Archdeacon George Austin

Orate pro anima Georgii Austin viri Venerabilis Ecclesiae Eboracensis quondam Archidiaconi necnon et Canonici Fidei quoque Catholicae propugnatoris qui nuperrime obiit.  C A P D

The Bishop of Broadstairs

His Excellency Bishop Richard Williamson nearly always seems to me immensely readable, except when he is in the grip of some Conspiracy Theory which leads him on to blame some predictable groups.

One of his recent 'Eleison' blogposts attacked, yet again, those in the SSPX who hope for a rapport with the Vatican. He advances the theory that Rome might assign to the Society a couple of "relatively decent Newbishops" (his terminology) to provide it with the Sacraments of Holy Order and Confirmation, rather than letting it choose bishops from within the ranks of the Society.

What can he mean? What has he heard? Whom does he have in mind? I speculate ...

The retiring bishop of Chur is going to live in an SSPX school.

And there is the admirable Bishop Schneider, who once went on a semi-official mission to 'inspect' Econe, and liked what he saw.

It seems to me that, if Bishop Richard is right and I am right in my guess as to what he means, he is being less than fair to Bishop Athanasius. Bishop Athanasius has been a great deal more open and out-spoken than most in his attitude to the present disorders in the Church Militant. Leaders of the Ecclesia Dei communities have been cautious. And the universal Episcopate, successors of the Apostles, vicars of Christ ... plurima ne dicamus.

However, regretfully I would have to agree that the Society needs be be very wary of putting its neck into a curial noose, however silken. Above all, it needs to be very sure that it does not lose its potential ability, in a possible situation of great necessity, to consecrate more bishops sine Mandato Apostolico.

At the very least, the Society would need the assurance, already enjoyed by the Ordinariates, that its new bishops would be chosen by Rome from a terna submitted by the Society itself.

And some in Rome have sometimes shown a sinister interest in assets owned by orthodox groups.

Genesis 18:32 and Athanasius Schneider

"Then he said, 'Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.' He answered, 'For the sake of ten I will not destroy it'".

Bishop Schneider has spoken up, unambiguously, about PF's disreputable descent into Indifferentism.

Could it be that nine more bishops might now follow his lead? So as to make up the ten bishops for the sake of whom the Almighty might in gracious Mercy lay aside his destruction of the Episcopate?

To adopt again the terminology of Blessed John Henry Newman: one man has reversed the Suspense of the Church's teaching Office. Might the example of just this one, a mere Auxiliary Bishop from the Peripheries, precipitate an avalanche of orthodoxy among the soi-disant Successors of the Apostles?

What will it take to induce these timorous men to rediscover their inner Parrhesia?

Mohrmann

A kind and generous benefactor has responded to my plea! A heartfelt Thank You to all who responded.

Prezzy?

Sometimes kind people ask me if there is a book I would like.

For years, I have made do with the great Christine Mohrmann's The origins of Christian Latin in a pile of photocopied sheets. It would be nice, and relaxing, to have it as a book.

Could anyone find a copy and gift it to me?

That woman so incisively saw through the errors of the silly little fellows who paraded themselves as being Liturgical Experts.

"Diversity of religions is intended by God". Dr Newman comments.

So PF has agreed with a Moslem cleric that religious pluralism and diversity are willed by God.

I am rather interested in what other Moslem scholars might have to say about this. Some of them are quite sound chaps when it comes to the errors of Relativism.

Fr Zed has given a characteristically fine and intelligent interpretation of PF's words. As have some others.

Having perused them, I am also rather interested in what some parts of the Jewish Community might think of any suggestion that the Holocaust was willed by God as part of His "permissive will".

What Fr Zed and others have done is (this is not irony; I mean it) absolutely essential; it is truly necessary. In the great task which some future pontificate will inherit, of putting the Papal Magisterium back up on its feet after the disasters of this pontificate, it wo'n't do just to say "That man was repeatedly, disastrously, wrong". Because the obvious corollary of this is that any pope may be horribly wrong. The standing of the Successor of S Peter will need to be restored, for the good of the Church and for however much time there will be before the End. So, surely, it will have to be said that there are ambiguities in his texts which need to be interpreted carefully and authoritatively in order to rescue them, and him, from apparent heresy.

But I do think it is outrageous that pastors and academics should have to waste their time dreaming up these 'interpretations' of yet another PF disaster. By the way: was Cardinal Ladaria shown this text?

Blessed John Henry Newman dealt succinctly with this particular heresy in the biglietto speech which he delivered on receiving the official notification that he was to be a Cardinal.

"For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did Holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! it is an error overspreading, as a snare, the whole earth ... Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy."

Actually ... come to think of it ... you'd better keep quiet about all this. Newman is due to be canonised later this year; it would be a shame to put a spanner in the works (do Americans use that expression?) at this stage in the proceedings.

I have a terrible vision in my imagination of PF, dear poppet that he is, tottering out of S Peter's, propped up as ever by poor Mgr Marini; tearing up the text prepared for him to read (he quite likes doing that) and shouting "I'm cancelling the canonisation, and actually I'm dismissing this Newman from being a Beatus. I'd never realised what a Rigid Pharisaical Pelagian Sourpuss Elitist Coprophiliac he was. AND THAT'S MAGISTERIUM!!!"

You wouldn't want that to happen, would you? Just when we're all looking forward to having JHN on the Calendar as a Double of the First Class with a Common Octave?

So ... ... 'nuff said ... ... Shhhhhhh!

Behold a Great Priest

Behold a great Priest who in his days was pleasing to God and in a time of wrath was found a Reconciliation. Mgr Edwin Barnes has died after a short illness. He was the first Bishop of Richborough; one of those who led a people out of the wilderness into Full Communion with the See of S Peter; into the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham and Blessed John Henry Newman.

At our meetings in Westminster, as some people tried to devise ways of staying in the Church of England, he repeatedly said, with charming faux naivety, "But the game is up!".

He was a dear, kind, clever man and bishop.

Cuius animae propitetur Deus.

"Invalidists"

I do not enable comments which claim, for whatever reason , that PF is not (or might not be) the true Bishop of Rome. I do not wish, on the Day of Judgement, to have to explain my collusion in encouraging souls for whom Christ died to separate themselves from His Body the Church.

For similar reasons, I do not enable comments which say, suggest or imply that the Orders of the post-Conciliar Latin Church are not (or might not be) valid.

There is a funny side to this. Often these idiots discuss how many ... or rather how few ... immensely aged but validly consecrated bishops there are now still left in the Catholic Church. They appear to be unaware of the existence of the sui iuris Oriental Catholic Churches, which still today continue to confer Holy Order in accordance with the rites they have uninteruptedly received from Antiquity and which were regarded as adequate for validity at the Council of Florence, and, after that, whenever a dissident community returned to the Roman Unity. One wonders why these nutty specialists on invalidity don't join Ukrainian or Melkite or Syro-Malabar or Maronite or Coptic or Chaldaean jurisdictions. Or have these also all now suddenly become 'invalid'? What weird parodies of rational argument will these people dream up to invalidate the Orders of the Catholic Orientals?

But I have an additional personal reason for not enabling 'invalidist' comments. Only three or four weeks ago, I published a series "Are they really bishops?" in which I discussed this subject in case such discussion might be helpful to people who had been unsettled by Invalidists. I deployed a lot of facts. On the basis of these facts, I asked lots of questions. I have never received, from these lofty and omniscient individuals, any suggested anwers to any of my questions.

So when people write asserting as unargued fact the invalidity of modern Orders, with not even a passing allusion to my articles, I take it very personally as just shockingly bad manners. So, get lost!

A final warning. If sedevacantists or invalidists treat the Sacraments of the "Post-Conciliar" Church as invalid, they will be be committing sacrilege.

Sacrilege is a very bad idea.

Don't go to Hell.

Lust (2)

We live in a world in which sexual disorders are actually inculcated by that Dark Hegemony which saps both the joy and the virtue from authentic human life.

I can only describe my own feelings about what is needed.

Above all, the current Suspense in the Magisterium needs to be brought to an end. The Roman Pontiff, if his job description is to have any reality, must do this. The Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter so that, with His help, they should defend and put forth the Tradition handed down through the Apostles, the Deposit of Faith.

Perhaps we need a Year of Purity, like the Year of Faith, in which the Church's ancient Traditions should be reaffirmed ...

 ... particularly with regard to Chastity, Celibacy, Marital Fidelity, and Virginity.

An Apostolic Letter could begin by confessing to the World that many of the Church's own ministers, even at the highest levels, had fallen short of their calling.

And that the Roman See itself had allowed the Truth to be concealed beneath ambiguities, especially in the document Amoris laetitia. 

The ambiguities of that document could then be resolved. An obvious way of doing this would be to answer the Dubia.

Next, the Magisterial teaching of, for example, Casti Connubii (!930), Sacra Virginitas (1954), Sacerdotii nostri Primordia (1959), Sacerdotalis Caelibatus (1967), and Humanae Vitae (1968) should again be set forth, in all its beauty and dignity.

It would be convenient for such a document to conclude with formal anathemas condemning specific and specified erroneous teachings in the field of Holy Purity. After all, is it not the munus of the Roman See is to act as a remora against innovatory error? Perhaps there should be modifications to Canon Law to ensure that adequate and orthodox teaching is given in seminaries, novitiates, Roman academies, etc..

Would it not then begin to become possible for the Church to move on?


 

Lust, Lust, Lust, and Bishops. (1)

PF believes that the crisis in the Church is to do with Clericalism. He will not blame homosexuality.

My belief is that the crisis relates to Lust. And to disordered  Lust.

If an abusing priest is homosexually inclined, his problem is Homosexual Lust. If he is heterosexually inclined, his problem is Heterosexual Lust. I fail to see that there is very much practical difference between the two. I fail to see that it is particularly helpful to fling the word 'disordered' about. Does anybody seriously argue that there is any 'right ordering' in the abuse of a young girl just because it may be her vagina that is abused?

I share papa Ratzinger's view that the problem acquired vaster dimensions in that period during the 1960s when crooked individuals among seminary and university teachers were spreading the diabolical gospel that there are no absolute moral prohibitions. The dreadful problem has been shown to have peaked in the period 1965-1985.

I can see only one real difference between, say, 1970, and today. It is this: we know now that paedophilia is, at least usually, incurable. This has not always been quite so obvious, not least when there were psychiatrists who were prepared to guarantee that they had cured an abuser. (I wonder, incidentally, why some of these 'clinicians', who assured bishops that Fr X was OK now, are not being given their rightful share of the job of facing the music.)

So I do have some sympathy for some bishops who, back in the 1970s, gave a second chance to 'cured' paedophiles. Whether that same sympathy is owed to bishops who have operated cover-ups in more recent decades, I am far from sure.

If the hierarchs who meet in Rome next month, representing their respective Conferences, let PF get away with his sick dodge of blaming 'clericalism', rather than facing up to the the problem of LUST, and of profoundly disordered seminary teaching, they will have a lot answer for.

And it is not presbyters who should bear the brunt of criticism. The current crisis is the result of massive mismanagement by that Order in the Church which, with so much self-congratulatrion, used Vatican II to award itself an enhanced status in the Church. The pompous episcopal oligarchy which emerged strengthened from that disastrous gathering is a big part of the problem.


I remember Ratzinger, years ago, complaining that so many bishops, timorously faced with difficult decisions which might make them unpopular back home, kicked the ball to Rome for the CDF to do the hard stuff, and then played Mr Nice Guy on their home turf.

Is it not obvious that the current generation of Bishops is, as a whole and generally speaking, a very busted flush? If this were not true, they would have done something before now about this scandalously disfunctional pontificate.


There is an old Anglican joke about a child watching an episcopal consecration. (In Anglicanism, the coconsecrators all gather around the consecrand and impose hands simultaneously.) The kiddy asked what they were all doing.

"Removing his backbone".

A second part of this will discuss , more constructively, what is to be done.

Ante torum huius Virginis frequentate nobis dulcia cantica dramatis

Some years ago, Fr Sean (quondam Vallis Adurni notissimus Pastor nunc autem montis cultor) and I were trying to solve our mutual perplexities about this antiphon, which so many of you will have been singing with the last psalm of the first nocturn at Mattins of Candlemas. Here is the gist of what, with the help of some learned contributions on threads, we discovered.

Perhaps the easy bit is ante torum. Torus is a couch or bed, and usually means a marriage bed in the Vulgate. Frequentare did sometimes mean to repeat. No problem.

The odd bit is dramatis. It is very uncommon in Latin and does not occur in the Bible. S Anthony of Padua remarks in passing that drama means a rather active form of music, with gesticulatio and repraesentatio.  It does, presumably, come from the Greek drao (I do). It is clear that those who quote this antiphon felt a great need to give their readers some sort of account of the meaning of the word. There is a persistent tendency to link it with the Song of Solomon. S Aldhelm (d.708) refers to that Song as a sponsale drama. A writer who died in 1089 calls it cantica dramatis. A writer of the 1150s says that it is called drama "because it is a love song, which is sung by lovers without personae [named characters]; whence that song is called dramaticum where different characters are introduced but not named". Another medieval writer refers drama to the "change of character, as also in the Song of Solomon". An Assumption Day hymn desires all things earthly, and the stars, "to alternate a song of dramata before the bridal chamber of the Virgin".

I am convinced that this antiphon was already venerable when it entered the Divine Office (I have traced it in liturgical books as far back as about 860), and that it came from an already much older source and thus already had the status of a venerable tradition.

 The anonymous undated Pseudo-Ildephonsus (PL 96 coll 239 seqq) makes most use of this anthem. He relates it to Bethlehem and to the Dormition. "We are invited to the cradle of this Infancy, which the angels frequent (frequentant) ... For dramaton, my beloved ladies, is a type of song, in which type the Song of Solomon is said to be written. Lo! we are commanded, so that a more generous chanting may be commended, to repeat (frequentare), in honour of this Virgin, sweet songs in this genre, where [Angels, the star, magi, shepherds, are all busy doing it] ... before whose couch, I ask you again, that at her burial you should sing not dirges (threnos) of sorrow, not lamentations of weeping, but sweet songs to God, for today she has now, rejoicing, arrived at the King's bridal chamber ... where the choirs of Saints alternate wedding songs, where epithalamia of bride and groom are melodiously chanted ... she herself [the Virgin] sings with them [the heavenly host] a new song of drama, which nobody is able to sing except in that choir ... ."

I think the writer is enjoying, wallowing in, the deployment of an exotically alien word. The clerks of the Carolingian renascence rather liked this sort of game. Might that be its cultural background?

Perhaps a drily literal account of it would be:

Before the couch of this Virgin repeat for us sweet songs of alternating characters.

"Annibale Bugnini ..." by Chiron (2)

Continues ...
The Chiron biography of Bugnini records that, during the pre-Conciliar drafting of the decree Sacrosanctum Concilium, "at no time, it seems, did any participant (member or consultor) ever propose - at least publicly - the addition of other canons to the sole Roman Canon then in use. Some, however, were proposing that changes ought to be introduced into it."

Ha!, I hear you cry. So  the rats were already nibbling away ...

True. But how deep were these rodents biting? One of them was a man called Vagaggini, later to be a great advocate of the proliferation of Eucharistic Prayers. What, in 1961, was his daringly radical , earth-shaking, proposal?

"Granting the faculty of introducing one or two local saints among those named in the Canon".

!!!

If only!

Some bold Austrian Jesuit called Hofinger said there ought to be no prohibition against changing something in the Canon. This led to an immediate retort from the most distinguished and learned historian of the Canon, J A Jungmann. His magisterial two-volume History of the Roman Rite is still normative. He was a colleague and former teacher of the Bold Jesuit.

"But those changes ought to occur only for the gravest reasons," he said.

We need to remember (1) how rapidly the entire landscape was to change. Less than a decade after these comparatively restrained scholarly debates, the Roman Canon had to all intents and purposes ceased to be used and some two or three hundred home-made "Eucharistic Prayers" were, to S Paul VI's great consternation, in circulation. And (2), that in 1961, neither the avant-garde, the Hofingers, not the rear-gard, the Lefebvres, had the faintest, remotest, tiniest idea of where we know now it would all lead.

Chiron's biography of Bugnini enables you to go back in time and to be a fly on the wall as the 'experts' ... if you will allow me to mix my metaphors ... edged blindly forward into the quicksands and through the mist.

I shall, from time to time, make more use of Chiron.