Liberation Theology (1)

May Day ... and, in the pre-Pius XII rite, the churches were decked out in red to celebrate the Holy Apostles Ss Philip and James. In the old Breviary, (si tunc temporis non legitur de Epistula B Iacobi) the first sixteen verses of the Letter of James are today read in the First Nocturn of Mattins*; a passage which Archbishop Cranmer transferred to be be the Epistle of the Mass; " ... so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways". The Breviary has this entire Epistle, with its lucid (Amos-like) teaching about the Righteous Poor and the Righteousness-despising Rich, read during the week after Easter IV.

Now ... just suppose that S Joseph the opifex had always been commemorated on May 1; imagine that Paul VI had then replaced him with the Blood of the Martyred Apostles and the anti-plutocratic theology of S James; Catholics of a certain tendency would have grabbed at this as evidence that the poor Pontiff was a secret Marxist! Go on! Admit it!

The Church's attitude to Liberation Theology is still fossilised in the 1980s. I believe it should be unfossilised. I once hoped that our present Holy Father would do it ... but, most sadly, the Kaspers and the Marxes persuaded him by 'poor' the Scriptures meant well-heeled unrepentant German adulterers.

It is commonly held that the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith condemned Liberation Theology in the 1980s; and that this is all that needs to be said. That is a travesty of the truth. There were in fact two documents, with only a couple of years between them, and, a couple of years after that, a significant Encyclical by S John Paul II ('1984', '1986', '1988')

'1984' was, indeed, negative. We must remember that the period beteeen 1960 and 1984 came during the polarised situation of the Cold War; of blacks and whites. It was also a time when there were vivid memories of clergymen such as Fr Camillo Torres, the clerical Che Guevara, who left Altar, Breviary, and Rosary behind him and died fighting as a guerilla. There were indeed clergy who drew their inspiration from Marx rather than from the Magisterium or the Bible, and who saw themselves as commissioned to lead their congregations in cathartic wars of political liberation. During this period, "The  Historical Jesus", that protean individual, was, as represented by Professor Sammy Brandon, a Freedom Fighter. And there was a simplistic (and profoundly erroneous) assumption that Scriptural references to "the Poor" related solely to the economically disadvantaged per se. In such a situation, it would have been a dereliction of duty if the Congregation had not laid down clear markers. And, in 1984, it did so. But that was not the end of its interest.
To be continued.

*FOOTNOTE  In the very nice 1946 Burns Oates Breviary which I use, in lectio ii, the print-setter suffered parablepsis so that his eye slipped from (exaltatione) sua to (humilitate) sua, missing out the intervening words, thus making it the poor man rather than the rich who sicut flos foeni transibit!

Only for classicists

Here is the poem Erasmus composed to go with a picture of the Child Jesus which his fellow Humanist Dean Colet had put up in the school he founded and headed at S Paul's Cathedral in London.

Sedes haec puero sacra est Iesu
Formandis pueris dicata; quare
Edico, procul hinc facessat, aut qui
Spurcis moribus, aut inerudita
Ludum hunc inquinet eruditione.

It is written, as you perceive, in Phalaecian hendecasyllables (I think I-e-su is three syllables). Quaerendum: Did Erasmus derive the use of this metre from Catullus, or from Martial? The former survived antiquity only in the Veronensian codex discovered in the middle of the fourteenth century, while Martial was much more widely known at least from the Carolingian Renaissance onwards. I think I can prove it was Martial: there is a lovely little book in the British Library containing verses by the Italian Humanist Giovanni Gigli (1434-1498), later bishop of Worcester, but, when he wrote the book in 1486/7, a writer of pure and elegant classicising verse and a seller of indulgences (a revealing combination!). It includes a very long Genethliacon dedicated to the recently-named Arthur, later Prince of Wales ... in Phalaecian hendecasyllables. And I have spotted a quotation from Martial in something else Gigli wrote: which seems to me very probably to settle the question of where this fascinating generation of circa 1500 Humanists got that metre from.

Incidentally, Gigli's genethliacon begins with a recusatio explaining that disertiores will be able to do his high subject justice in heroic measures. As people scrambled for favour and jobs in the new Tudor court, it was clearly important for him to do a quick job. Indeed, many of us, I suspect, found when we were schoolboys that hendecasyllables are just about the easiest metre in which to write Latin verse fast. I wonder if that is why Erasmus produced Phalaecians to be hung up where Colet's schoolboys would see them, so that the little chaps might be tempted to have a go at doing it themselves.

Orthodixy; it's Patrimonial

In the glorious days when that very considerable Pontiff, Kenneth Escott Kirk, saintly and learned, ruled the Anglican Diocese of Oxford ... he was a close friend of Dom Gregory Dix; it was a very 'Catholic' diocese in those days ... the following ditty just emerged ex nihilo ... acheiropoieton, as you Byzantines might say.

How blessed are those Oxford flocks
How free from heretics
Their clergy all so orthodox
Their Bishop orthoDix.      (Tune: O God our help in ages past ...)

Half a century later, none of those propositions is still valid. How swiftly the waters have come flooding in.

Dix is often best remembered for his quip that the heraldic symbol of a Bishop was a Crook, and, of an Archbishop, a Double Cross. I do not know that he ever offered an exegesis of Papal Heraldry.

And recently there have been stories in the Meejah about Catholic bishops in Yankie Doodle Land who have been persecuting clergy ... no ... not for using the Old Mass, but just for facing East or using incense. Just as Proddo Anglican bishops and Mr Kensit's lads used to do!!! Patrimonials will remember how Bishop King denied the authority of the Privy Council to forbid him from celebrating ad Orientem, and that the then Archbishop of Canterbury backed him up. Those were happier days ...

Dix, at a time when some bishops in the Church of England were doing their best to prevent their clergy from reserving the Blessed Sacrament in a Tabernacle on the High Altar, observed
" ... the historian grows accustomed to the idea that even the best and most energetic of bishops will one day have rest from his labours and that the lance of his successor often delivers the diocese from the menace of some quite different windmill."

The Anglican Patrimony does have a modest contrbution, still, to make.

You see, we've seen it all before. We were here several decades ago.

We know these people, whether they call themselves Anglicans or Catholics.

off again ...

... to teach the LMS Latin Summer School. I'll look through submitted comments when I get back. But I hope to post something each day.

Fromthecardinalsdesk

"Let is be patient, let us have faith, and a new pope, and a reassembled Council, may trim the boat".

Seeking the cool on a hot day

Aestu languidus illud quaesivi frigus quod nonnisi a Curatoribus Ashmoleanis praebetur. Menandrum poetam Graecorum principem praeterivi -- ardor libidinis hodie nequaquam allicit -- et petii Summum Pontificem Benedictum XIV. Nodulum quendam expediri cupiebam.

Quem allocutus sum "Cur ..."

"Salve pusille" ait pontifex. "Et tu me salutare nequis? Ubi illa urbanitas, illa consueta Oxonietas?"

Erubui. "Da veniam" dixi. "Salve Pater Sanctissime".

Caput humiliter inclinavi.

Mora interposita ille "Et quid rogas?"ait.

"Pater Sanctissime, cur successor vester tot et talia totiesque profert mendacia?"

Uno tantum verbo papa "Qualia?" respondit.

"Illo tempore quo de pueris stupratis agebatur, episcopum quendam 'innocentem' papa raucus clamavit negavitque se unquam testimonia accepisse e quibus illum 'reum' iudicaret. Sed postea pater quidam purpuratus O'Malley patefecit magnum librum (Callimachus recte 'mega kakon') eidem papae datum in manus esse. Memini quoque patres quattuor Dubia quaedam ad eum scripta misisse; quae tamen ille accepisse negavit. Mendacia talia."

Subridens Pontifex "Verba Pilati mutemus et rogemus Quid sit Mendacium. Variis in regionibus leges variae inveniuntur. Quod in Anglia vestra ut mendacium  haberetur, alibi non tam graviter acciperetur. Inter viros Argentineos ea dici et audiri possunt quae inter Anglos Francos Italos non essent pro vero dicenda. Ecce: in illa terra miserrima Argentina, a tyrannis tam diu oppressa, mores loquendi dissimiles habentur, et cotidie peronizare solent. Ethica sua Principia 'e situationibus' depromunt. Veritas ipsa inversa et ut ita dicam capite suffulta stare cogitur. Non minus quam inter Cretenses illos veteres et notos, Est fit Non et Non fit Est. Color albus et color niger facillime inter se commutantur. Hoc fortasse et in Amazonia invenietur. Exspectanda est vobis Exhortatio post Synodum Apostolica Mendaciunculi Laetitia."

Aliquantulum post tempus ego haec "Negavit se papa Dubia accepisse; negavit se librum de pueris stupratis conscriptum legisse; sed in terra Argentina haec et talia pro Veritate stare possunt? Hoc Sanctissime dicis?"

Nictans annuit Pontifex. Qui addidit "Homerus eos andras polytropous dixisset, et Hesiodus absque dubio hoc monuisset 'Noli ab Argentineo currum emere qui diutius in usu fuerit'. Hoc est Magisterium! Placetne?"

Ego "Domne valde placet".

Deinde onere expeditus et ridebundus secessi. Menandrum quoque exiturus (iam non dyscolus) salutavi, haec subiungens "Faxit Thalia ut fabulae tuae deperditae Argentinea et Amazonia inter huius domus papyracea mox inveniantur!"

Annuere benevolens visus est.

S Anne

Near Oxford there is a village called Marsh Baldon (yes, I can assure cynical American readers that English villages really do, even outside novels, have names like that). Like most village churches, it stimulates thought.

The Buildings of England series (popularly known as 'Pevsner' even when, as in the Oxfordshire case, a particular volume was written by someone other than old Bauhaus himself) informed me that the East window dates from 1902, Heaton, Butler, and Bayne. I would have said that, beyond any doubt, this window represented a quite common English phenomenon: the gathering together (with restorations) into one window of fragments of medieval glass from throughout a church (in fact, there is another chancel window, unmentioned by 'Pevsner', including jumbled late medieval fragments from the time of one of the Henry Tudors). (Alternatively: around Oxford a late Georgian antiquary called Fletcher collected unwanted medieval glass; parts of his collection can be found in quite a number of places. But I go for my first suggestion.) I get intrigued by so often seeing tiny glass fragments too insignificant in themselves to attract attention but which cumulatively point to a massive movement in different parts of England to provide new glass, often with Renaissance motifs, on the eve of the Reformation.

The central light at Marsh Baldon has a nice representation of S Anne engaged in her customary occupation of teaching her Daughter.

And ... what a coincidence! ... the next church, Sunningwell, also has a vitreous S Anne. Here, the date is about 1877, and the designer "J P Seddon, a friend of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites" (Pevsner), who restored the church. In this case the reason for S Anne's presence is that among those whom the window commemorates there is a woman with that Christian name.

[Unmentioned by Pevsner: there are fine and unusual encaustic tiles in the Chancel at Sunningwell, by Seddon, showing the Elders casting down their crowns before the throne; "The Lamb slain"; and related themes reminding me of Canon Chamberlain's famous Eucharistic Window in S Thomas's Oxford, representing the worship of the Lamb at the heavenly altar and, below, the Sacrifice of the Mass. The unity of the earthly and heavenly sacrifice(s), so exquisitely taught in the paragraph Supplices te rogamus of the Roman Canon, was a favourite theme among the Tractarians. Part of our Patrimony!]

For me, S Anne has Sacred Memories. She is the Patron of Pam's College ... undergraduate memories of so many Sunday lunches in Hall there before we set off on walks through the Oxfordshire countryside ... gracious, all that was nearly six decades ago ... water under bridges ...

S Anne (and S Joachim?)

I feel it was dreadfully sexist and patriarchal that the Novus Ordo should make the obscure S Joachim play first fiddle to his illustrious Spouse on today's Festival. After all, S Anne is the Patron of Lesser Britain; Titular of my wife's College here in Oxford; so popular a Saint in Medieval England and iconographically associated with the cause of female literacy. Even if the Novus Ordo did borrow the idea from the Benedictines, that is no excuse!

In the Library of the Dean and Chapter at Exeter is an unpublished fragment of a medieval liturgical book. It survived by being reused as scrap paper after that amusing episode which we call the 'Reformation'; it is closely associated with the great bishop John Grandisson, who dominated fourteenth century Exeter. Grandisson was a micromanaging control-freak with an immense and intense devotion to our Blessed Lady Matri Misericordiae. He codified and reformed the worship of his Cathedral; in doing this he provided carefully for the cultus of our Lady in her own chapel at the East end of the Cathedral. Every day there was to be Full Service there of the Mother of God; except that on a small number of days this was replaced by the Service of someone very closely associated with her. For example, S Gabriel ... and S Anne.

The fragment which survives at Exeter is clearly from a Mary Missal created for use in either that chapel or in the corresponding chapel in his collegiate foundation at Ottery. It gives us the Mass of S Anne. And what is interesting is that Grandisson was not content to provide it for his clergy to use; he checked and carefully corrected the text in his own handwriting. The Secret prayer shows this happening; it is a variant of a prayer we find in other medieval sources such as Sarum. This is how the scribe left it:

Sanctifica, Redemptor mundi, munera praesentis sacrificii, et beatae precibus Annae nobis eadem effice salutaria de cuius utero mater tua virgineae puritatis est egressa.

The genitive 'virgineae puritatis' appears to have nothing upon which to depend. Sarum suggests that after 'tua' there was the word 'aula' - our Lady was the 'Dwelling' of Virginal purity; 'aula' would easily slip out because of parablepsis resulting from homoeoteleuton. Grandisson spotted the omission but, I suspect, lacked an archetype from which to correct it*. So he supplied, ad sensum, the word 'flos' - flower.

This sort of thing somehow brings one very close to the dear, devout old tyrant. Incidentally, he ordered the Octave of the Assumption, which he selected for the date of his enthronement, to be kept for ever as a day of high rank. Three cheers for John 'Patrimony' Grandisson [pronounced Grahns'n].

Here is a rendering of the Collect in that Mass:

God, who didst make blessed Anna, barren so long, fruitful with a glorious and saving offspring: grant we beseech thee; that all who, for love of the Daughter venerate the Mother, may deserve, in the hour of death, to rejoice in the presence of each.

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*Logically, of course, it may be that he possessed a master copy which gave a different reading from what eventually got into Sarum.

Delightfully politically incorrect

Tomorrow, S James the Great! Let us listen to the first harbinger of liturgical renewal, Dom Prosper Gueranger [I slightly abbreviate]:

"The land of S James's inheritance, Spain, had been overrun first by Roman idolaters, then by Arian barbarians, and when the day of hope seemed about to dawn, a deeper night was ushered in by the Crescent. But who is this unknown chief rallying against an immense army the little worn-out troop whose heroic valour could not yesterday save it from defeat? Swift as lightning, and bearing in one hand a white standard with a red cross, he rushes with drawn sword upon the panic-stricken foe, and dyes the feet of his charger in the blood of 70,000 slain. Hail to the chief of the holy war! Saint James! Saint James! Saint James! Forward Spain! It is the reappearance of the Galilaean fisherman, of the elder son of thunder, now free to hurl the thunderbolt upon these new Samaritans, who make Christ no more than a prophet. And when, after six centuries and a half of struggle, his standard bearers, the Catholic kings, had succeeded in driving the infidel hordes beyond the seas, the valiant leader of the Spanish armies laid aside his bright armour, and the slayer of Moors became once more a messenger of the faith ...".

I wonder what Elizabeth Tudor, Bloody Bess, would have made of the fact that the old Spanish embassy chapel, S James Spanish Place, now has former Anglicans on its staff, not to mention in its congregation. I well remember the very happy day when my friends of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group invited me there to offer the Holy Sacrifice for them.

The Church preserves a Spanish Royal Flag, so that if his Most Catholic Majesty turns up unexpectedly, the pp can quickly run up the flag. The advantage of visiting this Church also includes the fact that it is directly behind one of London's best kept secrets: the Wallace Collection. You can glut yourself there on the finest artefacts of Bourbon France and then pray in the former embassy chapel of the Bourbon Monarchy of Spain..

What did Cardinal Pole think of Lake Garda?

Landscape is so elusive. As we all know, most of what takes away the breath from the tourists nowadays and appears upon the millions of postcards was unappreciated until the age of Edmund Burke, with some help from Salvator Rosa, invented the Sublime; and the lecherous Wordsworth began to get excited by the hills as well as by the girls of Cumberland. So we mustn't be anachronistic.

Lake Garda was known to the last Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole (we pronounce him Pool in order to confuse other people). By 1553 he had taken up residence in the Benedictine Abbey at Maguzzano, from which he conducted quite a bit of diplomatic activity and polished his Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione. And that Abbey (suppressed in the 1790s by the Buonapartists) is near the Lake now called Garda (originally known by its Latin name as Benacus) just where the main Roman road, the Via Gallica, linking the fifty or so miles between Verona and Brixia/Brescia, cuts close along its Southern shore. Here Catullus's Sirmio peninsular and the modern Desenzano are to be found. (Catullus must have known the road well.)

As a Renaissance humanist, Pole would most surely have been aware that the homeplace of Catullus was at nearby Sirmio, about which Catullus wrote his poem 31. If this poem is anything to go by, Catullus' own reactions to his surroundings were not exactly Burkean or Wordsworthian; nor did he share Turner's fascinatiion with Alpine scenery. Sirmio and its subalpine surroundings and the snows on Mount Baldo fire him with nothing so much as a desire to rest on his desiderato lecto. Probably this is all he meant by calling Sirmio and Garda ocelle and venusta. And what exactly was the pleasure in tacking back and forth across the lake in his (poem 4) phaselus? He talks about the laughter of the waves as Aeschylus long before had spoken of their gelasma; but I have noticed nothing suggesting the awed reverence which Romanticism was to show to dramatic landscape.

The exciting printing houses of Venice had rushed out texts of Catullus (1472; and the edition published by Aldus Pius Manutius in 1502 ... I did a post on him 5 February 2015). It is improbable that Pole did not know them. By the time he went to Garda himself, his urbane friend and fellow humanist Pietro Cardinal Bembo was dead and his carmina, which include a long poem about the Lake, were only just being published (edition in the Harvard di Tasso series). I like to think that Pole's pietas inclined him to purchase and read them hot from the press.

But the Lake Garda, and its rivers, which he met in those pages, was a countryside of gods and goddesses, of fauns and nymphs and mythology, the countryside of Ovid's Metamorphoses even more than of Vergil.

I think I do understand why mad, bad papa Caraffa so hated Pole and his gentle Renaissance literary culture. Philistine and hot-tempered popes are rarely a happy thing for the Church. It is probably just as well that Pole died peacefully in his bed in England and never lived to be investigated by the papal interrogators who awaited him in Rome.

And, as pope Paul IV, Caraffa was a very bad thing for English Catholicism. You might well call him the Godfather of Bloody Bess Tudor's Proddy Church of England. But that's another story, well told by Eamon Duffy.

S Mary of Magdala

A post slightly updated from 2010.
What a rich and varied life S Mary Magdalen had, according to writers recent and ancient. An associate of the Apostle Junia in the kipper trade, she met our Lord while he was working as a healer, during his Year Out, in the spa at Tiberias. These things are certainties. And let us not question her well-documented presence leaning upon the Lord's breast at his Last Supper. Nor be doubting spoilsports if some latter-day equivalent of Chaucer's Pardoner announces that she possesses, enclosed in a rich reliquary, the genuine Wedding Certificate of Mary of Magdala, spinster of this parish, and Jesus of Nazareth. Rarely can a figure have attracted so rich a mythopoeia: the needs of medieval Provence for a Patron; of modern feminists for a female hyperapostolos; of conspiracy theorists for a Mrs Christ; all these are fulfilled in the Magdalen. Whoever was it who said that imaginative and fertile hagiography came to an end with the demise of the Middle Ages! It continues to fulfil our every need, however bizarre.

The Magdalen provides new certainties in Biblical Sudies, too. Back in the boring old days of Modern Scientific Biblical Criticism, when S John's Gospel was Late and Unhistorical, nobody would have bet a bent farthing on the historical veracity of the story about her meeting with Christ in Garden on Easter Morning. But now .... it would be more than anyone's life was worth to question the truth ... nay more, the centrality to the whole resurrection story ... to the entire Christian Gospel ... of that pericope*.

Personally, I feel we've lost a lot since the Western Church, guided by (what Louis Bouyer in his memoires called) Three Maniacs, followed Byzantium in distinguishing between Mary of Magdala - who is now as pure as the driven snow of August 5 - and the Sinful Woman. We now no longer have access to the attractive typology of Gueranger, who sees in the Sinner of Magdala a type of fallen humanity and of adulterous Israel, destined to become glorious in her repentance.

Hair and feet feature large in Dom Gueranger's entry for today; naturally he makes much of S Mary Magdalen's attachment to the feet of Jesus (he quotes S Paulinus of Nola "I would rather be bound up in her hair at the feet of Christ ..."). And he seems to suggest that S Cyril of Alexandria admired the beauty of the Magdalen's own apostolic feet. There is no doubt that the image of the reformed but still entrancing courtesan stirred up sensuous images in the minds of many ... and, of course, so many Western artists. And is there very much harm in that? Er ... except ...oh dear ... come think of it ... the stories are disturbingly heterosexualist ... in a generation's time, they will have to be banned as constructively homophobic ... ah, well, win some, lose some ... unless, of course, three New Maniacs can adapt them into a 'trans' narrative ... .

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*Similarly, the one-time conviction of so many Experts, based upon negligible evidence, that the last two chapters of Romans are inauthentic, is rarely aired nowadays. You see, these chapters contain the Apostle Junia ... dump them, and she disappears too. And that would be intolerable.

Brescia; Sancte Paule Sexte, ora pro nobis

While at Gardone, we took a trip to the local Cathedral City, the ancient Brixia. Good to look round; but, despite (local boy) Catullus's elusive poem 67, very little survives from the late Republic. Fairly good floors and walls from the Empire. I found an obscene graffito which amused me rather since it was in the form of a perfectly formed elegiac couplet. They clearly had literate graffiti-composers under the Divine Tiberius. How educational standards do deteriorate.

The newer of the two Cathedrals intrigues. Within it, a 'shrine' to S Paul VI 'Brixiensis'. It contains, apparently, neither relics of the Saint nor an altar. Speculation arose in our group about whether this latter fact was a piece of subtle symbolism indicating his desire to abolish the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I strongly disagreed, arguing that his condemnation of 'Transsignification' showed that at least his heart, or part of it, was in the right place. And the evidence (Bouyer inter alios) indicates that the the worst excesses of 'his' rite can be blamed on Hannibal's deceptions.

My own theory is that the Bishop of Brescia at the time of the beatification or canonisation was a secret sedevacantist who simply, and honourably, wished to prevent the offering of Mass at a 'shrtine' of one whom he considered to be a non-Saint. (I shall not enable comments which suggest that I am a conspiracy-theorist whose fantasies exceed even those of Bishop Richard Williamson.)

I had been told that the metal sewerage fittings in Brescia all bore the name Montini, but I carelessly forgot to check this out. Could they be classified at tertiary relics? Ought they to be formally venerated?