GREENERY

Being Ecological is all the rage. I sometimes feel tempted to put together a Traditionalist list of Things To Do To Save The Planet. Follows a ragbag of random thoughts ungrammatically dashed off in note form, and in no particular order, inviting comments and contributions.

Divorce/broken families mean that there are more households guzzling energy: Mrs Smith and the children in the house; Mr Smith in a flat somewhere. Outlaw divorce and tax punitively separation.

Fasting and Abstinence: much food is consumed today; much meat consumed (which means more cereals used growing meat). So: restore Pius V and Prayer Book rules on Lent, Fridays, Vigils.

The bathorshoweraday culture means the consumption of energy cleaning water and heating it. Chemicals used? Tax them; and also the chemicals produced to 'hydrate' the skin which the chemicals and the washing have dried out.

When I was in teaching I gathered that the women students washed their hair every morning ... and then again in the evening before setting out to socialise. Manufacture of chemicals? purifying water polluted by chemicals? Ecological consequences of the "You're worth it" culture? Tax the shampoos, and the chemicals which are advertised as repairing the damage the shampoos have caused, in the sort of punitive way nicotine is taxed? (What are 'conditioners'?)

Cut back the endless socialising of the urban young with its economic and ecological cost (and temptations to immodesty) by returning to a once-weekly outing with approved suitors ... and back by midnight.

Discontinue public funding and resources for unnatural medical and surgical interventions: plastic surgery; IVF; 'transgendering' ...

Saint Abraham on Quinquagesima

S Abraham, of course, does appear in the Roman Martyrology. His Day is October 9 (just imagine him and S John Henry Newman fighting it out for that day). And, in the Latin Rite Patriarchate of Jerusalem ... and in the Old Carmelite Rite ... there is a proper (duplex maius) for him on that day. Unless, of course, PF suppressed it with a mighty stroke of his potent hand this morning before brekker.

The reason why this Saint is not on the Universal Calendar takes us back to the time when Saints commemorated were either local, or Saints whose relics were held by the local Church. But ... for those who would like it ... I offer at the end of this post the Collect for S Abraham.

However ... I hope nobody will be upset ... I doubt whether this October liturgical provision has the same antiquity and auctoritas as the ancient, probably Gregorian, Roman provision for S Abraham: which we find in the Breviary Office of Quinquagesima. Deft and subtle clergy might usefully seize the crafty opportunity on Quinquagesima to preach about S Abraham.

This office was, needless to say, eliminated by the vandals who, according to arthur roche, produced the "much richer" Usus Deterior of the Roman rite, which he and his Argentinian mentor now desire finally to establish as the unicus usus of the Roman Rite. Their policy, poor poppets, whether in the Bugnini Age or in that of Bergoglianity, seems to me to come perilously close to being anti-semitic.

Because, in the Bergoglian 'mainstream' church, S Abraham now gets next to no mention at Mass. True, he is in the 'First Eucharistic Prayer' ... but in what percentage of churches is that august prayer used?

Mention of S Abraham can be found elsewhere in the liturgical world, not least in the de Sacramentis, but I am going to stick out my neck and claim it as a distinctive part of the distinctively Roman Rite. Rather like the teaching that Transsubstantiation is performed in caelestibus by the Acceptance by the Father of the Sacrifice, rather than by an 'epiklesis' of the Holy Spirit. 

Eucharistic Prayers which fail to mention the Saint (and which attempt to consecrate by Epiklesis) should be carefully cut out of soi disant "Roman" missals and forwarded to Hannibal B, via whatever his present post-code is.

S Abraham is our Patriarch in a way that no other human being is. It is by our participation in  his Faith that we are redeemed. His offering of his son, as mosaics in Rome and Ravenna and early Christian iconography powerfully remind us, is the type of which the Sacrifice of the Mass is the antitype. 

But Stay!! You don't need to go to Great S Mary's in Rome or San Vitale in Ravenna ... you don't need to traipse around the Romanesque churches of Lombardy ... to experience this. Direct your gondola to the glorious Ordinariate basilica of S Agatha in Landport: that will do you nicely instead. At the High Altar, as the celebrant raises his patten and his eyes, and prays Suscipe Sancte Pater ..., what directly meets his eyes is the fine sgraffito painting by a disciple of William Morris, Heywood Sumner. S Abraham stands there; beside him, his son carrying over his shoulder the wood for the sacrifice, just as the antitypical Son carried His Wood up the Hill of Sacrifice.

"Deus, qui in praemium fidei Filium tuum Unigenitum ex semine Abrahae mundo nasci promisisti; concede propitius: ut fide, quam in baptismo suscepimus, in nobis usque ad mortem per caritatem operante, caelo nasci mereamur. Per."

 

TYROPHAGOS and GASTRIMARGIA

EATING

I think I am right in saying ... given, for the sake of argument, the Gregorian Calendar ... that, for much of the Church, next Sunday will be Cheesefare Sunday. 

Those who possess a set of Gueranger will probably have noticed all the Byzantine texts for Cheesefare which he reproduces in his Septuagesima volume. They concern Adam and the Fall. One of the the enormous strengths of Gueranger is his awareness that Catholicism does not simply mean the Latin Rite. 

And I feel that few things are more edifying than these happy occasions when the instincts of Rome and Byzantium converge, as with the agreement that we prepare for Lent by meditating on the Fall.

Since Septuagesima, we Latins as we celebrate the Divine Office have been thinking about those magnificent and stately first chapters of Genesis. Byzantines, apparently, are also animated by similar instincts about how to prepare for Lent ... i.e. by recalling the Fall.

Why? I wonder if, originally, it could be as simple as this: the Fall of our race resulted from an incontinent act of Eating. It is appropriate for us to expiate this by a season of attenuated Eating.

HYMNS

I subscribe to the Conciliar mandate regarding the Breviary Hymns, and so I applaud the decision to restore to use the tenth century Lenten Office Hymn Iesu Quadragenariae. Medieval English usage employed this hymn at Lauds from Lent III until Passion Sunday. 

But why ... on earth ... did Dom Lentini and his merry men excise the second stanza: 

Quo Paradiso redderes/ Servata parcimonia,/ Quos inde gastrimargiae/ Huc illecebra depulit.

... Gastrimargiae ... lovely word ... Perhaps that's what Lentini didn't like ... but the heirs of the Carolingian Renaissance simply adored a resonant grecism ... although I would have to admit that this fashion caused a fair bit of textual corruption as scribes copied out what they did not understand or recognise.

The English Hymnal renders that stanza: That he who fell from high delight/ Borne down by sensual appetite,/ By dint of stern control may rise/ To climb the hills of Paradise.

er ... no ... I agree with you ... this is not quite the sure-footed genius of John Mason Neale, is it? The translator here is Thomas Alexander Lacey (1853-1931; Fellow of Balliol, no fool, the principal Anglican theologian who spent time and effort in Rome resisting Cardinal Vaughan's frantic campaign to get Anglican Orders condemned).

Of course, our Lenten liturgies do inevitably cram in every biblical reference they can find to 'Forty Days'. Nevertheless, I feel that Protestant worshippers, accustomed to turning up in Church on the first Sunday of Lent, and hearing the organ thumping out the Victorian hymn For-tee days and for-tee nights ... and Cranmer's collect O Lord, whiche for oure sake dyddeste faste fortye days and fourtie nights ... might have been left with the mechanistic notion that Lent is nothing more than an imitatio of the Lord's Fast.

To us Latin Catholics and to Byzantines is left the headier pleasure of entering through an imposing portal into a vivid world of stimulating Typology and rich Intertextuality.

Personally, I feel diminished by the incessant post-Conciliar attempts, renewed under this lamentable pontificate, to eliminate the links between the worship of the 'Old' and 'New' Testaments; and to ignore genuine and instinctive convergences between Rome and Byzantium. Narrow-minded, uneducated lot ... anti-semites and anti-byzantines (even ... what is worse ... without knowing it!)

The Old, Authentic, Roman Rite is thoroughly worth fighting for.

Beware of pickpockets.

The Five Wounds

What terrible news to wake up to this morning. I said Mass for peace; I will do the same tomorrow, making use of the Mass of the Five Wounds. 

Incidentally, recently I ran into Henry Bradshaw and one or two other friends, knowledgeable chaps, and thought I'd see if they knew anything about the dates of the entry of the Mass of the Five Wounds into medieval Missals. Apparently the Hereford Missal, which achieved a printed edition in 1502, lacked this Mass. But there is a manuscript version which has it copied in by a later hand at the end, together with the Sarum introduction about Pope Boniface. And, as in Sarum, it is associated with that other exemplar of late medieval Christological affection, the Mass of the Holy Name.

York was more interesting - my chum Surtees came up with the facts. It has the Mass of the Five Wounds in editions printed in 1509, 1516, 1517, 1530, 1533. However, it is not in the (earlier) manuscript versions of the Missal except ... get this ... that there's a nice ms at Stonyhurst, which Surtees says is from the second half of the fifteenth century, which has it written ... but left unfinished ... on an outside folio.

But it was Henry Bradshaw himself who knocked me for six. You see, I'd always assumed that the Mass of the Five Wounds was an adapted, augmented, version of an earlier Mass  de Passione Domini, still preserved in the Missal of S Pius V. Well, as Henry makes clear, neither the Mass of the Five Wounds nor the Mass de Passione Domini was in the (Milanese) 1474 editio princeps of the Missale Romanum. Nor in 1481, 1485, or 1493 editions. But the Mass of the Five Wounds appears in a 1505 edition from Venice and also in Venetian editions of 1508, 1509, 1543, 1558, 1560, and 1561, and Parisian editions of 1515, 1530, and 1540. (A Lyons edition of 1516; two Venetian editions of 1558 and 1560 from the same House; and a 1574 edition from Antwerp, do not have it.) And all these also do not contain de Passione Domini)

So, in a very crude, prima facie sort of way, might one tentatively wonder if de Passione Domini is a chopped down version of the Mass of the Five Wounds, rather than the original from which the latter was developed?

Please God, may Europe's Eastern border at least be spared the horrors of an infantry war, with all its terrible consequences.

"NOW, UNCONDITIONALLY, and FOR EVERYONE" ... SSPX

 The Superior of the SSPX, Fr Pagliarani, has recently been to see PF. No report, I think, has appeared of this meeting. But on 15 January Father gave an address in Paris, provided by Dr Moynihan in translation.

The only criticism of his words that I now make is that he speaks as if the Tridentine Mass were the only Catholic Rite. This has never beeen true. There are the Oriental rites. And, even in the Latin West, there are the Dominicans ... the Mediolanese ...

But, in my view, the following section of his address is crucially important; and needs to be taken seriously. 

"There is one last thing that the Society must obtain, and this is crucial. We want the Mass, not only for ourselves, but we want it for the Universal Church. We do not want simply a side altar in the Church. Nor do we want the right to enter with our banner into an amphitheatre where everything else is permitted. Certainly not!

"We want this Mass for ourselves and at the same time for everyone. It is not a little privilege that we want. This Mass is a right for us and for all souls, without exception. This is how the SSPX is, and will continue to be, an active part of the Catholic Church. That is because it aims at the good of the Church. The Society does not aim at obtaining a particular privilege. Obviously, Divine Providence will choose the moment, the modalities, the graduality and the circumstances, but as far as we are concerned, we want this Mass and we want it now -- unconditionally and for everyone. 

"And this we want without entering into an overly human perspective that looks for a particular privilege. We do not want to enter into negotiations where we are conceded things bit by bit: to be given a church here, a time for Mass there, the possibility to use the maniple, or the biretta, or the Holy Week liturgy of S Pius X ... Definitely not! We do not want to enter into this scenario.

"Quite simply, we want two things: the Faith and the Mass. We want Catholic doctrine and the Cross that nourish the spiritual life and moral life of souls. We want them now, unconditionally, and for everyone ..."

The Paedophile Question

HOMOSEXUALITY

The first thing I object to in the reported remarks of some foreign cleric called Hollerich is the imprecision in the use of terms such as "homosexual".

Does this refer to orientation? Or to a cohabiting relationship in which the probability is flaunted that unrepented genital activities are performed?

The respect I have ... and it is considerable ... for a person with homoerotic inclinations who, by God's grace, lives a celibate life, is in strong contrast to my convictions about the objective moral state of any human being who engages in sexual relationships with any person to whom they are not joined in Christian wedlock.

To elide this difference, especially in public debate, is to omit such a centrally important piece of the evidence that it is pretty well a lie.

So is this Hollerich, who "knows of" homosexual priests and laypreople in his diocese, refering to the one or the other? It seems to me to make a big difference. To say "No one is dismissed because they are homosexual" without defining terms is not so much just shifty as plain dishonest.

"I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct." (Hollerich.)

So many statements like this are bandied around. "God made me like this so it must be OK for m,e to play out my inclinations".

The test to be set against all such statements is: Does it also apply to paedophiles?

But this gets you into trouble. People who can't think straight allege that you are saying 

(a) all homosexuals are paedophiles; or/and

(b) homosexuals are "as bad as" paedophiles. 

Asking "Does it also apply to paedophiles?" involves neither of these beliefs, from each of which I firmly dissociate myself.

It does involve an argumentum ad hominem, "pressing a man with the consequences of his own concessions". 

If you claim that X is justified in acting on the basis of his innate inclination simply because he has that inclination, you must allow the same liberty to paedophiles. Or, if you don't, you must tell us why.

DOGMA

"The cardinal said it was time for a fundamental revision of church teaching, and suggested that the way Pope Francis had spoken about homosexuality in the past could lead to a change in doctrine".

I hope this is a misreport, because, if it is accurate, it reveals a thoroughly heterodox mindset. It implies fundamental  doctrinal change; it implies or suggests that the basis of such change could include obiter remarks uttered by a pope without having been checked through by ... for example ... the CDF.

I repudiate with all my heart, and execrate, such an account of how Dogma can or should evolve. And I similarly repudiate any purported exercise of the Petrine Office which might appear to confer legitimacy upon such accounts.

 

Arthur Roche and Pope Francis at loggerheads

 In 2015, Arthur Roche cosigned a Decretum in English and Latin. It promulgated a big glossy book called Divine Worship: the Missal. (DWM in what follows; the other signatory was Cardinal Sarah.)

This was the "Ordinariate Missal", of course. 

Latinists with time to spare might spend a few amused minutes comparing the English and the Latin versions of this Decree. Schoolmasters, practising and retired, may find their fingers twitching for a Marking Pencil with which to strike through the schoolboy howlers. But this post today is not yet another part of my boring series How clever I am to be able to spot the elementary grammatical errors in Vatican 'Latin'.

Arthur's 2015 Decree asserted that his Dicastery knew that "authentic Catholic worship in Spirit and truth had always found expression in diverse forms" (verum cultum catholicum in Spiritu et veritate multimodis semper elocutum esse).

Arthur's admirable 2015 Decree also called the DWM "a legitimate adaptation of the Roman Rite".

But ... er ... um ... PF has recently (2021) declared that there is only an "unicus usus" of the Roman Rite ... and that this "single use" is to be deemed to be the tired and tatty, half-a-century-old, cobweb-festooned product of Hannibal and his committees ...  the poor seedy Usus Deterior of the Roman Rite.

Bit of a contradiction here, eh? 

In the left corner, wearing the red shorts, Arturo. In the right corner, wearing the blue shorts, Francesco. Which of them will land the knock-out blow?

Multimodis is just what the doctor ordered, as far as Arturo is concerned. But for Francesco, Diversity is Rigid and Divisive and needs to be extirpated. Bang bang bang. Gotcha! Why won't you lie down and just die quickly?

The Ordinariate Missal, of course, contains the Preparation at the foot of the Altar from the Tridentine Rite; its pre-Conciliar Offertory Prayers; and its Last Gospel.

Very broad-minded. Jolly jolly jolly good! Ecumenical!! Inclusive!!!

Why is it so super duper for the ex-Anglicans in the Ordinariates to enjoy these goodies in the DWM ... while Mainstream Catholic Clergy are to be given a thorough whipping if they want such things? Bend over again for another six ... especially on the First Sunday of the Month ... Cupich Day ...

There must be a moral here somewhere  ... 

S Stephen's House, Vatican II, and the Cappa Magna

 Spare a prayer today for the Rt Revd (William) Gordon Wheeler, quondam Bishop of Theudalis in partibus infidelium and then of Leeds. Today, 20 February, is the obit of his death (aetatis 87) in 1998.

I feel comfortably disposed towards his Lordship. Like me, he had his priesthood 'formed' at "Staggers". Like me, he was at one point Assistant Chaplain at Lancing College. He was a product of the fine, robust, triumphalist Anglo-Catholicism of the 1930s; if you desire to verify that observation, go and look ... first, at the belle epoque glories of S Bartholomew's Church in Brighton not far from the Railway Station, where he served as a curate ... then at the high gothic glory of Lancing Chapel perched on its South Downs hilltop.

After entering into full communion, he was ordained by Cardinal Hinsley on 31 March 1940 in the Crypt of Westminster Cathedral "for fear of the bombs", as Fr Brian Houghton, one of the four other ordinands, recalls. [Have you acquired and read Unwanted Priest, the autobiography of Fr Bryan Houghton, a priest who refused to say the New Mass and led a diverting and diverse life ... just published by Angelico Press in its Catholic Traditionalist Classics series.]

[Fr Houghton records that, at the Beda, where he and the future Bishop Wheeler studied together, about a dozen of the seminarians had been Anglican clergymen, and "the Anglican clergy saw to it that the liturgy was performed precisely according to the rubrics ... it gave a very good training".]

Wheeler had "Anglican Previous" and a Staggers training: so it's not surprising that he was the last English Catholic Bishop to wear the cappa magna; and that throughout his life, his personal liturgical preference was for the 'Tridentine Rite'. [Fr Houghton summarised him as "a good bishop".] If vernacular had to be used, he favoured English of the "Thou/Thee" variety ... which must make him a sort of Forerunner of the Ordinariate Liturgy! 

Not all Catholic Bishops of Leeds have had such sound instincts! Wheeler was one of the Fathers of Vatican II; so he knew it from the inside ... from the inside of the Bar-Jonah as well as the inside of the Conciliar aula. He was in favour of the Council but strongly opposed to the misappropriation of the Council in later years.

Should you ever hear talk of any later Bishop of Leeds who was not a Father of the Council, but who blathers on about Vatican II, beware. As far as Liturgy is concerned, the conciliar decree Sacrosanctum Concilium did, indeed, allow some (mainly optional) modifications, but its cautious and sensible suggestions bore no connexion with the wholesale slaughter that followed when, after the Council, gangs of crooks got their hands on 'implementation' and treated this as a carte blanche to make whatever faddish liturgical alterations appealed to them.

Cardinal Heenan was to be terribly embarrassed by the fact that the reassurances he had given about the Council were made to seem untruthful. Archbishop McQuaid, Primas Hiberniae, was never more wrong than when he guaranteed to his people that "No change will worry the tranquillity of your Christian lives".

Decent men deceived. An episcopate manipulated.

"Only four bishops voted against Sacrosanctum Concilium". Dishonest commentators glibly use this fact to imply that all the changes which were introduced after the Council were enthusiastically mandated by the Council. Not in a million years. The point is that the vote for SC would not have been anything like so overwhelming if the Fathers had realised that, as far as the radicals were concerned, they were being dishonestly tricked into signing a blank cheque. 

Do you really, seriously, think that in any known world Marcel Lefebvre would have contentedly signed SC if he had known that, within a decade, the Canon Romanus would be almost entirely and universally discarded?

This is a good moment to remind you of Dom Hugh Knapman's edition of the limericks composed at the Council by the English Bishops, including a number by Wheeler himself, and comments about Wheeler by other bishops. Bishop Wall translated them into Latin. A Limerickal Commentary on the Second Vatican Council * (Arouca Press) provides an amusing sidelight on the Council. And a revealing one. When the Barbarians shouted Ottaviani down, it was not in the name of the Anglophone Bishops ... or, indeed, of many of the un-Rhineish prelates.

*"Of Rahner and Congar and Kung /The praises are everywhere sung; /But one bello domani /Lord Ottaviani /Will see the three of 'em hung."

O utinam ...

From Heenan downwards, the Anglophone hierarchies were generally dubious about the unscrupulous tricks being played upon them. But, like the rest of us, they did not foresee the half of it.

REMEMBER: IF SOME SUBSEQUENT BISHOP OF LEEDS OR OF ROME OR OF ANYWHERE ELSE TRIES TO PULL A FAST ONE BY IMPLYING THAT "THE COUNCIL" AUTHORISED THE NOVUS ORDO AS IT SUBSEQUENTLY EMERGED, HE SHOULD BE SHOUTED DOWN WITH CRIES OF "WOTTA NAUGHTIE PORKIE" AND PELTED WITH SCREWED-UP COPIES OF TRADITIONIS CUSTODES.

*"What John Carmel, Westminster's Archbish, /Dislikes most intensely is fish. /He's not slow in declaring /He can't stand red Haerring, /It just simply isn't his dish."

Fish, indeed! They come in so many shapes and sizes!! 153 or perhaps even more!!!

"O, she comes!!" [SPEED! corrected; and with a QUERY]

I regard the locus classicus in Christian apologetic with regard to Speed, as being the introduction of Lord Feverstone in Lewis's Hideous Strength. Deftly, Lewis insinuates the suspicion that Feverstone, as well as being a very poor driver, was also a very bad man. Perhaps he was descended from Toad?

The craze for Speed, as an emblem of Progress and Modernity, was expressed as early as 1903 by W E Henley (1849-1903) in his last poem, A Song of Speed. Henley deified power and arrogance: he was also the author of that misguided ditty Invictus which concludes with the much-quoted phrase "I am the captain of my soul". 

In Speed, Henley concludes this long and tedious poem with what surely must strike us today as risible bathos. Here is a taste of just a tiny bit of it:

"Hence the Mercedes! Look at her. Shapeless? Unhandsome? Unpaintable? Yes; but the strength of some seventy-five horses: seventy-five puissant, superb fellow-creatures: is summed and contained in her pipes and her cylinders ... handle her valves, her essentials, her secrets ... this marvellous Mercedes, this triumphing contrivance, comes to make other Man's life than she found it: ... thus the Mercedes comes, O, she comes, this astonishing device, this astonishing Mercedes, with Speed -- Speed in the Fear of the Lord. So, in the Eye of the Lord, under the Feet of the Lord, out of the measureless goodness and grace in the Hand of the Lord. Speed! Speed on the Knees, Speed in the Laugh, Speed by the Gift, Speed in the Trust of the Lord --"

In his whodunnit The Body in the Silo (1933), Mgr R A Knox entertains himself and us with the absurdities of all this. One of his characters is a Phyllis Morel, who loves cars ... and, especially, their speed ... and has even worked up for herself a lucrative automobile business. Have you ever seen the 1930 dust/wrapper of Waugh's Vile Bodies? (BTW, there floats into my mind that self-portrait [1929] by Tamara de Lempicka ... sitting in her Bugatti, "cold as ice, and all the more provocative ... arrogance ... freedom, speed, mobility, power and riches" [Ingried Brugger])

Knox's characters are discussing Speed; "I don't want speed to brace my nerves," observed Miss Morel. "I want it for its own sake."

"Speed, speed, speed in the knees of the Lord?" suggested Worsley. "I never could quite understand how Henley managed to lug theology into it."  

Indeed. But, if one has to be biblical, isn't the Tower of Babel the most suitable allusion?

H/t to Joshua.

Query: having perused Wikipedia, I remain a bit vague about which Mercedes on the roads in 1903 was 75 horsepower.

Bishop Ned Darling, and the Bugnini Lectionary

"You know, John, I think I'm getting a bit tired of the Bread of Life."

This was said to me by an Irish bishop ... a Church of Ireland bishop ... one Sunday morning in the church of S John Baptist on Valentia Island, off the beautiful West coast of Ireland. No; his words were not an example of old-style Church of Ireland Protestantism; bishop Ned is (he's still going strong in his late eighties) a civilised and well-read man with a catholic Sacramental theology. 

He had many different ways of signing his name; Edward Limerick; Edward Ardfert; Edward Killaloe; Edward Kilfenora; Edward Clonfert; Edward Kilmacduagh; and Edward Emly.

Yes; you will have guessed: he was not a confidence trickster with multiple aliases, but a very grand episcopal pluralist and the inheritor of seven originally separate dioceses. I would like to tell you that when, on a Sunday morning, he stepped off the ferry at Knightstown, he processed up the main street wearing seven cappae magnae ... but you might not believe me. It is so hard to pull the wool over your eyes.

It might interest some of you that a couple of his seven dioceses lost their independant existence around 1834, when the British government took a savage pair of scissors to the Church of Ireland. This, in turn; led to the Oxford Movement, the 'Catholic Revival', in the Church of England. You see, on grounds of Catholic principle, the Oxford clerical establishment objected to Erastian politicians interfering in the organisation of the Church, even when that involved suppressing Irish bishoprics.

Incidentally, Bishop Ned is the son of an archdeacon and the grandson of a Bishop of Cork. Even more incidentally, the local Ascendancy aristocrat is known as the Hereditary Knight of Kerry, and the present holder of that title is ... a Patron of the Latin Mass Society! It's a small world!

So: why was his Lordship Bishop Darling "getting a bit tired" of the Bread of Life?

The Church of Ireland was, I regret to say, using the very same Eucharistic Lectionary adopted after Vatican II by most of the Latin Church. This was constructed on the principle of a three-year Sunday Gospel cycle: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. (S John appeared on special occasions.) But S Mark's Gospel was a bit short ... and so it was padded out by having S John's 'Eucharistic Discourse' (John 6) divided up and interpolated into the Marcan sequence of readings. This meant that, every "Year B", one had no fewer than four successive Sundays (in high summer too, with the mackerel biting in the bay and the myrtles around Glanleam in full blossom) in which one ought to be preaching about the Bread of Life. Yes; I know; one can't say too much about that. But four Sundays in a row every third year seems a tadge unsophisticated as an arrangement.

I know this sort of thing does not worry many of the Mainstream clergy of the Catholic Church, who only fall back on preaching from the Readings on occasions when they can't think of anything really interesting to say; but Bishop Ned, being only an Anglican, was a conscientious homilist. 

We were recently told by arthur roche that the Usus Deterior is very "rich", and I can see a tiny something of what the poor fellow has in mind. Sunday worshippers do nowadays liturgically hear things which, in the days of the Usus Authenticus of the Roman Rite, were not set before them on Sundays or special days. In the UA, we get parts of John 6:25-to-end only on Corpus Christi and All Souls' Day.

But Bishop Darling's light-hearted throwaway witticism, cleverly concealing a very powerful point, made me wonder whether the methodology behind the 1960s creation of a new Eucharistic Lectionary de novo ... with no basis whatsoever in Tradition ... really was as clever as most people (including me) thought it was half a century ago.

Scissors-and-paste is not the only valid liturgical methodology. Scissors can be a very blunt instrument!

Fas est ab Anglicanis doceri!

Promotions in the Army List

I have been reminded that Arthur Roche once served as factotum to the distinguished former Bishop of Leeds, Gordon Wheeler, of whom I intend to publish an appreciation upon the occasion of his Year's Mind in a few days' time.

I was, indeed, aware of that fact. But, as every military man knows, it is almost always a mistake to turn a passable sergeant into not a very good officer.

Restructuring the CDF

My first reaction to the restructuring of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was ... relief! The Ordinariates will remain within its competences! This must surely mean that Arthur Roche, who shares PF's profoundly mistaken view that liturgical uniformity is essential to Unity of Faith, may not find it so easy to get his twitchy hands on the worship of the Ordinariates. (The other good news in this area is that the American Ordinary, the intelligent and affable Bishop Lopes, was elected boss of the liturgical department of the USA Episcopal Conference ... which must usefully enhance his standing in Rome.) Cardinal Ladaria, the current Prefect of the CDF, has shown himself a man of principle: when the question of blessing homosexual relationships came up, he resisted PF and uttered a negative. This meant that the CDF response was not (as is usual) "approved and ordered to be published" by the pope; and, soon after, PF preached another of his favourite rants about Rigid People.

My pleasure, however, was short-lived. I read the rumours that Ladaria, who is already well past the 'retirement age', might be replaced by Archbishop Scicluna. He is on record as having uttered one of the most stark, comprehensive, and pure articulations of the Bergoglianical error:

"Whoever wishes to discover what Jesus wants from him, he must ask the pope, this pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that. This present pope."

I ... and you ... should never pass hasty judgments. But I find it hard to believe that such a person is fit to occupy such a sensitive post.