Busts

It is not Nice always to be attacking people, so I am glad to be able to reset the balance with regard to President Biden.

Frankly, if I had an Ovoid Office and if it contained a bust, or, indeed, any sort of representation, in however many or few dimensions, of any member (even remote) of the Churchill Family, I would have had it removed. Just as Mr Biden, following Mr Obamama, has recently done. I would order it to be 'relocated' in the Staff Rest Room. Had the Taliban ever taken me into their confidence, I would have tentatively suggested to them the careful transfer of the Column of Victory in the grounds at Blenheim to ... er ...  ... no, I wouldn't really ... another joke in bad taste ...

In Bond Street, just a bit down from Sotheby's, there is a bronze representation of "Sir Winston", sitting beside Mr Rooseveldt. Whitherabouts, I wonder, should these two buddies be 'relocated'? Should they be joined by the figure of their genial chum and playmate Uncle Joe Stalin?

Incidentally, in Chips Channon's Diaries, recently made available to us, Churchill is described as "fat, brilliant, unbalanced, illogical, porcine". Thank goodness for our American cousins! Whatever would we do without them? And, of course, their ever-available heiresses.

So I have no complaints about Mr Biden's alterations in the Ovoid Office. But I am less sanguine about his claim "I am Irish". Since we can all have as many as 32 great great great grandparents (have I got that right?), anybody whose family has lived in North America for any period of time ... given a healthy dash of enthusiastic miscegenation ... must have an Irishman or an Irishwoman lurking in it somewhere. 

I doubt if Mr B is any more genuinely Irish than Vladimir Vladimirovich O'Putin.

GAMALIEL ...

... or THE REVENGE OF THE TRADDIES?

I feel fairly strongly that, when the long nightmare of Bergoglianity is eventually over, the last thing we want is some sort of revenge culture. The next Roman Pontiff should not be Pope Antifranciscus!

I would rather like the next Roman Pontiff to take the name Gamaliel, in memory of the admirable  Pharisee in Acts 5 who so wisely advised that the followers of the new Christian movement should not be persecuted out of existence: if this thing is of God, he thought, it will prosper.

The Spirit of Gamaliel was very much alive among the Franciscans of the Immaculate before the Vatican's cruel (and continuing) onslaught upon them. The Usus Authenticus was not part of their rule; it spread among them rather like ... well, rather as Christianity spread among that first, Jewish, generation of Christians. But there came the moment when it attracted the notice of the wolves. 

In the next pontificate, I hope for a degree of peace. I long for a Catholic culture in which the Faith is taught firmly but quietly and gently; in which the Holy Spirit is allowed to speak in the hearts of priests and people and religious without the Police hammering at the door. 

I hope for a pontificate in which the pope refrains from giving aircraft interviews; does not give interviews to loose-cannon journalists who don't even take notes; in which papal documents are very much rarer and more careful and are footnoted with sources a decent percentage of which will go back well beyond sixty years.

Hatred should not be given the sort of free rein which it has enjoyed in this pontificate. It should not be made possible for amused young cynics to make collections of the rhetorical excesses used by the pope ... or by anybody else ... to denigrate and humiliate fellow Catholics. Not even fellow clergy!

PF has left nobody in any doubt about whom ... and what ... he loaths, and with what visceral disgust he detests them. We can all, I hope, do without another raging, angry pontificate.

Personally, I would welcome a pontificate in which the Personality Cult of the reigning pope is considerably scaled down. Papal visits may be necessary or useful when there is a crisis of teaching or of communion which needs addressing (one thinks of Germany), but not as a regular institution.

And, in practical terms, we could do with a pope who listens (and even answers dubia!) rather than one whose natural idiom is to rant.

And one who, when he does open his mouth ... tells the truth. Wouldn't that be a treat!

Keeping the Wolves at bay

I must confess it: I was shocked by the number of religious communities listed by Archbishop Vigano as having been mangled by the current regime in septem collibus. (How useful it is when a Nuncio decides to spill the beans ... is there an Italian proverbial expression analogous to our "spilling beans"?).

It is, frankly, upsetting to think of pious religious being dragged from their knees and interrogated; tricked by cunning and devious 'Visitors', whose agenda will include building up a case against their charism and spirituality, so that they can be dispersed or subjected to alien structures and patterns.

In the world of education, there are different but similar processes. If management decides to take steps against somebody, the victim is allowed to have (what is colloquially called) a 'prisoner's friend' present at the procedings. And also present will be an official of the victim's professional association. (The latter will make interjections with the formula "It is my member's view that ...". For some reason, I found the reiteration of the phrase "my member" more than a little comical.)

I was once a Prisoner's Friend. I enjoyed it immensely. The 'prisoner', very wisely, had efficiently maintained an extensive Paper Trail, which I was able to use, to devastating effect, against the Prosecution. I found the entire process incredibly [have you noticed how ubiquitous that adverb has become in the last few months?] exhilarating, rather like taking a powerful drug. (Not, of course, that I have ever done that.) We won!

Visitated religious, I realise, are not formally being forensically prosecuted. They might have more protections if they were! But I think the parallels are close enough to merit the following suggestion.

When the interrogation of each Visitated individual Victim is taking place, that Victim should be accompanied by a sympathetic and acute canon lawyer who has been carefully briefed on the particular circumstances. That canonist would be able to spot devious snares and traps and to give useful advice on dealing with them. And he/she would have the opportunity of building up an overall picture of the case being built up; of how the Victims are, to use S John Henry Newman's phrase, being "practised upon" both individually and collectively.

I know that this would not be quite within the Spirit of Peronism. Could we live with that?

My readers would rise up in fury against me if I were, even in the merest jollity and fun, to use such a phrase as "Banana Pontificate". Idcirco talem opinionem omnino praetereo. But will anybody deny that the life of Christ's Church would be strengthened ... and purged ... if a dash of our Anglo-Saxon tradition of openness in public affairs were introduced in atria domus Domini?

Atcherleee ...

From a stylish English writer in the mid-thirties who had a fair bit of experience of youff:

"They found [him] a tornado of well-bred apologies, all punctuated with an irritating repetition of the word 'actually' -- a habit of modern youth, particularly when it is lying."

I do find these usages fascinating, until they become infuriating. As readers are aware, I am sick to death of Y'know; there is a Beeb programme in which members of the chattering classes comment on the stories in the first editions of the following day's papers. Most of these people are young women with squeaky vowels and a limited tonal range, and ... er ...

Some of them use a new and stylish adverb: particully.

When I was in teaching, I deemed it professionally insulting if I caught myself speaking in this sort of way, even (or a fortiori?) to beta minus students. Yet Mary Beard does it all the time; apparently deliberately, to establish an atmosphere of unpompous intimacy ... or, if not that, of what? Educate me.

"To be frank" and "To be honest" always provoke me to inner mirth because of their plain, ingenuous admission that the rest of what that speaker says is naturally to be taken as unfrank or dishonest. Or am I misunderstanding some more profound linguistic trope? Did Tully ever say ut vera loquar? I think he may have done ...

Talking about profundity ... Before the US election, Mr Trump, accepting the Republican nomination, said "I profoundly accept". 

Ahhhhhhh ... happy days .....

Jorge and the Jews

Some viewers of the Internet may have been puzzled to find that PF is currently the recipient of strong criticism from some Jewish quarters. Surely, such a kindly gentleman whose universal love ...

I am not at all puzzled. In 2016 I contributed a paper to that year's Gardone Conference, subsequently published in  Luther and his progeny, 2017, ed. John Rao, pub. Angelico Press. I am surprised that it has taken so long for this subject to become a matter of public controversy. I am glad I am not Cardinal Koch.

Let me explain PF's big problem. On the one hand, he ... of course ... like all the Nice and the Good ... loves Jews and desires his love to be manifest and accepted and reciprocated. On the other hand, he loves to attack those in the Church whom he hates, smiting them with the accusation that they are rigid and unloving and hypocrites. He does this by bracketing them with the Pharisees of the time of the Lord's Incarnation. "You are just like those whom Christ so fiercely criticised" is his eternal refrain. "By opposing me, you also oppose Christ."

So it is not surprising that he gets his knickers in such a twist.

In my 2016 paper, I quoted a passage from his Bull of Indiction of his Year of Mercy.

"Before [S Paul] met Christ on the road to Damascus, he dedicated his whole life to fulfilling in every way the Righteousness of the Torah [Lex]. But, converted to Christ, he so radically [prorsus] changed his mind that he wrote in his Letter to the Galatians: 'We have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we are made righteous out of Faith in Christ and not out of works prescribed by the Torah.' Paul turns totally upside down the basic idea of Righteousness [rationem iustitiae omnino evertit]. He puts in the first place, not now the Torah, but Faith. Keeping the Torah does not save, but Faith in Christ Jesus, who through His death and resurrection brings His salvation through the Mercy which makes righteous."

My paper also explains how poorly PF's views, like those of Luther, have stood up to the renaissance in Pauline studies associated with the name of 'Ed' Sanders in the last half-century. 

Having strong views but a fragile grasp upon Catholic Doctrine makes one rather vulnerable to such confusions. 

I have not forgotten the disrespectful attack by the CBCEW on Pope Benedict's Prayer for the Jews.

 

Lethal Typists

What a jolly story in today's news, the one about the 'feisty' [nowadays, a must-have word for every right-thinking woman] little old German lady in her late nineties who legged it from her care home just hours before the scheduled beginning of her trial in North Germany. She is charged with having, as an eighteen-year-old, worked in the admin department of an extermination camp.

Herr von Plod did catch up with her. I wonder whither she was heading ... to that much-storied Last Nazi Redoubt somewhere in the Alps, perhaps?

Perhaps they will confiscate her zimmer-frame to ensure that she now faces justice without further mishap. Her escapade, of course, ensures that her trial will receive more coverage than might otherwise have been the case.

Personally, I believe that the Shoah was such a horrible act of monstrous evil that even a typist who merely made up the lists should have to answer for her conduct. However aged she is. 

Every single Jew who was exterminated deserves at least this modest expiation.

Just as I like to hope that, be it ever so long after my own death, the nice young ladies who with elegant efficiency confect the Operating Rotas in our fine modern British Abortion Clinics will be given the opportunity to explain themselves.

PF and the Ordination of Women

If a future pope wishes to introduce an innovatory Ordination of Women, he or she will have to go directly against  ... not only S Paul VI, S John Paul II, and Pope Benedict; he will have to go against pope Francis. In his document after the Amazonian Synod, PF categorically put the Ordination of Women off-limits. The Usual Suspects, who had been 'expecting better' of him, were predictably disconcerted.

Why did he do this?

The Ordination of Women is a matter unlike most of those currently disputed. 

It can't be fudged. Or, if it can, it can't be as easily fudged as other matters. 

To smuggle in Communion for Adulterers, it needed an ambiguous footnote. And an interpretation by a group of Argentine bishops. And a Letter from PF to the Argentine bishops. And a statement that PF's Letter would be published in AAS. A process which PF once called "Making a Mess"? 

The ARCIC ecumenical process between Catholics and Anglicans operated on a basis of fudge. If you place in the same room a number of clever people who want to agree, they will eventually find or create a form of words which all of them will regard as not ideal, but which is just good enough to secure the necessary signatures. Perhaps the best example of this was the ARCIC document on Mary.

Women can't be fudged. You either ordain them or you don't. The persons you ordain are either male or female. Yes, I know that such binary simplicities can be, and by some people are, disputed. But, thank God, in the Catholic Church such an attempt would still cause a megarumpus and a strong probability of formal schism.

PF knows that he could not get away with this without the most enormous commotion. It would involve confronting ... fully frontally ... a document of S John Paul II which was classified by his successor Benedict XVI as infallible qua involving the Infallible Ordinary Magisterium of the Church. And once the magic wand has been waved and the I-Word has been invoked over something, you can't surreptitiously smuggle it away in the night. Folks will notice and wonder ...

I believe that PF realises that in WO (as we used to call it) he has met his match. He is up against a problem which cannot be managed by the astute methodologies he has successfully deployed so far.

Of course, there will remain possible subterfuges ... we may come to notice how many more parishes are run by female "parish administrators". But ...

A PESSIMISTIC SCENARIO

At the moment, the College of Cardinals probably does not contain enough electors to elect a Franciscus II franciscior. If a third of the voters were unwilling to elect F2f, that would be enough to block such an election. Perhaps PF will reign long enough to leave behind him an electoral body of cardinals which is not encumbered with such a Blocking Third. And then F2f will be elected. 

How might F2f advance the Cause?

Possibly by crafty means of the ad experimentum device. And perhaps, initially, in orders of enclosed nuns (if there are any such communities left).

But, as Euripides observed long before this pontificate, the Unexpected does so often happen. That's why Pessimism is in most cases probably a device of Satan, who loves to try to make us despair over what has not happened ... and isn't going to..

So forget it!!

 

"Come here" or "Become more adjacent"??

  (1)

LOCATE/LOCATION
When and why did these words supersede the verbs 'to place' and 'to find' and their derivatives? 'He located [=placed] the wine-glass on the table'. 'He located [=found] the lost sixpence under the table'. Two perfectly decent monosyllables with totally different meanings seem to have been replaced by a single ambiguous latinism, thus affording opportunities for confusion. 

Latin Prose Composition (and, I suspect, its parallels in other ancient and modern languages) disciplined learners. You gave somebody the task of translating into Latin "What is your location?" You watched him flapping through dictionaries getting more and more worried. She then brought up to your desk some such nonsenses as "Quae est tua locatio? You then worried at him for a minute or two, getting her to think what the words 'really' meant, until ...Triumph of Paedogogy! ... he came back with "Ubi es?" 

Simple, clear, chaste, unpompous. Yet by diabolical malevolence, the Me-Important classes think that Latin is impressive ... so we get ad hoc and argumentum ad hominem and endless other latinisms which the poor silly fellows almost invariably misunderstand and misapply. Some of this may lie in the desire of clerklets to sound Important and Official. One train company (I'm not making this up) has this announcement: "Safety Information is located adjacent to the doors". I would have written "Safety Information is by the doors". 

 This is not simply a matter of words of teutonic origin being preferable to gallicisms, latinisms and grecisms (although it often may be ... I remember as an eight year old being - helpfully - advised to write begin rather than commence). The meanings of words have always been unstable: 'place' may itself have started its long life as plateia, the broad boulevard in Hellenistic town planning, upon which the confusions of Menandrian New Comedy were played out. The problem is not, I think, that curmudgeonly old retired Educators dislike linguistic evolution as that the evolution of modern English is dragging the language towards incomprehension and logical dissolution. You no longer listen to the words someone says, because they, in themselves, might give you quite the wrong 'take'. Instead, you attempt to guess, from context and tone, what the speaker might be getting at. And this is far more dangerous than allowing words to have meanings.

(2)

I am toying with the theory that the disintegration of our previous class-system may have something to do with it. Once upon a time, the gentle and the educated talked in one way among themselves; in a different way when addressing their social inferiors. (Does anybody nowadays ever read U and Non-U?) But today, We Are All Middle-Class. So everybody wants to sound Latinate ... and, for those who do not know Latin, that, poor things, is quite burden. But they work manfully at it, and for all their pains just end up looking silly. In the previous culture, only those who had done their mensa mensa mensam risked Latin. Now everybody has a (disastrous) go at it.

A fairly recent example: mitigate and militate. I was once at a Planning Enquiry where there was much talk of mitigation ... which, perfectly correctly, was used to mean moderating, making less dreadful, the results of building a new railway line: mitis+ago. But there is a similar word militate, which means fight: miles is a soldier. So now you hear poor confused people (ex.gr. Nicola Sturgeon the other day) talking about "mitigating against X". And I have not the faintest idea what that is supposed to mean: does it mean 'fight' or does it mean 'moderate'? . Perhaps I don't need to. Perhaps I am expected just to register that (a) the speaker is in an unspecified way opposed to X, and that (b) she wants to say this in a posh way ...

(3) 

And there is the disintgration in the understanding of how to construct relative clauses. As in "This is the thing which everybody wants it." Very Semitic ...

Saint John Henry Newman and Aggressive Insolent Factions

There can be no doubt that PF has presented us with yet another Rupture; and a rupture which (as well as having practical aspects) is also a rupture in the field of dogma. 

Pope Benedict XVI unambiguously taught that what, in liturgical tradition, has been loved and practised, cannot be simply forbidden. Pope Francis I has now declared that the Roman Rite has only one (unica) form; and that the form is the Bugnini-Liturgy. As logical and practical outworkings of their conflicting positions, Benedict XVI enacted that no priest of the Latin Church needs any permission whatsoever to celebrate the older form; Pope Francis I now as categorically asserts that the older form may not be celebrated without permissions galore.

Neither of these two contradictory positions has the authority of an infallible declaration by an Ecumenical Council or a Roman Pontiff. In fact, in each case, their authority is manifestly well below that of an infallible utterance. Which ... if either ... binds us?

I propose to look at attitudes adopted by S John Henry Newman at the time of Vatican I, confident that criticisms and qualifications which he deemed appropriate with regard to a doctrinally active and infallible Ecumenical Council will, a fortiori, apply to these much lesser papal declarations and in this current crisis. It seems to me that his guidance is all the more important in these days leading up to his Festival ... if we are to celebrate this festival with any integrity.

 

Early in 1870, S John Henry received a letter from his bishop William Ullathorne about the disgraceful bullying going on at the [First] Vatican Council. He replied with words which became justly famous: "Why should an aggressive insolent faction be allowed to 'make the heart of the just to mourn, whom the Lord hath not made sorrowful?'" ... words which spring easily to mind when one thinks about the this pontificate in general, and Traditionis Custodes in particular. They are positively uncanny in their appropriateness! Seven months later, on 23 July, Newman saw the Definition of papal infallibility five days after it had passed through the Conciliar Aula. He was relieved, even delighted, at its "moderation"; it afforded him no problems.

But a further question did remain to trouble him. "Does it come to me with the authority of an Ecumenical Council?" 

Newman did not instantly accept it as such. He wanted to know what the conciliar minority would do. This was important, because unanimity, at least 'moral' unanimity, was accepted as essential for the validity of a conciliar definition of doctrine. If the Fathers "allege in detail acts of violence and deceit ... if they declare they have been kept in the dark and been practised on, then there will be the gravest reasons for determining that the Definition is not valid."

We may not possess 'our Cardinal's' immense erudition. But we are subject to the same moral imperatives as those by which he was moved to speak and to act as he did.

If some papal intervention repeats or is in continuity with what the Church has immemorially taught and practised, then it is for that reason magisterial; if it were to bear manifest signs of shameless rupture, the reader would have to draw the necessary conclusion and repudiate it ... to declare "This is not valid".

Traditionis Custodes bears, unmistakably and aggressively, manifest signs of shameless rupture when it is compared with Summorum Pontificum. It bears upon its surface the very clearest marks of violence and deceit.

 

These are troubled days when we, laics and clerics and bishops, are surely called upon to speak with the same Parrhesia that S John Henry employed. If members of the hierarchy attempt to bully, to intimidate, to abuse their status to silence any who speak out, we should remember 'our Cardinal's' condemnations of an aggressive insolent faction. 

We have this Holy Father's own reiterated encouragements of Parrhesia as our defence and inspiration. 

Not to mention Canon 212.

How wise are serpents?

 We read that a traditionalist convent of Carmelites in North America is to receive an "Apostolic Visitation".

We all know what that sinister phrase meant for the Franciscans of the Immaculate. The word "Apostolic" is rapidly becoming as menacing as the word "Democratic" was when it was employed by the Stalinists or "Healthcare" when used by abortionists.

How to survive?

Surely, faithful Catholics need to be or to become as Wise as any biblical serpent ever was. New religious communities should not acquire any canonical status. Canonical status just means that they can be forced to receive the untender unmercies of a Visitation. New religious communities should be allowed technically to remain simply extra-canonical gatherings of women or men.

After Fr Hope Patten restored the Pilgrimage to our Lady of Walsingham in the Anglican Parish Church of Little Walsingham, the evangelical Bishop of Norwich became difficult. So Father built a Pilgrimage Church (with Holy House) on land which did not belong to the House of Bondage ... and was thus exempt from her law. Alternatively: there will continue to be a supply of redundant churches being put on the market by a wide variety of imploding sects, for the foreseeable future. (But guile might be needed to purchase them ... a number of years ago, the SSPX tried to buy a former C of E church in Manchester, until, er, ...)

Whatever legal and financial structures are necessary to secure property and money from the risk of being 'apostolically' grabbed, should be put in place. Nobody could doubt the sincerity of PF's own profound and principled dislike of a certain style of Catholicism (and of a certain style of Catholic!), but there have been suspicions that there are people in Rome whose 'Apostolic' motives are more monetary than stylistic. 

Such suspicions do not present the Church in a good light.

There is no way of knowing how long the aggressions and cruelties of 'Apostolicity' may last. The working assumption should be that it may be quite a time.

 

Quite apart from all that, I question the broader suitability of using "Apostolic" as a fancy, la-dee-dah, way of saying "Papal". If I were myself an Apostle, I would probably consult a lawyer about it. 

I think it was harmless enough back in the days of the 'Vicars Apostolic', but if it is to mean henceforth "We're coming after you and just you wait till we get you," its use is, er, less attractive.

The See of Antioch is 'Apostolic', but I doubt whether His Beatitude is intimately involved in Visitating and harassing Latin Rite sisterhoods. Perhaps he should sue his Roman 'brother'.

I can't see what's wrong with describing the Roman Bishopric in the nice old-fashioned way as "The Holy See", and keeping ones fingers crossed.

Vivat

 It is reported that PF thinks his critics hope for his death.

I can honestly say, without any irony, that I have not heard or read of any of of his critics ... I don't deny that he has critics ... wanting him dead. When I do, I will condemn it. On the contrary, given the fact that his predecessor abdicated, I think some of his critics are rather thankful that this makes it possible for them to hope for an end to this pontificate without thereby hoping for PF's death. Personally, knowing within myself what it is like to be aged and ill, I pray that he may be given respite from the pains and anxieties of being old.

Perhaps the Holy Father is confused by memories of the time around his own election. Readers will remember that some very unsavoury emails were published, showing the then Tablet Correspondent, Bobby Mickens, and one of his chums, delightedly relishing the prospect of what they termed "the Rat's Funeral".

Even Mickens appears to have forgotten this episode. In supplying journalists with statesmanlike quotations about people who, he claims, are planning for After This Pontificate, Bobby fails to explain the circumstances which led to his own sacking from the Tablet for his unprofessional nastiness with regard to Benedict XVI. 

An account of it would have contextualised the present reports, surely?

But enough of this sad business. Here is something much jollier from within our own Anglican Patrimony.

There is an anecdote concerning an Anglican priest who, during the last century, prayed publicly that the Almighty would grant the greatest privilege of His grace, the blessed Crown of Martyrdom, to the (then) Archbishop of Canterbury.

Can anybody put any details onto this story? It may be from around the time when Geoffrey Fisher was persecuting the Tridentine Rite.

ENCAENIA post scriptum

The No Shows were J Lubchenko and S Solomon. The honorandae who attended were H R Clinton, L Colley, S Davies, A Deavere Smith, Baroness Lister, J Winterson. Given the change of date and the Pestilence, these distinguished ladies are much to be commended for coming to be with us.

A 'modernisation' which I resent is that the Student Prizewinners no longer read out potions of their compositions. They just stand there to be clapped ... how condescending ....

According to Mr Orator, all over this country the teaching of languages is plummetting ... German being particularly hard hit. There's Global Britain for you ...