The Western as quite literally an enduring genre at High Noon

 This COP26 Conference in Glasgow has hilarious possibilities.

I just heard Prince Charles say: "Quite literally, it is the last chance saloon."

Exquisite! Such gems adequately justify all the expense of having a Royal Family! One wonders what confused kaleidoscopic images were dancing round in the poor poppet's mind when he drafted that. At least, it must prove that (unlike Good Catholic I'm Irish Biden) he does write his own speeches.

His sister, Princess Anne, also writes her own speeches. I infer this from the fact that she once came to give a 'lecture' at the college I taught in, and it was totally captivating. Nobody, clearly, had ever explained to her that a sentence should contain a main verb!

Perhaps some readers employ the same dodge to stay awake as I do when forced to listen to twaddle: trying to render it simultaneously into Latin. No need for such contrivances when the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg get up onto their haunches.

I earnestly entreat exhort and beg readers to communicate via my thread the funniest bits they hear from the COP26.

With so many fully qualified windbags in the same place at the same time ... 

(That's an aposiopesis.) 

"They have uncrowned Him" Archbishop Lefebvre ... and Eric Zemmour?

On this yummy Feast of Christ the King, I find myself again wondering if a prophet-before-his-time has ever been so justified by subsequent events as Marcel Lefebvre. Here is piece I rote in 2017.

I am reminded of Archbishop Lefebvre's book with the above title. When I first read that volume, I was struck by a great sense of familiarity ... combined with an overwhelming awareness of unfamiliarity.

The familiarity? The understanding of Society which I found on his pages is radically similar to what, for most of its existence since 1559, would have been seen as the distinctive mark of Anglicanism ... yes, even more so than 'episcopacy' or 'Patristicism'. I invite readers to let their imagination take them back to the English countryside before the Industrial Revolution or the Catholic Revival; to the Squire and the Parson (each of them probably 'two-bottle men', or better) drinking to "Church and King" or "Church and State". The understanding was that the Crown defended the Church, and the Church upheld the Crown (a view that 'Gallican' Frenchmen might have shared). There had been a decade of hiatus in the middle of the seventeenth century; but that had become just a bad memory. True, there were ambiguities after the Dutch Invasion; as Squire and Parson raised their glasses together, perhaps the candlelight glinted on some words etched into the glasses ... Redeat Magnus ille Genius Brittaniae ... and perhaps there was a bowl of water on the table ... and perhaps Sophie Western in her lofty bower heard the drunken voices downstairs rise in song to 'bless our King ... soon to reign over us' or to peer into a future 'when the King shall have his own again'. But the implicit ideology, of a Christian state, of a 'realm', lay beneath it all.

In this sense, if you wanted to call classical 'cultural Anglicanism' 'Lefebvrian', people might find you rather eccentric but you could make a strong case for your eccentricity; as long as you made it clear that you were referring to the old 'High and Dry' churchmen more than to the new enthusiasts of the Tractarian and Evangelical movements.

The unfamiliarity? A vivid scene described early in the Archbishop's book: we are inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, where the painter David has been prostituting his skills in the interests of a new ideology, and has turned from oils to papier-mache. Instead of the altare Dei and the August Presence, there is a 'mountain' with a 'Greek' temple, occupied by an agreeable petite danseuse deemed to be the Goddess Reason and surrounded by her associates singing 'hymns'; then a small gathering moves off to the Assembly so that its President can embrace 'la Deesse'. The date? 20 Brumaire, in the Year II. The Capetian uncrowned, the Redeemer dethroned, the very Calendar remade.

British Society has never since 1660 experienced quite such a brutal and total moment of discontinuity, which has marked the whole of later history and has bequeathed such rigidly defined polarities. If Britain had done a deal with Hitler in 1941, Buckingham Palace might very probably have been occupied by Wallace Simpson and a bevy of German Advisers, but EDWARDUS VIII DEI GRATIA REX INDIAE IMPERATOR would have appeared on the coins, the royal standard would still have fluttered from the flagpole, and there would ... I suspect ... have been a continuity of outward forms.

French history, on the other hand, has been marked by repeated discontinuities in the rituals and the forms, so that under Marshal Petain the Revolutionary motto and symbols in their turn give way to coins inscribed Travail Famille Patrie and bearing a Gallique Francisque. And what might a President Zemmour do? 

I am inclined to feel that an Englishman has little hope of understanding Lefebvre (or possibly many other Frenchman) if he fails to understand this.

His Excellency the Archbishop described 'the social doctrine of the Church' thus:  
"Society is not a shapeless mass of individuals, but an arranged organism of coordinated and hierarchically arranged social groups: the family, the enterprises and trades, then the professional corporations, finally the state. The corporations unite employers and workers in the same profession for the protection and the promotion of their common interests. The classes are not antagonistic, but naturally complementary".
You could call this ideal 'Corporatism' and recall with distaste that it appealed to Mussolini; or 'Toryism' and remember that as early as 1749 Henry Fielding was ridiculing it as old-fashioned; but it has broad links with the Catholic High Medieval Society which John Bossy described in the 1980s and the disappearance of which the Anglican 'Radical Orthodox' Catherine Pickstock lamented as the basis of modern, atomised, individualism.

Our more gradual British revolutions and our shyness about disturbing inherited symbols deny us the clarity afforded to Frenchmen by the almost comic abruptness of their own episodic cultural transformations; but have we not now all ... on each side of the Channel ...  ended up in very much the same place?

CHRISTUS VINCIT CHRISTUS REGNAT CHRISTUS IMPERAT

 

Bishops and their Camels

Dom Gregory Dix supplies a vivid and jolly account of episcopal inadequacy during the Diocletian Persecution.

"[I]t cannot be said that the episcopate as a whole had come well out of the universal crisis of the Diocletian persecution. 

"Few bishops when it broke out were men of much distinction. Eusebius, who as a bishop and a contemporary has some claim to be heard, says frankly that they were on the whole a poor lot, and ascribes the persecution largely to divine anger at their conduct. He is rather given to pious thoughts of this kind, which have not quite the value of historical judgments. But the precise and definite evidence of episcopal failure everywhere at this time can hardly be discounted ... The better bishops, of course, proved faithful and were martyred. But a shockingly large number at the first question turned traditor - i.e., handed over the Scriptures and sacred vessels to the authorities for destruction, the formal act required of them, which Church and State agreed to consider as constituting apostasy. Others denied that they had them in their keeping, but gave the names of the lectors who had them. Others again salved their consciences by handing over other books instead ...

"When the African Council of Cirta met in 305, after the persecution had spent its first violence in these parts, it revealed a pitiful state of affairs. All the bishops present but two seem to have been traditores in some sense. The president himself was compromised, and agreed to suspend all enquiries to avoid unpleasantness. Nor were the only faults those of lack of courage. More than one of these men was afterwards found guilty of direct theft; others of simony and adultery, and of peculating Church funds. One bishop, who admitted to two murders, retained his seat in this assembly by a timely display of diabolically bad temper.

"We may hope that this sort of thing was exceptional, but the evidence is not reassuring. We hear, e.g., of bishops in Palestine who after the persecution, "because they had not rightly shepherded the rational flock of Christ, were by divine justice turned into camel-drivers, an animal of a natural perversity to which they were suited". It is a fact that though there were a score of sees in Palestine, no bishop was martyred there in ten years of persecution ... "

Father Hunwicke asks:

(1) Isn't there some jolly old ditty about Making the Punishment Fit The Crime?

(2) Does the Annuario Pontificio give careful statistics about the ratio of Bishops to Camels in each Episcopal Conference area?

(3) Might a new, reforming, pope need to have exactly this sort of information at his finger tips?

All Hallows' Eve

A lovely day, the day before All Saints, in which the Roman Liturgy, with its beautiful Mass of the Eve, or Vigil, of All Saints, sets up a big marker against the heathen puerilities of "Hallow Een". And carries forward the themes of the Social Kingship of Christ. I am sure that both clergy and devout laity will enjoy the texts of this Mass.

Except that they wo'n't. What a shame that Vatican II abolished it. Just another example of all that has been wrong since the 1960s.

Except that the Vigil of All Saints was not abolished by Vatican II.

Because, as everybody knows, it was abolished by the undoubted vandals who, in the decade after the Council, certainly did use "Vatican II" as a thoroughly dishonest excuse to ignore what the Council did actually mandate. Shockers, the lot of them.

Er ... No; wrong again. This lovely Vigil was abolished by Pius XII, hero-pope of a certain sort of Traddy!!

Pius XII it was who employed Hannibal Bugnini and began the deformation of the Roman Rite, years before Papa Roncalli had any notion whatsoever of summoning a Council. They began by interfering with the rites of Holy Week. And the Vigil of All Saints, they felt, had to go.

If, in a second-hand bookshop, you spot an old pre-1950 Missal going cheap, snaffle it up!

According to the pre-Pacelli Roman Rite, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, in a year like this one, when November 1, All Saints, comes on a Monday, you are ordered to anticipate this Vigil on Saturday October 30.

If, following the complicated current usages of the modern English Catholic Church, you observe All Saints, this year, on Sunday, it will still be mighty suitable to celebrate the Vigil on Saturday ... wo'n't it?

The only people, I imagine, who really do carefully observe this and other such traditional Vigils are Anglicans who belong to "the Prayer Book Society" (led, I believe, by dear Prince Charles and the former Mrs Parker Bowles); and those American sedevacantists who (used to???) follow the S Lawrence Press Ordo. 

QUESTION:

Have members of those two last-named highly-principled organisations inherited any megatraditional dietary customs about special 'vigil' observances? A modest Lobster Thermidor, perhaps, for breakfast? A penitential Bouillabaisse for lunch? [Native British home-shucked] Oysters for those in-between snacks? I don't wish to encroach upon Fr Zed's mouthwatering culinary posts, but perhaps this is a field in which my own readers who have appropriate Traddy contacts can make a modest contribution to edifying and recatholicising the Wider Church.

Censorship

Those who, very kindly and indulgently, read even the more ephemeral of the ephemera I publish will have noticed that I recently took an interest in the Just William stories of Richmal Crompton, especially a short story William and the Nasties. 

I have learned an important lesson. And I thank all of you who helped me to find this text for your part in advancing my very limited education! Here is the Lesson you have taught me:

Never jump to conclusions. Never assume the obvious.

That story, written in 1935, shows William proposing to imitate 'Him Hitler' and the 'Nasties' and the Storm Troopers; to drive out of their English village a Jewish shopkeeper and to ransack his vast supply of sweets. In fact, the subtext of the story is elegantly anti-Nazi; it is made clear that, in England, Hitler's treatment of the Jews would be illegal. One would go to prison! William and his associates gradually realise this and lose all confidence in their plans of exspoliation. (In a somewhat mannered twist of the plot, all ends happily with a real 'thief' dragged off to prison by the police, while William and Mr Isaacs join together in happy amity.)

I assumed ... mea maxima culpa ... that the story was expunged from the canon at the time of WW2. 

I was very wrong.

It wasn't. It was expunged in 1986.

It appeared, in reprint after reprint, throughout the testing years of the War. But it was meat far too strong for the sensitivies of (what Vatican II called) hodiernum tempus.

What did 1986 find so objectionable? 

Possibly, the typecasting of the Jew; he is an entrepreneur; he speaks in an English in which W becomes V. Possibly, the presentation of something as vile as Hitlerism as a mere joke (cf also the tribulations of P G Wodehouse ... "the German Army ... a fine body of men ...").

Richmal Crompton, the author(ess), was the daughter of a clergyman who was also a Classics Master. She herself read Classics at the Royal Holloway, and went on to teach it. She was a sophisticated ironist and stylist. Her Narrator's English is literate and highly latinate; it sets off the naive illiteracy in the dialogue of the small boys whose words and exploits she presents as objects of satire. Indeed, a real 'William' would not be able to understand most of her texts at all! 

I suspect that she began by intending what she wrote to amuse literate and latinate adults. She offers us a comfortable and amused viewpoint, sitting at her own side, chuckling when she chuckles. 

Readers will recall that C S Lewis explained that he did not set out, as he visited Narnia, to write stories for children ... but what he did want to write presented itself in the genre of Children's Stories. How many child-readers would fully appreciate, for example, the passage where Lewis argues that abominable should be etymologically derived, not from abominabile, but from ab homine?

Wozzat you say? In Middle English, and in the Shakespearean folios, abominable is indeed spelt abhominable? (Holoferne favente scribo.)

Exactly. This gets us to the heart of the matter. Censorship tries to cut us off from our cultural past. It attempts to slam shut the doors into other human worlds. Writers of the 1930s, or 1430s, were not always right, but they were not always wrong. And writers of our own time are not always wrong ... but they are most certainly not always right. And, in a generation's time, this will be embarrassingly clear.

Lewis (On reading Old Books) recommended that we should never read something new until we had (re)read a couple of old books.

I suggest that the many volumes of Just William deserve to be added to the Official Canon of Old Books which need to be reread. William and the Nasties is a good starting point.

Professor Germaine Greer

I will not repeat information about her which you can find on Wikipaedia. But, briefly for those who have never heard of her ... Greer was one of the great names of Feminism from the 1960s onwards. Intelligent and articulate and academic, she was a name to conjure with ... and be threatened by.

Not now. She's gone off message. Or rather, 'Feminism' has itself mutated into positions which she never held, has never accepted, and sees no reason not to repudiate. As well as The Female Eunuch, the work by which she made her name, a book I don't think you will regret giving time to is her The Whole Woman.

Don't get me wrong. I am not parading Greer before you as some Victorian Convert to Righteousness. Reading her will not reinforce all your own convictions about things with regard to which you have strong feelings. For example, she has joined no anti-abortion organisation. She waves no pro-life banner. But read what she writes about Abortion ... and a lot of other things ... in TWW, and you'll see what a lot of acute good sense she talks about the Abortion industry as a way in which men exploit, demean, and make money out of women. I rather like her angry rhetoric about "the gynecological abattoir". (Incidentally, she praised the initiative of Cardinal Winning to give women in Scotland a genuine alternative to Abortion.)

Political Correctness throughout the Western World is particularly preoccupied at the moment with 'Transgender People'. And Dr Greer has maintained the simple and obvious position that a man, even if rendered incomplete and filled with female hormones, is not a woman. Greer is willing to use female pronouns for such an individual out of courtesy; she does not desire to prevent them from having the thing done to them; but she doesn't see why she should be forced to say that Black is White. She campaigned against the election of a 'transwoman' to be a Fellow of her College in Cambridge on the grounds that the Statutes prescribe that Fellows must be women ... and that the fellowship candidate wasn't. Total universal uproar. From being a Feminist Icon, transformation into Major Hate Figure.

Among us cispontines (go on ... admit that the term is rather neat), Feminism is currently riven. Our Green Party, and our Women's Equality Party, are both divided about whether they (exempli gratia) concede the right of women to have access to safe places from which penile humans are excluded; or whether a human who declares that he is a woman must be excluded from nowhere.

This does make life less drab. In The Times, most Saturdays, there is a column by a 'feminist' called Janyce Turner. Time was, when you would have assumed that you, reader, and I, disagreed with her. But her arguments and rhetoric about trans- and cis- are admirable.

I hate to criticise my superiors. But I rather wonder whether the Lowerarchy may have made a strategic error. Led by our Father Below, they may have thought that Gender Self Identification would be their master (er!) stroke. 

But have they gone just that bit too far down the path of demanding submission to manifest contradictions?

Whatever happened to all those Actresses? Authors?

I only ask because, this side of the water, the word 'actress' seems now only to exist within formulaic jokes which turn upon the phrases "As the Bishop said to the Actress" and "As the Actress said to the Bishop". I suppose the magic would be aborted if the phrase mutated to "As the Bishop said to the Actor". (Does this genre of humour exist trans undas?0

Perhaps, in the Catholic Church, there should be jokes articulated by the formula "As the Cardinal said to the Actor".

Anyway ... QUESTION 1

An English actress called Beckinsale is in the news for saying that, in Hollywood, if you are 

(a) a woman, and

(b) clever,

the combination will be a very notable career disadvantage.

Why do so many men have problems with clever women? I invite serious answers.

In the following extract, we find women undergraduates ... circa 1935 ... alluding to the phenomenon:

"I hope," said Miss Millbanks, "[Miss Flaxman] has not been trying to collect your Geoffrey."

"I'm not giving her the opportunity," said Miss Layton. "Geoffrey's sound-yes, darlings, definitely sound-but I'm taking no chances. Last time we had him to tea in the J.C.R., Flaxman came undulating in-so sorry, she had no idea anybody was there, and she'd left a book behind. With the Engaged Label on the door as large as life. I did not introduce Geoffrey." 

"Did he want you to?" inquired Miss Haydock.

"Asked who she was. I said she was the Templeton Scholar and the world's heavyweight in the way of learning. That put him off."

"What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Haydock.

"Well Eve-it will be awkward if I do that. Poor lamb! I shall have to make him believe I only did it by looking fragile and pathetic at the viva." ... 

QUESTION 2

I have just heard a discussion on the Home Service about why nearly all novels nowadays are written by women; 80% of the readers are women; and what can be done about it.

Does anything need to be done?

Are women different from men? If not, why not?

 

Very personal query only for fellow-brits

 Apparently there is a Just William story ... William and the Nasties ... from the mid-thirties, which seems unavailable for PC reasons. I have a weakness for the Thirties which inclines me to try to get behind the wall of censorship inevitably erected by the horrific events of the following decade. I have an eccentric desire to be able to see that decade as it saw and expressed itself, without the censorship that comes from hindsight.

Can anybody tell me where to find this tale (in full) on the internet?

It is pretty shameless of me ...

 ... yet again to plug a collection of essays one of which is from myself! But, of course, I always succumb to the temptation to do this! 

Are Canonizations INFALLIBLE? Revisiting a disputed question.

Arouca Press, edited by the admirable Professor Kwasniewski.

I know many readers have been worried by the spate of canonisations of 'Conciliar popes', seeing this process as politically motivated. This collection has sixteen pieces ... including one from Prospero Lambertini, Pope Benedict XIV. Their views are varied. But many of the contributions are from the stable which, as well as the Dubia, brought you the Filial Correction and the other recent documents which establish a theological case against this pontificate.

Not to be missed!

I am repeating this August post because I really do think that this is a very important book, at a time when PF has forced upon us nolentes volentes a duty of taking a long and careful and critical look at the magisterial claims he makes. This question of Canonisation is pretty central. 

Vladimir Vladimirovich

There is on the Internet an interesting piece by VV. He suggests that the Wokery and attempts at cultural or linguistic transformation which are being played out in Western societies at the moment resemble the similar attempts made in his country at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. 

I hope I am not naive about VV.Yes; I do know about his background. He may indeed be complicit in homicide, not least in my own country.

But he's not the only one to play such games. Osama bin Laden was killed by an American unit operating without sanction in the sovereign territory of another country, Pakistan. There are photographs of Obama and his cronies watching the exercise on a screen, so we know that the operation was sanctioned at the highest level. Russkiland is not the only place where it can be decided that inconvenient people be removed from an equation.

And, yes, I do realise that VV is a politician, and that ... even when they are right ... politicians have an agenda for what they say.

But ...

Whom to name in the Te igitur?

Note that I do not say "in the Eucharistic Prayer". 

Because the EPs of other rites and the newer "Roman" EPs may have a different theology from that of the Canon Romanus. 

More than half a century ago, Dom Eizenhofer (Sacris Erudiri 1956, 75 gives the Latin summary) demonstrated, in my view conclusively, that the word "Communicantes" goes grammatically and theologically with the end of the Te igitur (Memento being an originally diaconal parenthesis). The grammar is "una cum ... communicantes". And that the theology of the Prayer means that our sacrifice is commended to the Father as acceptable because we are offering it in and for the Church in union with its [earthly] head the Bishop of Rome. He backs this up with a great many pieces of contemporary Latin showing that the language expresses the ideology of the Roman See at the time the Canon acquired its present state: that being in communion with the Roman See is the touchstone of Catholic communion. 

Of course not everybody accepts that notion. But what Eizenhofer's demonstration makes clear is that it would not be proper to substitute another prelate for the Roman Pontiff unless one were prepared at the same time to argue that he is not just a Catholic bishop, not just the Head of a Communion, but the actual Prelate communion with whom gurantees one's Catholicity. 

So the old Anglo-Catholic ploy of naming the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Orthodox 'Western Rite' practice of naming a Patriarch, are improper unless one really does believe that communion with that prelate is the universal touchstone of whether anybody is in full commuion with the Church Catholic. 

It is also worth noting that this Naming is not a prayer for the Roman Bishop. It is true that we should pray for him; but that is not what we are doing here.

We are expressing our Communio with the Successor of S Peter. I think it was S John Henry Newman who spoke about the Soliditas Petri ... In communion with him, we know that we are in the One Fold of the Redeemer (Newman again).

I find it easy, during this disastrous pontificate, to sympathise with those who question whether Bergoglio really can be pope. But you and I cannot decide such matters. The constitution of the Church is not a DIY game for anybody to play. Our duty is to bear witness against the gross errors of this pontificate, while at the same time allowing nobody to prise our fingers away from Communio with the Successor of S Peter.

That is why, every morning, I name Francis in the Canon of the Mass; and why, dear reader, your faithful priest does the same.

Apologies ...

... for not having reviewed Comments ... I have been away for a few days. I have now been through them all.

I have decided that, for the foreseeable future, I will not enable posts which keep on about migrations of 'alien' peoples' into the Three Kingdoms.