S Joseph and an Irish Bishop

I have a little Prayer Card ... how these things do accumulate with the passing decades ... encouraging devotion to S Joseph. It indicates 200 days of Indulgence; and bears the Imprimi potest of + Joannes Carolus Archiep. Dublinen. Hiberniae Primas Dublini, die 11a Februarii, 1958. I wonder who on earth he was, and whether the date has any significance.

'Tween ourselves ... and I hope I'm not upsetting too many readers ... I find the Prayer somewhat ... laboured. It is based on the Ave Maria, but, frankly, such things do not always come off.

The English version is: Hail, Joseph, so abundantly endowed with the grace of God, thou whose arms did enfold the Infant Saviour and whose eyes did gaze on Him as He advanced in years, how blessed art thou among men, and how blessed is Jesus Christ, God made Man, the Son of Mary thy Virgin Spouse.

O chosen one, Saint Joseph, fosterfather of the Only-Begotten Son of God, intercede for us through all the days of our life in the midst of our many cares of home and health and toil, and graciously come to our aid at the hour of our death. Amen.

And, in Latin: Ave Joseph, gratia Dei abundantius praedite, cuius ulnae Salvatorem parvulum portaverunt et oculi crescentem aspexerunt: benedictus es inter viros, et benedictus filius almae Sponsae tuae Jesus.

Sancte Joseph, qui Unigenito Dei in patrem es electus, quamdiu in terris inter familiae valetudinis laborisque curas versamur, ora pro nobis et morte imminente nobis subvenire dignare. Amen.

Interesting, that the author of the English version felt the need to interpolate God made Man. But I hope the writer is not under the impression that alma and virgo are synonyms. I think one often gets the best out of alma by remembering that its roots are in the verb alere.

Has anybody any information to share about these formulae?

S Joseph, and the English Bishops

 In my trusty 1874 breviary, I read the following in the Officia Propria Sanctorum Angliae for January 23: In Festo Desponsationis B. M. V.:

'Omnia ut in fine Breviarii sine commemoratione S. Josephi.'

I expect yours is the same.

What on earth is going on? 

Back to the Appendix pro aliquibus locis, the 'finis Breviarii'.

"The feast of the Espousal of the Blessed Virgin Mary with S Joseph". And, yes, there are Commemorations of S Joseph at First Vespers, Lauds, and Second Vespers; but the rubric says that, where it is granted, before the other commemorations there is to be a commemoration of S Joseph.

So the English Vicars Apostolic had sought ... and received ... permission to use this Proper. But ... if they also sought permission to commemorate S Joseph, they had not received that.

The liturgical Espousals of our Blessed Lady had been observed for some time, on different days and in various places. But it was in the Diocese of Arras that this Feast was instituted (1556) to be kept on 23 January. And from there that it spread. Liturgical provsion was drafted by a Dominican, Pierre Dore (obiit 1569), Confessor to the Duke of Lorraine.

Originally, it was a Festival of Blessed Mary; it did not immediately and universally spread to be a Feast of the Engaged Couple. S John Henry and his English contemporaries were, I presume, not accustomed to include S Joseph. Except if they were in Dublin founding Universities, and if the Irish arrangements differed from the English. In which case, Irish clerics would have needed care as they boarded the packet at Holyhead.

What a complicated subject Liturgy is.

I wonder what is going on here ... conservatism (resistance to the introduction of S Joseph, as a new and major devotion) ... some species of liturgical sexual politics ...

Doubly tearful (2)

Did Mr Cheesemeadow, the great Victorian architect, ever stray from Barsetshire into the Diocese of Oxford?  Mgr R A Knox would know ... but I am pretty sure he did. The High Altar of Dorchester Abbey bears all the signs of his attentions. Behind the mensa there are the words Ecce panis Angelorum Factus cibus viatorum. I suspect that these words will be familiar to most readers.

I wonder why it is that Lauda Sion can move me almost to tears. Perhaps it has something to do with the way, towards its end, that the stanzas become each a line longer ... almost as if Holy Mother Church plangently and clamantly piles on more rhymes and more rhetoric as she hurries to her conclusion.

So I could not but notice that, to the North and to the South of the Altar, there are some more words from the same sublime Sequence: to the left, Bone Pastor, Panis vere; and to right, the South, Iesu nostri miserere. But then I stopped. Quite apart from their context within the hymn, I have seen these lines before.

Please forgive me as I step back a little. For some years I weas fortunate enough to run the Latin Summer School organised by the admirable Latin Mass Society. And, for some years, we met annually in a Franciscan House in Flintshire, North Wales. There are good things there: a statue of our Lady which A W Pugin sent to the great Exhibition; some characteristically mega-wonderful Harry Clarke glass ... how the fortunate Irish should pity us poor English because they have so much of his work, and we have so little. 

In the early days after the Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850, that part of North Wales was within the Catholic Diocese of Shrewsbury (pronounced ShrOwsbury by the cognoscenti). And the first Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr James Brown, did quite a lot of building there ... most of it now converted into nice remunerative little flats. My former Fellow Seminarian, Fr Mark Elvins, is buried in the cemetery. And so is Dr Brown. And, on his solidly Victorian grave, there are lots of Latin quotations and inscriptions. "Ah", I cried, "just the stuff". So I incorporated lots of the Latin into my teaching. The students (weather permitting) had to discover the Latinity ... and translate it.

You know what I'm going to say:  Bone Pastor, Panis vere, Iesu nostri miserere is, if my recollection does not deceive me, among the crowded episcopal pieties.

The sentiments, in Dorchester, accompany a despoiled Anglo-Catholic milieu, in a place where, in happier times, the Faith was strong. 

But, as the Franciscans in Pantasaph themselves wind down, I wonder if a depressing parallel could be discerned.

Doubly Tearful (1)

Sunt lacrimae rerum ... and especially when one enters a church in which there are manifest signs of the elimination, at the Reformation, of Catholicism and of Catholic worship. S John Henry deftly allowed the physical and the metaphorical to throw light on each other with his words "Oh, that miserable day, centuries before we were born! What a martyrdom to live in it and see the fair form of Truth, moral and material, hacked piecemeal, and every limb and organ carried off, and burned in the fire, or cast into the deep! But at last the work was done. Truth was disposed of, and shovelled away ..."

 Yes indeed ... shovelled so literally away ... but for those of us who have emerged from the 'Anglican Patrimony', the nastiness is sometimes redoubled. We've had to experience it twice.

Dorchester Abbey near Oxford offers an example: despoiled at the 'Reformation' ...the shrines demolished, the August Presence ejected, the signs of the care of the Most Holy Mother of God destroyed. But, in the course of the Catholic Revival, it all came back. A succession of faithful priests, and of faithful congregations, put Truth back into her place. Fr Poyntz, who loved to be in Brittany especially in order to witness the Corpus Christi processions, wrote "we must not be surprised therefore if often we find our religion is very much like the Roman Catholic religion ...". During those days, "the whole or main part of the Canon of the Mass, according to the Roman or Sarum Use"was kept on the Altar"for private devotion". 

Wht a blessing it was for the Tractarian clergy, that the Canon was, in the Catholic Church, said secreto: the Anglo-Catholics could plausibly subsume it under the heading of Priest's Private Devotions!

Closely associated with the Abbey was the Missionary College, training clery for Mission. Jolly photographs survive showing students and clergy, many of the latter in birettas, in long processions. Fr Darwell Stone was for a while Principal of the College; later he became Principal of Pusey House, Oxford's Anglo-Catholic Library, Chaplaincy, and House of Studies, and it is recorded that, at the Altar there, he interpolated the Canon memoriter. What a shame that, since 1970, the Canon Missae has almost totally disappeared from the use of the mainstream Latin Church. Especially as, de facto, it has been shamefacedly replaced by the Second Eucharistic Prayer, with its spurious origins ... and with its Brevity its only seedy advocate!

Catholic restoration might sometimes meet resistance. But if a hostile witness could claim that "nearly half the parishioners were deterred from attending church" by these illegal Roman practices ...well, is this not an admission that more than half the congregation were not deterred?

To be concluded

VIRGINITY and VIRGINS

Embarrassing, this. We do not relish hornets or their nests. But I think there is a lost bit of Tradition here which deserves at least mentioning. 

We have enough bother upholding the negatives in our Christian sexual Tradition. "Thou shalt not" seems to be the whole of the law. Denouncing Fornication and Adultery seems as far as we go in suggesting that the Spirit of the Age needs denouncing ...

Moreover, I do not have a neat or worked-out 'line' to take on this subject. 

Oh dear.

But here we go, or I go, with some tentative musings on one of the subjects that few of us grasp.

Tradition makes it clear that 'the gift of Continency' is an admirable state. Virginity ... have I got this right? ... is indeed superior to other Christian callings. 

Let me put before you some unusual remarks from a liturgical source few of us often approach. 

Before the number of 'Proper Prefaces' in the Roman Rite was severely cutailed aound the turn of the millennia, the Commune of a Virgin Martyr naturally had its own Preface. The Common for a Virgin Martyr in Leofric begins by suggesting that it is 'from the example of Blessed Mary that all Holy Virgins have despised the voluptates et delicias of 'the present age'. It is by God's gift that after 'the Virgin 'proceded from 'the Virgin' (Christ from Mary), the 'sexus fragilis' was made strong. It had had the 'peccandi facultas'; now it has the 'vincendi felicitas'. 

As we look back on the narratives of the Fall, we are reminded that the 'antiquus hostis' was proud to have defeated the human race through the 'antiqua virgo'. But now 'through holy virgins who are followers more of Mary than of Eve, he is defeated, so that the weak sex is now victorious'.

It is through their intercession who 'have defeated both their sex and the Age' that we pray to deserve to defeat the unseen Enemy, and to adhere to the Father's only-begotten Son.

I wonder what a Christian of this Age can derive from such a narrative? So what is the ecclesial function of the ordo virginum?

Democratic appointments

 We have been having a lot of news about questionable goings-on in our British Post Office. Private Eye reports that 

"Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells is an ordained priest in the Church of England. Until April 2021 she was non-stipendiary assistant minister in charge of St. Owen's Church, Bromham, in the diocese of St Albans.

     "She was also on the shortlist to be the Bishop of London in 2017 -- an extraordinary step for a person who had never actually been employed by the church. Vennells missed out on becoming a bishop ..."

Is such a story conceivable? 

I began by thinking No. But I do find myself imagining this following scenario:

As the London vacancy drew closer, I can imagine the Great and the Good putting their heads together. "We'd better make sure we take this opportunity of putting a woman into the Church's top management. But it had better be a woman with a proven record of managing a nation-wide institution ..."

Which, of course, might help to explain why Dame Mullarkey, ex-head-nurse, got the job.

 

A truly terrible pope

 Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, otherwise known as Pope Paul VI, did the churches of this Kingdom of England no favours.

When  Queen Mary I, and Reginald Cardinal Pole, both died, the former was in  state of war with the Pope, and the latter was stripped of his legatine powers and summoned to Rome on charges of heresy. Caraffa appears to have referred to Pole's "Lutheran household"; the jolly little 1958 CTS pamphlet THE POPES From St Peter to Pius XII, usually a trifle nervous about being too critical of those who have occupied the papal throne, summarises his "ferocious character. He was actuated by a violent hatred of Spanish influence in Italy and an over-mastering dread of concessions to the Reformers". 

It is argued that Bloody Bess, "Elizabeth I", found it all the easier to subject this poor Kingdom again to heresy because Caraffa, deliberately, had left so many English sees unfilled.

Caraffa himself died in August of the following year, 1559, when news was beginning spread of Elizabeth's deprivations of surviving members of the clergy left in place by Good Queen Mary. But not before he had promulgated a Feast of the Cathedra of S Peter at Rome for January 18. The point of this commemoration was obvious, you may feel, in the context of Caraffa's character and politics. 

But there is, I am sure, a lesson for us here; especially for troubled souls inclined to sedevacantism by aspects of the current pontificate. Yes; things are bad, but they have been bad before. Neither that, nor anything else, can change the fact the George Bergoglio is truly and lawfully the Successor of S Peter.

The 'reformers' of the Pacellian period, needless to say, suppressed the Feast of January 18 (but before the Council: so don't blame the Conciliar 'fathers') on the grounds that it wickedly duplicates the Feast in February of S Peter's Cathedra in Antioch.

But I value Caraffa's January Feast of S Peter's Cathedra at Rome as a valuable reminder of the status of iffy popes, and of our dutiful obligation to accept with humility the reality of their pontificates.

Canonisation 'by Acclamation'

Who canonised S Brendan? Or S Colman moccu Loigse? I can tell you: S Columba. Supernaturally enlightened, he ordered extra ordinem a celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist, and, in the case of S Colman, ordered the chanters during the actual celebration itself to include the newly-departed Holy One.

During the first Christian millennium, the custom arose of seeking Papal agency in canonisations; my impression is that this was mostly in order to enhance the solemnity of the procedings ... and hence, of the Saint ... and hence, of a sponsoring political entity. 

But Canonisation by popular acclaim never quite disappeared. I have on several occasions drawn your attention to King Henry VI (obiit 1471), and the shrines and pilgrimages associated with this never-canonised Saint; and Michael Hodges's magnificent recent The Golden Legend brings together information and raises new questions. 

In 'East Anglia', Hodges lists eight paintings of Henry VI; of those, two have readable inscriptions, and, in each case, the words are Rex Henricus Sextus. 'Sanctus' (or Scs) does not occur. Three of the paintings show Henry with a halo.

This suggests to me that artists and worshippers were well aware that the King did not have the formal status which would have secured the title Saint. But a halo, surely, does suggest sanctity. 

This record also lists four examples of Sir John Schorne ('Sir' is the form by which the medievals addressed and referred to a priest who was not a graduate). A never-canonised parish priest of North Marston in Buckinghamshire, Schorne died in 1313.

Michael Hodges lists four representations of Sir John: I cannot see that any of them bears a text enabling us to discern whether he is addressed as sancte or described as sanctus. But three of them, I think, have haloes.

I'm not quite sure where these snippets of pointers leave us.

(I was uncertain whether to be irritated by the fact that Michael refers to Essex as part of East Anglia. As a determined Essex Man, I had always thought I might count as an East Saxon, rather than as an Angular. But since childhood, I concede, I have seen myself as a citizen of the Roman Colonia Claudia Victricensis Camulodensium, rather than of any terrible group of invading Teutons. So it must be OK.)

Here we go again ,,,

I wonder if we shall have bombs again in London this time round.

Who will be the first politician to say "We shall leave no stone unturned ..."?

Extraordinary Form ORDO, and Ordinariate directions, for the Chair of Unity Octave

The Chair of Unity Octave ("Unity Week") starts on Thursday January 18 and ends on Thursday January 25.

This observance was begun by Anglo-papalists in the early twentieth century specifically to pray for the Unity of all Christians in communuion with the See of S Peter and S Paul. It was encouraged by a succession of Roman Pontiffs and endowed with indulgences (see below).

At a time when PF has launched a relentless attack upon Tradition within the Latin Church, it is surely even more important to pray for Unity. Surely, in the front of our minds ought to be, not the old 1960s-style Ecumenism of ecclesiastical bureaucrats from different ecclesial bodies cosying up to each other, but the urgent need for Unity to be restored within the Latin Church herself. 

The Chair of Unity has itself been converted into a sign and instrument of disunity: in this dreadful crisis, may God keep us and guide us.

                                              EXTRAORDINARY FORM

Before the 1960s, January 18 was the Feast of the Chair of S Peter at Rome (while February 22 celebrated his Chair, that is to say, his episcopate, in Antioch). The Feast of the Conversion of S Paul on January 25 still survives, even in the Novus Ordo.

In the Good Old Days, the Wantage Sisters ... who now comprise our Ordinariate Sisters ... the praying heart of the Ordinariate, as our Ordinary puts it ... used to publish an annual ORDO  "in strict accordance with the Use of the Western Church". This was widely used both in Anglo-Papalist churches and in Anglo-Catholic churches generally. The latest one was probably that of 1969, which I still have. Before January 18, the following information is printed:

                                               CHURCH UNITY OCTAVE BEGINS

Ad lib, during the Octave: one 2cl Vot M For the Unity of the Church. Cr (on Sunday only), Common Pref (pref Trin on Sunday). P[urple]

This will undoubtedly have been lifted from what was authorised for Roman Catholics in England, Scotland, and Wales on the very eve of the liturgical alterations of the late 1960s. What it means is that it is lawful to say daily one Mass of the Votive for Christian Unity (Ad tollendum Schisma if your Missal, like mine, is pre-1962; but the texts are the same in the 1962 Missal) on the Sunday within the Octave); and also on each of the weekdays (because they are all at the most "3 class").

[Incidentally, in the fine 1939 ORDO provided by the Saint Lawrence Press, both the Chair of S Peter and the Conversion of S Paul are Greater Doubles ... an identification which usually translates into "2 Class".]

No Gloria, of course. Only one Collect; Secret; Postcommunion; is said ... in other words, no commemorations.

My own practice is to start the Octave with a (perfectly 'legal') Votive Mass of the Chair of S Peter on January 18 (Mass as on February 22 except that the Alleluia is said; the colour is white) and to conclude with the Mass for S Paul on January 25. It was the idea of linking up the two Roman Apostles which gave rise to the Octave.

Alleluia for the Chair of S Peter outside Lent and Septuagesima: Alleluia, alleluia. Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam. Alleluia.

I have thought it worth while providing this information because I do not think it is in the available Authentic Use ORDOs in Latin, English or French.

                                                            INDULGENCES

In the current Encheiridion: Plenary under the usual conditions for a Catholic who shall have taken part in any functions in the week; and shall have been present at the conclusion of this week (i.e. on 25 January). Partial for whosoever shall have devoutly recited an approved prayer for Unity.

                                                  
                                      ORDINARIATE 'DIVINE WORSHIP' MISSAL

The same Mass for Unity, of course, is provided for use in Liturgical English in the Ordinariates. The rubrics make clear that it can be said on any day except Solemnities, the Sundays of Advent, Lent, and Easter, All Souls, Ash Wednesday, Ember Days, Rogation Days, weekdays of Holy Week and of the Easter and Pentecost Octaves. Such votives ARE allowed BUT ONLY FOR "a real necessity or pastoral advantage" on Obligatory Memorials and the weekdays of Advent, Christmastide, Lent, and Eastertide. Pretty permissive, eh?

A Day the Devil Hates

January 15 is the Anniversary of the Erection of the Three Ordinariates. 

What commemoration, however, to select? Thanksgiving, of course!! 

And for Thanksgiving, the Missale Romanum advises a votive of either The Most Holy Trinity or the Holy Spirit or Blessed Mary the Virgin or Any Canonised Saint; with the Collect, Secret, and Postcommunion added (under One Conclusion) which are printed right at the end of the Votive Masses section of the Missal.

It might naturally occur to reverend Fathers to offer a Votive of our Blessed Lady or of her Holy House; or of S John Henry Newman. It seems, however, to me that a Votive of the Holy and Undivided Trinity has a lot to be said for it. This Mass was habitually used (before the cataclysm) on occasions of great Thanksgiving. If you want a more delicate reason, here is one: The Collect is the one provided in Anglican liturgical books since 1549, even in Common Worship; so it could in itself be seen as a sign or prolepsis of Unity.

Additionally ... S John Henry held a very high opinion of the Quicunque vult, otherwise known as the Athanasian Creed. He described it as "The most simple and sublime, the most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth." Whether included as an element in the Divine Office, or used as a stand-alone devotion, it is difficult to think of anything more suitable.  

1549 ordered that it shalbe song or sayd ... It would be immensely jolly to hear it chanted coram Sanctissimo at Solemn Benediction.

Big Women (2)

 Once upon a time ... are you sitting comfortably? ... once upon a time, there was a couple called the Percivals. They were very wealthy;  Sir John owed much to judicious matrimony. and perhaps even more to the surge in the wool trade at the end of the fifteenth century ... and to mercantile acumen. He owned land in Cornwall, Devon, and Kent. He lived in London and rose through the ranks of the Company of [Merchant] Taylors to be its Master. Through his personal connections, he received knighthood and, after personal interventions by the newly-crowned Henry VII, became Lord Mayor of London.

After his death. his widow and collaboratrix, Dame Thomasina, continued to run the business and to train the apprentices. His will endowed chantries in significant places and provided for for good deeds in places both conspicuous and inconspicuous; he founded the (still existing) school in his native Macclesfield.

Not to be outdone, Dame Thomasina, before she died in 1512, founded a school in her native Cornish St Mary Weke. Together with the King's Mother, Thomasina was thus one of the first women to make such a foundation.

We should note Sir John's Christian name: the Merchant Taylors were intimately connected with S John Baptist, who had remarked Ecce Agnus Dei. And Dame Tomasina's chantry at Weke was dedicated to the Baptist. She endowed a daily anthem to S John to be sung at the Percival church in London, S Mary Woolnoth, and a taper to burn before his image in the chapel where both Percivals were to be buried.

Percival had risen to the very top of the mercantile aristocracy. He desired to associate himself with the new Tudor regime, and hissupport was acceptable.

His first duties as Lord Mayor were to preside over ceremonies to honour young Prince Arthur who, but for his early death, was destined to be the first monarch of a great new Arthurian dynasty.

When Percival died in 1503, the first monarch of the House of Tudor was in the process of an elaborate attempt to embellish his tenuous ancestral claim to he throne. The steps leading up to his rebuilt Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey were endowed with the same generous indulgences as the Sancta Scala. And, as she approached death, Dame Tomasina provided for the endowment of a chantry nearby, near the tomb of the king's mother who was also the foundress of a school. She also provided for the preachers at Paul's Cros to rehearse the names of herself and her husband, and of Geoffrey Boleyn and his wife. 

It seems clear from the records of their lives that the Percivals, Husband and Wife, shared status and shared the administration of the their considerable empire. They were intimates and associates of the great merchant princes of London as they sat together in the capital and did the deals which built up their estates all over England; and spent money they on churches, monasteries, and schools in the last half-century before the bankruptcy engendered by the Tudor government's warlike foreign policy led to the looting of the churches, the suppression of the monasteries ... and the imposition of a crippling tax on sheep.

Thomasina is a powerful example of the sort of mulier fortis described in the Mass of S Helena. In the lection of Proverbs 31, we should not miss the (exiguous!) reference to her Husband. We learn practically nothing about him except that he is nobilis in portis quando sederit cum senatoribus terrae. 

I do not think that the womenfolk of medieval England were demure or retiring or insignificant. I suspect that, as their menfolk sat grandly in Council (or livery companies!) and made big decisions, their women fulfilled the daily duties of commercially viable enterprises. They were not all as grand as Dame Thomasina Percival, but I suspect that Abendon held enough women, big fish in their own pool, to estimate fairly accurately their own economic importance.

And to understand the roles of mulieres fortes.