Reordination: (1)

There follows, in four parts, a Letter which approaches from different angles the the problem of the requirement that priests joining the Ordinariates be 'reordained'. As well as reaffirming Newman's belief that the conditionality of such rites is implicit in the mind of the Church, the Letter will examine the question against a wide background, suggesting that the requirement is historically the sort-of-thing-that-has-always-happened, and offering from within the liturgical Tradition ways of understanding and welcoming it. (I may not enable irritable comments unsympathetic to the human dilemmas involved. In fact, most of you don't need to read this at all.)


Dear Father *********

Thank you for your letter; I am glad that you and **** are in good health. Pam and I return your greetings; we are feeling on a bit of a high because Senior Granddaughter has just been offered an Oxford place. You know the feeling! By my calculation, your ******* must now be in his second year.

And thank you for taking me into your confidence about why you have not felt able 'this time round' to accept Pope Benedict's offers embodied in the Ordinariates he created. I am very moved by your evident sincerity ... and grief.

You remind me of the developed teaching of the Western Church with regard to the iteration of those sacraments which confer character. No informed Catholic could deny the truth of what you write. And I sympathise with your conscientious unwillingness to appear to indicate, to yourself and to those whom you served in the the priesthood for so many years, that you were not a 'real' priest celebrating 'real' sacraments. Moreover, like you, I deplore the unavailability of explicitly conditional ordination for Anglican priests entering presbyteral ministry in full communion with the See of Peter: which, at a stroke, would eliminate these problems. After all, there is the precedent set by what the CDF decided in the case of Bishop Graham Leonard - who, as we all know, was not required to be ordained to the Diaconate and whose presbyteral ordination was private, low key, and sub conditione. After all, there can be few clergy under the age of 100 who do not, as Graham did, have the Dutch Touch in their 'pedigree' of orders! But, as I hope to get round to arguing before the end of this missive, conditionality can be implicit.

Some of our mutual friends, such as Fr ***** and Fr **********, have "longed for Catholic Unity in communion with the See of Peter" all their lives ... but now decline to accept Rome's gracious offer of the Ordinariates. They give this particular problem as their reason. It would be easy to suspect that their bluff has been called and that they find this a convenient pretext for staying where they feel comfortable; but we are bidden by the Lord not to judge others. However I know you well enough to be confident that you are not in that position. You long to take this opportunity of exercising your priesthood in communion with the Church Universal. It is a genuine scruple of conscience which delays you. All I can do is to explain my own thinking. I am afraid some of it may look rather like walking round and round a couple of mulberry bushes!

May I begin by boring you with the laudable Prebendary Dudley of Lichfield, and the admirable Farmer Hodgetts? It is by their doing that over the High Altar of Pugin's Catholic Cathedral at Birmingham repose the relics of S Chad, rescued from Lichfield Cathedral at the 'Reformation' by the Prebendary and preserved (over his bed!) by the Farmer. S Chad is an interesting saint, not least because, unlike most of us, he was consecrated Bishop twice. Indeed, if we are to believe S Wilfrid's biographer Stephanus (otherwise known as the Aeddi who was invited by S Wilfrid from Kent to Northumberland in order to teach genuinely Roman chant to Northerners), S Chad was not only twice consecrated bishop, but ordained twice through all the Orders! You see why there lingers in my mind the thought that his 'case' may have some relevance for us.

We do not know why the reforming Greek-Syrian Archbishop of Canterbury, S Theodore, insisted upon treating S Chad in this way. Chad had turned up in Canterbury for Consecration only to discover that Archbishop Deusdedit was dead. He then betook himself to the only 'canonically consecrated' bishop he could find in England, Wine at Winchester ... who duly consecrated him. Wine, however, was suspected of simony. Is that why S Theodore was so worried about S Chad's consecration? Or was it the fact that S Chad was consecrated to an already occupied See, that of York? Or was it the fact that two 'British' bishops took part in his consecration? Theodore's reason may have been any combination of these pretexts ... but the association in the Consecration of the two Cornishmen has often been thought to be the most probable reason why S Theodore assured S Chad that he was not "rite consecratus". Theodore was moved by the humility of S Chad's reaction; assured him that did not need "episcopatum dimittere"; and then "ordinationem eius denuo catholica ratione consummavit". The interest of this episode rests not least upon the fact than none of these reasons - simony; attempting to occupy a See already lawfully occupied by another; participation in a Consecration by Cornishmen - would be regarded as a remotely possible basis for a verdict of Nullity of Consecration according to the later (and present) Western teaching with regard to Sacramental Validity. Not even S Bede - a man who never had a moment's doubt about the necessity of doing everything according to the Roman Book - doubted the reality of S Chad's episcopal status.
Continues.

(Crypto)Lefebvrianism (1)

If it is possible to accuse people of  'Cryptolefebvrianism' ... and one does come across such accusations ... then clearly there must be a 'Lefebvrianism' of which the deceitful 'Cryptolefebvrians' are the secret and underhand Fifth Column. I am having some trouble understanding what the 'Lefebvrianism', the existence of which is implied by some rhetoric, actually might be.

H.E. Archbishop Lefebvre would, of course, have rebutted vigorously any suggestion that he was or could be the exponent of any other -ism than Catholicism or Traditionalism. At the Econe episcopal Consecrations, the Consecrator asked the prescribed question "Habetis Mandatum Apostolicum?" Some members of the vast congregation must have been bemused when he received the answer "Habemus". Had Pope John Paul capitulated overnight? "Legatur!". But No ... "We have this mandate from the Roman Church, ever faithful to the holy traditions received from the Apostles. This Holy Tradition is the Deposit of Faith which the Church orders us faithfully to transmit to all men for the salvation of their souls. Since the Second Vatican Council until this day, the authorities of the Roman Church are animated by the spirit of Modernism. ... It is by this mandate of the Holy Roman Church, semper fidelis, then, that we elect to the rank of Bishop in the Holy Roman Church, the priests here present as auxiliaries of the Priestly Society ..."

A critic might observe that the Archbishop appeared to be appealing from the actual and actualised hierarchs in a real city called Rome to a Platonic idea of the Holy Roman Church. But it is more useful to observe what he did not do. Archbishop Lefebvre did not purport to assign jurisdiction, far less sees in partibus, to the new bishops. Nor did he commit the administration of the Society to them; Fr Schmidberger, a presbyter, discharged the role of Superior after the death of the Archbishop. Lefebvre was clearly making the sort of limited provision that sometimes has to be made in episcopally ordered bodies in times of ecclesiastical crisis: provision for the transmission of valid orders to secure valid sacraments. One presumes that this is why he consecrated four; when one died, there would still be the preferred number of three bishops to consecrate a successor. Anglicans may remember the crisis which struck England and Scotland after the Dutch Invasion of 1688; my Traditionalist Anglican readers will probably have a profound veneration for those priests and bishops, learned and saintly, including the great Bishop Ken, who were unwilling to disregard their oaths of allegiance to the Catholic King James II, and who were ejected from their churches and sees. They had no legal means to perpetuate their ministry; so some of them took matters into their own hands and ordained what were sometimes called 'College Bishops', who lacked jurisdiction but could confer and preserve the Sacrament of Order. For the Non-Jurors, this was intended to enable their Church to survive until the restoration of the lawful King ended the crisis. For Lefebvre, his four consecrands would enable 'Operation Survival' to endure until Rome returned to Orthopraxy, when the bishops would place their episcopate in the hands of the Holy Father. The Archbishop was determined not to be a schismatic; and had he purported to assign jurisdiction to the Four, he would have been just another new schismatic setting up his own new 'church'.

Thus the entire logic of Archbishop Lefebvre's dispositions rested and rests upon the premise that the Pope is the Pope and diocesan Bishops are the Bishops, however poorly they may be thought to behave. It is the Roman Pontiff, and the local Ordinary, that SSPX priests name in the Te igitur. If there is such a thing as Lefebvrianism, it cannot rationally be categorised as a call to schism. To the principles that the Pope is the Pope and the Bishop is the Bishop, and that all the de Fide pronouncements of all the Councils and all the Popes are still completely binding, a 'Lefebvrianism' would only add the proposition that in exceptional circumstances exceptional methods might be called for. More on that, DV, tomorrow.

To be continued.

Mascall and Betjeman

Two very different men, two quite different poems. Mascall was not primarily an aesthete; with a precise cerebral logic he really did believe, with a passion for dogma, sometimes demonstrating sharply and polemically his disgust at sloppy thinking and careless expression. In his poem, the supreme irony is in the penultimate word: despite all the Ultra-Catholicism ... the priest had a wife. And remember that Mascall led an austerely disciplined celibate life as a Priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd.

Betjeman loved with an all-consuming passion the whole Anglo-Catholic edifice ... but I think he was sometimes troubled by doubts about whether anything was true. If God, then ... yes, the rest all follows ...  thurifers most certainly, and Martin Travers quite definitely, and baiting the Kensitites ... what else are they for! But ... God? And his sensuality, his sexuality, often got the better of him. But how he tried to believe! In his poem, the last line of the last stanza is not reserved for a final waspish irony but for  tear-jerking nostalgia as he recalls the real Faith under all the 'play-time' of triumphalist 1930s Anglo-Catholicism.

The Dogmatician versus the Aesthete, obviously. The Incisive versus the Maudlin??

But both are part of the luggage we brought through Customs into the Ordinariate!

Advice?

I know nothing about IT and all that. Can anyone help?

The problem is the "sitemeter" attached to this blog. As far as 'Last Month' is concerned, it forgets daily statistics more than seven days old. As far as 'Last Year' is concerned, it forgets everything more than a month old. The 'Total Visit' statistic is stuck on 923,226, and has been for a long time.

The sitemeter has a facility for asking for help. I have asked three times; I get sent a codenumber - I've now got three; but nobody ever gets back to me; the problems never go away.

More advice??

I would have loved to share with you a malevolent Comment (no, I get remarkably few of those) which tells me that I am 'a nasty old married queen' and suggests that this category abounds in the 'backdoordinariate'. I would have enabled it for your diversion, but it also libels a brother priest. Surely such statements are vitiated by a lack of definition? Possibly also by a circularity of argument? What would that wonderful logician Peter Geach (friend of Wittgenstein, husband of Elizabeth Anscombe) have had to say? I've just heard of his death; cuius animae propitietur Deus. I pray that as a good Catholic he's gone straight to heaven because it would be yet more bad news for the poor souls in Hell to have been joined by that sharp and merciless intellect.

A deafening Silence???

After Benedict XVI celebrated the Mass for the Feast of the Lord's Baptism in the Sistine Chapel versus Orientem, the Media were full of outraged denunciations. "There were all those young families there for their babies' baptisms", they cried, "and he turned his back on them".

Pope Francis committed the same outrage this year, but a lengthy search on the Internet has not enabled me to locate the Media outcry.

Have I got to live in frustration until this Friday's Tablet reveals Pepinster incandescent? I can't wait. Not that I will actually buy a copy.

APPENDIX FRANCISCANA?

It suddenly occurred to me. Do the Holy Father's public utterances, the products of his quite miraculous loquacity, have to be translated into Latin for publication in the Acta? If so, one can see why he moved into the Domus Sanctae Marthae - it was clearly to liberate the Apostolic Palace so as to provide lebensraum there for the waves and cohorts of Latinists who must, like Romanian gypsies, be flocking into Rome, landing at Fiumicino with the two green volumes of the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis in their hot little hands. Mind you, I've so very often found it a rather useless work. It will frequently offer you, as the modern Latin for some modern piece of technology, a circumlocution like "Machina quae facit XYZ". What one really wants is a neat, brief, one-word neologism, perhaps when necessary leaning on Greek, as the Romans so often did. Or perhaps an inspired sudden realisation that there is a word for something very up-to-date, just waiting to be dusted down and brought back into use. This happened to me hours ago. I had just seen something on BBC News about Twenty Much-used Very Modern Words. Among them was the new verb "to Twerk". A definition was given; and at once a penny dropped in my mind. I had recently posted (December 31) about the metre called the Trochaic Tetrameter catalectic. I expect you hung on my every word. I mentioned an unspeakably disgusting Greek dance, found in Athenian Comedy both Old and New, called the kordax. Which seems to be pretty well exactly 'twerking'. Heureka! You don't get much more up-to-the-minute than my blog. Or Nil novi sub ...

And one can relish something really clever: as when the Oxford Public Orator gave us "e-pistula" as Latin for "e-mail".

But the Two Green Volumes will in any case be inadequate to deal with the output of the Holy Father. So much of what he says includes words or phrases which I, at least ... I have had a limited education and led a sheltered life ... have never heard before. What, for example, is a sourpuss? Am I a sourpuss? What do I have to do to become one? Is it an abbreviation of 'sour pussy'? Are Mrs Slocombe's animal preoccupations relevant? Is this an undeserved attack upon Pushkin, the numen loci of the Birmingham Oratory? I have done my best, out of the obsequium religiosum which one owes the Sovereign Pontiff, to survey and comprehend the contextual complexities of this term (I have even looked at the French and Italian versions of Evangelii gaudium, from which cats are mysteriously absent); and I tentatively suggest that the Greek term dyscolos might get the sense. But perhaps you will all tell me that I have Menander too much on my mind. I think you are all sourpusses ... It occurs to me that, more useful to the Vatican translation industry than the Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, would be an Index Verborum, if there is one, covering Juvenal and Martial; Latin writers who seem to have very much our Holy Father's own attractive and engaging instinct for the down-to-earth. These authors ... perhaps with a helping hand from Trimalchio ... and from those gigantic volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum which contain the very ... er ... elemental street graffiti from Pompeii and elsewhere ... could provide the raw materials for what is undoubtedly the current philological opus desideratissimum: the Appendix Franciscana Recentioris Latinitatis.

I suppose I need to get in training for when the Call comes to get to Rome fast in order to join in all this fun. I'm hoping I might be offered a humble little marbled flat in the Palazzo Apostolico with walls frescoed by Michelangelo and overlooking the Piazza di San Pietro. When this happens, you will be very welcome to come and visit me ... ah, but there is a complication. Pam doesn't much like cities. So, in addition, we are going to need a villa in the Alban Hills and the assurance that Roman buses will accept our Senior Citizen Bus Passes.

You don't need to tell me what the Latin for Senior Citizen is because it might tempt you to be rude; but how would one say 'Bus Pass'?

The good news ... the bad news ...

GOOD: today there are two very important posts; the great Father ZED gives a superb prayer to the Magi composed by Evelyn Waugh; and my friend Father BLAKE has important things to say about how papal bureaucrats and diplomats should not have the charism of episcopacy sprayed all over them as a matter of course. Fr B has said this sort of thing before and I've said it before; but we need more people to say it more often until it gets through. I would add an analogous point about Cardinals' hats. And wonder why certain curial posts, and certain archiepiscopal sees, should automatically attract them.

BAD: you may have noticed that an increasing number of blogs now lack the facility to comment. I love comments. But I will not enable them if they speak disrespectfully about our Holy Father or about  members of the hierarchy who like to be treated with respect.

Un discorso da fare

It is plain that our Holy Father Pope Francis talks a lot. In my view, a question that is going to have to be faced is the magisterial status of his various utterances.

This is not an entirely new problem. It was creeping up on us during the last Pontificate. Pope Benedict was not averse to giving interviews, on the record, to journalists on planes (one of those led to the kerfuffle when journalists anxious for a scoop ignorantly misinterpreted his words and portrayed him as saying that condoms were morally acceptable). We had already come long way from the remote and lofty, godlike, manner assumed by Pius XII and his canary! Earlier, I believe, popes did give off-the-record interviews to journalists. But we now have a Roman Pontiff who is not averse to the sound of his own voice reverberating in public; and so the amount of papal wordage emerging from Rome is expanding exponentially.

A Roman Pontiff has an august status and his pronouncements, depending on their level of solemnity, require different levels of assent or respect. But not everything he says or writes is necessarily part of the papal Magisterium. Benedict XVI made this clear in the introduction to his superb three-volume work on Jesus of Nazareth. An additional problem with Pope Francis's utterances is that they are pretty well always, as far as I am concerned, so very much more difficult to understand than were Papa Ratzinger's lucid and simply-expressed statements. (I have a sneaking, and, I hope, not too disrespectful suspicion that the young Bergoglio did not spend as much time in school honing his skills in Latin Prose Composition, a tremendous training in clear thinking and clear expression, as the young Ratzinger did.)

Like many people, like many readers of this blog, I had been getting worried about whether I would ever be able to find my bearings in this Pontificate.

I accordingly felt a great sense of relief (and gratitude) when I heard Cardinal Burke's interview with EWTN. I have never done an extensive course on the Law of the Catholic Church and I am not a Vaticanologist. I had felt embarrassed that I could not understand so much of what the Holy Father said and that I felt so completely at sea about the status of it all. Now ... Cardinal Burke is not, of course, infallible; but he occupies the highest juridical post in the Church after the Roman Pontiff himself. As a lawyer, he must have a mind trained to analyse and to assess documents. And: he does not understand what the Pope means, or the status of his utterances, either. It's not, as I had nervously feared, just my stupidity.

Raymond Burke found the Pope's words about refraining from talking too much about abortion, difficult to interpret. Perhaps more significant is what he said about the status of  the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. He did not know "exactly how to describe it". It seemed to him "a distinct kind of document". The pope, Burke said, had described it as reflections, suggestions, guidelines. The Pope, he said, "doesn't intend them to be part of the papal Magisterium" ... a phrase the Cardinal repeated with emphasis a few moments later. (He concluded "At least, that's my impression".)

I believe I am right in saying that one is meant to discern the gravity of a papal utterance from what the speaker himself manifests it to be. If a canonist of high Curial status cannot detect clear indications of the status of a document, then it is surely morally certain, as far as concerns us lesser beings, that the document contains no such clear indications. And that, therefore, it is appropriate for us to follow Cardinal Burke and to regard Evangelii gaudium as the words, not of the Summus Fidei Magister, but of Jorge Bergoglio.

Monsignori

What a splendid thing that the Holy Father is cutting out the Monsignori business for youthful careerist clergy. What a load of nonsense it was. Far better to leave honorifics to the local Church. I point out that, as well as Canonries, there is the possibility of using Archdeacon  as a diocesan honorific. In Ireland, and I believe in one or two other European countries, the word survives as a title of honour. From the Anglican Patrimony we can also offer Prebendary. Byzantium has Archpriests, protopresbyters.

Query

Could American readers, or Europeans learned in North American Demotic English, explain a phrase to me? It comes at the end of Fr Zed's post (03:01:2014) with the horrific story about Islamic atrocities in Syria (q.v.). Father ends with:  "Europe? HAH!".

The (contextual) sense?

VETUS again

I've had a brilliant idea - yet another one - about the Holy Father's brilliant decision to rename the Extraordinary Form the Vetus Ordo.

Could we take the formula Vetus Ordo to refer to any Mass of the Latin Rite celebrated according to the rubrics that existed at any time before the publication of the Novus Ordo? This would include several sub-varieties; one could multiply them endlessly, but practically speaking, these ...

(a) ("1965") the Mass celebrated by those who follow the use of 1965 (I believe there are communities which celebrate this by indult), according to the Ordo Missae which was promulgated that year (and ordered to be printed in future printings of the Missale Romanum: ...et in novis Missalis romani editionibus assumeretur ...). If Summorum Pontificum had not specifically mentioned 1962, this rite of 1965 would have been naturally, and logically, assumed to be the final form of the Old Mass before the introduction of the Novus Ordo*. It is the form used by Archbishop Lefebvre before he subsequently decided to revert to 1962. It omits the psalm Iudica me and the Last Gospel; simplifies the gestures at the Doxology of the Canon; introduces the Forma Ambrosiana ("Corpus Christi R Amen") at Communion. Then there is

(b) ("the Extraordinary Form") the rite of 1962. There are two forms of this. (bi) The form authorised  as the Editio typica was authorised and published before the Council. It lacks S Joseph in the Communicantes. But (bii) dates from December, after the start of the Council, when B John XXIII added S Joseph to the Canon. Logically, (bi) fits the prescriptions of Summorum pontificum. But (bii) is, I think, most commonly although illegally used by those celebrating "1962". As for

(c), I must be discreet here. This is for your eyes only. Not to be mentioned outside these four walls. There are those, dangerous men, who use the rite as it was before Pius XII and his ally Bugnini got to work on it. (I shall not enable comments which disclose group or individual identities.)

"Vetus Ordo" suits as an umbrella to refer to all of these. And version (c) we could call  ... what? Usus authenticior?
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*I presume Pope Benedict XVI picked upon "1962" rather than 1965 in his motu proprio quite simply because His Excellency Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre had previously done so; an example of his gentle and ecumenical courtesy; his desire to make things as easy as he possibly could for the SSPX.

The alterations mandated in 1967 do not, in my fallible view, constitute another variety of the Vetus Ordo because they were never printed in the form of an Ordo Missae and were not ordered to be incorporated into editions of the Missale Romanum (indeed, the accompanying Instructio includes the words firmis manentibus actualibus liturgicis libris).