EPISCOPAL CONFERENCES in the climate of the German claim to leadership for the Universal Church.

So might the Holy Father try to cut  the Gordian Knot about Holy Communion for remarried divorcees by kicking the ball into the long grass of Episcopal Conferences? He has already dropped hints about elevating the doctrinal competences of such Conferences.

I find myself entirely out of sympathy with any such agenda. Partly, this is on personal and pragmatic grounds. We, in the Church of England, saw what happened when 'Provincial Autonomy' was allowed to ride rough-shod over Doctrine, Tradition, Bible ... and even the Dominical Imperative of Unity. It is a thoroughly nasty and miserable experience. Any attempt to introduce anything remotely like it, or anything that could act as a first step towards anything remotely like it, into the Catholic Church, should be resisted by any and every means of Resistance that orthodox Catholics have or can devise. As a former Anglican, I warn you: decades of internal warfare within the Church on this subject are exactly what the Church Militant can do without. For most of my priestly ministry in the Church of England, this question hung like a dark shadow over my head. Any attempt by anybody to inflict a similar wound upon the Catholic Church merits, as Cardinal Burke has intimated, Resistance in whatever forms may be necessary, and with as much vigour as God's Grace gives us.

But my main reasons for queasiness are doctrinal rather than merely practical.

As Pope Benedict XVI made clear, the Universal Church has both a temporal and an ontological priority (i.e. it came first in historical time and it comes first in the realm of Being) over the local (i.e. diocesan) Church. Setting up powerful regional bodies would have a disastrously fissiparous effect on the Church Universal. The promoter of the opposite idea, that the local Church has ontological priority, Cardinal Walter Kasper, has made no secret of the fact that he sees his theory as justifying the possibility of different Catholic Regions, as it might be Sophisticated Germany and Primitive Africa, having different disciplines even in matters where discipline and doctrine are indissolubly bound up. This is to revisit the question upon which S Thomas More chose martyrdom: whether a portion of the Church Militant has any more right to go against the the whole Church than the city of London has to go against the whole realm of England.

Secondly, such a proposal is ecclesiologically illiterate. There is one Body of Christ, One Catholic Church. It subsists in two modes. There is the Church Universal spread throughout the world. Then there is the Particular (i.e. Diocesan) Church with its Bishop, priests, deacons, people. This distinction goes back to S Paul, who uses 'Ekklesiai" in the plural to refer to the local churches, but "Ekklesia" in the singular to refer to the Universal Body of Christ which lies behind, as it were, each local church. Yet the two are one. The Catholica is in the local church, and you cannot participate in the Catholica without participating in your local Church. The Body of Christ subsists in the Particular Church.

This theological simplicity calls into question any attempt to muddy its waters, unless it is firmly understood that that any 'groupings' of dioceses are merely functional and ad hoc. Powerful regional "churches" ("the French Church"; "the African Church" ...) introduce a, to me, incomprehensible and intolerable confusion into the simple teaching of Scripture and Tradition. And they are subversive both of the unique role of the local bishop (with his curia of presbyters and deacons) and of the unique role of the Roman Pontiff (with his curia). I was very pleased when Benedict XVI dropped the title of Patriarch of the West. A real contribution to ecclesiological lucidity.

This means that the Curia Episcopalis, and the Curia Romana, are both in no way lacking in theological garments, while the Episcopal Conference with its bureaucracy, however grand, powerful, and well-paid, is an Emperor entirely without theological clothes.

Frankly, I have come to doubt whether the Holy Father quite understands the politics sometimes inherent in theological discourses. Upon coming to power, he lost no time in praising Walter Kasper; and he has repeated his praises since then. But, in the decades before the election of Pope Benedict, there had been some years of argument, in public periodicals, between Ratzinger (the Universal Church has the ontological priority) and Kasper (the Local Church is ontologically prior). Ratzinger argued with his customary gentle but compelling courtesy; Kasper in his characteristic bully-boy style.

I hope that Cardinal Bergoglio was ignorant of this background. If he was aware of it, it would show remarkably bad taste that he should have chosen, so soon after his election, to ladle such extravagant and unnecessary encomia over the head of a Kasper who had been something of a thorn in the side, theologically, of his immediate predecessor ... whom the new Pope Francis claimed to respect.

But doctrine is more important than any light all this throws upon Bergoglio's character. Talk about "Ontological Priority" can very easily sound like some sort of irrelevant academic nonsense. Rather like how many Angels can dance on the Head of a Needle. But the question of the ontological priority of the Universal or the Local Church is in no way some academic and theoretical  irrelevance. Kasper, to be fair to him, would agree with this. It is a very practical question.

It is the theological basis of the question whether Germany, or wherever, can go its own way and "find its own solutions in response to the questions and problems of its own culture".

It raises the ultimate question of whether Christ is King, or whether each nation bows down before the idol of its own national Zeitgeist.

Some of this occurred on my blog some time ago; and the question of the title Patriarch of the West interested some readers. I reproduce some input by Professor Tighe upon this question, from an earlier thread.

SSPX chapels? UPDATED

UPDATE
I am reassured to be told that SSPX priests whom readers know do indeed follow the rules laid down by the Society. Furthermore, I would accept that the presence in the Sacristy of a picture of Papa Bergoglio, or the customary NOMEN SUMMI PONTIFICIS FRANCISCUS NOMEN EPISCOPI VINCENTIUS, would be a sufficient indication that all is well. I can only say that I wished to offend no-one but had heard that there were clergy who ... I will say no more.

Also, I know of a European city where the Bishop himself suddenly provided an EF Mass at exactly the same time as a very long-established SSPX Mass ... instead of providing people with a second EF Mass at a different time for their potential convenience. I cannot convince myself that this was an initiative likely to build up the People of God in a unity of sincere affection and trust.

I'm not a canonist; but I'll take the risk of answering two recent queries about attendance at SSPX chapels.

(1) Different vibes have come from different Roman authorities about this question at different times; my own pastoral and moral praxis has always been what the old manualists called Probabilist; so I would say that there is certainly sufficient doubt about this to make the liberty of doing it at least a probabilis opinio, which, accordingly, you are at liberty for sufficient reasons to follow. But ...
(2) Practically if there is a diocesan Traditional Mass reasonably handy, I think it is by far the best to go to that, not least so as to encourage the flourishing of Tradition within the mainstream. And ...
(3) Theologically I think one should be extremely careful about the rumoured risk that some SSPX clergy might not be entirely in line with the very proper course which has been steered by their Superior H E Bishop Fellay. It seems to me that a crucial question is whether a celebrant is really a Sedevacantist either quoad papam or quoad episcopum. How to find out? I would be inclined to ask "Father, I have a rather impertinent and personal question to ask you ... I hope you don't mind ... but it's important to me ... in the Canon of the Mass do you Name Pope Francis and Bishop X [the diocesan]?"

Actually, it's not personal or impertinent for you to ask this, because, although the Canon of the Mass is said secreto, it is a very important public Prayer of the Church, and the Naming of the Vicar of Christ and of the local Ordinary is a desperately significant marker of Communio (or the lack of it). So you really have every right to ask and to be told and to know ... but it is best to be diplomatic!

Remember: Communion with Rome is what the martyrs and confessors suffered for under Elizabeth Tudor! In 1558/9, the surviving primate, Archbishop Hethe of York, risked the royal wrath by delivering a courageous speech in the Lords in which he did not conceal his immense dislike of the Pope, Caraffa, whose malicious Westpolitik (he hated Spain, and England was allied with Spain) had led him intentionally to weaken and humiliate the English Church. But, good pope or bad pope, Hethe made clear the duty of being in communion with the See of S Peter. As did every single English diocesan bishop, large numbers of the Upper Clergy, and most senior academics at this University.

If a celebrant cannot say Yes, or declines to answer, then I wouldn't attend his Masses. I would, if necessary, go to a poorly celebrated Novus Ordo rather than to the Mass of a priest who, every time he says Mass, formally and deliberately sets himself before God out of Communion either with the Successor of S Peter or with the lawful bishop of the place. Remember that the Te igitur is not a prayer for the Pope or the Ordinary; it is a prayer expressing Communio with them ... or not. That is its function. This is important! Do you want to become, in effect, a non-Catholic?

If, happily, Father's answer is satisfactory, then your subsequent decisions should reflect prudent consideration of the good and/or harm that the various options open to you might have on yourself and your family and on the other worshiping Catholic communities nearby. No man (or family) is an island!

Never forget that there are loads of keen young diocesan priests out there just longing to discover enough well-instructed laity around for it to be possible for them to start an Old Mass! Have you ... delicately ... tactfully ... tried any of them out? Never forget that there are Catholic churches in which you may find the Melkite or Ukrainian or Ordinariate liturgies.

And if you attend the SSPX chapel, don't share in a lot of cheap schismatic chatter. It's not good for you and it's not good for those who hear you.

Another Must Read

After Fr Ker's biography of Blessed John Henry Newman, I want to commend to you the biography of Archbishop Lefebvre by H E Bishop Tissier de Mallerais. The book, and its English translation, are more than a decade old, but it seems to me to have a lot to say to our current ecclesiastical malaise.

As a biography, it is a finely detailed and balanced account of someone whom the author loved and respected, but with regard to whom he was determined to find out the truth. So one can find in this book a very 'conflicted' person. Sometimes he seems to be leaning over backwards to show proper deference to the Vicar of Christ; on other occasions, he seems almost sedevacantist (ET p 549 "the See of Peter and posts of authority in Rome being occupied by anti-Christs ..."; et cf ex gr pp 487, 506, 508). I do not see this inconsistency as unforgivable. The Archbishop was reacting to an ecclesial situation which has little parallel in the more recent history of the Church and accordingly has few guidelines provided for it in Canon Law and the Manualists. And the p 549 I cite in my parenthesis follows closely upon the Assisi Event; one can understand why the vision of the Antichrist, sitting where he ought not, as pagan idols did in the basilica at Assisi, should have been particularly vivid in Lefebvre's mind. But he remained firmly and resolutely opposed to the seductions of sedevacantism at a time when a lesser man might have sought its easy and 'logical' solution.

When there are dysfunctions in the institutions of the Church Militant, the problem is that the old markers, including the Rule-Book, do not, cannot, function in the same way that they are designed to work in 'normal' times. The history of earlier centuries does provide examples of behaviour, not much less uncanonical than Lefebvre's, which was subsequently validated by History. The Arian crisis, marked by widespread episcopal heterodoxy, is one example. The Avignon exile and the Great Schism of the West afford a veritable laboratory of confused crises in which tidy solutions were beyond the grasp of good men and eventually order was restored by untidy expedients. These were not neat solutions; but perhaps an openness to untidiness is sometimes the only sort of solution available to Christians in via.

But is it true that Marcel Lefebvre was faced with a situation of grave disorder? I think we can avoid just loudly shouting at each other about our own individual subjective judgements; instead we can simply consider objective, Magisterial  decisions. Summorum Pontificum confirmed juridically that the Latin Church had lived for some four decades under the dominion of ... yes ... a lie. The Vetus Ordo had not been lawfully prohibited. Much persecution of devout priests and layfolk that took place during those decades is therefore now ... officially ... seen to have been vis sine lege. For this so long to have been so true with regard to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which lies at the heart of the Church's life, argues a profound illness deep within the Latin Church. And that Big Lie was reinforced by multitudes of Little Lies ... that the Council mandated reordered Sanctuaries ... that the Council mandated exclusive use of the vernacular ...

So, I suggest, we can read Bishop Tissier's book as a narrative of how a good, but very often puzzled, man coped with the incomprehensible. And we can do this to our own benefit. Many Catholics find our present situation incomprehensible. As in the situations which Lefebvre faced, some Catholics may naturally feel inclined to act as though the rule-book does still apply (and so to treat the Church's current office-holders with the same obsequium as if we were still in the pontificate of S Pius X); on the other hand, others may discern the dysfunctions and ask their consciences what God expects of them by way of resistance, as many did during the Arian crisis and the Great Western Schism.

But I must express my own considered judgement by saying that the Church Militant, and her institutions, have not collapsed to the degree that many fear. Proper respect for the Roman Pontiff, despite all; and to the Bishops of the Catholic Church; are still our obligation. It is conceivable that graver deterioration may occur (again, vide the Arian crisis and the Great Western Schism): it has happened before without the Church's ultimate indefectibility being affected, so, in theory, it could happen again; but it has not happened yet.

But what about if it does? Frankly, I do not think it is is our Christian duty endlessly to be anxious about worrying contingencies. There are millions of these, and what eventually does happen will probably not be any of them. That's what happens in History. But ... OK ... I have just agreed that such things, theoretically, can happen ... they can happen because they have happened ... so: what did previous generations of Catholics do?

Both Councils and popes have behaved very foolishly in the past. What followed? Christian people kept their nerve and got on with everyday faithful obedience and, eventually, the disordered Council or the nutty pope or the barmy bishops were quite simply forgotten.

Time itself possesses a quasi-Magisterial status. The decrees for regulating the Jews of the Fifth Ecumenical Lateran Council are now simply matters for embarrassment. What was iffy about that Council, or about the Pope who presided over it, has disappeared or gradually merged into what one might call the Church's general background noise (dogmatic decrees and anathemas of dogmatic councils are, of course, a different matter). What was unhelpful in Conciliar texts or their consequences or their "spirit" ... and when, after the Ecumenical Council of Vienne, the Templars were being led out to be burned, they probably thought that was unhelpful ... Time has purged away; or will purge.

Take the long view. Never panic. Stick to the Sacraments. Read your Bible. Stay in Communion with the Bishop of Rome and with your own local bishop, however silly either or both of them seem to you to be.

Fr Hunwicke's 2016 RISUS PASCHALIS: Medical Documents galore

In the Vatileaks trial, Mgr Vallejo rebutted the accusation that he had passed a confidential medical report on Papa Bergoglio's health to the Chinese Secret Service in Dubai (sic; sic; sic), by saying that he only gave them a medical report on his own 82 year old Mother, with the name (and, one hopes, the gender) changed. He claimed that his leaky behaviour was occasioned by attempts to blackmail him after he was allegedly led slightly off the paths of monsignorial rectitude by a fellow defendant.

The trial was later adjourned after Ms Chaouqi's lawyer handed the court a certificate from her doctor saying that she needed riposo assoluto a letto. Eye-tie doctors, indeed!


I wonder what Johnny Chinaman makes of it all.

CHRIST OUR PASSOVER IS SACRIFICED FOR US

In the Ordinariate Mass, as the Priest breaks the Host he says

V Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.
R Therefore let us keep the feast, Alleluia!

This is derived from a formula in "The Masse" which Cranmer composed for his 1549 Prayer Book. For explanation, let us turn to the Easter Homily of Pope Benedict XVI in 2009:

" Christ our Passover is sacrificed: S Paul's triumphant words ring forth ... It is a text which originated barely twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, and yet - like many Pauline passages - it already contains, in an impressive synthesis, a full awareness of the newness of life in Christ. The central symbol of Salvation History - the Paschal Lamb - is here identified with Jesus, who is called 'our Paschal Lamb'. The Hebrew Passover commemorating the liberation from slavery in Egypt, provided for the ritual sacrifice of a lamb every year, as prescribed in the Mosaic Law. In his passion and death, Jesus reveals himself as the Lamb of God, 'sacrificed' on the Cross, to take away the sins of the world. He was killed at the very hour when it was customary to sacrifice the lambs in the Temple of Jerusalem. The meaning of his sacrifice he had himself anticipated during the Last Supper, substituting himself - under the signs of bread and wine - for the ritual food of the Hebrew Passover meal. Thus we can truly say that Jesus brought to fulfilment the tradition of the ancient Passover, and transformed it into his Passover".

Footnote: the Alleluias are added during Easter. The passage of S Paul is at I Corinthians 5. "For us", not in the earlier manuscripts, is found in the Textus Receptus, the common Greek text of the Middle Ages, but not in the Vulgate Latin.

Unburnt Cranmer

Poor Thomas Cranmer, long since degraded for heresy, long since burned. But, in this first Holy Week since the authorisation of the Ordinariate Missal, he is quite the man of the moment. Cranmer, perhaps almost single-handed, created the sacral dialect which was identical with the notion of Anglican worship until the 1970s; and it is worth noting that even when the Church of England followed (bad old) ICEL into unfortunate modernity, little of what it created was quite as horrible as what (bad old) ICEL had produced. It is clear that Cranmer's periods and cadences continued to influence and constrict his successors, while the 1970s Roman Catholic translators were culturally free to construct ex nihilo their own new disastrously bathetic liturgical style.

What was less fortunate in Anglican liturgy was that there was very little inclination, after one or two efforts in 1928, to translate from those ancient Latin sources upon which Cranmer drew. Indeed, this must give rise to a suspicion that many modern Anglican liturgists may not be comfortable in dead languages. The English Common Worship provided a complete set of proper postcommunions, but not a single one of them came from the thousands of postcommunions in the ancient Roman sacramentaries. Perhaps those Latin postcommunions are just too simple and workmanlike; not 'clever' enough? Whatever the reason, the result has been that new compositions often look like pompous products of late twentieth century middle-class wordsmiths, convinced that their own talents and insights absolve them from the need felt by the early popes, who composed the old Latin prayers, to express a limited number of ideas in a few elegant words.

Happily, help comes to us, by the grace of God, through the Anglo-Catholic Altar Missals produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although they did not always attain the heights of Cranmer at his best, they provided usually good and often excellent renderings of the formulae in the Sarum or Tridentine Roman books. Among them are gems like Mgr Ronald Knox's Cranmerian pastiche of the Exsultet, a snatch of which I have just republished on this blog. This is a tradition which has now been reappropriated by its heirs: the Ordinariate Missal contains Knox's Exsultet in its elegant, sacral English.

Now I have a subversive thought for you. I do rather hope, in the furtive recesses of my soul, that elements of the Ordinariate Rite may spread like a joyful osmosis through the 'Mainstream Church'. OK, as a priest privileged to say a Latin EF Mass most mornings, I thank God for Summorum Pontificum. But the additional availability of the audible parts of the same rite in the dignified, hieratic sacral dialect of the Anglican tradition could only enrich an Anglophone Catholic Church which already encompasses so much (mostly unedifying) variety. And such Mutual Enrichment would, after all, merely fulfil the provisions of Vatican II about maintaining the 'substantial unity' of the Roman Rite; about allowing a 'suitable' place to vernacular languages; and about ensuring that new forms should in some way grow 'organically' from forms already existing.

Twenty five years

... since the death of H E Archbishop Lefebvre. The first occasion, perhaps, on which he has not been remembered at Mass on his Year's Mind since his death.

I know many people are worried about the present situation in the Church. In my opinion, there is no need for the panic which some feel. But above all it is important never even to THINK of taking actions which would put one outside the community of Christ's Church. Adhering to Sedevacantism would be one of these dangers.

It is very sad that the Great Archbishop died, at least ostensibly, under excommunication latae sententiae. But he and his sons bore a solid witness against all the heresies which have attacked the Church since the 1950s; and one of the worst of those heresies is Sedevacantism.

Worst, because it is the Devil's ingenious way of attacking good orthodox Catholics whom he has failed to seduce in any other way!

The Royal Banners Forward Go! IO TRIUMPHE!

I have never known a Chrism Mass with such a completely joyous atmosphere. What a happy chance I did that post on Sunday about our Patron Blessed John Henry Newman: because at the end of the Mass our friend Archbishop Tony Mennini blessed a splendid new picture of the great Beatus, given by the generosity of some of the Friends of the Ordinariate. He also waved around triumphantly a letter intimating that our Holy Father had made a financial contribution to the training of our seminarians ... and brought the house down by almost handing it over to one of them, but withdrawing the text at the last moment with the words "I'd better just check there aren't any secrets in it!". Viva il Papa! Viva Antonio! He is an ever-present reminder to us of the joy of being in Full Communion with the Successor of S Peter and, through him, with the Whole State of Christ's Church Militant here in Earth.

The music was superb; indeed, triumphalist, as befits the wonderful triumph of Realised Ecumenism which our Ordinariate represents. And a brilliant sermon on the role of the perfumed in human memory and in the Liturgy. It set me wondering about a stanza in Vexilla regis prodeunt which was cut out of the liturgical text in Antiquity: fundis aroma cortice ... etc.. [Literally: You, Tree, pour forth perfume from your bark; you are superior to nectar in flavour; joyful with a fertile Fruit, you clap your hands at the famous triumph.] Perhaps it was thought to be just too intoxicatingly, surrealistically, exultantly, exotic? Bring it back, sez I.

I'll return DV to S Venantius Fortunatus and his Passiontide hymns tomorrow. Where would Holy Week be without them? Lacking in expressions of Triumph!

A Must Read

Yes, this book is more than a quarter of a century old; but I am still going to recommend it to you ... well, to those of you who don't already have it, or who don't refer often to it ...

John Henry Newman A Biography by Ian Ker (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988) (available in paparback).

Blessed John Henry Newman is exactly the man you need to read now. And "Dr Ker's biography is gripping because it allows Newman to speak for himself. An acknowledged master of Newman scholarship, he writes with sympathy and fairness of the polemical masterpieces written during the Anglican half of Newman's life ... Dr Ker has been able to use a goldmine of unpublished papers and correspondence. The letters fascinate not only for their style or for the religious and educational topics central to Newman's mind, but also for the accidental flashes of social and personal history ..." So went the review by the late Henry Chadwick, who was himself one of the last of the great Anglican minds of the twentieth century, before the noble construct which had been Anglicanism collapsed into women bishops, Area Ministerial Training Schemes, and Messy Church.

But why should a modern Catholic read Newman, just one of those cobwebby Victorians, in 2016? Because his world was, to an uncanny degree, our world: the problems he faced were so often the problems we as Catholics face. His was a a world in which hyperultrapapalists were trying to impose a bloated and maximalised and unCatholic model of Papacy upon the Catholic world ... the notion that a Pope can do anything. Nor was Newman sentimental about bishops: he had studied deeply a period of Church History in which the majority of the Episcopate had been heretical. Liberalism and relativism stalked the world hand in hand; Newman's detestation of those errors is expressed in the speech he made when he accepted his Cardinal's hat: if you haven't read it, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Read it; and never again will you be able to keep your temper when some ignorant fool implies that Newman was a 'Liberal Catholic'.

This great Blessed lived through a Council in which a gang of bullies tried to take control, and he was prepared to entertain the speculation that it had not been a genuinely Ecumenical Council at all. He talked about the problems which could arise if the Magisterium attempted to impose dubious doctrine. He even wished that the pope under whom he lived had not survived so long. He was subtle; but his sophistication had nothing soft or soggy about it. It better resembled a sharpened steel blade.

The best reassurance I can give you about Blessed John Henry's character and hence his readability is that he was not always very 'nice'. He took no prisoners.

Ker's biography is a big book; but you can get into it in sections, subject by subject, through the index at the end.

I conclude with another quotation from Chadwick: "[Newman] is an unsurpassed master of English prose. Deeply sensitive and subtle (some of his contemporaries thought too much so), stamped with high culture so as to give the lie to the venerable myth that unreformed Oxford was intellectually torpid, he was a formidable controversialist, as supreme a master of irony and satire as any in our literature."

Blessed John Henry Newman is fun to read, and so, very often, is this book about him.

Beate Iohannes Henrice, ora pro nobis.

Three more bishops

Well, this planet by now supports three more bishops than it did a few hours ago; two consecrated lawfully in S Peter's by and in full communion with our Holy Father Pope Francis, the Successor of S Peter; one consecrated unlawfully and schismatically by His Excellency Bishop Williamson. What all three of them have in common is (1) that they were validly consecrated; and (2) that they were not consecrated to be Bishops of Particular Churches. All that splendid stuff about Episcopacy in the endless pages of the documents of Vatican II applies to them ... er ... hardly or not at all. Not one of the three will have one single presbyter to Name him as antistite nostro ... in the Eucharistic Prayer, the Canon of the Mass.

"Many [curial bishops] are bureaucrats and this is not good. Episcopal Consecration is not an honorary title, it is a Sacrament; it is to do with the Church's sacramental structure. So why must a bishop carry out bureaucratic tasks? That is where the Sacraments risk being violated, in my opinion". (Walter Cardinal Kasper.)

Just for once, I agree with him. Just for once, Papa Bergoglio appears not to agree with him!

Strange world!

S JOSEPH: AND THE FAMILY

I quite like to live dangerously ... in the sense that I like to venture a prophecy about what will happen, so that I either have the opportunity of crowing ("I told you so!!"), or else I have to say "How wrong I got that!"

So, with my gambler's instinct, I will now tell you about the contents of the document which our Holy Father Pope Francis is to sign today, Solemnity of the great and chaste Spouse of Blessed Mary Ever Virgin, and which, on past showing, will be published in the main vernaculars some time later. (I am reconciled to the likelihood that an official normative Latin text will be delayed.)

So here goes.

          *****

The Document will be long. Never has there been a Pontiff who so predictably refuses to say something in one word if a mere 500 will do.

It will be full of flowery language about the Family and about Marriage and the will of the Lord with regard to its indissolubility.

It will be full of flowery language about the anguish of those who 'find themselves' in situations which objectively contradict that ideal.

It will not open up a regular public pathway to the admission of such people to the Sacraments without the regularisation of their matrimonial situation through the Nullity system.

But it will promote the inclusion of such people fully within the life of the Church in ways which do pragmatically contradict the objective fact that they are public adulterers (so they will be able to act as godparents ... as Church representatives and employees ... as readers ... in any conceivable public role ... but not to approach the Sacraments).

There will be much flowery language about how deeply the Church loves them, how much she values the important contribution they can make to her life and mission and finances.

Yet, very likely, there will be Something in the document, possibly with regard to "exceptional circumstances", perhaps with regard to "more work which has to be done" [I most devoutly hope we shall not have any suggestion that a new Ecumenical Council could resolve the matter], perhaps with regard to local Episcopal Conferences being accorded a degree of autonomy in this matter [the Kasper-Marxist and Anglican heresy], which will make it possible for the heterodox to say that the door is ajar.

Whatever this Something is, it will not be such as to compel the conclusion that this Roman Pontiff has actually, by this document, formally and unambiguously taught Error.

          *****

There! I've told you! But, whatever befalls, remember the logic that this post-Synodal Exhortation cannot have any greater doctrinal, Magisterial, authority than any other document at the same Magisterial level. Such as Familiaris consortio. The authority that any pope has is precisely identical to the authority that any other pope had. Not smaller, not greater, not by a nanogram. Remember, above all, that ...

"The Holy Spirit was not promised to the Successors of Peter so that, by His revelation, they might make known new teaching, but so that, with His assistance, they might devoutly guard and faithfully set forth the Tradition received through the Apostles, i.e. the Deposit of Faith".

Whatever teaching Pope Francis gives, remember that it is obliged to be ...

"Eodem sensu eademque sententia" with what has been taught in the past.

Our Lady of Sorrows

Perhaps this is the time to recall the devotion of the Via Matris; seven stations of the seven sorrows, dolours, of our Lady. These are not hard to find on the Internet; if you want traditional language devotions, you will find them at http://www.liturgies.net/saints/mary/viamatris/viamatris.htm

Our Lady of Sorrows has a feast very appropriately situated on the old Octave Day of our Lady's Birthday, September 15, which by a Providential neatness is the very day after Holy Cross Day (how can anybody doubt that Providence is a Catholic Liturgist?). The old Roman Rite and the Ordinariate Missal also had a commemoration on the Friday after Passion Sunday, i.e. the Friday last before Good Friday. Missale Parisiense - does anybody recall a post I did about this, not very long ago? -  gave the text (and I invited readers to contribute translations; which they did) of the collect for that day. In fact, the collect concerned appears in Servite texts of the Via Matris. Does that mean that, rather than being composed by one of Archbishop de Harlay's 'Gallican' and semi-Jansenist young men, it is an older Servite formula? Or did the Servites get it from the Paris Missal? And I see it in my old pre-Conciliar Walsingham Pilgrim's Manual, to be said in the Chapel of our Lady of Sorrows, the fourth of the Stations of the Cross, in the Shrine grounds. I wonder how precisely Fr Hope Patten came by it. Or probably, since HP was not much of a latinist, it was Fr Fynes-Clinton.

Of course, the Passion Friday commemoration went for a Burton in the Bugnini deformation of the Roman Rite. But, fathers, the Editio Typica Tertia Missalis Romani inserts a new optional collect for use in the ferial Mass of that day. I give the text; translation  will be found in the Daily missal.
Deus, qui ecclesiae tuae in hoc tempore tribuis benigne beatam Mariam in passione Christi contemplanda devote imitari: da nobis, quaesumus; eiusdem Virginis intercessione, Unigenitio Filio tuo firmius in dies adhaerere et ad plenitudinem gratiae eius demum pervenire.
No harm in it; but ... don't you agree ... it plods. I also observe that it contains a phrase that I keep seeing in post-Concilar liturgical formulae: plenitudo gratiae. I suspect this of being semi-Pelagian: in these blessed guilt-free times, we no longer grovel in our wretchedness but just ask God for a bit of a top-up; not for grace but just for a bigger dose of it..

In these post-Conciliar days, we no longer commemorate the Dolours of our Lady; we make it personal and celebrate Maria Perdolens (the prefix per- intensifies the meaning of dolens.) The great 'Avignon' Bishop of Exeter, John de Grandisson (pronounced Grahnsen) in his arrangement of daily Marian votives to be said in in the Lady Chapel of his Cathedral listed the Friday Mass as Maria Compatiens.

Now - do I mistake me - we have there a way-in, do we not, to an understanding of Maria Coredemptrix?