Fr Aidan Nichols, and the Ecumenical Future

 Fr Aidan Nichols, is without doubt the most considerable living theologian of the English-speaking Catholic World. For members of the Ordinariate, he is the great friend who, when we were still Anglicans and he was still a Dominican, helped and guided us during the years when we were planning, and then setting up, the Ordinariates. And he is as prolific a theological writer as Joseph Ratzinger (on whose theology he wrote a still normative guide, long before the election of Benedict XVI).

Fr Aidan once delivered a characteristic lecture on the crisis which had been precipitated by Amoris laetitia. The Catholic Herald gave a report on 18 August 2017, which is still there, only a google away.  I urge everybody to read it; and to take it very seriously.

I would like to make two comment on my own behalf.

(1) Fr Aidan delivered his lecture at a meeting of the English Fellowship of Ss Alban and Sergius - largely an Anglican/Orthodox Society. Was this a good idea? Washing our dirty Catholic laundry in front of non-Catholics??  

Detur Responsum.

It was a thoroughly brilliant idea. You see, there are people who think that Pope Bergoglio's style of papacy may be somehow more "ecumenical" than that of some other popes. Bergoglio goes around kissing Patriarchs and begging their blessings; he insults his fellow-Catholics with such easy and iterated fluency yet can speak only well of non-Catholics. He is reported to have reopened the "Question of Anglican Orders"; he spoke ambiguously about "intercommunion" with Lutherans; made a fool of himself at Lund.

But as we conclude this 2023 Octave of Prayer for the Unity of Christians, you will forgive me for reminding you that thoughtful Orthodox and Anglicans will not be attracted by a model of Papacy which can make any Roman bishop a self-obsessed tyrant propped up by an unhealthy personality cult; somebody whose least word or whimsy has to be accepted; who can, at will, change doctrine, morality, liturgy, and law. 

Such a papacy is not a papacy which the more open-minded Anglicans and Orthodox have ever been prepared to receive from earlier popes. There is no reason to think that they will be any more prepared to accept it when it comes with an Argentine accent and emphasis. 

BUT the best reason whey should not accept it, is because it is not what the Catholic Church teaches.

Fr Aidan reminded his hearers that Vatican I in fact limited the papacy; and surmised "it may be that the present crisis of the Roman magisterium is providentially intended to call attention to the limits of the papacy [in regard to teaching]"

(2) Very naturally, there have been people, during this Pontificate, who have kept their heads below parapets; who have been cowed into acquiescence by fear of the bully-boys, delatores, and sycophants who surround the current Roman bishop. 

The courage, and unambiguous words, of Fr Aidan Nichols might inspire them to demonstrate that parrhesia for which ... at an earlier stage in his pontificate ... pope Francis himself so often loudly called.

UNITATIS CAUSA!

Anglican Patrimony, S John Henry Newman, and the Argumentum ad hominem

Saint John Henry Newman, Patron of our English Ordinariate, made an observation which seems to me germane to the purpose of our Ordinariate. He was praising B Pius IX for the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850; but I think it has an application particularly to ourselves: "... by giving us a church of our own, he has prepared the way for our own habits of mind, our own manner of reasoning, our own tastes, and our own virtues, finding a place and thereby a sanctification, in the Catholic Church".

In his review of Ian Ker's Biography of Newman, the maestro assoluto of modern Anglican writers, Henry Chadwick, called Newman "as supreme a master of irony and satire as any in our literature". It is the great gift of Irony and satire, which Newman developed first as an Anglican and then brought to its full flowering in the Catholic Church, which I wish to think about today. The capacity for Doing Divinity within the forms of Irony and Satire was not an invention of Newman's ... one only has to think of the admirable Dean Swift ... but I believe that Newman both formalised it and cast it in a form which has done good service since. It is pre-eminent among the habits of mind, manner of reasoning, tastes which, following him, we in the Ordinariate have brought into Full Communion with S Peter. It is part of us; we are not (just?) an eccentric group to whom, of its goodness, the Holy See has granted an unusual form of the Roman Rite. We have a culture, which no-one shall take from us. Reducing us to a community which simply has a distinctive Liturgy without its associated culture, is that "Uniatism" which is rightly so disliked by Orientals and is disowned by Catholic ecumenists who know what they are talking about. 

S John Henry wrote about his own controversial habits as a young don: "I was not unwilling to draw an opponent on step by step to the brink of some intellectual absurdity, and to leave him to get back as he could. ... Also I used irony in conversation, when matter-of-fact men would not see what I meant". He is here describing the argumentum ad hominem mode of controversy, defined by Locke as "pressing a man with consequences of his own assumptions or concessions". It was a method used by Origen (according to S Gregory Thaumaturgus).

It was brought to perfection by another great Anglican Ironist and Satirist, the Anglo-Papalist Benedictine Dom Gregory Dix, in the 1930s. Have you just proved ... Hooray! ... that the early popes did not exercise jurisdiction, in its modern sense? Dix will not contradict you ... nothing as crude as that. He will agree with you; and then spring his trap: neither, in those times did bishops have, in the modern sense, any jurisdiction. If you wish to assert episcopal jurisdiction, you won't be able to avoid the papal. If you deny the latter, you have cut the episcopal branch from underneath you. Do you assert, with tuttuttery and disapproval, that Vatican I defined papal primacy in terms of a modern Canon Law which did not exist in the New Testament period? Dom Gregory will pat you on the head ... warmly agree with you ... and then enquire how you cope with the fact that Nicea defined the Nature of Christ in terms of Greek metaphysics ... which also had no place in the minds of the New Testament writers.

Then, of course, there was Ronald Knox ... who explored the argument that in the Divine Plan Satire is the reason why humour was given to us: so that the pompous can be deflated.

Has there ever been a time when Satire was more needed in Christ's Church Militant?

Ecumenism

A far greater example of Unity Solved and Delivered than any I have so far mentioned is found in the teaching of S Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians. Part of that teaching is found in the Epistle of the Votive Mass for the Ending of Schism aka for the Unity of Christians. My own hope is that this Mass, beautiful in its profundity, will be widely available during this Chair of Unity Octave. But I would urge that readers reappropriate the entirety of that great Epistle (there is a very fine major Commentary of gigantic size by Thomas Winger).

S Paul deals with the the most profound division imaginable: between being within God's chosen People or outside it. He alludes to the soreg, the wall that separated Gentiles from Jews in the Temple at Jerusalem, marked by its rather chilling inscriptions threatening death to Gentiles who disregarded it.

That wall, S Paul points out, is abolished and, instead of Jew and Gentile, we have the new One Creation which is Christ.

In this Chair of Unity Octave, we must renew our commitment to oppose anything which strives to build that wall up again. The Faithful Remnant of Israel, so major a theme among the Prophets, is the one Body of Christ, together with those saved from among the Gentiles, snatched out of Gentile impurity and anomia by that fontal Act of Faith which Abraham made.

I think one of the weaknesses in the Church of today is that so few of her members are of Jewish descent. What we lose from this is a firm sense of our essential rootedness in the discipline of narratives handed down from the past, and an awareness that identity needs to be expressed by visible markers which distinguish us from the unclean pagan world around us.

And just suppose there were a strong Jewish presence in the Church, of intelligent and focussed Jews who understood that the Fall of the Temple and the cessation of its Daily Sacrifices is a coin which has, on its other side, the Daily Sacrifice of the tamid Lamb who is the Incarnate Torah. Perhaps we would not have such a dearth of sacrificial awareness among the mainstream congregations within our poor impoverished Latin Church.

What did he say? (Corrected)

 I do not credit the reports that PF recently said to seminarians from Barcelona ... in effect ... that there are "f*cking careerists f*cking up the lives of others".

I know PF has a history of foul-mouthed bad language. You don't need to explain to me that he is not a terribly nice individual. But justice requires us to apply the same standards of proof to a Roman Pontiff as charity requires us to apply to any other human. 

PF spoke either in Italian or Spanish or ... just conceivably ... in Catalan. (His English appears to be negligible ... and why, in any case, would he use English when speaking to such an audience?)

The English phrase (cited supra) is a neat and sinewy piece of indecent English prose cleverly combining different idiomatic uses of the verb f*ck. Could Italian or Spanish equivalents combine the same indecency with the same lexicon and idioms? I am not a Hispanist; but my instinct is to question it.

I shall not believe that PF said these words until somebody competent in Romance philology can tell me what his Italian/Spanish words actually were; and supply a scholarly account of the idiomatic linguistic usages at play in his Italian/Spanish.

Then we can start to examine more straightforward considerations of historical fact.

Until then, I consider it unjust to assume things that need to be demonstrated.

Jalland

The 1942 Bampton Lectures of my distinguished Anglican predecessor at S Thomas's, Dr Trevor Jalland, are a tour de force demonstrating his sure-footed competence in discussing the relationship of Papacy to Church in every succeeding Christian era, from "a decidedly favourable verdict ought to be given regarding not only the Petrine texts, but also the tradition of the Apostle's residence and death in Rome" down to "That the Roman episcopi, whether in plurality or as successive holders of a single office, were held to be and were in fact the heirs of the authority of St Peter and of his co-Apostle St Paul in the Roman See seems to be suggested, if not guaranteed, even by such limited evidence as we still possess, though it is equally clear that reflexion on the real implications of the original data was needed before their full significance was generally appreciated. The value of the papal office as the primary centre of unity, as the highest court of appeal, as a custodian of order and a corrector of aberrations from the original depositum fidei - all this and much more emerges ... only when the Church becomes aware of itself in a fuller sense as a world-wide organisatiom, and when a local and 'parochial' consciousness gives place to an oecumenical outlook. This papal ideal, in spite of the occasional distortion and falsification which it has undergone in the course of its long history, is to be viewed in its perfection not as an instrument for the suppression of liberty, but as a means under providence for the safeguarding of the ordered freedom of the 'sons of God' ... it is a strange form of historical blindness which is unable to perceive in its long and remarkable history a supernatural grandeur which no merely secular institution has ever attained in equal measure. Its strange, almost mystical, faithfulness to type, its marked degree of changelessness, its steadfast clinging to tradition and precedent, above all its burning zeal for order and Justitia, compel us to acknowledge that the Papacy must always defy a categorisation which is purely of this world."

Time was when I used to quote Jalland to try to persuade Anglicans of the divine reality of the Petrine Ministry. Now, by a strange conversio, I find myself commending Jalland's insights to fellow Catholics who need to be instructed about why Bergoglianity is such a falling-away from the real papacy ... such a theft from God's people of the Papacy which they have a right to have at their service. I have, of course, particularly in mind passages such as those I have ventured to emphasise above in red!

SUMMUS PONTIFEX?

Rumour has it that Cardinal Mueller is about to publish a theological work on the Papacy. This just has to be very good news. The constructive destruction of the real Papacy under the present pontificate surely calls for reconstruction work at least ... and at last ... to begin.

In my view, the terminology of both the pre-Conciliar and post-Conciliar Missals is not above criticism.

As Sister Doctor Ellebracht gently hints.

She comments on the word Pontifex that "This native Latin word, taken from [pre-Christian] Roman cultic language, is used in the ORATIONS to mean bishop"; and, delightfully tartly, adds "The expression summus pontifex ... as a designation for the Pope is of later origin and does not fall within the scope of this work".

Exactly so, Sister. The phrase made a ham-fisted way into the euchology of the Roman Rite when, in 1943, a new Commune (Si diligis) was inserted into the Roman Missal for summis pontificibus. On the Festivals of a canonised pope, if he had previously possessed his own Mass formulae, he was allowed to keep them. But if, before 1943, he had instead been observed by the use of one of the Communia for bishops, he was now, so it was decreed, to be commemorated instead by the use of this new Pacellian Commune. 

Its Prayers described popes as Summi Pontifices, supreme or sovereign pontiffs.

I possess an altar Missal in which some conscientious person has inked in the dozens of changes needed in order to give effect to this new and innovatory ordinance. And the new commune is neatly pasted in at the back. (During the war, papal tinkerings with liturgy could not be imported from the great continental liturgical publishing houses; so this page has the imprimatur of Bishop Edward Myers, with the title Vicarius Generalis deleted and replaced by Vicarius Capitularis.)

This new commune also provided that, in Masses of summi pontifices, the praefatio of the Apostles should be used ... as if a Pope is another Apostle!!! How very Irvingite!!!!

This was the high sun-baked tidemark of Pacellian aggrandisement of the papal office. Soon (when??) this use of the Preface of the Apostles was withdrawn because of learned protests. And when the post-Conciliar Missal of 1970 was published, the phrase summus pontifex had disappeared from its communia.

However, the post-Conciliar Missal unfortunately makes a point of repeatedly emphasising that the Pope is the Great Big Boss of the Entire Church. 

This habitual insistence is no part of the liturgical inheritance of the traditional Roman Rite before 1943.

The impression given by both the Pacellian and post-Conciliar dispensations was that a Pope is an additional tier of the Sacramental Ministries ... so that we would have Deacons, Presbyters, Bishops, and Popes; quattuor munera. 

Not so! Never ever!! 

So ... what about "Summus Pontifex"? 

The phrase is, surely, best regardeded as a canonical commonplace, a decent and pleasant curial courtesy, a gracious classicism. 

S Prosper of Aquitaine enjoined us to allow the lex supplicandi to articulate the lex credendi (and not the other way round). For doctrine, we surely look first and foremost to the centuries-old liturgies of the Church ... which means, for most of us, of the Latin, Roman, Church, our dearest Mother.

For sound guidance, I do not think that our priorities lie with a Pacellian innovation which survived not much more than a quarter of a century.

Part of this reworks an earlier post with which I do not now totally agree.

Can readers help?

There are reports that the Roman Pontiff recently used an impromptu speech to criticise "f***ing careerists who f*** up the lives of others", and "those who climb to show their a***"

Can anybody supply me with facts about to whom he was spaking, and, in particular, what  exactly he said in which language.

(Incidentally, the present Anglican Bishop of Worcester once began a sermon with the word "F*ck!")

Again ... PLEASE!!

Dear Readers

In July, God Willing, there will take place the 2023 Roman Forum Conference in Gardone, in North Italy. The subject this year is to be "Christianity and Paganism ... old and new".

I regard this as highly important. On the one hand, the Vatican sponsored the idolatrous Pachamama business, and is involved with Middle Eastern interests in a scheme which seems to rest on Relativism and Indifferentism: projects which Joseph Ratinger opposed. More significantly, they were opposed, throughout his life, by Saint John Henry Newman.

In addition to this, there is the persistent determination of our enemies to drive Christ to the margins; to forbid Him entrance to public fora. They hope that hearing will only be given to their own  wokery, gender-bending, and all the rest of Satan's agenda.

I very much hope I can again bring my modest voice to the Gardone project. But financial imperatives do not remain the same. Last year, kind friends were prepared to sponsor me financially to lecture at Gardone. 

This year, I'm afraid, the need for such help is even greater.

I beg all who think well of my teaching, and have means to do so, to help me in this matter. You can do this by assuring Dr John Rao of your willingness financially to support my participation in Gardone 2023.

Please help! To whom can I turn if not to you?

John Hunwicke

Dr Rao is at: drjcrao@aol.com

Change

 Well, I felt like change. So a year or two ago, I gave up those plain modern Priests' Hosts which have only a plain indented cross upon them, but are 'guaranteed to be crumb-free', and I began to use old-style Hosts from the Farnborough Abbey shop. 

They are quite as crumb-free as those post-Conciliar Hosts, but have a multiplicity of traditional designs ... I think I have counted eight. They are also marked on the back so as to break correctly at the Fraction.

I hope I never have to revert ...

A lot of these Hosts show the Crucified. Some have a straight-forward Latin-style crucifixus; others the same but with an alpha and an omega flanking the Cross. This, I think we all know, is a very early Christian design in both East and West, reproduced upon the High Altar of Westminster Cathedral. On my study wall, I have a rubbing of a first-millennium incised example from the slopes above Waterville Bay in County Kerry, looking out to the Skellig Islands and across to the State of Maine.

I think my favourite design is a baroque JHS, encouraging me to reverence the Most Holy Name of Jesus, YHWH Saves, and to spare a thought for dear S Bernardine. There is a Nativity scene with, I think, the star shining above as the Infant Deity raises a hand in blessing. There is a large FISH, ICHTHUS, bearing ... is it a basket? of fish? or of loaves? 

A Pelican in his piety suggests that I include in my Thanksgiving later this morning the Prayer of S Thomas Adoro te devote with its stanza Pie Pellicane, Jesu Domine, Me immundum munda tuo sanguine ...

Another of my favourites is the Lamb standing upon the Sealed Book ... do we soak ourselves sufficiently in the Book of Revelation/Apocalypse? How mindful am I each morning as I climb up to the Altar, that I go to immolate the Tamid /Lamb of Sacrifice, the one Oblation of Himself Once Offered, upon the LORD's Holy Mountain? (I think I do indeed hear an echo of S John Henry Newman's question to his sumpresbuteroi, "You, who day by day offer up the Immaculate Lamb of God, you who hold in your hands the Incarnate Word under the visible tokens which He has ordained, you who again and again drain the chalice of the Great Victim; who is to make you fear? what is to startle you ...")

And there is the Dove of the Holy Ghost, surrounded by Pentecostal flames, Breath and Fire of God.

I think I gathered that these Hosts are manufactured by Slovakian nuns.

God bless them!

Cana and the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Today wraps up - or it does in 'Traditional' lectionary terms - the Scriptural offerings of Epiphany. Hitherto, the Lucan picture of Mary has concentrated our attention upon how attuned her Immaculate Heart is the will of God: "Let it be unto me"; "He has done great things for me"; "Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her Heart"; "And his Mother kept all these things in her Heart". But in this the traditional Gospel reading of the Second Sunday after Epiphany, S John steps up to the podium to show her as also attuned to the needs of others ("They have no wine"). Even though the Hour of her Son's Glory has not yet come, the intercession of her Heart mediates through shared obedience ("Do whatever he tells you") the first great Sign which manifests his Glory.

Scripture** tells us that, because her Heart is Immaculate, Mary Sees God, and the intercession of the one who Saw led to the Johannine Theophany. However, although the divine doxa was manifested to his own, his own received him not. But to all who did receive him - to all who beheld and behold his glory, glory as of God-only-begotten - he gives power to become (like himself*, indeed, in himself) the Son of the Virgin, born not of the will of the flesh nor of the will of the male, but as the Only-begotten of the Father and the one Seed of Abraham who is the one Child of Mary aeiparthenos kai polupais.

Her Immaculate Heart will prevail!

_____________________________________________________________

*Whatever the origin of the 'Western' variant reading hos ... ouk egennethe, I feel sure that it accurately pinpoints the allusion intended by S John to the Lord's Virginal Conception and Birth.

**This paragraph draws on Luke 1:38,49; 2:19,51, John (and the apparatus criticus of) 1:13, Matthew 5:8, and Galatians 3:16.

CORONATIONS

 Because some people might consider coronations a topical topic, I am publishing occasional pieces on this subject, considered liturgically. Here is Leopold George Wickham Legg (son of ...).

 " ... was framed by no less a person than St Dunstan for the great coronation of King Edgar at Bath, when in 973 there was celebrated the final union under one sceptre of the Saxons, the Mercians, and the Northumbrians. ... long after it had been abandoned in its native land, it continued to be used for the coronation of the Kings of France, and it was last used at the coronation of the unhappy Charles X. Like his predecessors on the throne of the lilies, he was consecrated  with a prayer that he would not abandon the sceptre of the Saxons, Mercians, and Northumbrians, while it is clear that at one time the order spread to Italy, for a Milanese pontifical contains a Coronation Service of this selfsame recension, with the prayer that the King of Italy likewise may rule over the Saxons, Mercians and Northumbrians ..."

The second printing of this piece is dated 1936 ... how very ben trovato ...

THAT HORRID ROMAN BOOK

 It is a little known fact (yes; this one of my even-more-than-usually pompous pieces) that in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a vigorous episcopal attempt to kill off the Tridentine Rite, and especially the Canon Romanus, in the (many) Anglo-Catholic churches of the Diocese of London. Here is an account (1956) of that period from a priest (Hugh Ross Williamson) who witnessed it.

"The Vicar of All Saints, Margaret Streety, was the Rev. Cyril Tomkinson, whom I had known very well since 1926 when he was a curate of Little St. Mary's at Cambridge. Cyril ranked with the present Bishop of London and Gregory Dix as one of the three wits of the Church of England; but he was a 'Protestant -in-chasuble' par excellence and refused to allow me to say even a private Mass at All Saints--'because, my dear, you'll use that horrid Roman book and the rule here is music by Mozart, choreography by Fortescue, decor by Comper, but'--his long forefinger wagged roguishly and his voice became solemnly emphatic--'libretto by Cranmer.'"