Mueller (1) and Mueller (2)

Mueller (1): It is ... erroneous to think that a council or a pope could annul an earlier dogma or stipulate, for example, that the nature of the sacrament of Holy Orders does not include the reqirement of the male sex of its recipient. ... in an extreme case, a pope could become heretic as a private person and thus automatically lose his office if the contradiction to the revelation and the dogmatic teaching of the Church is evident".

Mueller (2): "the rainbow flag ... is a public rejection of the Christian image of man ... they have replaced the Apostles' Creed with the creed of the idols of a neo-pagan religion."

Do you pray daily that Jorge Bergoglio may die a Catholic?

ORDO ... ... ORDO!

This is a time of the year when those of us who offer daily the August Sacrifice ... and /or say the Divine Office ... find our minds turning to the thought of Next Year's ORDO. 

One really does need an ORDO to know what's going on liturgically, day by day.

Real traddies, using the Sarum Rite, needed to resort to PICA, of which Thomas Cranmer wrote "the nombre and hardnes of the rules called the pie and the manifold changings of the service, was the cause, that to turne the boke only, was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times, there was more busines to fynd out what should be read, then to read it when it was founde out."

Coming down to near-modernity: in the Good Old Days when the Roman Rite was endearingly complex, and the Ordo was in Latin, the one to get was one which still survives annually today, and which I very strongly commend: the Saint Lawrence Press Ordo [59 Sandscroft Avenue, Broadway, Worcestershire, WR12 7EJ]. There you found and still find the full glory of privileged octaves, common vigils, doubles of the Second Class, you name it, all just as it was before Bugnini's chum Eugenio Pacelli, sometimes known as Pius XII, started the long gruesome process still known by the gullible as 'Reform'. These were the days (1923) when Mgr Ronald Knox wrote a spoof review of " ... the unpretentious but tastefully produced booklet that reaches us from Burns, Oates, & Washbourne, entitled Ordo Recitandi Divini Officii, etc., (1/6 net). The author modestly preserves anonymity, nor does he betray his identity by any marked individuality of treatment; but his colleagues will be glad to welcome a piece of solid work from his pen, and will not fail to recognise his painstaking attention to detail and his terse, nervous Latinity ... "

In the C of E, we often used the Ordo of the nearest Popish diocese; thus one can work out that Eric Mascall's The Ultra Catholic (1959) probably lived within the geographical Archdiocese of Westminster: "The psalms of Dahvid I recite in heaven's own native Latin./And though I don't quite understand those awkward moods and tenses,/ My ordo recitandi's strict Westmonasteriensis." [The Wantage Sisters still produced up to 1969 an English ORDO " ... in strict accordance with the use of the Western Church."]

Back down to earth and the Novus Ordo: I still edit annually an Anglican ORDO; curiously, the calendars of readings  currently guaranteed by the Authority of the General Synod are (I mean this seriously) very much more complex than Pie or anything in Sarum, so you do need a lectionary. The Ordinariate offers an extremely nice ORDO based upon the (much preferable) Anglican rules of 1961. 

The Latin Mass Society provides a very neat (and recently reconfigured) ORDO for the 1962 rite. The SSPX ... I think ....

One thing to check: do you need an ORDO which provides for local Saints? If so, you should make sure you get an ORDO which does actually do this. It really does matter; around this time of the year, various dioceses prescribe(d) S Willibrord; S Justus; Holy Abbots Hugh Cook, Richard Whiting, and John Beche. 

TODAY ... for example ... you wouldn't want to have missed S Edmund Rich, of Abendon, Oxford, and Canterbury, Patron of the Catholic diocese of Portsmouth ... would you? 

Or ... in the next few days ... S Margaret of Scotland, S Hugh, S Hilda or S Edmund of Edmundsbury ...

The LMS ORDO does give all such local information; so does an American SSPX ORDO, which encompasses all the dioceses of the the entire Anglophone world. 

ME AND THE GERMAN BISHOP

No sooner had I written my piece for 11/10/22 than a German Bishop gratifyingly provided me with a precise exemplum of exactly the point I was making.

I am therefore repeating my post for 11/10/22, in red. 

But first I will give you, in black, the observation of the German bishop, updated by me in just one word so as to clarify why I disagree so strongly with the bishop. 

It is followed by my original article in red.

"We cannot give paedophile people the answer that their feelings are unnatural and that therefore they must live celibate lives. As a Church, we have to answer these questions in a new way", said Bishop Helmut Dieser.

 

One can never turn on one's computer without reading a load of Stuff composed by skilled Stuff-manufacturers about our necessary openness to all sorts of minorities, especially sexual ... L ... B ... G ...  + ...  +  ... and all the rest.

In these apparently, graciously, exhaustive lists, which seem to grow ever longer, I never see the paedophile or epheberast communities sympathetically listed as minorities deserving our enthusiastic understanding and acceptance.

Why not?

Are they not human Beings? Are they not Loved by God? Are they not "Made the way they are" by God?

I do, admittedly, reject logically the idea that their lifestyle is acceptable, because I personally accept the radical Catholic assertions directing and limiting the use of sexuality. Accordingly, I believe that Adultery, Sapphism, Sodomy, Bestiality, Fornication, Masturbation, Polyamorism, Dendrophilia, Ichthyerastia, and a lot of other things are inevitably excluded by the Christian imperative of Chastity.

But I am prepared to deal humanly, and courteously to speak with, those who subscribe to those and to all other such lifestyles; and to treat them lovingly as Children of the Almighty, protecting them, as far as in me lies, against aggression in thought, word, and deed. Even German  'remarried divorcees' ... as long as they obediently pay their Church Tax ... need not fear so much as a rough word from me. I share Sir Max Beerbohm's evident sympathy for bulldogs like Corker, although, possibly, I might have advised that catholic animal to mitigate his Growl. Meden agan.

Now will somebody explain to me ...

... why those Catholics ... including priests, bishops, cardinals and popes ... who appear to entertain tolerant sentiments with regard to Adulterers, Sapphists, Sodomites, Fornicators, and the rest, seem so much more shy about explicitly including paederasts and ephebophiles among the exemplary groups whom they accept and uphold? Whom they ecclesially and socially validate ... to whom they say "Who am I to judge you?"

They seem just the weeniest bit nervous about praising and encouraging paedophilia (for example) publicly and robustly. Why?

Is there some elephant in this (rather crowded) room that, with my moral myopia, I haven't noticed?

Should I try to get out-and-about a bit more?

Parsons Galore

I bet you've never been described as a "minister".

It must be some fifty years since I was last described. The family was on holiday in the South of Scotland, and we desired entry to a Church of Scotland church which contained one of those marvellous 'Anglian' carved crosses. When the aged crone who kept the key had got my profession straight, "Och", she cried, "ye're a meeenister". 

I once found a similar but much more culturally nuanced crone in County Kerry (Ireland does very good quality crones and the Kerry ones are best of all). I had knocked on a cabin door in the hope of finding a boatman to take me across the straights to an ancient monastic settlement on a tiny island called Illaunloghan. As she retired into the back room I heard her describing  me to her husband in awed tones as the Pairson. Although I have never held a benefice, I have an ineradicable weakness for that nice old term. I would never bridle at it. Infinitely better than the fearful (American?) vocative "Reverend". 

I came across Parson later in a Breton church when I was looking at a bilingual monument to a former Parish Priest. The French version called him the Cure; the Breton, Parsoun. And you find it in medieval texts in the old Cornish language. 

(Don't worry, I did get the boat.)

In the novels of Dorothy 'Patrimony' Sayers, full of accurate observation of the verbal usages and social delicacies of the 1930s, I recall an account of an old West Countryman telling an anecdote concluding with the words "And Old Parson [i.e. a previous incumbent], how he did laugh!" 

Parson' also has a whiff about it of Anthony 'Patrimony' Trollope and the rooks cawing over the Close at Barchester [Which English word is Trollope implying sounds exactly like a covine clamour? Does it rhyme with snore?]. And, of course,there are all those well-worn much-loved Edwardian jokes ("What do Hell and the Smoking Room of the Athenaeum have in common?" "You can't see the fire for parsons".).

I think we need to restore this decent usage in the Ordinariate. They don't need it any more in the Church of England, because their country churches are mostly now in the hands of ladies of a certain age who prefer to be addressed and referred to as Jill or Jan or Jen and are sometimes cohabiting with a lady called Jen or Jan or Jill. 

Come to think of it, the most authentic old-style Parson I can think of is the emeritus Bishop of Ebbsfleet (now disguised as a popish priest and pastoring a couple of the learned and admirable Dr Egan's country churches). 

 I'm pretty sure he has never once ridden to hounds without wearing gaiters.

New Light on Royal History

(1) Last Saturday, a most astonishing announcement appeared in The Times. A revolutionary piece of information about the reign of Tudor Minor AKA 'Henry VIII'.

Writing about the current proprietors of Castle Howard, The Times refers to them as "unassuming folk who happen to be able  to trace their ancestry to Anne Boleyn".

Wow!!  Wotta Girl! Did AB squeeze in a neat little bastard or two during her incestuous affair with her brother George? Or did Anne's only acknowledged child, 'Queen Elizabeth I' AKA Bloody Bess, have her own little ... er ... miscalculation? Life must have been most terribly awfully boring during all those long decades being a "Virgin Queen" at a time when even bishops (mostly neither Virgins nor Queens) had wives.

 

(2) On Sunday morning, the Beeb ran a lot of 'royal' stuff, in the course of which King Charles [shall we, as a compromise, call him Charles III bis?] was described as taking part, for the first time, "as a Moderate".

Does the Beeb have some dirt on Charles III's earlier, more extreme, political affiliations? Are they going to blow the gaffe and tell us that, at the horrible School he was sent to, he had the nickname 'Blackshorts'? Wodehouse enthusiasts have the right to be told why, among his several appellations, the name Spode fails to make the cut.

Later in the day, Auntie suppressed the word 'moderate' and, instead, called Charles a 'Momnarch' [sic]. Surely, that is a title more fitting for his Mother?

The texture of Establishment English is so suggestively rich.

 

WARE (2): Challoner the liturgist.

Challoner was consecrated a Coadjutor Bishop in 1741; succeeded to the London Vicariate in 1758; and died in 1781. The most interesting of his memorabilia carefully preserved and beautifully exhibited at Ware, is a small sheaf of handwritten papers, labelled 'Challoner's Lectures at Douay' vel sim.. I was only able to see the top sheet (the case was of course locked), but these were clearly not 'lectures'; I think some well-meaning but unlatinate Keeper must have been misled by the word 'lectio'. What they are is something which seems to me potentially much more interesting: a Supplementum pro Anglia of a Breviary. Readers will know that clergy reciting their Office follow the Calendar of the Universal Church except when the local supplement provides for the observance of local Saints or Devotions. Nowadays, each Diocese has its own Supplementum, which is bound in at the back of each volume of the Breviary. But, in a Breviary I possess of 1874 (formerly in the library of my late dear friend Fr Michael Melrose, Vicar of S Giles, Reading, who was denied entry to the Ordinariate by his sudden death), the Supplementum is not diocesan but national (Anglia). I wonder when this Supplementum was created, and by whom. Does this evidence from Ware give us the answer: By Challoner?

You will recall that these papers of Challoner's are handwritten. It is not easy to know why a Vicar Apostolic was using handwritten propers to say his Office if a printed Supplementum, approved as such things were by the Sacred Congregation of Rites, had been available. And here's something else. These sheets contain, I think in Challoner's hand, alterations, emendations.

My theory, quite possibly wrong since I only had ten minutes and only saw the top sheet and have been able to conduct no relevant researches, is that Challoner may here be constructing an English National Supplementum himself, and then tweaking it year by year as he himself prays his own drafts. I would be fascinated if those more erudite in such sidewaters of the history of the Roman Rite could explode or supplement my thoughts with data (such as, of course, a printed Supplementum pro Anglia  predating Challoner!). And when did the SCR start authorising local Supplementa?

If, however my preliminary musings are right, then what we have here is a Bishop, the presiding Liturgist of his Particular Church, still exercising a right of liturgical composition (not so terribly surprising in a century in which the 'Gallican' bishops of France continued to do exactly that; cfr. ex. gr. the Missale Parisiense of 1738). And we would also have one of the last examples of the transmission of liturgical texts manu scripti. And we would have a creative intervention of Challoner's not unlike his own radical revision of the Douay-Rheims Bible; his composition of The Garden of the Soul, Brittania Sancta, the British Martyrology; and so many other works.

He was providing a complete Catholic culture for an English Church which did not yet possess one. 

WARE (1): S Edmund of Abingdon and Canterbury; and Bishop Challoner

Together with the Birmingham and Brompton Oratories, the Chapel at Ware is one of the candidates I would put forth if I were asked to nominate three Catholic churches to survive a holocaust. It was built before the English Church had cathedrals, and so it in many ways has the feel of a Cathedral, particularly of the London District. This is partly because of the numbers of Vicars Apostolic buried there, or remembered by chantries; and, aesthetically, it is the product of A W Pugin's successful realisation of the spirit of late Gothic Christianity. 

I think he would have been pleased to see it in heavy use around dawn when traddy clerics are in residence: the murmur, the tinkling of bells, as priests and their servers take turns saying their private Masses at the (is it six?) altars. There are also many relics, and a beautiful Shrine Chapel of S Edmund of Abendon*, containing a femur of the Saint brought from his shrine at Pontigny. He also features prominently in the glass.

The College also has fascinating museum items. I feel an interest in Bishop Challoner, V.A. of the London District, partly because I have been able to say Mass from his Missal in the recusant Chapel at Milton Manor near Oxford, where Challoner liked to stay and where he was buried in the Squire's vault inside the Anglican Parish Church. (The prayer for his beatification is said after each Mass at Milton.) 

Ware possesses the lead crucifix which was on his original coffin (before the poor fellow was exhumed and carted off to Westminster Cathedral). It has his splendid tall baroque mitre, exhibited beside a Puginesque Gothic mitre about a tenth of its height! And various other memorabilia.  

* Yes; I think that is the correct, or historical, way of spelling Abingdon. I love this great Saint's festival in November, and enjoy visiting the Church  there  ... full of allusions to the Order of Malta.

Martinus, nunquam vincendus, contra Lupos victor!

I love these special days when our brilliant and gracious Church of the Latin Rite asks us to use the Sunday psalms at Lauds ... and encourages this by providing 'proper' antiphons for those psalms. I expect that, at some point in its exemplary ministery, NLM has explained the history of this.

And November 11, Feast of S Martin, thoroughly deserves such a distinction. Few saints as superbly mark the transition from the Roman Empire to the Christianity-based institutions in which civilisation was recovered and enhanced and perpetuated.

Two completely different questions, but both arising from today's 'lauds' antiphons.

(1) The reference to lupi rapaces. So reminiscent of the words, perhaps a self-warning, uttered by Benedict XVI during the Inauguration of his Petrine Miniistry. Was that a far-sighted prophecy of what that particular Roman Pontiff saw as an imminent threat in his own time? Or is it true, in every age and every pontificate, that the wolves are already circling the encampment and howling; always ready to snatch and to devour; to wound and to destroy?

I wonder if Benedict XVI realised that the identity of his own 'wolves' would be so ineluctably bound up with the character and particular corruptions of his own successor!

(2) The use in today's Office of the gerundive vincendus. For decades, I have had a nagging suspicion that some writers, in both 'Classical' and 'post-Classical' Latin, used the gerundive, when it suited them, as a future passive participle. 

I expect reference to standard grammatical handbooks would afford me instruction, but with age I am getting lazier. Perhaps the same will happen to you.

Lupos vincere et debellare valeamus!

UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2) Newman, the Mass and Office

Surely, the liturgical celebration of S John Henry Newman calls for attention. 

The most moving small room in the world, I believe, is at Birmingham, where the Saint's study contains his intimate library, including his Breviary. Even as an Anglican, Newman held the Roman Breviary is the very highest regard. He was convinced that, if Anglicans actually opened it and looked at it, they would be stunned, awed, by what they would find. 

What is now needed is a full provision (with three nocturns) of whatever liturgical formulae are required to enable the celebration of his Feast in whatever version of the Roman Breviary may be called for by different people and different groups. 

And proper provision for [the Tridentine] Mass, on his festival, and at Votives, is needed. 

And, in that same little room, behind a screen, is the altar at which Newman offered, morning by morning, the August Sacrifice.

Newman gives us this encomium of the Tridentine Mass, on the lips of "Willis": "I declare, to me, nothing is so consoling, so piercing, so thrilling, so overcoming as the Mass, said as it is among us. I could attend Masses for ever, and not be tired. It is not a mere form of words--it is a great action, the greatest action that can be on earth. It is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare to use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble. This is that awful event which is the end, and is the interpretation, of every part of the solemnity."

I have often wondered about the six words I have rendered here in red. Why did our Saint put them in to this passage?

Did Newman, with the eyes of his very great holiness, discern and look into a future when the Holy Mass, "said as it is among us", might again have to be fought for, suffered for; during a sort of corporate martyrdom when wicked men would strain their every sinew to destroy such a divine wonder?

No longer over the water

Today, November 8, is the Anniversary of the day when HRH the Prince Regent, later HM King Charles III, entered the Kingdom of England at the head of his army. An occasion for a loyal toast?

When the family was young, we used to have fireworks, and a bonfire on which an effigy was burned.

All things shall be well, when the King shall have his own again. Vivat Rex!

UNFINISHED BUSINESS (1)

Fr Ker's demise, naturally, pushes S John Henry's importance to the front of our mind. And the most important Unfinished Business is, surely, the question of his proclamation as Doctor of the Church.

I hope ... I pray ... that this aim will be given the same enthusism and priority as were the beatification and canonisations themselves.

 

Ian Ker

The death has been announced of Fr Ian Ker, cuius animae propitietur Deus.

An acute obituarist recalls the description of Fr Ian as the greatest biographer of England's greatest Saint. I believe that is remarkably true. I do not think we have ever had a greater Saint than S John Henry Newman. And all the woffle we used to hear about his influence on, or relevance to, Vatican II, completely missed the point.

And the point about Newman is not that he was a brave liberal heroically witnessing to unpopular liberal truths which, only in the years after 1962, have received due recognition.

If anything, the diametrical opposite is the Truth. Saint John Henry bore witness, even when he received a 'calvinist' conversion, to the heretical nature of indifferentist liberalism; in effect, of our current Bergoglianity.

Reviewing Ker's book, Henry Chadwick wrote "[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."

I would add to that an appreciation of Newman's precision. In his treatment of the Syllabus of Errors, he beautifully demonstrates the necessity for painstaking accuracy necessary in the analysis of Magisterial documents and their status. 

Is Fr Ker's book still in print? The paper-back copy on my shelves has practically fallen apart. 

Its glory rests in the utterly tolerant way Ker permitted Newman to speak for himself.