DE RE PISCARIA: Only for Classicists. A discussion in the Ashmolean. A Yorkshire Nanny and an infallible Pontiff.

cum beato papa benedicto xiv in museo ashmoleano colloquens haec hodie rogavi:

"sancte pater: omnes dum boni anhelitu cotidiano exspectamus elevationem arturi nostri in cardinalem, oritur quaestio quomodo eum paucis et parvis verbis nominemus. 'reverendissimus ac eminentissimus dominus arturus sanctae romanae ecclesiae cardinalis diaconus roche' bellissime sonat, necnon et almae nutrici eius summopere placebit; sed mihi admodum longius videtur, praesertim in bloggo meo tam laconico, tam presso, tam conciso, in quo verbum superfluum numquam inveniri potest.

"multa temptavi qualia sunt pisciculus eboracellus; pisciculus roseus; leuciscus  subrubens ... frustra: nam in catalogis linnaeanis et libellis aliorum doctorum de re piscaria scriptis nil certum inveni de hoc pisce quomodo exacte dignosceretur.

"sed fortasse hoc sufficiet: pisciculus purpuratus.

"hoc brevius etiam fiet si ita id breviare licebit: pp. 

"quid autem dicent docti? suetonianum illud fortasse iactabunt purissimum penem? si vero his verbis caesar divi filius octavianus quintum horatium flaccum quondam appellavit, quid ad rem? quid elegantius flacco; quid pisciculo nitidius?"

et pontifex doctissimus subridens benignissime annuit suoque magisterio infallibili suffultus dixit: 

"pp placet!"

Ovidius in Luca ludit ... for classicists only

I suggest that the writer of the Corpus Lucanum in the New Testament was at least familiar with the Metamorphoses. Yes; you're right; I have in mind Luke 2:7sqq, and the pericope at Acts 14: 8-18. Surely, if one met these passages in profane literature of the same period, one would cheerfully analyse them as witty, even frivolous, expressions or inversions of the topos of the Theoxeny of the Unrecognised Gods, as at Metamorphoses VIII: 611-724 (there are, of course, famous Callimachean exemplaria ... Hecale ... Molorchus ... Hollis remarks that "between them, the two stories clearly set a vogue in Hellenistic poetry"; he points out that elements in such accounts go back to the visit of Odysseus to the hut of Eumaeus). 

An inversion and a frivolity almost worthy of Naso himself, you would tell me.

Indeed so. I would agree with you. I generally do. But I want to pitch the hypothesis a tadge more broadly.

Perhaps the theme most central to the Metamorphoses is the stylistic metamorphoses within the work itself*, as it swings gaily from genre to genre pastiching wildly as it goes ... Homer and Ennius and Accius and Vergil and Theocritus and the 'neoterics' and the elegists and Euripides and Lucretius and Callimachus ... you never know where you are; or, if you do, you enjoy every moment of it.

Surely, the writer who composed the first two chapters of the Ad Theophilum I in such a convincing Septuagintal pastiche could, if he had wished, have claimed elegiacally if naughtily Naso magister erat.

But S Luke has pressed his lusus into the service of God, rather than drawing his gods into the service of his lusus.

He has bequeathed a very jolly Christmass prezzy for us all! 

Finally: would it be wildly excessive ... is it totally mad ... to ascribe to a wise and whimsical Providence the notion that the enthusiasm in Greek and Latin Literature for Allusion, Imitatio cum variatione and Intertextuality provided a fertile cultural praeparatio for the 'Typological' approach to Holy Scripture?

I go for it!! Even poor Milton might have agreed!

 
*Surely we must, with Tarrant's OCT, emend the mss reading of the last word  of  Metamorphoses I:2.

A GIRL FULL OF GOD

In a patristic reading offered (remarkably) both by the Roman Breviary and by the Liturgy of the Hours, S Ambrose reminds us that the first thing our blessed Lady did after the Annunciation was to hurry into the hill country to visit Elizabeth; and asks, rhetorically, 'For whither, now Full of God [plena Deo], should she hurry if not to higher places?'

The greatest of the Roman poets was Publius Ovidius Naso, whose rococo imagination and baroque syntax would have made him a most wonderfully Counter Reformation Catholic, had he lived a millennium and a half later. It is purely and simply the Spirit of Ovid that animates the exuberant baroque statuary in the fountains and squares of renaissance Rome. In his youth, the dear old boy appears to have written a tragedy, the Medea, of which only two fragments remain as citations in later rhetorical treatises ... yes ... a sad fate ...

One of these fragments gives a few words of Medea, the Colchian Witch, a liberated feminist girl who engagingly terminated her children in order to irritate her husband; a wench quite worthy to be adopted as their tutelary deity by the crazed half-naked demonstrators plenae Diabolo [full of Satan] who riot for Abortion; the Choroi whose spondaic-dactylic-spondaic-dactylic incantation orders us "keep your rosaries off our ovaries". Apparently, in her frenzy, Medea cried out in Ovid's play feror huc illuc, ut plena deo [I am carried this way, that way, as full of (a) God].

In Roman literature, it is not unnatural for one in the grip of madness or, indeed, merely alcohol, to be called 'Full of (a) God', because Roman deities were so often personifications of dangerous or even disastrous things. So, after your Christmas celebrations, you might be (but I trust you will not be) said to be full of Bacchus. Medea was, I'm afraid, merely demented, poor thing.

I wonder whether S Ambrose, as an exercise in what we Classicists call Creative Intertextuality or imitatio cum variatione [copying something but with a significant change] but which lesser mortals mistake for Plagiarism, has consciously transposed this witty topos from the demented, noisy and bloody mythological figure of Medea, to the reality and hesychia [quietness] of a particular Jewish Girl who, quite literally, carried God Eternal and Incarnate an inch or two south of her fallopian tubes and is now Queen of Heaven. If so, he certainly put his finger on the Culture War, the essential enmity, between the Theotokos and today's maddened Satanic perversions of her icon.

But her heel will tread down the Serpent's head; and the Immaculate Heart of our Lady of Fatima will prevail.

A penitential day?

Those of you who, very sensibly, keep at least one eye on the illuminating St Lawrence Press ORDO will know that, before the liturgical tinkerings initiated by Pius XII, today, Holy Innocents' Day, the Mass was penitential: Violet colour; no Gloria; no Alleluia; Benedicamus Domino.

How very, totally, immensely, completely, indisputably, brilliantly suitable for a Day which has justly come to be an occasion of penance for our present politically-correct and on-going daily Holocaust: that of the pre-born. 

I wonder how many have already been finished off this morning in Oxford, in the great white hillside 'Teaching Hospital' with its high chimney looming over the city ... so very Dachau. I bet the distinguished physician after whom it is named ... John Radcliffe, temp Queen Anne ... didn't wear a gown ever freshly red with the blood of babies.

There has been quite a lot of publicity recently about the Mother and Baby homes in which unmarried women who became pregnant, were once, four or more decades ago, taken to give birth ... and then to have their babies taken from them for adoption. I have no heart to mount some great defence of that or, indeed, of everything else that was done during the first half of my own life-span. Sunt lacrumae rerum.  

But I do think it as well to remember that, today, a very large percentage of those stolen babies would have had their lives extinguished before birth. 

"Better Dead than Stolen" seems to be the maxim..

I've heard a fair bit of sentimentality on our media about the way the babies were taken from their mothers, particularly when they had both already 'bonded'. Sentimentality, of course, can so easily be the mother of hate. So we are corralled into hating the nuns, or whoever, who took the babies away ... babies who were at least still alive.

"Better to kill it before she sees it." Our cultural masters get very hostile towards any suggestion that women considering an abortion might to be shown a picture of the baby in their womb. And when pro-life campaigners show photographs of aborted foetuses.

Our age is characterised by so much profound and noisy moralising. So many people have an insatiable need for Moral High Ground from which they can sneer down on anybody who doesn't keep up to date with their slogans. Ecology ... Trans Rights ...  

And that noise is accompanied by the 'no-platforming' of anyone who is hesitant to chant whatever is the prescribed slick and up-to-the-minute perpetually updated Horst Wessel Song.

Egeneto de en tais hemerais ekeinais ...

... exelthen dogma para Arthourou Leuciscou that nobody henceforth should use the old Roman Pontifical ...

 I regard this watery edict as being, in principle, the most perverse of the Decrees which keep blowing off the desks of PF and his Roche. True, for clerics and laics, what they have to perform or endure daily or weekly is bound to seem the most perverse. But ...

But hear me out.

The rites of Ordination are that area of liturgy currently most badly in need of reform. Corrupt? That's far too good a word.

As concerns the Diaconate: the euchology there has kept getting worse since the Council. Paragraphs have got added which express a view fashionable in the Sixties, that a deacon is a sort of minister to the poor, the needy, the disadvantaged. This is nonsence. (Vide a book published in 1990, Diakonia, by John N Collins (OUP)). The Ordination Prayer currently in use urgently needs to be cut back down to what it was before the Improvers got to work and glued onto it all manner of rubbish.

The rites for ordination to the Priesthood have suffered least ... 

But the Consecration of Bishops suffered very badly in the actions taken (entirely without Conciliar mandate) subsequent to the Council.

The entire, ancient Roman Prayer of Consecration was ... yes; entirely!! ... thrown out.

It has been replaced by a Prayer which, in the 1960s, was erroneously thought to be by an ancient Roman cleric called Hippolytus. It has survived in use in some Eastern churches, sometimes for the Consecration of a Bishop, sometimes for the Elevation of a Patriarch. It involves the use of a phrase (from the psalms) pneuma hegemonikon ['Spirit of Leadership'] to mean 'Episcopacy'.

Now: if our Holy Mother the Church takes a phrase ABC and solemnly proclaims that it shall mean XYZ, then her authority is sufficient: XYZ is what it will mean. So I don't think there is any doubt about the validity of the Consecrations of our current bishops. This sort of deft verbal conjuring gets them (and us) safely across the nervous boundary between Invalid and Valid.

That's a relief!

But the whole procedure seems to me rather seedy ... not really quite Kosher ... it's the sort of thing at which Maiden Aunts would purse their lips ...

The Bergoglio/Roche view, that the ancient Roman formulae must finally be given a lethal clobbering ... dealt an effective death-blow in the Vatican abattoir ... is precisely the opposite of what is needed.

It is the (now discredited) fashions of the 1960s that we now need to bash around the head. And from which we need finally to move on.

We need a lightly revised version of the pre-Conciliar Pontifical.

 

Sancte Stephane ...

... Ora pro nobis.

May he also pray for the great number of Catholic priests and bishops now happily in full communion with the See of S Peter whose priesthood was formed at S Stephen's House ["Staggers" or "The House"]; when it was on the site of what we are now supposed to call the Weston Library alias the New Bod here in Oxford; and later in Norham Gardens sandwiched between S Anne's and LMH; and, most recently, along the Iffley Road. If the influx of former Anglican clergy both before and after the vote of 1992 has brought things of value into the Catholic Church, to a large degree that must represent the sound liturgical spirit and the traditions of focussed clerical professionalism inculcated at Staggers ... not for us the cheerful, undoctrinal, disordered amateurism which Anglican seminarians imbibed in other places!

I intend by that no sneers at some of the dear old English 'Cathedral Close' seminaries. They had their charm back in the days when the more erudite inhabitants of Cathedral Closes possessed 'Tractarian' strengths. But Staggers' independence of that ethos enabled its thoroughly ultramontane Romanita. Nowadays, of course, many ... most? ... Anglican clergy pick up what little they do pick up at multi-denominational non-residential 'Ministerial Training Courses' which are far from what Cardinal Pole devised and the Council of Trent put in place, and which S Charles Borromeo established in Milan and Charles Marriot established at Chichester. (Most of the Anglican colleges are now closed.)

Incidentally, the John Moorman who, as Bishop of Ripon, signed the Letter which led to the"Agatha Christie Indult", was at one point Principal of Chichester. It produced fine priests.

There are repeated demands that, in the Catholic Church, seminary formation should be radically changed so as to eliminate "Clericalism". As with so many disastrous current ideas, that one has already been tried out in the Church of England. It is guaranteed to lead more or less efficiently and directly to infidelity.

Pretty well everything the Evil One is now up to in the Catholic Church, he has tried out in the Anglican Communion already. He is a convinced and principled empiricist. He has been content with the results. How could he not be?

Please pray for the repose of the souls of departed students and teachers at 'the House': not least for Arthur Couratin, priest; Derek Allen, priest; Dai Thomas, bishop; Principals, quorum animabus propitietur Deus.

Light from Exeter

Some words of Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter 1420-1458.
"There is truly nothing, after God, more useful than making memorial of his most holy Mother, for if the name of God's Mother has been invoked, even if the merits of the one calling upon her do not deserve it, yet the merits of God's Mother intercede so that he might in mercy be heard; for she is the Palace of Universal Propitiation, the Cause of General Reconciliation, the Vessel of Grace and Temple of Life Eternal and of the salvation of all who are to be saved, she, the dear Mother of God and Ever Virgin Mary; who, the only one to guard unimpaired the likeness of the Heavenly Craftsman, gave birth under the seal of holiness to the Splendour of the Father's Glory, the only begotten Son, indeed, of God, who knows not the Fault of Adam, that he might, by the merit of His own holiness and righteousness, restore to Paradise those whom our first Parent exiled by his fault of disobedience; for this woman, most blessed among and above all blessed women, through the blessing of her childbearing abolished for ever the curse of our first Mother Eve and trod with the foot of virtue the poisonous head of the ancient serpent ..."

I break off here because the sentence goes on for ever. I doubt whether, even now, this great Exonian Pontiff has completed it. He even chose, as a venue for a dissertation on the Immaculate Conception, a General Chapter of the Order of Preachers in his See City ... I know I need not remind you that the Dominicans were still distinctly negative about the doctrine at this point.

Lacy was a considerable intellectual whom his people deemed also to be a Saint. His shrine was dismantled at the 'Reformation' (by the 'Protestant Dean', Simon Haynes, who so got up the noses of his Anglican Catholic fellow chapter-members that they were able - even in the reign of Edward VI - to contrive to get him imprisoned); but when the Cathedral was bombed during the War the wax votive offerings from it were found concealed behind a nearby stone. He had a definite cultus as a beatus.

Thank you!

 It was splendid to get so many Christmass Greetings ... both electronic and through the letter box. And such kind greetings!

Very many Thank-yous, and even more reciprocated good wishes. 

And best wishes to all who read this humble blog, even when they don't always agree with what I write.

John Hunwicke sacerdos indignus.

A memorable day ...

Amid all the busyness of Advent and Christmas ... here is (yet) another event to which you might care to raise a glass.

The Diocese of Oxford, erected de facto by Tudor Minor, was erected de iure by Reginald Cardinal Pole on December 24, 1554, by virtue of his Legatine powers, in his Legatine Constitution Cum supremum. (So, indeed, were the other Henrician de facto diocesan creations.)

Roman Catholic writers love to inform us that, apart from a Welshman called Kitchen, no 'Marian' bishop conformed to the 'Settlement' of Elizabeth Tudor the-once-Virgin Queen. Not so. Hugh Curwen, who had been consecrated Archbishop of Dublin by Edmund 'Patrimony' Bonner, Bishop of London, in 1555, was later translated to Oxford. 

I often wonder how this poor old bishop-of-bray got on with the grim gang of Calvinists who were his confratres in episcopatu. Not to mention the Puritan bullies who by this time had been intruded into Oxford professorial chairs after their occupants fled to Douay. 

"Serve the old b****r right", I hear you say. 

You are a heartless lot.

I append two very interesting comments attached to a much older post on this subject.by Professor Tighe.

YOU NEED TO READ THIS STUFF

 What a day! 

A day to read the Rorate  blog, which has an important piece by a Fr Ferguson. His point, amusingly and cogently made, is that "Pomposity cannot abide ridicule". This is what my blog has always practised! We have inherited this perception from figures like the Revd Dr Geoffrey Kirk, RIP, whose writings, first in our Anglican context and later in the Bergoglian context, operated precisely on the principle of laughing at the bullies and the heretics. Rideat nunc cum Angelis in caelis.

Don't let them worry you! Laugh at them! If you want a good example of pompous and risible fatuity, read yesterday's "Address to the Curia". He's still going on about 'Clericalism'! He still thinks he's humble! He is providing you with your Big Christmass Laugh!!

Also in today's Rorate, a fine letter, fizzing with righteous anger, from the Founding Prior of the Traditionalist Dominicans. He points out that, back in the era of Ecclesia Dei, the Holy See gave its word to certain communities about the preservation of their rites and their spiritualitiues. PF has no right to play fast and loose with solemnly given undertakings. "Obedience" does not oblige the sort of craven obsequiousness which PF thinks he has the right to demand. He's only the pope.

Fr de Blignieres is dead right. I also entered into full communion via a scheme which guaranteed me the use of the Roman Rite (which at that moment had received the watertight papal clarification that it [already] existed in two licit Forms) and, additionally, (what was to be) the Divine Worship Missal. No-one on earth has the right to deprive me of the use of the Old Mass, and I require no permission ("in principle", as Benedict XVI put it) from anybody to use it. Furthermore, the logic deployed by PF and his Roche to attack the Old Mass ("Unity and Communion require Uniformity") excludes also the Divine Worship Missal (not to mention the "Uniate" rites). This has not yet been spelled out by the Bergoglianicals, but I do not see how, logically, they can avoid this conclusion (even though the DWM was issued by PF's own authority). No edicts from the Vatican will alter my attitude to the DWM.

PF is only the pope. He should read the teaching of Joseph Ratzinger in The Spirit of the Liturgy. 

Finally ... still with Rorate ... they have published a superb article by a senior and experienced parish priest in the English 'Mainstream' Church, Fr Puginopolitanus.

Please!! Don't let all this essential reading get lost in the Christmas rush!!

George V, Casti Connubii, and Bishop Gore

A recent book about George V (GeorgeV Never a Dull Moment, Jane Ridley) suggests that he was "fighting a one-man war against the twentieth century". Some readers might join me in considering that this was a fairly laudable thing to be doing. Not because that century was the only epoch in which horrible things happened (although the two World Wars and the genocides against the Armenians and the Jews take a bit of beating), but because his reign ... particularly the last part of it ... exhibited the seeds of corruptions which were to become explicit ... and disastrous  ... in our own time. I have recently written a few words on the Cult of Sterility which is discussed in some Christian literature from those years.

But it was hardly a "one-man war". There were teachers, even in Anglicanism, who stood out against the perversions of Christian morality which took hold in the 1920s and 1930s. Permit me to remind you of Bishop Charles Gore.

Gore was founding Principal of Pusey House in this University, where I worshiped as an undergraduate and had the honour of a Senior Research Fellowship when I returned to Oxford; later he was Vicar of Radley, a few hundred yards from where I now live; then Bishop of Oxford; also Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, of which our much-loved Mgr Robert Mercer of the Ordinariate is a member. You can find ... I admit it ... in his writings attacks upon what he saw as the failings of the Catholic Church, and teaching upon Biblical Inspiration which might have been unpopular in the pontificate of S Pius X.

But it is my strong conviction that blessed Benedict XVI intended us to bring into the unity of the Catholic Church all that was good in our inheritance; setting it when necessary within a Catholic context so that it may be corrected and completed.

The Lambeth Conference, a gathering with no canonical status but considerable 'moral' authority, used to gather together, every ten years, all the bishops in peace and communion with the See of Canterbury. Its meeting in 1920 spoke very sternly about the immorality of Contraception. By 1930, on the other hand, this teaching had radically changed. Gore spoke about this change, with no holds barred! I urge you to read his arguments at anglicanhistory.org/gore/contra1930.html. He was, like Pius XI (Casti connubii) and S Paul VI (the Pope of Humanae vitae) a prophet who foresaw the complete overthrow of Christian sexual morality in the final third of the twentieth century. The 1930 Lambeth Conference was indeed the thin end of Satan's wedge; the dirty work was to be finished off by the 1968 Lambeth. Gore admired the Catholic Church for bearing a witness to Truth and Purity which his own Communion had, to his distress, abandoned. He also wrote well about the High Priests who served before the 1930s Altar of Modernity, the HG Wellses, the Bertrand Russells, the Margaret Sangers, the Eugenicists, Racial Hygienists and  Euthanasiacs, worthy Precursors of Adolf Hitler's Gestapo and of the Thought Police of our own time. Gore has a lovely tone of righteous and faintly surprised indignation.

At this when the wolves are knocking at the door of the Catholic Church as they once did at the door of the Three Little Piggies, Gore is a Christian Teacher with a message directly for us. A 'Patrimonial' gift to the whole Church Catholic? Why not read him?

THE SACRAMENT OF CONFIRMATION

Arthur Roche has recently decreed that the Old Pontifical cannot be used for Confirmation. 

The facts are totally beyond dispute. As Roche explains, in his best school-masterly tones, "it should be remembered that the formula for the Sacrament of Confirmation was changed for the entire Latin Chrch by Saint Paul VI with the Apostolic Constitution Divinae consortium naturase (15 August 1971)". (I can just imagine Roche giving Bloggs minor a cuff around the ear, like the Chaplain in the film If ....)

Indeed; it should be remembered. That's quite simple, then. No room for controversy there. Fancy ... Papa Ratzinger not knowing that!!

How silly, perverse, and ignorant he was to decree (7 July 2007) that "Ordinaries are given the right to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation using the earlier Roman Pontifical, if the good of souls would seem to require it".

Daft, ignorant old man! All those stupid - if innumerable - books and articles he wrote! Incredible, that he hadn't read and couldn't even find copies of the Acta of S Paul VI! Just imagine the poor chap hobbling round all those libraries in Rome looking for them and, everywhere, the same brush-off: "Sorry, Old Man, we don't have room on our shelves for that sort of stuff!". 

And how absolutely wet he was to allow bishops to take account of "the good of souls"! What on earth do bishops know about the good of souls?

Clearly, we now need stronger hands upon the tiller! Thank Goodness we now have men of the intellectual and moral calibre of Jorje Bergoglio and Arthur Roche to set us on the right track!

Outrageously, the English Bishops were prepared to act on Ratzinger's flawed "decree" and go around doing Traddy Confirmations!!! However can they have been so misguided! They need to be strictly disciplined for conniving in Ratzinger's apostasy!

Joking and irony aside: I think a pastoral need has opened out here like a great big gaping hole. I don't know if Cardinal Burke will be willing to traverse the continents administering Confirmation according to the Usus Authenticus of the Roman Rite ... but, if he isn't, will the aging bishops of the SSPX be able to hear God's call to go round doing so? The world is a big place.

How much longer can the Church avoid the necessity for more Episcopal Consecrations, even if they do have to take place sine Mandato Apostolico?

The time, surely, has passed for Rigidity and Legalism. The God of Surprises wonders if we shall step up to the plate.