AUCTORITAS in Liturgy

 Well, having used the Propers for S Joseph on the Wednesday after the Second Sunday after Easter, I can only say how Scriptural, how inspired by the spirit of Typology, I found them. And Genesis 49, with its Benedictions ... Wow! No wonder the confectors of the Post-Conciliar Lectionary ... charged with their Conciliar Mission of expanding the amount of Holy Scripture to be shared with the laity ... decided, er, entirely, um, to (Yes!!) miss it out! God bless them wherever they are. No prizes for suggestions!

Yet, curiously, the Novus Ordo can sometimes be just that weeny bit more welcoming to some healthy liturgical instincts than the 1962 Rite was. Here is what the post-Vatican-II revisers of the Calendar wrote in their (1969) Commentarius:

"The Feast of Ss Philip and James is connected with the dedication of the Roman Basilica of the XII Apostles, performed on May 1 around the year 570. This incredibly ancient [perantiquum] feast of the Apostles was transferred, after the introduction of the feast of S Joseph the Workman in 1955, to the first free day, i.e. to May 11. In the [Novus Ordo] reformed Calendar, May 3 becomes the first free day after the Memoria of S Joseph."

Notice here the tug, the magnetic attraction, of the concept of Auctoritas ... respect for antiquity and for long-sanctioned and far-respected praxis ... a respect which survives even the lately-arrived assumption that positive legal enactment, the whimsy of the latest pontiff, can somehow trump every other consideration. "The Three Maniacs" (sic Bouyer) knew that May 1 was the real day for Pip and Jim ... they instinctively wanted to get the pair of them ... at least ... as close as possible ... to Their Correct Day, May 1. Poor confused poppets.

And please also notice this. In the Novus Ordo S Joseph the Workman is made Optional. Practically, this means that on May 1 you can "lawfully" say a Votive Mass of Ss P and J (as, indeed, of anybody). And, in many years, you might very possibly also be free to say a votive of S Joseph on the Wednesday after the Second Sunday after Easter. 

But, in 1962, the liturgical observation of the Workman (like a dying whale marooned high up a sluggish river) retained the rank of a heavily armoured First Class Sollemnity on May 1.

POST SCRIPTUM

Wise people who keep an eye on the wise St Lawrence Press ORDO will have noticed that, today, Sunday April 30, "all Masses except the Conventual may be of the Solemnity of S Joseph", i.e. as last Wednesday. This is an agreeable relic of the earlier period when S Joseph was fixed onto the Sunday rather than onto the Wednesday. It is also a relic of an incredibly important instinct that, if clergy spend generations encouraging the People of God to follow some or other pious practice, it really isn't quite decent, all of a sudden, overnight, before breakfast (see the final words of Traditionis custodes), to start sticking up great big unfriendly notices saying VERBOTEN or ACHTUNG MINEN. 

What a shame nobody ever explained Auctoritas to the Clevers of the 1960s or to Argentinian Altar-Boys.

(Last Gospel, of course, of the Sunday. You realised that was coming, didn't you?)

"Occasionally" Cantalamessa

In his remarkable homily on the "forth" [sic] Sunday of Lent, Cardinal Cantalamessa said: "I have great respect for the venerable Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman Canon, and love to use it occasionally, being the one with which I was ordained a priest.".

"Occasionally". What the General Instruction says is that this Prayer, Prayer I, is: "semper adhiberi potest". It does not say that about any other Eucharistic Prayer. It goes on to recommend it (opportunius dicitur) in Masses where there is a proper Hanc igitur provided; on festivals of Saints and and Apostles which get a mention in this Prayer; and on Sundays.

[It recommends that Prayer II, the ultra-brief pseudo-Hippolytan prayer, be used (opportunius sumitur) on weekdays.] 

I don't know what the total number of days when Prayer I, the Roman Canon, would be used if these recommendations of the Instructio were followed ... but I think it comes to something rather more than "occasionally".

In any case, it rather looks as though the Roman Canon is the 'fall-back' canon to be used unless there are pressing reasons for using another one.

So that is what the Novus Ordo itself actually recommends.

"Occasionally", indeed. [The three languages in which this homily was published offer these versions: of the English "occasionally": ancora qualche volta; a veces; encore parfois.]

It is noticeable that friends of the Novus Ordo, such as Cantalamessa, are very shy about playing their own favoured game according to its own recommended rules. 

Ecclesiae Doctor?

 Although not yet so declared, S Louis Grignion de Montfort must surely be a Doctor of the Church. As well as founding religious congregations, he was a New Apostle of Britanny. His name and his ministry came before a greater number of Catholics more recently when S John Paul II took for his own motto the words of S Louis Totus Tuus, relating to our blessed Lady.

Today is his Festival, his memoria. (Appendix pro aliquibus locis.)

I wrote about him on this blog a couple of years ago; about how he came one quiet evening into the little Breton village of La Cheze; found the people people kneeling around a statue of our Lady, in the porch of the Church of La Trinite. Much moved, he gave the statue the title of Our Lady of Light. This devotion he spread (Notre Dame de Clarte; Itron Varia ar Sklerder). A year or so ago a friend of mine, who likes to explore Britanny, discovered (and she kindly photographed it for me) a little chapel of our Lady under this title, associated with the ... incredibly unusual ... figure of Father Sir Harry Trelawney, Baronet, who brought the cult to Cornwall (the shrine is now at Clacton on sea in Essex, together with a fine statue of Grignion.)

Father Faber translated S Grignion's masterpiece Treatise on the True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin:  in his Preface he wrote about how the Saint died at the age of forty three in 1716, after only sixteen years in the sacred priesthood. Faber himself died, exhausted by his labours, at the age of forty-nine. 

Is there, perhaps, a particular and wonderful charism in the Church, of great missionary priests, opponents of Jansenism, who drive themselves to an early death by their Gospel labours?

Mainly for Lexicographers

 (1) Anglophone readers will be familiar with a ?newish sense of the verb to see.

"I suppose I had better admit that that I've been seeing someone else."

 I interpret this to mean that the speaker probably has been doing something more 'hands on' than mere visual contemplation, however intense.

And I wonder how far back such a quaint, nervous, circumlocution might go.

Back in the nineteen twenties, Mrs Miles (Angela) Bredon declines to agree to taking part in a meeting with the Catholic Bishop of Pullford. 

"I don't think I shall come and see the Bishop. It doesn't sound quite proper, somehow. ..."

(2) "To date". I presume this originally referred to a female "co-ed" looking through her diary and offering an importunate youth a 'date' within its pages. 

But I become more and more suspicion that, nowadays, it means "to meet for purposes of sexual intercourse". As in a recent newspaper heading about a woman claiming to have remained friendly with all four of the men she has married; and with all whom she has "dated".

Genocide

 How barbarous, that the present Turkish State continues even now to behave aggressively towards those who continue to remember the Armenian Genocide.

I wonder how many of those who suffered in the recent earthquake were descended from those who murdered and raped and robbed the Armenian populations of the area.

God bless Pope Francis for having, early in his pontificate, spoken openly and frankly about one of the most terrible events of the last century; an event still unrepented. 

Yes; it wasn't only Armenians who suffered: I remember with much respect the horribly martyred hierarch S Chrysostom of Smyrna, the shepherd who did not desert his flock.

But Armenians are entitled, surely, to at least one day in 365. I wonder what the Starmers of this world will have to say about them today.

Whither S George?

(1) Could  a medievalist explain the thirteen hundreds to me?

In the middle of the century, we find much play with S George and the symbolism of the Garter. 

But when we get to the end of the century, not a whisker.

As I look at the Wilton Diptych, S George ... and the ideology of the Garter ... are dogs that just don't bark in the night. 

Is it a matter of regime-change? Is there any evidence in the Garter archives?

The liturgical dispositions at Exeter by Bishop Grandisson, fourteenth century, include S George with a very low liturgical rank. When the Sarum Rite, in the Tudor period, attains the dignity of lots of printed editions, S George is still on a low liturgical rank.

I'm glad Benedict XIV felt he had to proclaim S George "Protector" [not "Patron", apparently] of the Kingdom ... but I feel there's somehow something missing in my understanding of the development of the cultus.

Does Shakespeare come into the story? Don't tell me that George is partly a fabrication of the Tudor lie-machine ... that would be just too much to swallow ...

(2) I trust that (English) clerical readers used the Proper (i.e. Sunday's) Last Gospel yesterday, at the end of their Masses of S George.

Before the Vile Disruptions, when a Day with its own Proper Gospel was reduced to a Commemoration by another supplanting celebration (as Sunday II post Pascha was yesterday by S George), the Reduced Day was commemorated by having its Collect, Secret, and Post-Communion read after those of the Supplanting Day ... and its Proper Gospel replaced the Johannine Prologue at the end of Mass.

This is in the Spirit of Vatican II (Some of you people seem never to have heard of the Spirit, the vital all-important SPIRIT, of Vatican II) which requires more Bible to be shared with the People (Sacrosanctum Concilium 51). 

When, after the Great Restoration, I am Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, I shall send the most ruthless members of my dicasterial Gestapo round banging on the doors of clergy who don't read Proper Last Gospels.

Our National Patron?

As the Feast of S George is upon us, I venture to remind English Reverend Brethren in the Sacred Priesthood of the Proper Preface for Patrons authorised in 2020 by the CDF. It came originally from the Patis Missal of 1738, having been composed by Dr Laurent-Francois Boursier [I think he's buried somewhere called, er, Chardonnet). The SSPX used it in France, to which it had been granted by long-standing indult. It has been thought to have a whiff of Jansenism about it: I can't see why ... it seems to me intelligently biblical.

Some time ago, there was a proposal that there should be a Patron Saint of the United Kingdom. I found it strange that such an ephemeral institution as "the Yew Kay" should have a Patron.

All political arrangements are transient and flawed. And the Yew Kay more so than most. It had its genesis in the unwholesome imperatives of the whig agenda after the Dutch Invasion; it subsumed Ireland only in 1800; it then lost most of that island after little more than a century of bungled misrule; and this same Yew Kay retains only a questionable and fiercely debated hold over that part of our own island which Whiggery tried to rename North Britain. 

It seems to me that a much more useful sense of identity is urged by the suggestion in Fr Aidan Nichols' The Realm that Christians should think of having a bipolar existence. We belong to a cultural construct which is 'at once internationalist as the Church of all nations, and yet patriotic'. And surely our priority must be S Paul's striking metaphor that our politeuma is from above: our real passports are issued neither by England nor by the Yew Kay, but in heaven. 

That is why S George is such an totally ideal Patron for England. He's all the more 'ours' because he never even came here! Indeed, Provincia Brittannia had not even become Angleland when S George bore witness. He reminds us that faith in Christ, even unto death, is what takes priority ... by several thousand miles ... over all narrower loyalties.  

According to lectio iv for the dioceses of England at Mattins today, S George was declared Protector of the Kingdom of England by that admirable Pontiff, Benedict XIV, at a time when, according to the constitutional assertion of the intruding Hannoverian Regime, there was no such thing as a kingdom either of England or of Scotland, because they had both been abolished in 1707 by the Act of Union!

This does rather set me wondering. The pontificate of Prospero Lambertini, 1740-1758, was a time when the Holy See recognised the exiled Stuart king de jure, James III, to be King of England. King James it was who formally nominated our Vicars Apostolic. 

And King James (like his successor in 1766, King Charles III) had adopted, for his incognito title, Chevalier de S Georges.

Was that Holy Father deftly seeking heavenly assistance for our de jure liege lord Charles III?

If the Yew Kay were to have its own patron Saint, S Theodore would be my nominee: a Greek-speaking Syrian monk sent by a Pope of Rome to be Archbishop of Canterbury.

 

Mags, Martyrs, and Memorials (1)

It's just to the North of Mags churchyard in Oxford; indeed, to be precise, it was built on land which had previously been part of Mags churchyard. It commemorated three clerical gentlemen executed just a few yards round the corner, in the Broad Street. But by the 1830s, with the growth of traffic, you couldn't agitate for building memorials in thoroughfares. Indeed, an earlier projected Martyrs' Memorial bestriding the Broad Street (Edward Tatham 1777), was never built. It would have been a rather fey, Adamsish, confection, including statues of the two bishops (mitred!!) and the words CHRISTUS TRIUMPHAT SANGUINE SUORUM.

So when, in the late 1830s, a movement erupted in Oxford for a memorial to be built to those three, the Northerrn tip of Mags churchyard looking up the wide expanse of S Giles Street to the church of S Giles, was the best available spot.

But this was more than just the erection of any memorial. The building of this memorial was right at the heart of the fierce ecclesiastical politics which were tearing Anglican Oxford apart. 

Oxford had been the centre of Anglican life and doctrine for ceturies. But, recently, a new movement had arisen which seemed set ... and was set ... to destroy Anglican Oxford. That movement appeared to call in question many of the settled assumptions of Anglican Oxford.

Hence there developed a brilliant polemical strategy among the party of those who most admired both Reformers and Reformation. If, so hey thought, we build, by public subscription, a memorial to Archbishop Cranmer and bishops Latimer and Ridley, then, they thought, we shall be able to smoke these Tractarian traitors out of their burrows. Either they will speak up and pay up for this monument to the Reformation martyyrs and heroes ... or, if they don't, they will have been exposed as traitors to the Reformation; as enemiesof Protestant Truth and perverts to the errors and tyrannies of Romanism. 

Gotcha, they believed, both ways.

But they didn't know [S John Henry] Newman. He sensed that Cranmer, in particular, would not stand up to scrutiny as a candidate for proposed public honours. "Cranmer will not stand examination--they are worst friends to him who put him up to be criticised--they are best friends who keep silence ...  Men are for him now--they will be less and less so. The more he is talked of, the less he will be borne." 

 But would refusal to subscribe to this partisan project rouse a clamour againt himself and those associated with him? To his life-long woman friend and confidante Maria Giberne, he wrote "Clamour makes our principles known--and then tires, and leaves us to prove them."

The  Memorial was indeed erected, in the first couple of years of the 1840s. 

It was not at all like Tatham's project.

To be continued.

O Frabjous Day! Callooh, Callay!

Some big rocket in America has blown up on take-off; the sponsoring organisation, I think I heard, referred to this as an "Erratic unscheduled disassembly".

Superb!!

When some other rocket exploded, some years ago, I recall that the then president (Reagan?) referred to the crew as "having touched the face of God".

I am aware that many people think that I have become too pro-American in my old age. To show that we brits are just as capable as Americans of writing totally and serenely incomprehensible gibberish, allow me to quote some words from the Looking Glass of Lewis Caroll.

"He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought-- So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought.

"And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood. And burbled as it came!

"One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back.

" ' And hast thou slain the Jabberwock! Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy ..."

This poetic masterpiece was rendered into equally sublime Attic Greek iambics by Mgr Ronald Knox, Protonotary Apostolic and Master of Arts of this University.  'burbling' became borbolismos; 'went snicker-snack', esnixen exesnaxen; galumphing', gaukhoumenos; O frabjous day became O trisbakarton emar ...

BRILLIG!! Even, perhaps, UFFISH!

 

Knock; Biden; babies.

I do not believe that a priest , bishop, or deacon, should always preach against Abortion. Doing so, risks creating a sense that the homilist has only one message; and lacks balance.

Nor is it always a good thing to speak publicly about this or any other great evil. Doing so, might cause some people to claim or to feel that the homilist is using the pulpit to advantage one particular political interest. "A quiet word" might, indeed, sometimes be most appropriate.

So I was not too disturbed about the welcome given to Mr Biden at the Shrine of our Lady of Knock. Perhaps the Shrine Administrator ... or the Diocesan Bishop ... did take the opportunity gently and pastorally to commend to him the Church's teaching, but did it well away from the ears of the media.

But the Biden/Knock event does still worry me. There was once, I think I remember, a time when some American Politicians approached the question of Abortion by claiming that they were (personally!) opposed to it; but, they suggested, they were approaching the question by grappling with social problems, such as poverty, in order to eliminate the motives which impelled women to seek such a horrific 'remedy'. I was far from easy about this approach; but I do feel that Biden (in any case) has moved on from such formulae  to what sounds to me like an unqualified support of Abortion.

There have been rumours that the entire liturgical programme at Knock was put on hold for the presidential visit. If true, this, apart from any other consideration, disquiets me.

All of this feeds a distinct sense of uneasiness in my mind about the public stance of the Irish Catholic Church regarding Biden's overt complicity in this mass-murder of the unborn.

I am not either American or Irish or both, and am therefore (wide) open to the accusation of putting my foot in and pontificating about matters wherein I have no competence; and which are none of my business anyway. But the Catholic Church claims universality, and this makes grave moral issues a matter of concern to any and every Catholic in every and any land at any and every time.

Can anybody set my anxieties at rest?

RATZINGER 1961 (2)

"Early Catholic theology  ... uses the word 'apostolic' in a very precise and and strictly limited sense. It is used to designate only that very limited number of sees standing in a special, verifiable, historic relation to the apostles, a relation other sees do not enjoy ... Thus, the catholicity of a see was not measured simply by its size, but by its 'weight', or importance; that importance, however, depended on apostolicity. ...

"... when the Church thus first undertook consciously to define her own nature, i.e., to formulate the 'canon' of her being, was neither an episcopal theology nor indeed a papal theology. It was dual ... the duality  ... has nothing to do with later patriarchal theory. ... The more New Rome  ... obscured the old idea of the apostolic see in favour of the patriarchal concept, the more Old Rome emphasised the completely different origin and nature of its authority ...

" The majority of the bishops has, from time immemorial in the Chuch, been determined not simply by the externally greater number, but by the 'weight' of the sees."

 

A revised list ...

 ... of sentiments banned from the Comments thread of this blog.

(1) Expressions of what is commonly categorised as Sede-vacantism.

(2) Expressions of what is commonly categorised as Anti-semitism.

(3) Assertions that the Roman Canon once contained what is commonly regarded as an Epiclesis, i.e. a prayer asking the Father to send down the Holy Spirit upon the elements in order to change them into the Body and Blood of the Lord.

Number 3 is now added because I got tired of being offered comments like the one, not enabled, which (condescendingly, I felt) informed me that Adrian Fortescue wrote that the Roman Canon once had an Epiclesis. I commend to the writer of that comment, my piece of April 10. (I first purchased and read Fortescue when I was a schoolboy, back in the 1950s.)