The unasked question

I have read quite a lot of the reactions to the CDF document about 'blessing' intrinsically disordered relationships. I am grateful to those who enable me to read this material by supplying links on the Internet.

As I have written before, what seems to me the acid test is this: Would these bishops and 'theologians' and 'moralists'apply identical or analogous arguments in order to justify paedophiliac relationships?

If not, why not?

Why, as far as I am aware, does nobody apart from me ask this?

I know the problems about asking this question: (1) people with a limited appreciation of logic will attack those asking such questions on the grounds that "You are arguing in favour of paedophilia". And (2) other people with equally challenged capacities will complain "You are saying that we are as bad as paedophiles".

But, unless this question (or one similar) can be asked, and answers sought, I do not see how discussion can move ahead on a rational basis. "Discussion" will continue to be, as it is now, a constant reiteration of simplistic mantras (such as "love" [undefined] justifies everything) in order eventually to wear down those who at present decline to bow before the Zeitgeist.

We had it all in the C of E. Demands for "dialogue" or "to be listened to" or "to have our experience heard" amount simply to an insistence that one must keep listening to the speaker, politely and preferably without interruption, until one is prepared to make ones submission. 

On no account may one cite Holy Scripture or objective expressions of the Church's Magisterium. If one does so, one becomes particularly subject to unargued abuse and contempt.

The demand being ruthlessly made is for a one-way journey facilitated by unquestioning obedience and with a prescribed, ineluctable, conclusion.

It is a policy and a process bearing all the hallmarks of where it originated.

PS I just heard a (clerical) supporter of change, on the BBC Sunday programme, say "The Pope can change everything". 

What a beautifully succinct summary of the Bergoglianite heresy. Why was poor Doellinger excommunicated for declining to subscribe to Pastor Aeternus of Vatican I, while this appalling doctrinal disorder is pretty well a commonplace ... and is never disciplined?

Mary's Month of May (3)

S Gregory Palamas preached this sermon on August 15, hence the now in the next sentence. The Hesychast tradition which he skilfully expounded emphasised the truth, reality and possibility of human participation in the Divine Nature; accordingly, it was easy for him to see our Lady as the supreme triumph of divinisation. 

O Virgin, divine and now heavenly, how shall I tell the whole of thee? How shall I glorify thee, who art the treasury of Glory? It is alone thy memorial which sanctifies the one who uses it. Attention to thee (neusis pros se) is the only thing which makes the mind clearer, raising it immediately to a divine height; through thee the eye of contemplation is made more acute; through thee is illumined the spirit by the indwelling of the divine Spirit; for thou didst become steward (tamiouchos) and full content (perioche) of graces; not so that thou mightest keep them by thyself, but so that thou might fill the whole of everything (ta sumpanta) with grace - because the Dispenser of inexhaustible treasures ordains (epitropeuei) it on account of the distribution: for why would he make the undiminshed wealth to be closed up?

One more paragraph..

ZOODOCHOS PEGE

Today, in the Julian Calendar the Friday in Bright Week, Byzantines celebrate the role of the Mother of God in pouring Christ's healing streams of grace upon us. Originally Zoodochos Pege (the life-receiving fount) referred to one of Constantinople's greatest basilicas (next door to the imperial residence), Blachernae. Our Lady appeared there at the hagiasma (miraculous stream), standing with her hands raised in the orans posture. After an ikon was created to portray this and placed in the church, water began to flow from her hands. One is reminded of similar imagery and ideas at much later Western shrines such as Fatima and Lourdes, and of linked motifs of water and of grace flowing from her hands. The congruence here between East and West is quite uncanny, and it can only be a glorious intimation of the fact that both East and West drink from the same wholesome wells.

Zoodochos Pege is is also the dedication of that nice little Orthodox chapel up the stairs at the back of the Anglican Shrine Church of Our Lady of Walsingham. Suitably so, because a big part of the pilgrimages at Lourdes and Walsingham is the use of the water which our Lady showed to her servant. 

What a pity there is no Catholic Byzantine chapel at Walsingham! The Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer on Papa Stronsay have a history of biritualism ... a shame that, I think, their lovely little Ukrainian chapel has not been used since the Brethren regularised their canonical position. And in England there are Melkite Catholics. It would be beautiful if Byzantine Christianity were better known to English Catholics! I would love to have the faculties and facilities to serve the Liturgy in memory of a dear friend long-departed, Christopher Commodatos, Bishop of Telmissos, also associated with the Camberwell New Road! And of the Little Brother Lazarus.

It seems to me that the symbolism of Zoodochos Pege is an expression of what we Westerners have in mind when we call Mary Mediatrix omnium gratiarum, or refer to her Omnipotentia supplex.  

May she pray for the unity of all her Son's people.

Holidays

Perhaps, in the hope we that may eventually emerge from the pestilence, you would like a suggestion or two from me about possible Summer holidays ...

I venture to suggest the Co Kerry village of Sneem ... a very unusual Irish village. 

The Church of Ireland Rector there a generation or two ago was Charlie Gray-Stack, who was also Dean of Ardfert ... the old episcopal See of Co Kerry (features of the ruined Cathedral at Ardfert were copied by Pugin when he built the new Catholic Cathedral at Killarney). It was, I think, in 1952 that the Catholic Church, most regrettably, stopped calling the Kerry diocese Ardfert and Aghadoe (as they still do in the rather more traditional C of I). 

Charlie was no Paisleyite Protestant. He astonished both the papists and his fellow Irish Anglicans by his enthusiasm for the Holy Rosary and his defence of the televised Angelus - which, even in those days, was already being targetted by the secularists of Dublin 4. He transfigured his church; announced that it was dedicated to the Transfiguration (C of I parish churches originally lacked dedications, as did many C of E churches until the Victorian 'ecclesiologists' came along and invented them); and filled it with icons. It had been a typical, rather mean little Irish church in poor and ungrammatical Gothic, built to serve the as-yet unburned Ascendancy Big Houses which abounded in the subtropical climate of the South Iveragh. Charlie plastered and whitewashed the outside and planted palm trees, so that looked positively Mediterranean, instead of dour, Northern, and proddy. 

An earlier member of the congregation was presumably the actress Dorothea Jordan who was the long-serving mistress of William IV when he was Duke of Clarence. (That is why he surnamed his innumerable brood of bastards 'FitzClarence'; and created his eldest 'natural' son 'Earl of Munster'.)

The Catholic church in Sneem was built by Lord Dunraven, one of that interesting gaggle of Ascendancy aristocrats and gentry, not often remembered, who followed Saint John Henry into Full Communion. He had it dedicated to the Holy Cross. It was he who began the academic study of the extensive early monastic remains in coastal Kerry, sailing round the headlands and islands in his yacht and making notes and drawings. He is a gentleman and a scholar who deserves to be less forgotten both among Brits - and among the Irish who, despite their intermittent cultural make-overs (invariably for the worse), still suffer from a passion for discontinuity, their communal memories ruptured by the events of 1920/2 and a lurking anglophobia. 

Beside the Catholic church is a sculpture park; I recall one very surreal day when we gathered for the unveiling of a statue of Isis, given by the Egyptian ambassador (yet another addict of holidaying in Sneem). There stood I; beside me, Archdeacon Murphy, brother of the then Catholic Bishop (Irish Catholics retain the title of Archdeacon as an honorific); I wondered how an image of that Hellenistic Goddess who was such a potent rival of Christianity could be so lackadaisically tolerated by two Christian priests, not to mention a sternly monotheistic Moslem. When I last saw it, the Irish damp had done quite a bit of no good to the said idol which, under a shiny black surface, was plaster. The smooth Ptolemaic lines of the Philopateira Thea are now enhanced by enormous and positively super-baroque blisters.

Down by some lush inlets of the sea is the Parknasilla Hotel; G B Shaw used to go there, being driven, sitting bolt upright, in the back of his Rolls Royce, fearless through the bailiwick of the Third West Cork Brigade (who so memorably dealt with both the Black and Tans and poor Mr Collins). He wrote a lot at Parknasilla, including S Joan. Tea on the terrace there, overlooking the fertile, myrtle-clad coastline and Kenmare Water, is quite a Grand Hotel (often, Mediterranean) experience, if you can ignore the hunched figure of Bertie Ahern ... remember him? ... biting his fingernails in the corner. 

In fact, you could go on retreat there. The Hotel, needing to fill some empty book-shelves, bought en bloc the entire library of a defunct seminary (a commodity in which Modern Ireland is immensely rich).

Another military man, M le General de Gaulle, once holidayed in Sneem. Some wag, hearing that le General had stayed there, took to calling it Sneem les Deux Eglises which, it happens, is magnificently suitable! Attached to the Hotel is the most beautiful, scenic, twelve-hole Hotel golf course I have ever seen. Pam used to play rounds there with her sons/sons-in-law while I sat on a ruined and secluded jetty, drank Beamish, translated the Irish Times leader into Latin, looked out for the kingfishers and sea-otters, and watched the mullet drifting lazily in on the rising tide. 

The day when Ireland no longer offers Secluded Ruins will be the day when it is finally and irrevocably no longer Ireland.

If you were to holiday in Sneem, you could say the Rosary as you went out on the boats, past the great gannetry of the Little Skellig to the monastic island of Skellig S Michael (Shaw was rowed there but I doubt if he said the Rosary). It was one of the great pilgrimage centres in Ireland before, in the nineteenth century, Cardinal Cullen, that monumental spoil-sport, dragged the Irish Church kicking and screaming into the Tridentine reforms. 

I expect he used to preach about The Spirit Of The Council (of Trent, of course). Some people will stop at nothing.

BBC

 I've just heard a news bulletin from our national broadcaster informing us that today is the 200th anniversary of the death of "France's Last Emperor".

What a pathetically ignorant little country "Great Britain" is.

S John at the Latin Gate ... should it be a Double of the First Class?

S John at the Latin Gate, a Prayer Book festival (also still to be found in the delightfully unreformed Calendar of the University of Oxford) long since abolished on the modern Roman Calendar, reappears on May 6 on the Calendar of the Ordinariate (disguised as "S John in Eastertide")! Since you have probably been wondering why, and because I know you are discreet, I will let you into the secret. Just within these four walls. Are you sitting comfortably?

Before the Ordinariates were canonically erected by the great, the erudite, the fabulous Benedict XVI, the Pope of Christian Unity, a group of us had a series of highly confidential meetings in catacumbis, or, to be more prosaic, in the Catholick Apostolick cellars of Gordon Square, guided by our Flying Bishops. Episcopopteryx Andrew Burnham decided to term these the 'Latin Gate' meetings, because the first of them took place on May 6 in 2010! So tomorrow is the glorious celebration of the first synodos of that bold group, some of whom risked being bullied into premature resignation if their Anglican bishops had found out what they were up to (that is why the meetings had to be so secret).

What a lot seems to have happened in a mere eleven years!

Tomorrow's feast celebrates the start of the process which led to those priests becoming the core of the founding presbyterate of the English Ordinariate. Imagine us as being rather like the courageous First Wave that stormed up the Normandy beaches on June 6 in 1944! I think that we battle-scarred heroes, we noble Band of Brothers, the Class of 2010, ought to be given special medals to pin proudly onto the Black Scarves of our Anglican choir dress (what might its design include?). But, Fathers, the least we can do is to celebrate S John the Apostle at the Altar.

Those subterranean meetings eventually morphed into the 'Formation' [not a word I much like] meetings at Allen Hall, where we were made to feel wonderfully welcome by staff and students alike. It was an exhilarating experience for us, whose Catholic Faith was mediated to us within the Church of England, to feel, at last, our longed-for unity with the other great strand of English Catholicism, the Martyres Duacenses listed on the panels upon the walls.

A technical point here: do we count as Alumni of Allen Hall? I do so much hope so.

You will know that Allen Hall was founded at Douay following the accession of Elizabeth Tudor, Bloody Bess, after ex-vice-chancellors, Heads of Houses, Regius Professors, Fellows, students galore, had had to flee in a great Exodus from Oxford; and it was founded moreover by the indefatigable Cardinal Allen, sometime Proctor of this University and Principal of S Mary's Hall, who would have been Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England if only the winds had been a tadge more accommodating in 1588. I am sure he would have 'progged' the Elizabethan elite in ways they would not, in a hurry, have forgotten. Happily, his statue looks across to the University Church from the North front of Oriel ... one of the statues associated with the Rhodes of the Rhodes-must-go campaign.

So Allen Hall is in a real continuity with Marian, Catholic, Oxford (so well evoked by Duffy's Fires). And it was a novel luxury for us to have access to its bibliotheca superbissima where the Bullaria of the Roman Pontiffs ... including the great Benedict XIV, Prospero Lambertini ... were just sitting there on the open shelves, immediately inside the door, generously available to anybody and everybody to browse in passing. Not even the library at Staggers was as well equipped! No wonder Allen Hall men are such excellent priests!

The food, too, was better than at Staggers.

Mary's Month of May (2)

This continues a previous post in this series. 

For since the following rule is established for ever in the heavens: 'Through the greater the lesser share in the One who is established beyond Being' - and the Virginmother is beyond all comparison greater than all - through her those will share whosoevever will share in God; and whosoever know God will win her, the place of the Unencompassed One (tou achoretou choran); and those will hymn her after God whosoever hymn God. She also is the cause (aitia) of what came before her, and the advocate of those who follow after her, and guardian of eternal things. She is the subject matter of the prophets, the head (arche) of the apostles, the firm basis of the martyrs, the foundation of the teachers. She is the glory of what is on earth, the pleasure of what is in heaven, the pride of all creation. She is the beginning and fount and root of goods beyond telling. She is the highest point of what is holy, and its perfection.  

S Gregory Palamas was Archbishop of Thessalonica in the fourteenth century, defender and expounder of the 'hesychast' mystical tradition of union with God which was particularly associated with the monks of Mount Athos. It is my view that his Mariological writings are refreshingly different both in their content and their assumptions from what we are used to in the West.

 

To be continued.

Mary's Month of May (1)

I plan to reprint during this Marian month, bit by bit (because it is a very dense piece of Byzantine rhetorical theology and repays careful study section by section) a passage of a homily which, I feel, has an interest as explaining, from a Byzantine point of view, why our Lady should be deemed Mediatrix of All Graces. The author was S Gregory Palamas, sometimes thought of as a defender of the Orthodox theological tradition against 'Latin error' (Greek at PG CLI 472C sqq). 

Just as through [Mary] alone, [Christ] came to be with us and was seen upon earth and dwelt among men - he who before her was invisible to all - so, unto the coming endless age, every advance of divine enlightenment, every revelation of divine mysteries, and every kind of spiritual gift, cannot be encompassed (achoreton) by any without (choris) her. She it was who first received the fulness of him who fills all things, and made him encompassable by all, distributing powerfully to each, proportionately according to the measure of the purity of each: so that she is the treasury (tamieion) and Controller (prytanis) of the riches of the Godhead. 

I welcome comments, both on the theology and on my attempt to render the highly mannered Greek in comprehensible yet faithful English.

Unaccountably, last Friday's Vatican list of world-wide shrines of our Lady omits her great Shrine at Tinos. Or is "da confermare" the Italian for Tinos?

PLAGIARISM

Last year, I published a list associating each day of May with an English Shrine of our Lady.

Without any acknowledgement of my blog whatsoever, some people calling themselves the "Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples" have just put out a world-wide list for this May.  

I can't wait to get to May 24, when, in mind and spirit, we shall associate ourselves with the Shrine of our Lady "da Confermare".

May 1 is assigned to our Lady of Walsingham. There's still time if you hurry ... ...

S Joseph

Today, Fr Zed reprints on his admirable blog the Litany to S Joseph.

Ha Ha! Bishop Roach, who is probably in charge temporarily of the CDW, has just put out an updated and augmented version. 

I'm glad +Arthur's long years in Rome haven't made him lose his wicked English sense of humour! 

SWINE GALORE

The Times has a heading which includes the phrase "Male Chauvinist pigs".

I strongly approve of this. Such language makes life so much more vivid.

I am keeping watch for the visionary Times headline which will refer to "Feminist Sows". 

Grunt Grunt! C'mon, you Runts, roll it on!!

The Mary Month of May. She feared the light.

So reads a responsory which, in the Liturgia Horarum, comes after the first reading of the Office of Readings on March 25. 

Why did our Lady fear the light? Where does the detail come from?

The responsory was taken over from the old Breviary, so we don't have to wonder about on what grounds to criticise Bugnini & Co.. I tried the Protevangelium Iacobi, in case it has its origin in an apocryphal source, but no luck there.

The Latin has "expavescit de lumine" - which isn't quite the same. But what is the point, anyway, of this vivid little detail?

Could it be to provide a narrative reason as to exactly why our Lady was afeared? Perhaps it originated in a culture in which Angels did not (yet?) have the iconographical convention of big give-away wings, and so Light (rather than feathers) was how their presence was known.

In C S Lewis's interplanetary novels, the Oyeresu are described as manifesting themselves as pulses, scarcely perceptible rods, of light.

One of Lewis's motives in writing his interplanetary romances was to rescue Christianity from Religion (a point which, I think, Rowan Williams makes). Perhaps he felt that Angels, in particular, need to be rescued from the culture of the Primary School Nativity Play and the Victorian church window.

And perhaps, during this Mary Month of May, we might wonder if the Theotokos, also, needs to be rescued from Religion so that an apostate world can see her in her great might as a mega thauma, and wonder at her Immaculate Heart, and tremble?