A Favour??

Before the Ordinariates, an earlier attempt to secure a corporate solution for Anglicans seeking unity with the Holy See was scuppered by the English Catholic bishops. The Revd Dr William Oddie wrote an account of those shenanigans.

I think it was called THE ROMAN OPTION.

I have never read it. If anybody has a copy they are prepared to part with, I culd be a grateful recipient. 

CORONATIONS

 Is it true that Good Queen Mary asked the Pope to send her a specially blessed chair for her Coronation; made of wood, covered with purple velvet and fastened by gilt nails, which is still kept in Winchester Cathedral?

According to the records, Her Majesty was proclaimed as "the most high, most puissant, and most excellent Princess, Mary the First, by the grace of God Queen of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and of the Church of England and Ireland supreme head."

"the first" is interesting; on the large tower at Westminster, if my eyes do not deceive me, Victoria is described as 'Victoria Prima'.

SUPERTUNICA ... Dirtie Bertie amongst the Lotophagoi ...

 Have I got this right? That the Supertunica worn by an English monarch at the Coronation has a historical connection  with the uniform of a Consularis of the Byzantine Emnpire?

That it is embroidered with flower symbols for each of the monarch's realms?

That because of a long tradition which few readers will need to have explained to them, Queen Victoria (or, if you prefer, Princess Alexandrina of Saxe Coburg etc..) wore a Supertunica enriched with fleurs de lys?

But that her eldest son 'Edward VII', instead, sported the lotus which was held to symbolise India?

I wonder what ... er ...

Professor Peter Geach

Today is the obitus, or Year's Mind, of Peter Geach, whom readers will recall as a philosopher of distinction. He converted to Catholicism in the early 1940s while reading Greats at Oxford ... and married a no less distinguished philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, who also converted while reading Greats. The Geaches formed a last link with one of the principal philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and helped to ensure that in extremis he had a priest at his bedside, and received a Catholic burial. Quorum omnium animabus propitietur Deus.

The young Geach proclaimed King Robert I & IV, in 1937, standing on the steps of the Martyrs' Memorial, wearing his scholar's gown and doffing his academic cap. He was not arrested. Not even by a stray passing bulldog. Newspapers in the distant and dusty climes of Texas and the Malay Straits as well as in England covered the event. It would be very jolly to know whom the fifty-odd gathering of undergraduates included. 

 
The writer Luke Gormally, son-in-law of Geach, informed this blog that it was in 1938, his last year at Balliol, that Geach was received into the Church; the same year, Elizabeth Anscombe was received towards the end of her first year at St Hugh's.

Each of them had received instruction from Fr Richards Kehoe OP. They did not meet until after their respective receptions; their meeting occurred at the Corpus Christ procession at Begbroke, to the North of Oxford, where there was at that time a Servite Priory.

Not now, of course. Needless to say.But if you are driving to Woodstock, you will pass the site ...

CORONATIONS

 "One of the most extraordinary scenes imaginable". That is how Dale Hoak describes a moment in the Coronation of Elizabeth Tudor, alias Gloriana, alias Bloody Bess, alias Elizabeth I. 

Before the moment in the service when the new monarch swore the oath, Mr Secretary Cecil emerged from the side of the coronation stage and 'delivered' to the bishop of Carlisle, who was standing before the seated queen, a book containg the questions to be put to her.

The bishop of Carlisle was officiating at the coronation because the rest of the bishops refused, having little confidence in Bess's catholic orthodoxy. 

Part of this mystery arises from the fact that we do not have the text of the oaths sworn byTudor Monarchs. These texts are securely kept in Clio's bosom. 

Hoak argues that the oath sworn by Elizabeth was 'substantially' the oath sworn by the heterodox infant Edward Tudor in 1547, with an addition to the effect that in respect of the law, the sovereign was to act 'according to the laws of God, [and] the true profession of the gospel established in this kingdom.' Cranmer and Cecil are likely to have had a hand in designing this oath. Cranmer is on record as having argued that "the solemnites of coronation have their Ends and Utility", but that kings "be anointed, not in respect of the oil which the bishop useth, but in consideration of their Power, which is Ordained ... Your Majesty is God's Vicegerent and Christ's Vicar within your own Dominions".

One might, indeed, wonder why Zwinglians such as Cranmer needed a coronation service at all. My suspicion is that the Coronation was so securely integrated into the consciousness of [at least] the elite, that leaving a monarch uncrowned was deemed to be dangerous: it offered malcontents a ready-made argument for denying a monarch's legitimacy.

As far as concerns the oath, it transformed the transaction from being merely a declaratory statement or definition of the law as it was thought to exist; instead, its laws existed in their own right. 

" The effect", Hoak concludes, "was to remove all limitation on the scope  and authority of statute."

As so often, I a grateful to Professor Tighe for showing me this piece.

quid est commune inter eltonum ioannem et huius temporis papam?

in litteris hodiernis publicis nonnulla inveniri possunt de equite dicto aurato eltono nomine ioanne cantore.

qui vero quondam nonullis abhinc annis oxoniam cum venisset in litteris a iuvenibus publicatis ipse fertur summum pontificem benedictum xvi anum vocasse. 

his nostris temporibus, romanus pontifex eos quos criminari cupit coprophagos seu coprophilos luculentus vocare solet.

utrumque virum cacologum osque foedum nominandum suspicor.

nonne tu?

Lighten our darkness ...

Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord: and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.

This prayer comes from Anglican Use Evensong, and had originally been the concluding prayer of the Sarum Compline. Here is the Sarum original:

Illumina, quaesumus, Domine, tenebras nostras: et totius huius noctis insidias tu a nobis repelle propitius.

In other words, Cranmer, as his custom was, expanded propitius to by thy great mercy and insidias  ['ambushes'] to perils and dangers. the ambushes of this whole night thus became all perils and dangers of this night. 

Just as Cranmer padded and expanded, lest his vernacular version of the prayer be finished before the worshippers had quite realised it had started, so, through the Middle Ages, this prayer had already grown in the Latin. Here is the version in the 'Gregorian Sacramentary', with those words crossed out which were subsequently added.

Illumina, quaesumus, Domine, tenebras nostras: et totius huius noctis insidias tu a nobis repelle propitius.

But what will really surprise you is the Heading a little way above it the 'Gregorian Sacramentary'.

INCIPIUNT ORATIONES MATUTINALES

Gracious! It was apparently a collect for the Dawn!! It did not ask for God to protect us through the darkness of this night; it asked God to push away (repelle) the dangerous darkness of night. Look back at the Latin text!

[It may be that I am wrong. Another prayer in this section does look like a late evening prayer, so perhaps the Heading is erroneous. Illumina is certainly an evening prayer in the 'Gelasian Sacramentary'. But this exercise may serve to remind us how things are not always what they seem!]

When I am Cardinal Prefect of the CDW, I shall permit all who have Anglican Previous to use this prayer instead of Visita nos; which seems to be just a trifle odd when not used in a Religious House.

O Sapientia, here we go again ... can it really be seventy years?

 When I was very very small, so I remember, my Physics Master explained to us about the new Nuclear Power Station (Fission) currently being built not far away at Bradwell on Sea in my natal Essex. He explained how this marvel would provide (for ever) limitless electricity, pretty well free after the cost of construction had been met ... clean, limitless ...

'Poor gullible nitwit', I thought. 'If he believes that, he'd believe anything'. I gave up Physics as soon as I possibly could. 'Never knowingly be taught by a fool' was one of my infant maxims. (Of course, I am not aplying this language to all or indeed to any scientists; I love to hear anybody who is really set on fire by his own, reputable, academic discipline.)

Seventy or so years later than that ancient episode, just a day or two ago, there burst upon my computer screen a voluble and excited woman. She ... I hope I'm getting this right ... claimed to to have performed the miracle of Nuclear Fusion. This would mean, once the cost of construction had been met, clean, er, limitless, er, cheap electricity for ever.

The improbable twaddle continued to gush as if from the lips of a generously-executed baroque Tritoness. I grabbed an adjacent pencil ...

Long-term.

Clean. 

Limitless ...

My attention wandered ... back to long-dead Mr Wozzname at my ancient school ... to the Bradwell Nuclear Power Station, now defunct, contaminated, useless, ugly, expensive, a decaying monument to hubris looming nastily over the remains of the Roman Naval base of Othona and the early Saxon chapel and monastic site in those curlew-haunted Essex marshes ...

Something woke me from this autochthonous reverie. The poor dim woman was still warbling on. I resumed my pencil.

Clean.

Sustainable.

Long-term.

On-demand.

Long-term.

Clean ...

Homer's Iliad Book VI and S Ambrose: Episode 3

In the series of which this is the third and last part, I have ... in fact ... been meditating upon the passages in S Ambrose's commentary upon S Luke; passages which the Church gives us clerics of the Latin Rite to read at Mattins on the Wednesday and Friday during this Ember Week of Advent.

So now I invite you to apply the cultural analyses I have been drawing from Homer, to S  Ambrose's Book 2 in Lucam. Here are a few extracts.

"The Angel went in to [Mary]. Learn that she was a virgin by her way of life; learn it by her modesty; learn it by the Angel's word; learn it by the Mystery. It is the characteristic of virgins to tremble, and to be afraid whenever a man enters; to fear every utterance of a man. Women should learn to imitate the resolve of her chastity. Alone in the innermost parts of the house, so that no man might see her, that only the Angel should find her; alone, without comrade, without a witness, lest she be corrupted by any ignoble address, she receives the greeting of the Angel ... 

"... When Mary heard this, not as if unbelieving concerning his words, nor uncertain about his news nor doubtful about his example, but joyful for prayer, religious for duty, hasty for joy, she went to the hill-country. For, indeed, being now full of God, where should she go with haste except to the higher places? ... Mary, who previously lived alone in the most private recesses, was not delayed by the modesty of virginity from going out into the public realm, nor did the harshness of the mountains keep her from keenness, nor the difficulty of the journey from her duty ... Virgins: learn not to run around (circumcursare) other peoples' houses, not to hang around in the streets, not to gossip together in public. Mary was late leaving her home, but speedy once she was in public, and stayed with her cousin for three months."

Presumably, the habits S Ambrose castigates did exist, or he would not have wasted his time criticising them. It is the assumptions he can share with his hearers about what constitutes modest and decent behaviour that I wish to highlight.

Our society has lost, it seems to me, the entire concept of female modesty. This has been replaced by the bizarre notion that women can dress themselves and conduct themselves as shamelessly as they please and as publicly as they desire, but that a man who is misled into drawing inept conclusions from this is self-condemned.

I do not think our Christian forebears or the Greeks for whom Homer wrote or the Italian congregations to whom S Ambrose preached would have had any doubt that our society has been driven completely and incomprehensibly insane ... barking mad. To our shame, our Islamic neighbours are more likely to understand Christian and pagan antiquity, Homer and S Ambrose, than we are.

We are the strangers, the crazy misfits, the arrogant out-of-place tourists who plant our inappropriate and unwelcome feet in every other country, in every other culture, on every other age of history.

And we are so  pleased with ourselves.

HOMER'S ILIAD BOOK 6 AND S AMBROSE: Episode 2

No; Hector does not accept Helen's transgressive invitation to join her in the thalamos. You knew he wouldn't. Before returning to the battle, he goes back to his own house. But Andromache is not there. Standing ep'oudon, on the threshold, he demands an answer from the housewomen: "C'mon! Tell me the truth". He wonders if she has gone to visit her sisters-in-law, or to the Temple of Athene, with all the other well-haired women, to propitiate the goddess (in fact, she had gone, with chaperon and child, to a vantage point to watch the battle).

Observe that Hector, apparently, does not go beyond the threshold of even his own home. And notice that he is surprised that his wife is not where a wife might normatively be expected to be: at home. And don't let it elude you how few are the alternative possibilities which Hector, rather hectoringly, offers. To an extent which it is difficult for us to appropriate, pre-modern societies had very definite assumptions about this sort of thing. 

But think: even in the earlier twentieth century, women would not visit the billiards room in a gentleman's house. There was no rule; no notice on the door; it was simply assumed that women didn't go there. And I don't think it was expected that men would galumph at all hours around the Morning Room. In Rebecca the belle anonyme gets it wrong by trying to enter her own bedroom at the time when the maids expect to have it to themselves to get it straight. And the butler makes clear that it is very unexpected that she might wish to be in the library.

Ethnosociologists have written fascinating articles about the customs of instinctive, customary, gender segregation that still exist in traditional Middle Eastern societies. There are particular times when no man would dream of going near the village fountain because that is when the women go there to collect water ... and to do womanbusiness with each other ...  

We need to grasp how totally exceptional is our Western assumption that men and women just wander anywhere and mix with anybody at any time.  After all, it is still as a general rule true, in some Orthodox churches, that men are on the right side and women are on the left. A similar custom survived into mid-twentieth century Ireland. 

We've moved a long way, and so very fast, to reach the situation in which, not long ago, in an English university, a major row erupted when, exceptionally, it was proposed to have segregated seating in a lecture-room to accommodate the unusual preferences of a visiting lecturer.

I find it frankly frightening how readily we assume that our own habits, different, I suspect, from those of every other known culture, are a norm to which others ought to conform or to be forced to conform. 

I'm not suggesting starting a great campaign to return to pre-modern habits; I haven't quite lost all touch with reality. I'm simply suggesting that, since we are the cosmic Odd Men Out, the eccentric outliers, we ought to let just the tiniest smidgeon of humility enter our domineering treatment of others. But I know even this suggestion is a lost cause: so arrogant have we become. We are the great big global cultural bullies who know exactly how everybody else should behave, from Saragossa all the way to Sarawak, 24/7.

And how nasty we turn if the untermenschen worldwide are a bit slow jumping into line, our line.

The third and final Episode will bring us up to S Ambrose.

Oxford Cathedral

I popped into the Cathedral the other day to warm my hands at what Mgr R A Kox and his chums in the SSPP would have advertised as a "Latimer and Ridley Pricket Stand".  Frankly, I think the flickering candles (none of that electrical technology here; modern Anglicans find Mystic Flicker more attractive) would be better placed before the bust of blessed Edward Bouverie Pusey, whom I quite often visit. He would have some things to say about .... and .......

What a powerful part of the Ordinariate's Anglican Patrimony Pusey is. How splendid it would be if the Ordinariate were able to fund some promising young scholar to edit and publish his (unprinted) lectures on Typology, perhaps also to reprint the University Sermon on the Eucharist for which he was suspended a munere contionandi for two years. Typology is the Catholic way of understanding and using Scripture, needed more than ever in these times. And Pusey's Eucharistic teaching, based as it is on the utter realism of the Greek Fathers whom he so lavishly quoted, is just what we need for an age in which most Catholics stroll up to a 'Eucharistic Minister' or her husband, without any reverence; take a Host; and then stroll nonchalantly away, conveying It to their mouths and consuming It as they walk. 

Is such determined and ostentatious irreverence known to have existed in any other period of the Church's history?

And quite near Pusey is the tomb of Robert King, last Abbot of Thame and Oseney and the only recorded Bishop of Rheon in partibus infidelium. He was assigned that see in 1527, apparently, with the intention that he should provide episcopal ministry in the Southern (Oxfordshire) part of the gigantic diocese of Lincoln. Why Rheon? Because it was still in the news ... many books had been written since the siege of Nigripontis in Euboea in 1470? The end of that siege was marked by the Moslems with atrocities and massacres and by their elaboration of interesting ways of killing ... such as the sawing in half of the Christian leader. Plus ca change ...

In 1542, Henry Tudor formed a new Diocese of Oxford, with one of King's enormously grand Abbatial churches (Oseney, just the other side of the Thames) as its Cathedral; and with King as diocesan bishop. 

But money talks. The cathedra was soon moved to the Chapel of Cardinal College, and Oseney sold off. King, a veritable Tudor Ecclesiastic, sat at Cranmer's trial and survived all the changes introduced by successive Tudor monarchs until his death on December 4 1557. He was the first and the last Bishop of Oxford to be in full communion with the See of S Peter. 

The see remained vacant until 1567, when Oxford's next Bishop, Hugh Curwen, was appointed. Bishop Bonner had consecrated him with the Apostolic Mandate according to the rites of the Pontifical to be the Marian Archbishop of Dublin, but he had conformed to the 'Settlement' of Bloody Bess ... do you think he now regrets doing so? ... and he died in 1568. The see then remained vacant until 1589 ... I wonder why. Did an effective sede vacante of more than thirty years, 1557-1589, have anything to do with the very recusant character of Elizabethan Oxford? 

Or did it simply result from the poverty of the see?

Quorum Animabus Propitietur Deus.

Our Lady; the Moslems; and a great Patriarch.

On December 8, the Feast of our Blessed Lady's Immaculate Conception, brother priests who use the older breviary, in the form bequeathed to us by B Pius IX, will admire the 7th, 8th, and 9th Readings that morning, taken from the writings of S Germanus of Constantinople. Those who desire a fuller account of this important Saint should summon up Pope Benedict XVI's Catechesis on him from 29 April 2009 (ah; those were the days). He was Patriarch 715-730; a defender of orthodoxy, and an enthusiastic expounder of the Immaculate and of her role as Mediatrix of All Graces. In 717/8, when the Moslems were besieging the Great City, he organised a procession of the Ikon of the Theotokos and of a Relic of the True and Life-giving Cross; the City was saved.

I rather wonder whether the following passage in Reading 9 refers to just such an Islamic onslaught. S Germanus, having reached the peroration of a long address, is addressing our blessed Lady on November 21, Feast of her Presentation in the Temple (a day which often finds Byzantine preachers visiting themes which the later West associates with the celebration of the Immaculate Conception).
The unbelieving nations [kakotekhna barbara ethne] who blaspheme against You and the God who is born of You: lay them low and prostrate them beneath the feet of [orthodox emperors]. Strengthen the subject people, that according to God's command they may persevere in the duty of sweet obedience. Crown this Your City, which has You as its Tower and Foundation, with the triumphs of victory. Guard the habitation of God, girding it with strength. Ever keep the beauty of the Temple. Rescue those who praise You from every crisis [peristasis] and distress. Grant ransom to the captives. Show Yourself a comfort to exiles who lack a roof and any protection. To the whole world stretch out Your hand of assistance [antileptiken kheira], that in joy and exultation we may keep Your festivals ... in Christ Jesus, King of all [ton hapanton basilei] and our true God ...*

Thirteen centuries: not much seems to change, does it? What a triumph the creation of Islam, as of all the heresies, is for the Evil One. The captives ... the vast throngs of refugees ... the desecrated churches ... I know, because our politicians have so often explained it, that Islam is a religion of peace; but quite a number of thoroughly atypical Moslems do seem to inhabit the pages of History as century follows century.

I wonder if you dwelt on the logic of the last two or three lines in my extract. In every previous Christian age, and in both East and West, men and women when under affliction have prayed for divine assistance so that they could worship God in "joy and exultation"; or so that "Ecclesia tua tranquilla devotione laetetur". Few of our neighbours, now, pray at all; in as far as hopes are expressed, they seem to me generally to be hopes for a return to Business as Usual; hopes that a decadent Western society may be able to continue its corrupt and sinfully hedonistic way of life without any ill-mannered and murderous interruptions or any vulgar reminders of its own decadence. 

I am most certainly not saying that everybody who goes out for a Friday Night On the Town in a city like Paris or London or Oxford is manifestly in a state of mortal sin ... Of course all of them aren't. But ... well, if I were to design one of those great baroque pictures abounding in allegorical figures of Virtues and Vices, I think I might portray Decadence and Atrocity in covert alliance. Perhaps we will not be free from our present woes until, as a society, we can again pray and hope for ... peace indeed, but peace-with-the-intention-that, as a community, we will be able joyously to throng our churches; so that in every part of our lives, communally and individually, we may serve Christ our King. 

Her Immaculate Heart will prevail. If I could tell you when, I would.

______________________________________________________________________________
*A crude translation of the rather erratic Latin translation in the breviary, itself lifted from Migne PG 98. I have given one or two interesting phrases from the original Greek. The breviary text omits a prayer for the Byzantine army!