A Joy-free Pontificate??

As soon as he was settled on the Sedes Petri and had drafted his Christmas allocution to the Curia on their Seventeen Vices, PF sent a letter to his new nominees to the College of Cardinals ... telling them to receive their new status in a way "far from any expression of worldliness or from any form of celebration contrary to the evangelical spirit of austerity, sobriety, and poverty". 

The memory of this came back to me when I read Traditionis custodes ... especially the bit about new priests, ordained after July 16 2021, not being permitted to say their First Mass ... or any of their Masses ... in the Usus Authenticus. 

You see, hanging up here in my study I have this year's Papa Stronsay Calendar, which, for August, shows Father Martin Mary saying his First Mass (which, of course, happened last year).

It must be something like a decade or more since a group of the Transalpine Redemptorists, as we then called them, turned up at my house next to S Thomas's in Oxford. Sadly, I was out; Pam dispensed hospitality, and a few years later I had the inestimable privilege of spending some days on Papa Stronsay. And, when I said my First Mass "In Full Communion" at that joyous pietra dura  Lady Altar in the Brompton Oratory, there, to serve it, I had ... You've guessed!! ... but, sadly, the restaurant we rejoiced in afterwards is no more ...

Surely, it is a natural human instinct to celebrate New Beginnings ... so natural a human joy that it stretches far beyond the bounds of Christianity. We all know that, after the initial glee, days may come when the sun does not shine quite so brightly. But Rites of Passage ineluctably draw forth Celebration. Baptisms and the Bar Mitzvah; First Communions; Confirmations; Weddings; Professions; Ordinations; First Masses; Passing Out Parades; the winning of General Elections  ...

... perhaps they even draw forth "wine to gladden the heart of man", as the psalmist suggested. Horace wouldn't have contradicted him!

Human Beings, Christian or non-Christian, will not normally or naturally respond to such occasions in a "spirit of austerity, sobriety, and poverty". Unless they are rigid followers of the present Holy Father!

After the Conclave of 2005, even such a shy retiring academic as Benedict XVI hurried out onto the balcony, cheerfully dressed and with a beaming smile, receiving and sharing the joy of the crowds awaiting the appearance and Blessing of their new Pope.

But PF ... well, we soon learned that the Carnival was, indeed, over. 

Carni vale was Laetitiae vale.

UPDATE on a LIBRARY

A jolly good thread on my earlier piece! Apparently it was the Worlock who flogged off the Library, so as to get the cash for the very expensive removal of the 'ornate'  baldacchino in his Cathedral. 

'Theodericus' Worlock was bishop of Portsmouth from 1965 until 1976.

CAPD

Never for any reason whatsoever.

I find the following tale rather thought-provoking.

I have a Sarum Portiforium (ed. C Seager, 1843) which has this bookplate: 

Virtue and Cahill Library.

The Founders of this library earnestly request their successors in the See of Portsmouth to keep this library intact and never to sell or dispose of any book for any reason whatsoever.

No 8720 

John Virtue (or Vertue), 1826-1900, was the first Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth (consecrated 1882); John Cahill was the second Bishop, from 1900 until his death in 1910.

I presume that two episcopal coats of arms on the bookplate are those of the two bishops; and that the Library may have been founded for the edification of their Diocesan Clergy. The number suggests that the Library was not a small one.

Clearly, their Lordships, admirable pontiffs, knew full well the dangers, given episcopal frailty and infirmity of purpose, of the Library being got rid of, and formulated these words  ... in so far as could be possible ... so as to exclude that possibility.

Sed frustra!!

I wonder when the book (and the Library?) went wandering. Pencilled inside its front is "£10.50"; which must date from after the decimalisation of our currency in the early 1970s. (It came to me from the library of a great priest and mighty bibliophile, Fr Michael Melrose, [Anglican] pp of S Giles, Reading.)

The disorders which followed the Council must have led to the disregard of a large number of earlier injunctions which included such phrases as Never for any reason whatsoever.

I hesitate to thrust my own drearily predictable views into the defenceless mouths of departed others; but, surely, the original addition of this volume to the Portsmouth Library must in some way hint at a willingness to envisage users of that library being ... shall we say ... not entirely protected from the infections of an earlier liturgical culture. 

And, apparently, the person responsible for the eventual dumping of that Library or part of it (the bookseller who was happy to sell this breviary on for £10.50 cannot himself have paid a Cardinal's Ransom for it) did not share the same hermeneutic, or assumption, of continuity.

I wonder if any of the Virtue and Cahill Library did survive ... even its catalogue would be an interesting historical relic of the clerical culture which was so swiftly, ruthlessly, and comprehensively obliterated by the gauleiters of the 1970s.

A past age

I happened, entirely by chance, to notice the following; it is part of a Publisher's blurb (CUP) dated 1965 commending a book (Golden Latin Artistry) published in 1963.

"[L P Wilkinson] addresses himself mainly to the ordinary devotee of Latin literature -- the undergraduate, the schoolmaster, the sixth-form boy, the civil servant on Sunday, the country parson on Monday, the critic of modern literature and, perhaps, the don in another department of classics."

Apart from the teensy-weensy dash of Tab pride at the end, isn't that totally, wonderfully, evocative?

When I sat the (C of E) General Ordination Examination in 1967, the Latin paper had already been made optional; I think it was in the 1960s that they removed the legal requirement for Anglican ordinands to be "learned in the Latin tongue."

The Set Book used to be a section of S Bede; it was possibly the only important and interesting examination prescription (remember what the Sixties were like?) that most seminarians were encouraged to study.

FROM ARCHIVES: Weakening the Papacy

This piece is from June 4 2015.

If the head master of an English public school addressed Common Room and angrily listed the seventeen ways in which its members were corrupt, and did it just before Christmas [as the Pope did to the Curia in 2014], something would happen. The Governing Body would know about it within hours ... because there always seem to be members of Common Room who are on easy social terms with members of the Governing Body. So, sometime in January, two or three senior members of the Governing Body would be detailed to have a private, completely friendly, unofficial and entirely off-the-record chat with the head master ... sort of ... er ... about How He Saw His Future. But, of course, the Catholic Church is not like an English public school.

Is it like a British governing party? Mrs Thatcher was a powerful prime minister. But, in the end, too many people felt that they had just about had enough. In were sent the Men in Grey Suits. Perhaps the one blow that most deeply wounded the Iron Lady was delivered by the very greyest of all the grey men who have ever lived, Geoffrey Howe; of whom some wit (Dennis Healey, I think) had averred that being attacked by him was like being savaged by a dead sheep. Mercilessly, in a House of Commons where you could have heard a pin drop, he destroyed her with an elegant metaphor drawn from the game of cricket. Within weeks, she was History.

What, of course, has made the Papacy different from both of those institutions is that the pope does not retire. He carries on until death. So, apart from murdering him ... a solution with "First Millennium" precedents ...  there is no way of getting rid of him. He can't be manoeuvred into retiring. Strategies designed to isolate him, to put pressure on him, to plot against him, to ambush him, to stack up coalitions against him, simply don't make any practical sense. You just have to put up with him until Providence sends in the Grim Reaper. There are no men in grey suits, or greying cassocks, to put a friendly knife in.

Or rather, that is how things were until the abdication of Benedict XVI.

I do not think that the implications of his abdication have yet been fully recognised. Not since the Council of Constance had a living pope receded from the See of Rome. In 1415, the Council deposed the 'Pisan' pope John XXIII, and then accepted the resignation of the 'Roman' pope Gregory XII on 4 July. In 1417 it deposed the 'Avignon' pope Clement VIII, and elected Martin V. No subsequent pope has abdicated or been deposed. Since then, the assumption that the pope is a Given whom only God can loose from his pontificate, has, surely, been one of the most potent protections of each succeeding pontiff.

After Benedict's abdication, nothing can ever be the same again. No future pope can ever be as immovable as every pope was from Constance until Benedict.

Eventually, this will sink in. Eventually, popes will become as disposable as head masters and Mrs Thatcher.

And this implies a consequential loss of power; a vulnerability.

[I wonder if (I wouldn't put it past him) Pope Benedict XVI realised all this. I wonder if his abdication was his last and most masterly coup to undermine the post-Vatican II construct, against which he had so vigorously argued, of the Pope Who Can Do Anything, who is an Absolute Monarch; and to restore the Vatican I model of a strictly limited papacy with its limitations clearly and lucidly described.]

John XXII

Today is the Anniversary of the Election (1316) in Summum Pontificem of Jacques d'Euse of Cahors. The Roman See had been vacant for well over two years; indeed, in less than a century after 1316, the Universal Church was to find herself with no fewer than three claimants to the papal throne. Our own is not the first historical period in which the Roman See has provided as many ecclesiological problems as she solved!

John XXII has been seen as dodgy because of a particular view he held concerning the beatific vision. But it would be more positive to regard him as the Father of Counter-Reformation piety and devotion. He was a combination of reformer and innovator. His initiatives were rarely wholly new, but he consolidated and gave a new face to medieval dvotion. It was he who ordered the observance of Trinity Sunday; and the ringing of what came to be regarded as the evening Angelus. He prescribed the bowing of the head at the Names of both Jesus and Mary; the use of the prayer Anima Christi (of which he has been suspected of being the author). He promoted literati and encouraged the study of Greek and Hebrew.

He is also the immediate Begetter of the cult of the Blessed Sacrament which has been such a wonderful divine gift to the Latin Church. Forget stuff you may have read about the Bull Transiturus of Pope Urban IV (1264); this seems to have been ignored even in the papal capella itself! It may have been repromulgated at the Fifteenth Ecumenical Council, summoned to Vienne in 1311 by Clement V, after whose death in 1314 it was incorporated in the collection of decretals called the Clementines. John XXII was the next pope; in 1317 he promulgated the festival of Corpus Christi to the Universal Church, after which it spread rapidly. 

Observances which Transiturus had not envisaged inluded processions of the Most Holy in a monstrance; but in the years after 1317 sumptuous monstrances  appeared in great numbers throughout the West. They did not at first resemble the 'Rays of the Sun' baroque monstrances with which we are familiar; they tended to be immensely heavy iocalia which needed be carried, resting upon a feretrum, by several people.

Hitherto, the devotion of Latin Christendom had tended to regard the Blessed Sacrament as a Relic of the dead Body of the Lord; thanks to the revolution over which John XXII presided, we came better to understand It as the Living Body of the Living Christ; hence, as the locus for a direct, lived, relationship between believer and Lord. In such a context, the need was felt for vessels in which the Host could be placed and could be seen, worshipped, and prayed to, exposed within a cylinder of glass or crystal or behind a small window.

Thank God for John XXII! And for the Avignon Papacy!

Memories?

Today is the Festival of the Titular of the Cathedral, Christ Church, of the Catholic Diocese of Oxford ... erected as such by Cardinal Pole by virtue of the Legatine Decree Cum supremum of December 24 1554 ... except that there isn't such a diocese ... well, there can't be ... wasn't it implicitly extinguished by the Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850? 

Or do those old dioceses still exist in some sort of canonical limbo presided over by Plato?

I do wonder what to make of those former dioceses and their cathedral churches; as S John Henry Newman put it, "It was sore to part with them. We clung to the vision of past greatness, and would not believe it could come to naught ..." His maturer judgement was more robust: " ... That old Church in its day became a corpse (a marvellous, an awful change!); and then it did but corrupt the air which once it refreshed, and cumber the ground which once it beautified." (Could anyone but JHN have got away with calling the C of E a rotting and stinking corpse, even in those pre-ecumenical days? But he says it so beautifully.)

Yet ... and yet ...

When all is said and done, I sometimes feel that there is in the air a shadow left by Catholic England; a footprint left in the ground by those ancient dioceses. I suppose the tourists won't think along those lines today, as they begin again to tramp unknowingly past the grave in Christ Church of the first and last Catholic Bishop of Oxford, Dr King. 

Yet, when all is said and done, it would be a comfortable sentimental acknowledgement of what once was, if in the Old Rite, or the Ordinariate, we kept those old Feasts of the Titulars of the pre-1559 Cathedrals, as Doubles of the First Class (Solemnities)! 

Then Oxford's old Catholic diocese, like Flaccus, could murmur Non omnis moriar.

Domina?

Around 700ish someone wrote a hymn about our Lady, Quem terra, pontus, aethera. It was subsequently divided into two and and thus provided a couple of Office Hymns for the Common of the BVM. The second half began "O gloriosa Femina". This was subsequently altered to "O gloriosa Domina", ["woman" changed to "Lady"] for reasons which are fairly obvious. Urban VIII's revisers changed it to "virginum" ["of virgins"]. They will have disliked "Domina" because the first syllable of that word is short, while this is a metrical hymn in which the first syllable of the word at that place in the line has to be long - as the first syllable of "femina" is (pronounced more like Fame than as in the English Feminine.)

Don't forget that the first hints of corruption of the Roman Rite began, not with Paul VI, not with Pius XII, not even with Pius X, but when, in the 1620s, Papa Barberini aka Urban VIII mucked up the ancient Office Hymns because he wanted them to sound more like Horace. This was the first, deplorable, example of the Roman Catholic Church adopting the deplorable "we've-now-got-printing-so-we-can-now-impose-our-latest-revolutionary-fad-almost-overnight-on-the-Universal-Church" syndrome which ultimately led to Bugnini and is the deplorable godfather of PF's deplorable conclusion to Traditionis custodes: the (impractical) demand that the deplorable little document should come into force immediately. Jawohl, mein Fuehrer!

Protestants like Cranmer, of course, had seen the possibilities of this technology for imposing liturgical devastation even earlier, in 1548 ... although the order in 1549 "that this realm shall have but one Use" did but echo the order of a Henrician Convocation in 1542 that the entire Province of Canterbury should use the Sarum Breviary. (The printers, naturally, loved this vastly, and embellished a new edition of the Sarum Breviary with heavy hints that you would need to buy it in order to comply with the Royal Supremacy.)

"Back to Pius V" should be our Traditionalist instinct. That is why, if you want to use English translations of the original texts of the Office Hymns as given in Sarum and Pius V (and the Liturgy of the Hours), you need to use Anglican translations - done from Sarum by people like J M Neale and to be found, in large part, in the admirable English Hymnal - rather than RC translations by scholars like E Caswall.

Vatican II very rightly ordered that the text of the Hymns should generally revert to the original texts still for the most part found in S Pius V's original Breviary (not to mention in Sarum and the other medieval local dialects of the Roman Rite). Dom Anselmo Lentini's Coetus proposed, when dealing with the hymn we are considering today, restoring the original reading Femina [woman] on the grounds that " it seems to us very beautiful, since thus the glory of the humble creature raised to so great a dignity shines more brightly; moreover, Domina [Lady] spoils the metre ...". I think Dom Anselmo is hinting that Gloriosa Femina  is an oxymoron! But at some point somebody decided that Domina ... even if unmetrical ... even if unoriginal ... had better go back into the text. I wonder who ... and do you agree with them?

Incidentally, in the first part of the original hymn - what we know as Quem terra, pontus, aethera - Urban VIII changed aethera to sidera because he didn't share the Carolingian fashion that found a delicious exoticism in words borrowed from Greek.

And that hymn originally had a third stanza long since omitted, which Lentini wanted to reintroduce, but ... apparently ... here again he was vetoed by somebody. It went (I translate unmetrically):
"Therefore the ages wonder,/That an Angel brings the Seed [Lentini wanted to emend this line to "That the Spirit overshadows her"]/ That the Virgin conceives by ear/ And, believing in her heart, gives birth." This, of course, gives a picture which relates to much medieval iconography of the Annunciation, where a piercing ray goes from the Father or the Spirit to our Lady's ear.

There is material for speculation in that stanza!

A Bad Day ...

... for me as blogger. Two disasters.

(1) I had contrived a modest adaptation of Traditionis custodes which I planned to publish in the next day or two. But Mr Milburn, on the thread of the post for 3 August, got there before me. 

Do read it! 

(2) I had planned a piece on Joseph Ratzinger's use of (the still Anglican) S John Henry Newman's words about liturgical stability. Now the admirable Professor Peter Kwasniewski has dealt with it in a scintillating essay he has published on Rorate.

Of course, great minds think alike, and there were bound to be convergent views ...

Could get worse

There are problems in the text of Traditionis Custodes: even Vincent Nichols pointed out a place in the accompanying Letter where the English and the Italian texts do not seem to be saying the same thing.

I don't know whether other people have noticed the following: while TC forbids a bishop who already has a TLM group in his diocese from authorising any more such groups, a bishop whose diocese lacks such a group is subject to no such prohibition. I am not certain that this is intentional. 

One inference could be that the document was put together in a tearing hurry. Perhaps the surgeon was knocking at the door?

Normally, I whinge ... and how right I am to do so!! ... about Vatican documents issued without an official Latin text. This practice is, indeed, a deplorable exercise in Italophone cultural imperialism. Those of us who do not speak Italian are now (nobody bothers to conceal it) second class Catholics.

But ...

There are examples of extremely important documents being changed after their official publication. Many examples could, I suspect, be adduced: here is just a couple: 

(1) The bull Apostolicae curae of Pope Leo XIII, condemning Anglican Orders, somehow was changed between the first printing in ASS and its subsequent republication in Acta Leonis XIII, and ... get this! ... the Vatican website, when I checked in June last year, carried the original, displaced, ASS text! (The motive for the first alteration appeared to be the elimination of a "loophole" which lowered the status of the condemnation ... my suspicion is that Cardinal Vaughan ... er ...)

(2) In 2000, the Vatican Press published ("ex editione typica") the Institutio Generalis Missalis Romani, with an assurance that the Pope had approved it on 11 January 2000. But when the text of the entire Missal was subsequently published, the text of the Institutio had been very substantially modified.

The appearance of an official Latin version of Traditionis custodes in AAS could easily be an opportunity for the document to be 'tidied up' in a way that made it even more leak-proof and poisonous than it is in its current modern language texts.

It is important to remember that we are not at the mercy of honourable or decent people, and that PF's hatred of us is, er, visceral.

On the other hand, conceivably, if PF gets enough grief from irritated bishops, a changed text might be less nasty!

But I wouldn't put money on it. 

Not if I woz you, Squire.

An Anglican Speaks ...

  ... videlicet Dom Gregory Dix in Shape, who wrote of

"... a certain timelessness about the eucharistic action and an independence of its setting, in keeping with the stability in an ever-changing world of the forms of the liturgy themselves. ... In this twentieth century [Blessed, soon now to be Saint] Charles de Foucauld in his hermitage in the Sahara 'did this' with the same rite as [Saint] Cuthbert twelve centuries before in his hermitage on Lindisfarne in the Northern seas. This very morning I 'did this' with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since [Saint] Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third Sunday of Easter in the summer after he landed."

Can such a rite with such auctoritas really be stolen from any presbyter of the Latin Church? From any Roman Catholic priest, in England or anywhere?

By any legislative fiat or any act of naked violence of any innovator?

One very learned English priest has recently described "the provision of this liturgy" ... when it is permitted merely as "a remedial concession for those who are yet to find their way to the true Roman Rite" ... as "both crass and cruel".

Someone in Rome seems to have borrowed some ideas from Someone in China about the forcible cultural assimilation of Uighurs. Papa Xi! I have instructed my household to be careful about to whom they open the door. No Hawkers, No Pedlers, No Brainwashers.

For me, PF has created a new problem with regard to the Usus Deterior of the Roman Rite. He has ideologised it ... turned it into symbol of something other than itself ... made it a signum efficax of his own personal detestation of the Great Tradition and hatred of certain people. I'm going to have to think about the implications for me of this disturbing imposition of new meaning.

[NOTE: new usage ... I'm experimenting with 

UA = Usus Authenticus

UD = Usus Deterior] 

Fr Karl Rahner, S. J., and Traditionis Custodes

I owe this quotation (taken from a book which Rahner, one of the great Conciliar liberals, wrote in 1965) to the magnificent Phoenix from the Ashes by Mr Henry Sire (Angelico Press). 

"Imagine that the pope, as supreme pastor of the Church, issued a decree today requiring all the uniate churches of the Near East to give up their Oriental liturgy and adopt the Latin rite ... the pope would not exceed the competence of his jurisdictional primacy by such a decree, and the decree would be legally valid. But we can also pose an entirely different question. Would it be morally licit for the pope to issue such a decree? Any reasonable man and any true Christian would have to answer 'no'. Any confessor of the pope would have to tell him that in the concrete situation of the Church today such a decree, despite its legal validity, would be subjectively and objectively an extremely grave moral offence against charity, against the unity of the Church rightly understood (which does not demand uniformity), ... a mortal sin from which the pope could be absolved only if he revoked the decree."

Rahner was right. An action can be "legally valid" and, at the same time, be totally wrong. There is a Something which can trump mere "legal validity", and that Something is Holy Tradition. 

I would not, myself, play around as Rahner does with speculations about what papal confessors might or might not say in the confessional. I would certainly not join Rahner in his exalted view of the "competence of [the pope's] jurisdictional primacy" ... a view which seems to me to be a big part of our current problem. 

I would simply say that such a pope, and such a decree, would lack all AUCTORITAS, because they flout Holy Tradition.  

Such an action would be, as Sire observes, "not merely a sin, ... but an act of schism against the tradition of the Church, and one for which [a pope] has neither moral nor legal competence."

Rahner's observations, of course, hold true also of the Roman Rite, which has just as much auctoritas as the Oriental Rites. It is, in fact, older than they are.

PF's evident policy of destroying the Authentic Roman Rite, and his recent purported legislative action, lack auctoritas and place no burden upon anybody's conscience. I am confident that, one day, it will be declared that they were null.