I discovered he has no problems at all with initial Ss. After all, many much younger men might have had trouble negotiating a phrase of such allusive complexity as "Steel your Spines". So I plead not guilty.

The survey, however, did convince me that, as my maternal Grandmother (now, I very much fear, deceased) would have put it, "He hasn't got much up top". And I got to wondering if this had any relevance to the question of giving him, or refusing him, Holy Communion ... a subject currently in the news. Reports are circulating about the words of Archbishops Chaput and Aquila. I have tentatively wondered if it can sometimes, in matters like this, be pastorally right to take account of somebody's low intelligence, ostensible decrepitude, deteriorating mental condition, or impaired grasp of realities.

Take Rex Mottram, for example, in Brideshead Revisited. He has proposed himself as a convert because he wishes to marry an aristocratic Catholic. Father Mowbray, given the task of instructing him, complains:

"'I wasn't happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him. One has to take chances sometimes -- with semi-imbeciles, for instance. You never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there's someone to keep an eye on them, you take the chance.' ... 

"'Poor Rex,' said Lady Marchmain. 'You know, I think it makes him rather lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray.'"

When someone is extremely mentally confused, might it be right to give them the benefit of the doubt out of pastoral oikonomia?

Of course, I do realise that the question of Scandalum has also to be taken into account.

 

Working towards an Octave ...

The nearly total abolition of Octaves in the post-Conciliar "reforms" went against all natural human instincts, as well as Biblical precedent. Having a great festival ... and then putting on green vestments the next morning as if nothing has happened ... is upsetting as well as counterintuitive. Those who worship according to Byzantine and other rites can bear witness that, among themselves, a great festival lingers in the liturgical mind until a 'leave-taking'.

Surely, it is interesting that the Octave of the Immaculate Conception has been gradually, imperceptibly, with snail-like tread but non sine numine, creeping back. On December 9, there was S John Didacus Cuauhtlatoatzin, the Visionary of Guadalupe, in the Novus Ordo. By the legislation of March this year, he may be observed also in the Vetus Ordo. On December 10, our Lady of Loreto has for many decades been in the Appendix pro aliquibus locis of the old Rite. And today, Dececember 12, there is our Lady of Guadalupe in the Novus Ordo. These celebrations help to keep the Theotokos in mind for half an Octave!

Those of us who are Vetus women or men (as opposed to merely veteres) should remember that the EF department of the CDF expects us, on such days, to use Communia and not to 'adapt' the Novus Ordo texts until they have been revised for the Old Rite.

This is wise. Let me give you an example of a problematic Novus Ordo text.

The Novus Ordo texts provided a few years ago by the CDW for our Lady of Guadalupe give a good example of the need for care. The Collect has an EH (Elementary Howler) in its Latin: 'quaereant' must a mistake for 'quaerant'. And, elegantly matching this mendosa Latinitas, there is an iffy political allusion: to the opening and programmatic two words of S Paul VI's Encyclical Populorum Progressio. 

I don't want to overstate the case against this sort of phraseology or that Encyclical. And I'm sure you don't either. We are all moderate men and women. But I do sense, in both, a danger that the Faith, and the Church, may be demoted from being  God's Saving Truth, and His Ark of Salvation, into being valued for the contribution they can make to secular aims, however laudable. Our Patrimonial C S Lewis perceived and warned against this error back in 1941. See my post of October 29; or Screwtape Letter VII near the end.

My comments, of course, do not apply to the old Propers for our Lady of Guadalupe, which lack EHs and do not refer to the encyclicals of S Montini! These 'old' propers are presumably those authorised by Leo XIII (Benedict XIV had granted earlier propers which I have not seen). Readers will be reassured to know that the Propers in the Ordinariate's Divine Worship Missal are translations of the Leo XIII texts!

Footnote: My comments relate to the texts as published in Notitiae. It may be that EHs have been corrected in subsequent publications. Perhaps somebody could let me know?! On the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as the EH in the Collect, there are (at least!) these errors in the Lectio: last paragraph, ella should be illa and mirabant should be mirabantur. In the antepenultimate paragraph, accipere should be acciperes.

Have I taken your knee? GET UP!

A few days ago, footie teams here in Blighty were again allowed to have spectators watching them. As if ... er ...

One of the teams which played is now in the news. Before the game began, the players all genuflected, which, I gather, is called Taking the Knee and is an "anti-racist" quasi-sacramental rite. [Giggle giggle ... I heard you say that this would make it very hard for PF to be a professional footballer ... one can't take you anywhere ...] 

And some spectators ... it is probably offensive for me even to mention this ... BOOED!!

And ... worse even than that ... climax of horrors ... one OR MORE of them shouted out ... horror warning ... racist offense warning ... shouted out ... yes, you want to know what he shouted ... what racially offensive innuendo, what obscene and wounding slander ... "Sieg Heil", perhaps, or a nostalgic snatch from the Horst Wessel Song? Right ... I'll tell you ... are you sitting comfortably? Is your defibrillator ready? Is its battery still working? ... what he (or they) shouted was

     "GET UP!"

 

Back in the seventies, in our second, inner-city slum, curacy, there were lots of supporters of this particular club. They did have a bit of a reputation for putting themselves around, dear little fellows that they were. Not an underpass went unhonoured by their graffiti. Their chant was "Nobody likes us we don't care"; asyndeton, I grant you, but expressing a couple of truths nonetheless. Their Victorian origins were to be found in the working-class docklands of East London where their opponents were supporters of rival clubs based in rival business firms. Thus the youthful working classes fought out their proxy wars ... cemented their group identities ... and, thank goodness, expended their surplus energy. 

Of course, the anti-racism campaigning classes and their [genuine Maoist jargon now coming up] Running Dogs are in a mighty frenzy about all this. I imagine that Inspector Knacker of the Yard and his Boys in Blue are at this very moment Leaving No Stone Unturned to identify the miscreants. Dame Cressida, I am sure, sweet old lady, is "concerned".

But why should our good plain English yobs have outlandish Americanisms foisted upon them? I have been told that Black Lives Matter is a rather iffy organisation ... but even if it isn't, why should young white working-class Londoners, needing for their happiness nothing more than weak Australian beer and a little harmless disorder, be forced to watch these daft alien rituals being enacted upon their own footie grounds? Isn't America big enough?

 

The traditional form of our beloved Roman Rite can give us some guidance here. On certain penitential days, the deacon, generally an undercover BLM agent, intones "Flectamus genua", and the subdeacon laudably countermands his Wokish boss by shouting  

       "LEVATE!". 

 

Fr Ratisbonne

I found the middle reading of the Breviary Office for the Feast of the Manifestatio  of our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, vastly interesting. An entire Lectio devoted to one single convert! And what a sense of exuberant joy in the City of Rome because of that one conversion. "Christiana dogmata edoctus, paucis post diebus, communi Urbis laetitia, sacro baptismate lustratus est." This communal glee must still have been part of Roman chatter when S John Henry Newman was there: the account of it gives a new dimension to the life of our great Patron, and his background.

Neither the event, nor its description in the Breviary Office, give any evidence for Anti-semitism. An anti-semitic mindset, surely, would resent such a conversion. Anti-Semites, surely, would resist having a Jewish banker thrust prominently among them. Anti-semites would resent the speed of his reception (no sense here of long-drawn-out Rites for the Christian Initiation of Adults ... "Well; perhaps next Easter we might ... er ..."). No evidence of reticence about accepting his sacerdotal vocation or his desire to set up, in company with his priestly brother, the religious communities for men and women, dedicated to Our Lady of Sion, and devoted to the Conversion of the Jews. Not a sign of papal disapproval.

So much joy, just for one Jew!! One Jew matters. I have heard it said, of the Holocaust, that perhaps "only" 200,000 Jews were murdered. What a disgusting, truly horrible, obscenity. One Jew matters; in the sight of God, matters infinitely and absolutely.This is the settled teaching of the Church: Anti-semitism has no place in the Catholic Church.

But there is bad news. The website of the Congregation and the Sisters tell us this:

"In accord with the theological thinking of their time, our founders felt that, out of love for their people, they were 'sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel' and called to seek the conversion of the Jews in order to hasten the accomplishment of the promises made to Israel.

"Today, the Church has given new orientations concerning our relations with the Jewish people in  its declaration Nostra Aetate and in other documents that followed. Because of this and in obedience to the directives of the Church, we no longer seek to convert the Jews, but rather a better understanding of the place and role of the people of Israel in salvation history as well as their relationship with the Church."

Readers will know that I am unwilling to discern any formal teaching of error in the formal documents of Vatican II. Indeed, the words I have cited above give a disgracefiully and dishonestly perverted account of the Document they mention.

But there can be no question that the Enemy was at work among significant players and factions in that Council, and has been hard at work ever since. The "Spirit of Vatican II", the "Smoke of Satan", is a Spirit of Apostasy, and a gross deceit upon the People of God.

And what about the physical properties which the Ratisbonne brothers were able settle upn their followers? Misappropriated, now, to purposes which those Founders would have repudiated.

Theft.

Theft, to go with the Idolatry, the Mendacity, the Adultery, so successfully encouraged in the Church of the last half-century.

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

A Sermon I once preached for the Immaculate Conception; at Pusey House, Oxford.

 

On May 13, 1917 .… Yes, if I were Jeremy Paxman and that were a Starter Question, you would all by now laudably have pressed your buzzers. But I wonder how many of you recall the first words which that Lady ‘brighter than the sun’ said to those three Portuguese peasant children, nearly a hundred years ago. They were ‘Do not be afraid’. ‘Afraid’ is what frail humans so often feel when confronted by evidences of divine power; the Lord himself said it on His Easter Morning: me phobeisthe. But I like to indulge myself an idiosyncratic fantasy that Our Lady, when she appeared on that stony, arid field at Cova da Iria - although I imagine she spoke to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in some Portuguese dialect - was really addressing England; Protestant England with its underlying anti-Catholic bigotry (‘scratch an Englishman...’) even when it is overlaid by the broader anti-Christian secularism of our own age. (When the 1928 Prayer Book came before Parliament, someone asked an atheist MP why he was so keen to vote against it, and he explained ‘But I am a Protestant atheist’.) And such English, I put it to you, are scared, dead scared, scared out of their wits, by the great Mother of God, Mary most holy. Have you noticed that there's a certain sort of churchperson who twitches rhythmically at the very phrase 'Mother of God'. If you explain that Jesus is God and so his mother Mary is the Mother of God, they give you that sort of sideways look that implies they know you're playing some sort of Jesuitical trick on them, but they can't quite spot the catch. Well, of course, there is a catch; it is that they don't live with a real faith that Jesus is God. As Newman once analysed it, liberal protestants demote our Lord Jesus Christ into the slot reserved for Mary (I am butchering Newman's elegant periods into journalese so I will call it "Top Creature Slot") and then they're puzzled when we Catholics situate Mary in exactly that place. 'Romanism is not idolatry unless Arianism is orthodoxy', Newman observed.

So what - if they can't completely avoid talking about Mary - do liberal protestants call her? 'The mother of Jesus’; 'the Virgin'; and - get this - 'the Madonna'. As if it's safer to refer to her in Italian than to use the Prayer Book phrase 'Our Lady'. So let's keep her, they feel, in an Art History context - the Madonna ... weird, really, isn't it: you wouldn't, probably, refer to the Head of an academic institution as ‘the Il Principale’ or the 'il prevosto'; or to our beloved Prime Minister as ‘the Il Duce’. Or perhaps she will be called 'the bee vee', as if it sanitises and makes her safe to turn her into an English acronym.

In a sermon I preached nearly half a century ago, at the Mattins of Christmass Day in the year of my diaconate, I said that the Incarnation meant that God was in the belly of a Palestinian peasant girl who is Queen of Heaven. Critics fell into three categories: those who disliked my phrase because of its physicality and because it placed the origins of our faith among foreigners (surely Mary must have been a middle-class Englishwoman and if not a member of the WI then at least of the Young Wives); those who didn't like the phrase Queen of Heaven; and those who disliked both.

'The Immaculate Conception'. It's a lovely rolling phrase, isn't it (we classicists might analyse its rhythm as a trochaic dimeter). And it's a phrase, too, that can scare people silly. Is it sometimes the physicality – again, of conception - that disturbs them; conception, a process that occurs a little way south of the tummy button? Not the sort of thing the fastidious want to have dragged in front of their noses. C S Lewis points out that the devils too are fastidious in their horror at the flesh: Screwtape refers to a human as 'this animal, this thing begotten in a bed'. Or perhaps people are scared of the word 'Immaculate'; perhaps it suggests foreign religion - little old Irish women clutching their rosaries or Spanish ladies in black making their five successive First Saturday communions in honour of the Immaculate Heart (a devotion which Cardinal Ratzinger with his gentle irony once called 'surprising for people from the Anglo-Saxon and German cultural worlds'). But 'immaculate' is a completely biblical concept in its Hebrew and Greek equivalents: it means spotless; and only what is without blemish is truly for God (for example, a spotless sacrificial lamb). Because: Mary is to be wholly for God, is to give God his body, to give God his endowment of genes, to give God the food of her breast: so Mary by God's gift is to be the Immaculate, the one without blemish, the one in whom the Divine likeness has never been marred.

It is because Mary alone in the roots of her being is unmarked by sin that Mary alone is truly and wholly free. In our hearts, too, we should make her free and 'fear not'; she is never to be locked up in the tourist industry as a statue of doubtful taste carried in processions by foreign peasants for the English to photograph from within their coaches; Mary is not to be detained at the pleasure of the Heritage business in a Merry England; she is not to be 'the Madonna' of the Art Historians imprisoned in glossy coffee­ table books.

If Mary is the Mother of God Incarnate, she is our Mother too, because we are in Christ, limbs of his body by our baptismal incorporation. Mary comes to us this day, and what would a true mother bring to hungry children except food; food for her children in exsilio; food packed for our journey. Mary comes to this place and to this moment of time; Mary comes, bright with all the beauties known by men and angels; Mary comes to set upon our lips the blessed fruit of her womb Jesus.

Leo XIII??

A really big Thank You to all those who enabled me to track down the Breviary propers for the Feast of our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. I am truly grateful.

At Mattins, this hymn was is used:

Tutela praesens omnium, 

Salveto Mater Numinis;

Intacta in Hevae filiis,

Tu foeda munda pectora.

 

5. Numisma quos ornat tuum,

Fove benigno lumine;

Virtus sit inter proelia

Aegisque in hostes praepotens.

 

Sit flentibus solatium, 

10. Aegris levamen artubus,

In mortis hora, fulgidae

Aeternitatis sponsio.

 

Iesu, tuam qui finiens

Matrem dedisti servulis,

15. Precante Matre, filiis

Largire coeli gaudia. Amen.

 

Ever a schoolmaster, I will point out the importance of distinguishing your short a from your long a. In line 4, getting this wrong would make all the difference between asking our Lady to clean our defiled hearts, and asking her to to defile our clean hearts. Grammar matters!

I think there is a good chance that this hymn was written by that consummate Latinist, Papa Pecci., otherwise known as Pope Leo XIII. (We need another Pope Leo ... it would establish a fine precedent if Leo XIV were a person one of whose baptismal names had been Leo ... )

It was, indeed, Leo XIII who granted the Mass and Office "ad singulos Episcopos ac Religiosas familias petentes". The SRC had decided that this would be kosher, on the grounds that the Liturgy already took note of Devout Objects such as the Rosary and the Carmelite scapular.

But why might Leo himself be the poet? In lines 2/3, Mater Numinis /Intacta reminds us of Intacta Mater Luminis in Te dicimus praeconio, which Dom Alselmo Lentini intelligently surmised was composed by Pope Leo. Mind you, that didn't stop Dom Anselmo from emending 'numen' out of his text, crying "sapit Mythologiam"! Pope Leo got the line from Praeclara custos virginum, a seventeenth century hymn probably originally composed for the Feast of the Purity of the BVM. In that hymn also (now attached to the Immaculate Conception) Dom Anselmo bowdlerised the text!

It might occur to you to wonder whether Tutela was written by the same classicising poet who wrote Praeclara. Nice one! He had included the remarkable line "syrtes dolosas amove", which Dom Anselmo failed to emend (he could have explained "nimis sapit catillos tectonicos"). I prefer my Leo hypothesis because I can't find Tutela in the Thesaurus but mostly because the Miraculous Medal was not in circulation in the seventeenth century!

Tutela contains other matters of interest: not least the sense, not common in Christian Latin, of finiens in the sense of 'dying' (line 13). And there is the highly unusual final stanza which is not-at-all a Trinitarian doxology. But most readers will, I suspect, raise an eyebrow at Aegis. Originally, of course, the Aegis was the shield of Jove or of Minerva, with Medusa's head fixed on to it to apotrepein enemies ( we don't want to go into the use of it in Ovid's Remedium Amoris, do we?). 

I believe our Lady suggested that the Medal should be worn around the neck. Suitably apotropaic!

 

 

For Classicists only

Like the youngest columnist in Private Eye, I am Extremely Angry. 

(1) GREEK NAMES

For some years now, I have been distracted by the way people on TV and Radio pronounce names like Odysseus which end in -eus. (And their habit is even followed by professional Classicists).

They make the final syllable into two syllables. Thus, confronted by Odysseus, they pronounce him odd-iss-ee-uss (instead of odd-iss-ewss). (The only exception appears to be Zeus: I have never heard him called Zee-uss ... I wonder why not).

Finally, something snapped within me. I'd better chexk, I thought, that what I have always assumed to be the 'correct' pronunciation is not just some idiosyncrasy of my own. 

So I settled down with the Metamorphoses. Entering it by means of the Index nominum, I checked the nominative forms of a gaggle of such names. Perseus, Neleus, Prometheus ... there are dozens of them. I knew, of course, that in the accusative, genitive, dative, the final syllable divides up, but I was confining myself to the nominative because it is the nominative form of Greek and Latin proper names which is  taken over into English. 

No; this was not my personal idiosyncrasy: the metre reveals that Perseus was always per-sewss, two syllables, never per-see-uss. What I had picked up from my schoolmasters ... and the way it was pronounced in my undergraduate days sixty years ago ... was correct (this also applies, incidentally, to the vocative).

I quick foray into Flaccus and Maro confirmed matters. From Maro I moved up the River Mincio to that most exquisite of all lakes, to Catullus and to Pietro Bembo, his Eminence, the Great Humanist, the Poet of Lake Garda, friend of Reginald Pole (who got his cardinal's hat on the same day and, while in flight from Tudor's assassins, also sojourned by Lake Garda). 

But, of course, these names are really Greek. So I ended up checking through Homer. Here again, -eus is just one syllable.

I have read my 'Allen' and I am aware that a diphthong is two vowel sounds which the ancients ran together; but, surely, they did not pronounce them as two distinct syllables. Otherwise, they would hardly have scanned them as one united sound. Or am I philologically naive?

Here is what I would like to know: when did the modern pronunciation of the diphthong -eu- as two separate syllables arise?

My own current provisional theory is something that I have mentioned before: the consequences of semi-clerks being more familiar with words as phenomena upon a page than as something one hears or utters. I could go on to make elderly remarks about the disintegration of the beautiful old concept of the Respublica litterarum.

(2) THE GREEK ALPHABET

Currently, our new up-to-the-minute hurricanes are named from the Greek Alphabet. We've recently had ETA. But the Weatherfloosies pronounced it ETTA, with a short E. Di Immortales! The letter was only invented, to supplement Epsilon, because the need was felt for a letter specifically meaning long E rather than short E. When we get to the end of the alphabet, we shall, I'm sure, have to listen to the sisterhood prosing on about Hurricane o-MEEE-ga. (And what will they make of the Hebrew Alphabet?)

I bet the Plague would have been sussed by now if we had enjoyed the services of those superb physicians Sir Lambda Munu and Sir Omicron Pi (or, for that matter, Dame Rho Sigma).

But instead ... they give us Mr Hancock, who isn't in the Greek Alphabet. Every time he appears on screen, I hear in my mind's ear the special music in the early St Trinian's films which signals the approach of the spiv Harry (George Cole).

Groins and minds since the Fall

Has Human Nature changed? Did humans never, before today, suffer from sexual temptation? Are Fornication, Adultery, Sodomy, problems only of our own unique and spectacularly sui generis age? What did the New Testament writers mean when they talked about porneia, moikheia, malakia? Is there something crashingly new about the capacity or incapacity of modern human beings (whether with or without Grace) to resist temptation? What is supposed to be so different about our groins and minds compared with the groins and minds of every other human generation since the Fall? What has so privileged us that we are (apparently) free to claim exemption from the Divine Commands, entolai, which were considered to bind former generations since the dawn of history?

What is different about our age; what does set it apart from all previous ages?

Not, surely, human sexual organs or the human minds which have to cope with them. The only change is the spread of the curse, the heresy, of thinking that humans have a Right to Autonomy, free from obligations to God or even to the age-old genetic and social inheritance of our long history as a species; "free", in S Paul's terrifying phrase, "from Righteousness". In other words, the amoral individualistic wickedness of the Enlightenment Chicken is at last come home to roost and to befoul its roosting place. And it is phenomenally dirty.

You will remember C S Lewis's fictional snapshot (1943) of an atheist 'freethinker', a Professor Churchwood, "an old dear. All his lectures were devoted to proving the impossibility of ethics, though in private life he'd walked ten miles rather than leave a penny debt unpaid. But all the same ... was there a single doctrine practised at Belbury* which hadn't been preached by some lecturer at Edgestow? Oh, of course, they never thought that anyone would act on their theories! No one was more astonished than they when what they'd been talking about for years suddenly took on reality. But it was their own child coming back to them: grown up and unrecognisable, but their own. ... Trahison des clercs. None of us is quite innocent." 

 
And try putting that together with blessed Edward Bouverie Pusey's perceptive and prophetic analysis in the 1830s (unpublished Papers in the archives of Pusey House): "We must bend our minds and conform them to the teaching of Holy Scripture, or men will end in bending Holy Scripture to their own minds, and when it will not bend, will part with it. For a time a person or a generation may go on with this discrepancy unsettled; and a person of strong faith will go on to the end undisturbed, satisfied on this or any other point, that there is some way of settling it, though he knows not of it, yet ... for a Church, wherein men of every sort are gathered, it is a dangerous state to take a direction in any respect varying from Holy Scripture."

And finally, from Dorothy Leigh Sayers, an Anglican scholar whose genius is insufficiently recognised or remembered, in a paper she read at Oxford in 1947: "Right down to the nineteenth century, our public affairs were mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most part written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in places, where [the Scholastic] tradition was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood. Just so, many people today who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted that it never occurs to them to question it. But one cannot live on capital for ever. However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies."

That is precisely where we have got to now. We woz warned.

Pusey is forgotten; Lewis has been safely neutered into a writer of kiddie fantasies; Sayers into a yet another of all those female manufacturers of whodunnits. And the Smoke of Satan is still puffing through that widening crack into the Catholic Church herself. We need all those brilliant and incisive Anglican prophets redivivi.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*The first syllable ('Bel' is, I presume, a LXX/Vg transcription of Ba'al) indicates the significance of this fictional placename.

What's in a name? (2)

I really do think that there should be some sort of insurance arrangements, so that people who give a lot of money to Oxford in order to have their names perpetuated here, can at least have the reassurance that their heirs will get the money back as soon as intellectual fashion demands the damnatio memoriae of the Benefactors.

Even at the Reformation, this fascist Tyranny of Names was not yet around to make such totalitarian demands. Corpus Christi College retained its name . Whitefriars' Entry now leads only to the 'bus station, but keeps its name. In London, Paternoster Row was not renamed just because rosaries went out of fashion. Setting aside excesses in Ireland after the War of Independance, the closest parallel I can think of to this craze for obliterating the names of Unpersons is Stalin's Russia (remember those photographs with increasing numbers of Stalin's associates airbrushed out?). And, of course, German cities with Jewish names obliterated.

I think that this enthusiasm for purifying townscapes of politically incorrect names, generation after generation, is the surest indication that a country has lost any sense of social cohesion and has turned into a Banana Republic.

When Waugh's Mr Scott-King visited Neutralia, he learned that the "Hotel 22nd March was the name, derived from some forgotten event in the Marshal's rise to power, by which the chief hotel of the place was momentarily graced. It had had as many offcial names in its time as the square in which it stood -- the Royal, the Reform, the October Revolution, the Empire, the President Coolidge, the Duchess of Windsor ..." Neutralia, you see, had "suffered every conceivable ill the body politic is heir to. Dynastic wars, foreign invasions, disputed successions, revolting colonies, endemic syphilis, impoverished soil, masonic intrigues, revolutions, restorations, cabals, pronunciamentos, liberations, constitutions, coups d'etat, dictatorshps, assassinations, agrarian reforms, popular elections, foreign interventions, repudiations of loans, inflations of currency, trades unions, massacres, arson, atheism, secret societies ..."

And the Official Guide explained to Scott-King the historical sites they were passing: "Here the anarchists shot General Cardenas. Here the syndico-radicals shot the auxiliary bishop. Here the Agrarian League buried alive ten Teaching Brothers. Here the bimetallists committed unspeakable atrocities on the wife of Senator Mendoza ...".

The transpontines have just renamed a part of their capital city "Black Lives Matter Square". But our own journey thither is going at an ever accelerating speed, yes, here in the United Bananas.

What's in a Name? (1)

If you stand by the traffic lights at the corner of Parks Road and South Parks Road and look East, you will see, on your left, the Radcliffe Science Library. It is built in the style that rampaged throgh Oxford in the 1930s: squared rubble in small blocks with ashlar dressings. It is sometimes called Cotswold-Manorial, because of its claimed similarities with the vernaculat architectural styles of the Cotswolds, a mountain range a few miles West of the Railway Station.

But now it has stopped being the Radcliffe Science Library. With a touch of Circe's wand, it has become the centre of Reuben College ... a new 'Graduate College' designed to collect money off wealthy New Englanders whose daughters want to spend a few years in Oxford. I know no more about the Reuben Brothers than you can discover yourself from Wikipaedia. 

The proposed new 'college' had the 'holding name' Parks College. It is presumed that the Reuben Brothers have made a financial contribution.

Immediately opposite is the Rhodes Building, built in exactly the same Thirties architectural style ... except that, like so very many Cotswold Manor Houses and barns, it has a classicising portico and dome.

Cecil Rhodes, now fashionably an object of scornful detestation, gave a lot of money to endow his Rhodes Scholars, young men from America, Germany, and several parts of the Empire. In our undergraduate days, you could always recognise them from their uniform of three-piece tweed suit, neatly rolled umbrella, and copy of The Times newspaper.

I wonder how much longer the Rhodes building can cling on to the name of Rhodes. Quite possibly, even as I write, it has already lost it.

I wonder how long Reuben College will bear that name, before the dim and woke youth bully their wet and timorous elders into suppressing all memory of the 'Founders'.  

To be finished tomorrow.

Yet another great Feast!

 ... that is, of the Martyres Oxonienses. I began by wondering if Oxford is a unique educational establishment in having specific liturgical recognition of those of its members who subsequently achieved the  corona Martyrii ... almost as one achieves the possiblity ... vocation? ... of entering into a particular commemoration simply by being referri in matriculam huius Universitatis.

But then I remembered the commemoration of the Martyres Duacenses. 

And so I fell to musing on how nearly coterminous these two august categories are! 

Pietas inclines me to think, in particular, of S Alexander Briant, of the Aula Cervina in this University ... and of Douay College! He made the journey to Tyburn this very day in 1581, in company with two other Douay lads, Ss Edmund Campion (Scholar and Fellow of S John's College; and Orator) and Ralph Sherwin (Fellow of Exeter College).

Decus Angliae, Decus almae Universitatis, orate pro nobis!