Conclave Problems

As the Conclave grows closer, the mutability, during the last century or so, of the rules governing conclaves acquires more and more interest.

Since Pius XII, it has become almost the custom for each incoming pope to alter the rules bequeathed to him by his predecessor. The reason why this has rarely appeared to matter very much has been that those rules that have most tempted so many pontiffs to make changes [see Wikipaedia], mostly concern the means to be taken to secure a result at the end of a contentious conclave in which normal procedures have failed to deliver, er, the Bacon of a necessary two-thirds majority. 

And the desire of Cardinal Electors to enable a decorous succession has apparently led them to decide fairly soon into a conclave that, since X is pretty clearly going to get his majority eventually, it looks better if it's given to him sooner rather than after a long agony.

But there was a problem when Benedict XVI followed S John Paul II. The way matters stood then was that, if a two-thirds majority were not secured after the normal rules had been followed right to their very end, a new procedure then took over which could result in the next pope being elected on a simple majority.

You see, suppose candidate X had got an overall majority, but which was a majority which fell short of being two-thirds. 

What comes next?

All that the majority cardinals supporting X then needed to do was to sit back and pick their noses and just wait until this conclave reached the stage when the move had formally to be made to a simple majority. Then their man would slide comfortably in to the sedes stercoraria.

This breached the established principle that a pope needed a two-thirds majority ... a principle ancient enough to have acquired auctoritas. Moreover, a pope incapable of securing office except as the result of this extreme procedure would hardly be embarking upon his pontificate with his own auctoritas entirely intact. People would say "He only got in by ... ... ".

So Benedict XVI restored the principle that a two-thirds majority would, after all, always be necessary.

That is where we are now.

A Kairos?

People say ridiculous things in time of war. I have read of President Putin being accused of "Weaponising Winter". Really? War means War, and War is waged by weaponising whatever is at hand. Churchill, I believe, said something like "There is one Russian Commander that Herr Hitler has forgotten ... ... General Winter." 

Do we rebuke Admiral Nimitz for "Weaponising the Pacific?".

For millennia, those waging wars have let matters rest during Winter. When Spring returns, "the time when kings go to war", then men will blow the cobwebs off their swords.

Would it really be shameful if the next few months provided an opportunity for some fixing?

Territorial boders have never been sacrosanct. The ownership of the Crimea is ... well, go and research it yoursef.

I have links by marriage with a (formerly) landed Polish family whose estates are now well behind the Russky frontier. 

I believe that 'prioritising' men and women, flesh and blood, is more important than fetichising Historical Atlases.

The First Lord of the Treasury ...

 ... recently gave voice to the phrase "between him and I".

Somebody should find out where this monster of illiterate grammatical ineptitude got his education, and then we should have a Royal Commission to help decide what should be done to destroy that place hook, line, and whatever. Nec lapis in loco relinquatur ...

In a memorable poetic epiclesis during an earlier time of sorest national crisis, Sir John Betjeman spoke for the Nation when he bravely called upon Herr Goering's "friendly bombs" to fall on Slough. 

Did the Luftwaffe use up all its supply of pyroboli benigni on Slough? Or might there be some teensy weensy bomblets left tucked away for the present dire emergency?

Can NATO help? Are President Truman's superb bombers available for hire?

Tu Gloria Jerusalem

Throughout the opening chapters of S Luke's Gospel, like the insistent tolling of Great Tom after nine o'clock each evening, there rings the insistent phrase kata ton nomon Moyseos. Mary, the truest Daughter of Jerusalem, who is herself the antitype of Sion, obeyed punctiliously the Torah, as gradually, storing away like a miser in her Immaculate Heart the wonders of which she had been made a partaker, she came to full understanding that the Child upon her knee was himself the blessed Torah Incarnate. "Whatever he says unto you ..."

Mary Immaculate is, surely, meant to be known as an icon of Redeemed Israel; Israel as she and all men were meant to be if Eve had not fallen; as in God's promises she will be, purged from the disobediences against which her prophets preached, washed in the waters of Baptism, joyful in the knowledge that her God is faithful and that his promises will be fulfilled.

Condemn me as a 'judaizer' if you like, but my heart lifts whenever I see a family of what our nasty secular Media disdainfully call "the Ultra-Orthodox"; the mother caring for her children, the father, as likely as not, with his nose in the Torah. Surely we should pray for those whose devotion to the Torah needs but the gentlest removal of the veil from their eyes so that, seeing, they may grasp Who that Torah is.
Living and departed, may they be all faithful, like Mary, to the End (telos), knowing finally Who the End, the Omega, is, and, like Mary at Golgotha, hearing the proclamation tetelestai.

Meeting old friends

Today we keep S Nicolas; for a couple of decades of my life, at Lancing, a Double of the First Class and a half-holiday when we all sallied forth down to Brighton to do our Christmas shopping or, in the case of the students, to imbibe. I remember browsing happily, one S Nick's Day, in that shop for remaindered books down East Street. I had my back to the window; and I was showing a scholarly interest in a large glossy volume entitled Forbidden Pictures From Ancient Pompei (I didn't buy it). Some cheerful drumming on the window behind me suddenly awakened me to the fact that a fair portion of the V Form approved warmly of my reading matter and shared my views about its academic significance.

The cultus of S Nicolas is one of the most ecumenical and one of the most ancient; he was a saint with as large a portfolio of Patronages as a Renaissance cardinal. He was, at Lancing, co-principal Patron with the Glorious Assumption of our Blessed Lady; on his feast day we used to sing the hymn composed for him by dear Basil Handford: Sancte, Sancte, Nicolas// Tute Patronus noster es// Laus et Deo Gloria// Sancte, pro nobis exor-a. So many of the waterside churches in Sussex, and elsewhere (Byzantine East as well as Latin West), have his Dedication. Wherever one goes, he is the old friend one so often seems to meet up with again. 

When we go to Gardone for the Roman Forum colloquium, we offer our Masses each morning in the superb parish church ostentatiously dedicated Divo Nicolao (what a very 1750s turn of phrase!) high up the hillside overlooking Catullus's lake. Incidentally, one of the baroque ceiling paintings there shows S Nicolas Banishing the Moors. Sancte, pro nobis exora!

In the OF he is merely optional; however, in the Extraordinary Form, happily, he is included in the 2020 CDF list of Privileged observances which cannot be skipped.

Good on yer, mates.

An important point I would like to make concerns the historical-theological aspects of his cult.

What I mean is this. His observance is distinctly older, more widespread, and more significant than many feasts with a loftier 'intrinsic' status; even feasts, for example, of our Blessed Lord. 

S Nicolas on December 6 has Auctoritas, and oodles of it. S Martin is another saint about whom I would make a similar judgement. I would be outraged if either of them disappeared from the Calendar; but the disappearance of Christ the King from Excita Sunday, or of S Joseph Opifex from May 1, would simply encourage me to open another enthusiastic bottle of Waitrose Cava. 

Easy come, easy go, as Auntie used to say.

Or, in my own native Nerdspeak, Auctoritas matters a lot more than daft bits of paper from Rome.

 

S Birinus, of Dorchester, is celebrated on December 5

There are places where one has a vivid sense of the Saxon 'mission' to reconvert England being set down upon the still palpable ruins of the Roman Empire. For example ... Othona, or Bradwell in Essex, a 'Saxon Shore' fort  occupied by S Cedd and his monks. What a terribly remote and inaccessible place, one muses, until one recalls that, before the days of ubiquitous tarmacadam, travelling meant sailing; and perhaps such places were more accessible.

That may be true also of Dorchester upon Thames; a once-Roman town where S Birinus set up his cathedra. S Birinus was sent by Pope Honorius I ... yes!! By him!!!! The last pope before our Holy Father Pope Francis to have been anathematised for doctrinal error!

S Birinus converted the local king, Cynigils, to the Christian faith. S Oswald was present as patrinus; Cynigils received one of S Oswald's daughters as wife. I think we have here a fascinating peep into a society in which Faith and Politics were not a million miles apart; in which a Saxon princeling might feel that, in accepting a marriage alliance together with the Christian Faith, he was allying himself with the broader, Christian, Mediterranean World ... with the ordered world of Popes and Archbishops and even Emperors.

There is a Roman Road going through Dorchester, and the point at which it crossed the Thames can be detected on the Ordnance Survey. But I wonder if it was along the River itself that these kings and this bishop had made their way to Dorchester; if its significance lay in the access which the Thames offered.

Just for kicks, I print a Preface of S Birinus, taken from a liturgical book which has connections with the nearby Abbey of Abendon.

VD: deprecantes, ut beatus confessor Birinus ante thronum gloriae tuae nobis obtineat, quatenus ipsius societate perfruamur in caelis cuius sanctae depositionis festa celebramus in terris.

A bit jejune, I hear you murmuring ... OK, perhaps ... but the Saxon period comes well before the foolish and Rigid modern rule that one may never make a petition in a Preface. And such first-millennium prayers often have an admirable sense that communio, societas with heavenly intercessors, might well be a more sensible liturgical motive than an interest in terrestrial biography.

Back in the days of Bishop Kirk, when the Anglican Diocese of Oxford was under 'Catholic' management, the Bishop of Dorchester (a suffragan see of Oxford) had the right to celebrate Pontifical High Mass in Dorchester Abbey with the full ceremonial of a Diocesan Bishop on just one day a year, the Feast (Double of the First Class) of S Birinus of Dorchester. At one such Dorchester fervorino the Pontiff gave the blessing at the end of Mass with such enthusiasm that his ring flew off his episcopal glove and could only with difficulty be found. 

Ah, happy days. But happiness can still be discovered nearby, where, thanks to Fr John Osman, S Birinus' Faith can yet be found in his little, jewel-like, Victorian Catholic Church.

Anathema to the heretics!

 The idea is currently being pushed around that the true meaning of what an earlier pope may have taught or enjoined is to be discerned from what a present pope says.

If you don't accept this, you will be called a Dietrist by PF, and you will be attacked and sneered at. Attacks and sneers are two things he is really good at.

The Catholic Church does not teach thus. She teaches the prescriptivity of Tradition; a prescriptivity enjoined not only upon Clergy and People, but also upon the Roman Pontiff himself.

     [1] "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received".

I Corinthians 15: the words I have rubricised are respectivly paredoka and parelabon.

     [2] Vatican I: "The Holy Spirit was not promised  to the successors of Peter in order that, by his revelation, they might publish a new teaching, but in order that, with his assistance, they might devoutly guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith handed down through the apostles".

     [3] When Pope Leo II confirmed the Third Council of Constantinople, he repeated the condemnation of his predecessor Pope Honorius I: "We anathematise ... Honorius, who did not attempt to sanctify this apostolic Church with the teaching of apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted."

     The condemnation issued by the Council was succinct:

                               "TO THE HERETIC HONORIUS, ANATHEMA!"

All together now ... ... 

ANOTHER HERETICAL PLOT?

 There is a Catholic site on the Internet which, in the last day or two, has published a piece on a 'verse' which, they argue, has been deliberately left out of modern translations of the Bible.

People who read this might easily get the impression that we have here yet another example of a trendy, Modernist, Bergoglian plot to subvert the text of Scripture.

In fact, that site has got the whole business wrong. I explained the 'problem' in a piece here on my Blog on 10/10/2022.

As a general rule, I think it is a good idea not to go on about subjects about which one knows nothing. It just makes one look silly.

Right Reverend Abbess

The traditional Rite of our Latin Church, contained in the Tridentine Pontificale, for Blessing a Lady Abbess is, not surprisingly, very closely similar to the Consecration of a Bishop or the Ordination of a Presbyter or Deacon.. The Abbess prostrates herself as the Litanies are sung over her; a consecratory 'Preface' is chanted over her; the Bishop lays his hands upon her head and then for the rest of the Prayer holds them extended before his chest; for a porrectio instrumentorum she receives the Rule; if she has not previously been formally veiled, she now receives the veil. Such a rite speaks for itself.

But the words of the prayers are, if anything, even more expressive in what they tell us about the Order of Abbess. The precedent for the Blessing is seen as the appointment by Moses of Leaders set over the People of God (ad gubernandas Ecclesias praepositos), just as the Consecration of a Bishop is described in terms of the Aaronic high priesthood. The Gospel given in the Common of a Confessor Bishop is cited ("Well done, good and faithful servant ..." ). The Abbess, according to the Bishop's  prayer, "talis in hoc ministerio perseveret, qualis levita electus ab Apostolis sanctus Stephanus meruit perdurare". She is blessed "ad gubernandam regendamque Ecclesiam tuam fideliter ut speculatrix ...", recalling the traditional image of the Bishop as the Watchman of his Church.

The Episcopate, of course, is part of the divinely instituted Sacrament of Holy Order. The state of Abbess does not possess that quality.  But the Blessing of an Abbess is, surely, the very highest form of a Sacramental that the Church knows.

Perhaps readers have already reached out their hands to take up their copies of Bede. In the elegant pages of that great English latinist and historian it is made abundantly clear that S Hilda's religious foundations were 'double monasteries'; that is to say, Mother Foundress created and governed communities both of women and of men. S Bede proudly lists the number of monks trained under S Hilda who were chosen to the Episcopate: S Bosa (York), S Hedda (Dorchester), Oftfor (Worcester), S John (Hexham), and S Wilfrid (York). I suspect S Bede had S Hilda in mind when he observed that in the femineus sexus there are "persons who not only by their lives but also by their preaching (praedicando) inflame the hearts of those around them to the praise of their Creator". 

Perhaps all that is something the Church badly needs now: strongly orthodox and liturgically literate women taking a hand in the raising of clergy. Readers who know my background are hardly likely to suspect me of going  'soft' ... The contrary is true. I think calls for the 'ordination of women' are symptoms of disorders arising from a failure to understand the place naturally occupied by women in a sound and traditional and relaxed Catholic society.

My long experience in the Anglican Wars about 'ordaining' women led to my conviction that many of the men supporting such 'advances' were, deep down and in some cases not nearly so deep, misogynists or inadequates with a poorly integrated sexuality resulting in gynaecophobia. I sensed a whiff of the same sort of unhealthy and clericalist attitudes a few years ago when the 'Commissioner' put in to 'reform' the Franciscans of the Immaculate published a list of things that had gone wrong and needed 'reform' ...

... one of which was this: a certain Reverend Mother in the Order had too much influence among the friars!!

You couldn't make that up, could you? Scratch a feminist/liberal/modernist and ... ten to one ... you'll find ... a woman-hater.

What do we want?
Abbesses!
When do we want them?
Now!

INDIETRISM again

When issuing Traditionis custodes, PF mumbled again his aged and spiteful mantras about Fulfilling the Mandates of Vatican II.

Having counted it on my fingers three times, I think I am right in saying that it is now 53 years since that tragic Advent Sunday when millions of Latin Catholics were robbed of their Rite.

PF now accuses traddies of being Indietrists ["Advance Backwards, chaps"].

Liturgical studies, and Liturgical enactments, have not been exactly non-existent during these 53 years. In particular, the formal revelation of a Roman Pontiff that the Old Rite has never been canonically abrogated is, surely, very significant.

Even if Arthur Roche, an enormously clever man, disagrees with poor old Ratzinger on this.

FIFTY THREE Years. 

In calling on us (with menaces) to advance back to Vatican II, who exactly is the Indietrist?

FIFTY THREE YEARS!

S Andrew's Day ...

... is not only the Patronal Festival of Scotland and of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, but also the felicitous and significant day upon which Cardinal Pole absolved this realm of England from schism in 1554. Moreover, it is the anniversary of a marvellous scene on S Andrew's Day in 1569: the Absolution of the Diocese of Durham from Heresy and Schism. (Also a day to reread Eamon Duffy's Fires of Faith?)

It is, moreover, if we gaze back at the Protohistory of the Ordinariate, the anniversary of the Consecration of Andrew Burnham as Bishop of Ebbsfleet (it was to be Bishop Andrew who appealed to Pope Benedict for help; thus formally setting in motion the process that led to the Ordinariate). In those days, the old Anglican system persisted in the Province of Canterbury of consecrating all bishops in London, and Andrew was 'done' in S Paul's Cathedral. My three main memories (apart from George Carey's dismal liturgical instincts) are of someone trying to die in the pew behind me in the South transept; of a remarkably inapposite sermon in which the preacher appeared to be making fun of the Orthodox (which is also the Catholic) practice of the Veneration of Relics; and of the scene, afterwards, on the steps outside.

As the custom used to be, the Consecration had been of two pontiffs for the price of one. The other consecrand was being provided to be a new suffragan for that illiberal liberal bishop, Selby of Worcester. Afterwards, at one end of the steps, a large queue formed up to kiss Bishop Andrew's ring and to receive his episcopal blessing. At the other end, the Worcester consecrand seemed to be doing a strange little ritual dance amid a small group of friends and family, intermittently yanking up his trousers to show off his Socks Of Many Colours (Diversity Socks?). Perhaps he was a Mason, or an animist, or a cryptoBergoglian, or a reincarnation of Pachamama.

The Ebbsfleet years were fun. And fine preparation for the real fun: the Ordinariate!

Zucchini or Zucchetti?

 Apparently, after goodness knows how many proud years as the High Street's living, most vibrant, eyesore, the Mitre is reopening as ... an Italian 'chain' restaurant.

How depressing. Can anyone really imagine Peter Wimsey breakfasting Reggie Pomfret in an Eye-tie chain? Bad enough to live with the reality that Fuller's, home of coffee-and-walnut cake, is now a Burger King. That the Luna Caprese and the Elizabeth have gone oriental (not to mention most of Soho). 

And have you seen what the merciless Welsh hordes have done to the Cornmarket?

But now this.

Come friendly bombs and ... er ... Slough is no longer worthy of your attentions  ...

I have just one aspiration: that people will remember that I was the first to suggest ... in the interests of economy and concision ... that the old Mitre might be accorded the High Church nickname of Il Zucchetto.

Yes ... I do know that ...