Continues:
At the 2014 Encaenia, the then Public Orator, Mr Richard Jenkyns felicissimae memoriae of LMH, had used a phrase which one of his hearers ... none other than the then Vice-Chancellor himself, a poor silly Professor A D Hamilton ... had disliked so much that he cherished it, for four months, in a Resentful Bosom. When he came to make his own Oration in October at the start of the 2014/2015 academic year, Hamilton, speaking in English, had this to say:
"I want to reflect with you on the public value of Oxford; the benefit that flows to others from who we are, what we do, and how we do it. And if, in the course of these reflections, I manage to say something of wider interest and relevance about the special importance and value of higher education in the world of the twenty-first century, well, then I shall consider I have not entirely wasted my time or, more importantly, yours."
Oh dear. Not a word of this is Talking Oxford, is it? How terribly portentous and consequential! How full of a Politically Correct sense that we must demonstrate the vast amount of good we do to others! Might it even contain 'virtue signalling'? Do you feel the adjective "pompous" struggling to make itself heard in your mind? Not a touch here of that quick and allusive levity, that faux self-deprecation behind which Oxonians lightly conceal our feeling that we are so obviously unique that we don't even need to remember that fact, still less to be so unspeakably vulgar as to assert it. Even worse, observe the implication that Oxford is relevant. Nemo qui mammas almae huius Universitatis ipse suxisset haec vel talia unquam proferre potuisset! Quid de apicibus somniantibus? Quid de rebus desperatis?
This sad (and now happily long departed) Hamilton was not a man who, in those formative youthful years, was woken daily by his College Servant bringing him hot water and the information "Good morning sir, quarter to eight sir, blizzard in the night sir, three cars crashed on the ice coming down Headington Hill, eleven people killed sir, will there be anything else, sir?" vel similia. You see, Talking Cambridge is a class dialect designed to condescend and to insult those marked out by the speaker as social inferiors. But Talking Oxford is a style of processing and assimilating reality, of cutting mere facticity down to size, a style which in my undergraduate days owed as much (at least in the men's colleges) to our beloved and respected College Servants as to dons or undergraduates.
Let us resume our reading of poor daft Hamilton's embarrassing Oration.
"It was our celebrated Public Orator, Richard Jenkyns, at Encaenia [2014] who stated in the course of a typically mordant review of the worldly achievements of Oxford alumni, I quote: 'Life - always our most dangerous competitor.' He captures neatly that too familiar perception of the academic world having little if anything to do with life, certainly life as it is lived; life with a capital L.
"Well, this morning I want to try not just to take issue with that perception by illustrating some of the ways in which it is woefully wide of the mark, but to go further and even to argue that life as it is lived - still with that capital L ..." and blah blah blah for several pages more. Dinosaurs competed for mention with budgerigars. Honest! Heaven help us.
11 August 2019
10 August 2019
Talking Oxford (1)
Cambridge men and women, vulgo "Tabs", are, in my experience, without exception (well, 'spiritually', as Rex Mottram would say), Old Etonians with aunties and uncles high up in the KGB, who speak with a leisurely, languorous and protracted drawl which rarely seems to approach a conclusion. It expresses their contemptuous sense of superiority to the rest of the world ... "You dear little people, you have nothing better to do with your poor little lives than to listen to me". It has been suggested that Oxonians feel no need to prove any such thesis and and that we more characteristically speak faster and then pause for breath in mid-sentence so that, when we do get to the end of the sentence, we can immediately leap into the next sentence without giving any opportunity to a polite interlocutor to ... er ... er ... interlocute (stet haec sententia pro exemplo). I think this is right; but there is more to "talking Oxford" than just that one particular (very serviceable) device.
At this point you need to know that, since about 2004, the role of Vice-Chancellor in this University has radically changed. Previously, the VC was himself an Oxford product, commissioned, so to speak, from the Lower Deck. But since then we have had members of the new international elite of super-administrators, Staff College products who have never drunk from the Isis, who can (and do) cheerfully flit from running Yale to running Oxford; from running Oxford to running NYU. Let us not go into the question of any financial aspects there may be to these arrangements (neat example of a Ciceronian praeteritio, yes?). What this sociological change means is that a modern Vice-Chancellor does not now speak, or even understand, Oxford's own idiolect (forgive the dittography). He ... or she ... has, quite simply, not been suckled at the correct breasts. Ergo, a deep gap in communication ... C S Lewis's phrase a phatic hiatus will have sprung to your minds. Exactly. Gottit.
More later.
At this point you need to know that, since about 2004, the role of Vice-Chancellor in this University has radically changed. Previously, the VC was himself an Oxford product, commissioned, so to speak, from the Lower Deck. But since then we have had members of the new international elite of super-administrators, Staff College products who have never drunk from the Isis, who can (and do) cheerfully flit from running Yale to running Oxford; from running Oxford to running NYU. Let us not go into the question of any financial aspects there may be to these arrangements (neat example of a Ciceronian praeteritio, yes?). What this sociological change means is that a modern Vice-Chancellor does not now speak, or even understand, Oxford's own idiolect (forgive the dittography). He ... or she ... has, quite simply, not been suckled at the correct breasts. Ergo, a deep gap in communication ... C S Lewis's phrase a phatic hiatus will have sprung to your minds. Exactly. Gottit.
More later.
9 August 2019
Fromthecardinalsdesk
"[Like Balaam who] wished to curse but opened his mouth with blessings, so a pope may all his life be in error, but if he attempts to put it forth, he will be cut off, or be deterred, or find himself saying what he did not mean to say".
8 August 2019
"porne ps*l*ph*ge!!"; only for Classicists.
The Golden-Mouthed had his tetchy moments, like PG 59.28 "You there, Sir! [i.e. the verbs are singular] You stand listening to S John and through him learning the things of the Spirit, and after that you go off to listen to prostitute women talking dirty and behaving dirtier and to perverts (malakon) who get beaten and beat each other". It seems probable that Chrysostom is here referring to mimes of considerable vulgarity. A couple of sides of just one such mime appeared in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri vol. LXXIX, 2014, and they are full of very low-class slapstick and obscenity
I think the papyrological industry must be literally (ut ita dicam) motoring through those old tea boxes in the cellars of Ashmole, because this mime fragment is numbered P Oxy 5189 ... it seems like only yesterday when the numbering was in the 2000s. I recall a seminar ... I think it was in 2014 ... on the new discovery, set in motion by Peter Parsons, whose quick-fire witticisms flow as easily as ever they did in his greener youth (he started off by observing "Frankly, Greek Mime is no laughing matter ..."). There appears to be a stock character in this mime, the akairos who falls over anything that can be fallen over; and there are pornai and malakoi more or less wall-to-wall. Much of the humour seems to be at the level of abusing and thumping people for cooking badly. In fact, so much thumping goes on that we have a newish word kossos/kossizomai for it; it seems to mean swiping someone with an open hand, which Professor Parsons illustrated with a number of cartoon pictures. (Hooray for Desperate Dan! But he could also have drawn upon William George Bunter.) The term, apparently, has to be distinguished from kolaphos, for which Edith Hall suggested the translation 'knuckle sandwich'. kossos is so common in the Papyrus that it even (like the nomina sacra in Biblical mss) has its own abbreviation: kappa with a little omicron tucked between its two uprights. It is not completely new; it's in Suidas and in some Byzantine hagiographical (!!) authors such as Leontios (yes, the Papyrus is sixth century).
Discussion meandered through questions like the amount of rehearsing you have to do to get slapstick right, and the politically incorrect violence of Punch and Judy. Stephanie West suggested that mimes might have been hired for symposia; which would throw a new light on how Plato spent his evenings. A sort of mid-Byzantine equivalent of Strickly. I kept prudently quiet about my own theory that the fragment was a discarded early draft by Cardinal Baldissieri for the Amazonian Synod.
Somebody suggested a new aphorism, A slap a day keeps the slave in play. One of the main advantages of the Classics is that it keeps you politically incorrect.
I think the papyrological industry must be literally (ut ita dicam) motoring through those old tea boxes in the cellars of Ashmole, because this mime fragment is numbered P Oxy 5189 ... it seems like only yesterday when the numbering was in the 2000s. I recall a seminar ... I think it was in 2014 ... on the new discovery, set in motion by Peter Parsons, whose quick-fire witticisms flow as easily as ever they did in his greener youth (he started off by observing "Frankly, Greek Mime is no laughing matter ..."). There appears to be a stock character in this mime, the akairos who falls over anything that can be fallen over; and there are pornai and malakoi more or less wall-to-wall. Much of the humour seems to be at the level of abusing and thumping people for cooking badly. In fact, so much thumping goes on that we have a newish word kossos/kossizomai for it; it seems to mean swiping someone with an open hand, which Professor Parsons illustrated with a number of cartoon pictures. (Hooray for Desperate Dan! But he could also have drawn upon William George Bunter.) The term, apparently, has to be distinguished from kolaphos, for which Edith Hall suggested the translation 'knuckle sandwich'. kossos is so common in the Papyrus that it even (like the nomina sacra in Biblical mss) has its own abbreviation: kappa with a little omicron tucked between its two uprights. It is not completely new; it's in Suidas and in some Byzantine hagiographical (!!) authors such as Leontios (yes, the Papyrus is sixth century).
Discussion meandered through questions like the amount of rehearsing you have to do to get slapstick right, and the politically incorrect violence of Punch and Judy. Stephanie West suggested that mimes might have been hired for symposia; which would throw a new light on how Plato spent his evenings. A sort of mid-Byzantine equivalent of Strickly. I kept prudently quiet about my own theory that the fragment was a discarded early draft by Cardinal Baldissieri for the Amazonian Synod.
Somebody suggested a new aphorism, A slap a day keeps the slave in play. One of the main advantages of the Classics is that it keeps you politically incorrect.
7 August 2019
MANIPLES: the Finer Points
Moi, I am a pedant. I take my maniple off before saying the Leonine Prayers at the foot of the Altar. According to O'Connell, this is the strictly logical thing to do ... but it is, he says, commonly ignored.
It is the strictly logical thing to do because only the maniple is worn only during Mass. The Chasuble might sometimes be worn in extra-liturgical ceremonies ... but never the maniple. I remember that when Paul VI made the maniple optional, there was a most irate article in one of the old-style Anglican Papalist periodicals which still then survived ... it might have been the dear old Pilot ... in which some lovely ancient priest pointed out that, since the maniple is the vestment which par excellence is worn during Mass, the new rule meant, technically, that most clergy would now be saying Mass unvested.
One of the last of the old generation of Anglican Papalist priests, Fr Clive Beresford, followed such rules to the letter. Back in the early 1960s, in churches where the 'Western Rite' was followed, it was quite common, especially on Sundays, for some little bits of Cranmer to pop their heads above the parapet. For example, after the Secret, Dr Cranmer's Prayer for the Church Militant might be interpolated; after the Postcommunion, his Prayer of Thanksgiving After Communion. When pastoral necessity compelled Fr Beresford unwillingly to incorporate these dodgy Zwingligenous additamenta, he always took his maniple off before doing so.
We Anglican Catholics were a very principled people.
Too rarified to be allowed to survive, I hear you say ...
6 August 2019
Mr and Mrs Markel
The other day, it was revealed that the UK birth-rate, already well below replacement levels, had plummetted still further. The following day, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced that their family would not exceed two.
Bad luck for somebody if they conceived twins (or ...).
Her admirers will be relieved to know that the Duchess's reproductive processes will not be subjected to the strain of giving birth to somebody whose future labours and taxes might help to sustain financially the upper end of a top-heavy demographic.
And since the most fertile portions of our population are Islamic, nobody could accuse the Sussexes of anti-Islamic plotting to deny our Islamic population its probable eventual numerical superiority.
So what's not to like?
Bad luck for somebody if they conceived twins (or ...).
Her admirers will be relieved to know that the Duchess's reproductive processes will not be subjected to the strain of giving birth to somebody whose future labours and taxes might help to sustain financially the upper end of a top-heavy demographic.
And since the most fertile portions of our population are Islamic, nobody could accuse the Sussexes of anti-Islamic plotting to deny our Islamic population its probable eventual numerical superiority.
So what's not to like?
5 August 2019
Again ...
... I am taking time off from keeping up to date with the world! For about a fortnight, I will not be reading Comments (or emails); but, after that, I shall try to catch up.
As ever, I hope to post something every day.
As ever, I hope to post something every day.
Urban Myths and the Amazon Synod
Any English reader will be able to name a village ... some village, somewhere ... in which property prices are well above the incomes of that same rural peasantry which occupied the properties in yesteryear. Because these properties have been bought up as retirement homes, or holiday homes, by the upper middle classes. When a man has spent his working life in a city office, commuting daily from a dormitory suburb by means of a transport system bursting at the seams, his retirement fantasy is a (carefully renovated) country cottage, with hollyhocks crowding suggestively around the door.
An idealised and imagined rural idyll is a direct product of, and reaction to, Urbanisation.
It was ever thus. Theocritus initiated a tradition of European 'Pastoral Poetry' as he read in the great Library at Alexandria, one of the megalopoleis of the ancient world. While he sought the lucrative favour of Ptolemy II, he imagined a world of rural simplicity in which shepherds or cowherds held poetic competitions while their complaisant flocks or herds nibbled beautifully but unobtrusively. In this genre, the main problem was that shepherdesses often had tangled hair; but that mattered little as long as the shepherd could imagine himself exquisitely caught within her tangles. Vergil may have been libidinis in pueros pronioris, but, in the world of his Eclogues, a shepherdess or two running provocatively to hide behind the willow trees never came amiss. And that same Vergil, city educated, was among the court propagandists jockying for position and rewards in the cut-throat culture of newly 'imperial' Rome. Wall-paintings recovered at Pompei remind us that such mythical landscapes came right into the living quarters of the urban elite.
Already Horace (Epode II) had seen through this Urban Myth; but I doubt whether Marie Antoinette and her ladies read the Epodes as they tended their lambs at the Petit Trianon.
Trianon-time is back with a vengeance. The Pastoralist Community had never been quite sure where their 'True Countryside' was to be found; they just knew it had to be far distant from the tower-blocks and the filthy crowded streets of the metropolis. Might it be in Arcadia? Sicily? Shropshire? Versailles? ... but now the secret is out! Amazonia!! Amaryllis of the tangled hair, clutching her milking-stool, has decamped to the Amazon! At long last, Jorge I'm-the-Magisterium Bergoglio and his 'Spirit'-filled entourage have pinned it down! Amazonia is where the most mega-Trianon of all time is waiting to be built! Amazonia is where Rousseau's Savage really is still authentically Noble, happily unencumbered with either the felix culpa or the talis et tantus Redemptor!
Go there (by rowing boat, of course; little Swedish Greta Wozname will crew for you). Take your camera and get shots of Kasper herding his heiffers and of Marx playing with his syrinx. Your own face could even appear in a selfie together with Hans Kueng being pelted with apples by lascivious (but guaranteed indigenous) nymphs!
As Gerhard Cardinal Mueller has observed, "It is certainly beautiful to be beside by the Rhine and to dream of the Amazon"! How often that irritating man does get things exactly right!! No wonder he had to be sacked!!! What a good job PF has done in shutting him up!!!!
An idealised and imagined rural idyll is a direct product of, and reaction to, Urbanisation.
It was ever thus. Theocritus initiated a tradition of European 'Pastoral Poetry' as he read in the great Library at Alexandria, one of the megalopoleis of the ancient world. While he sought the lucrative favour of Ptolemy II, he imagined a world of rural simplicity in which shepherds or cowherds held poetic competitions while their complaisant flocks or herds nibbled beautifully but unobtrusively. In this genre, the main problem was that shepherdesses often had tangled hair; but that mattered little as long as the shepherd could imagine himself exquisitely caught within her tangles. Vergil may have been libidinis in pueros pronioris, but, in the world of his Eclogues, a shepherdess or two running provocatively to hide behind the willow trees never came amiss. And that same Vergil, city educated, was among the court propagandists jockying for position and rewards in the cut-throat culture of newly 'imperial' Rome. Wall-paintings recovered at Pompei remind us that such mythical landscapes came right into the living quarters of the urban elite.
Already Horace (Epode II) had seen through this Urban Myth; but I doubt whether Marie Antoinette and her ladies read the Epodes as they tended their lambs at the Petit Trianon.
Trianon-time is back with a vengeance. The Pastoralist Community had never been quite sure where their 'True Countryside' was to be found; they just knew it had to be far distant from the tower-blocks and the filthy crowded streets of the metropolis. Might it be in Arcadia? Sicily? Shropshire? Versailles? ... but now the secret is out! Amazonia!! Amaryllis of the tangled hair, clutching her milking-stool, has decamped to the Amazon! At long last, Jorge I'm-the-Magisterium Bergoglio and his 'Spirit'-filled entourage have pinned it down! Amazonia is where the most mega-Trianon of all time is waiting to be built! Amazonia is where Rousseau's Savage really is still authentically Noble, happily unencumbered with either the felix culpa or the talis et tantus Redemptor!
Go there (by rowing boat, of course; little Swedish Greta Wozname will crew for you). Take your camera and get shots of Kasper herding his heiffers and of Marx playing with his syrinx. Your own face could even appear in a selfie together with Hans Kueng being pelted with apples by lascivious (but guaranteed indigenous) nymphs!
As Gerhard Cardinal Mueller has observed, "It is certainly beautiful to be beside by the Rhine and to dream of the Amazon"! How often that irritating man does get things exactly right!! No wonder he had to be sacked!!! What a good job PF has done in shutting him up!!!!
4 August 2019
clap trap
When I was a simple curate in my (Anglican) Title Parish, I did my best to explain the Faith as lucidly and as vividly as I could. One Sunday, along came a visiting preacher, who made a great Thing about he called the Hic Et Nunc. And ... gracious me ... how impressed so many of the people were simply by his use of a Latin tag. It taught me one of the valuable lessons we all learn early in our Ministry: that very many of the laity are extremely gullible and terribly easily impressed ... particularly by charlatans who prey upon that gullibility.
The hyperbergolianistical Instrumentum laboris issued to guide the Fathers of the Amazonian Synod has been beautifully dissected by Cardinal Mueller. At the LMS Latin Summer School last week, somebody asked me what I thought of the Amazonian Synod. I wish I had just replied "Exactly what Cardinal Mueller has said". He beautifully demonstrates the pompous redundancy and repetitiousness of this fatuous document, pointing out that if all the repetitions were eliminated, it would probabably be less than half its length. His destruction job reminds me of the elegant pamphlets, Church Literature Association, which the late Professor Eric Mascal used to write after painful events such as the publication of the Encyclicals and Resolutions of the Anglican Lambeth Conferences. Trained as a Mathematician and then as a Thomist, Mascall used his icy and razor-sharp analytical mind to expose the pompous and silly twaddle that, in such documents, passed as Theology.
Mueller cites the following from the Instrumentum laboris: "Furthermore, we can say that the Amazon ... or another indigenous or communal territory ... is not only an ubi ... but aso a quid ... thus territory is a theological place where faith is lived and also a particular source of God's revelation: epiphanic places where blah blah blah "(I hope Fr Zed will forgive my appropriation of his convenient formula).
Need I say more? So I won't. Not least because His Eminence has already clobbered all this crass and evil verbiage far better than I could.
The hyperbergolianistical Instrumentum laboris issued to guide the Fathers of the Amazonian Synod has been beautifully dissected by Cardinal Mueller. At the LMS Latin Summer School last week, somebody asked me what I thought of the Amazonian Synod. I wish I had just replied "Exactly what Cardinal Mueller has said". He beautifully demonstrates the pompous redundancy and repetitiousness of this fatuous document, pointing out that if all the repetitions were eliminated, it would probabably be less than half its length. His destruction job reminds me of the elegant pamphlets, Church Literature Association, which the late Professor Eric Mascal used to write after painful events such as the publication of the Encyclicals and Resolutions of the Anglican Lambeth Conferences. Trained as a Mathematician and then as a Thomist, Mascall used his icy and razor-sharp analytical mind to expose the pompous and silly twaddle that, in such documents, passed as Theology.
Mueller cites the following from the Instrumentum laboris: "Furthermore, we can say that the Amazon ... or another indigenous or communal territory ... is not only an ubi ... but aso a quid ... thus territory is a theological place where faith is lived and also a particular source of God's revelation: epiphanic places where blah blah blah "(I hope Fr Zed will forgive my appropriation of his convenient formula).
Need I say more? So I won't. Not least because His Eminence has already clobbered all this crass and evil verbiage far better than I could.
3 August 2019
Kasper and his not-so-Noble Savages
The Bergoglianist apparent belief that a Neo-Eden inhabited by Noble Savages exists in the Amazonian Basin may perhaps remind us that people of this general theological orientataion have not always been so open to the intuitions of non-Europeans in a 'Third' World. What about Kasper and his views concerning African intuitions?
Readers will remember the theological debate between Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper about which comes logically first: the Universal Church or the local, i.e. particular, Churches.
This may seem to Plain Men and Plain Women like us a sort of arid 'theological' debate like the (alleged) debate about Angels and Points of Needles, involving fancy word games and with little relevance to our plain everyday lives. But that is not so. Followers of the Kasper line, in which the particular Church comes first, are now using that belief to justify their conviction that particular Churches, embedded in their different cultures, might adopt different doctrines and disciplines with regard to marriage and sexuality.
That is what lies behind the interview (which Kasper later, mendaciously, denied had ever happened, until Ed Pentin produced the tapes) in which Kasper talked sneeringly about African Catholics and said that "They should not tell us too much what we have to do". He admitted that "in the end there must be ... general criteria", but emphasised that "There must be space also for the local bishops' conferences to solve their problems". Memories for us of a Lambeth Conference at which an American 'episcopalian' bishop was heard to remark "Some of these Africans will do anything for a chicken". REMEMBER that we ex-Anglicans have seen it all. If you want to know what is scheduled by the Enemy to happen next in the Catholic Church, ask your Ordinariate friends.
Readers will remember the theological debate between Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper about which comes logically first: the Universal Church or the local, i.e. particular, Churches.
This may seem to Plain Men and Plain Women like us a sort of arid 'theological' debate like the (alleged) debate about Angels and Points of Needles, involving fancy word games and with little relevance to our plain everyday lives. But that is not so. Followers of the Kasper line, in which the particular Church comes first, are now using that belief to justify their conviction that particular Churches, embedded in their different cultures, might adopt different doctrines and disciplines with regard to marriage and sexuality.
That is what lies behind the interview (which Kasper later, mendaciously, denied had ever happened, until Ed Pentin produced the tapes) in which Kasper talked sneeringly about African Catholics and said that "They should not tell us too much what we have to do". He admitted that "in the end there must be ... general criteria", but emphasised that "There must be space also for the local bishops' conferences to solve their problems". Memories for us of a Lambeth Conference at which an American 'episcopalian' bishop was heard to remark "Some of these Africans will do anything for a chicken". REMEMBER that we ex-Anglicans have seen it all. If you want to know what is scheduled by the Enemy to happen next in the Catholic Church, ask your Ordinariate friends.
The truth is that the the Universal Church comes first. It comes first in time because it begins as the One Apostolic Church gathered from all nations into one in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost; it comes first theologically because it is the Mystical Body of Christ Himself, which must be ontologically [in the order of being] prior to the various gatherings of Christians (incorporated by Baptism into Him) which we call ecclesiae.
This has enormous practical consequences with regard to whether the German bishops, or others, can be allowed to go their own ways (unrestrained by the Universal Church) with regard to things like the treatment of remarried divorcees and of those living in genital homosexual relationships.
In 1992, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published, over Joseph Ratzinger's signature, a very fine document Communionis notio, approved by S John Paul II and ordered by him to be published. (I would remind readers that 'particular Church' in this and other similar texts refers to what we might call a diocese: the People, Deacons, Presbyters gathered round their Bishop.)
An extract follows.
An extract follows.
" ... the particular Churches, insofar as they are 'part of the one Church of Christ,' have a special relationship of 'mutual interiority' with the whole, that is, with the universal Church, because in every particular Church 'the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of Christ is truly present and active'. For this reason, 'the universal Church cannot be conceived as the sum of the particular Churches, or as a federation of particular Churches'. It is not the result of the communion of the Churches, but, in its essential mystery, it is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular Church. Indeed, according to the Fathers, ontologically, the Church-mystery, the Church that is one and unique, precedes creation, and gives birth to the particular Churches as her daughters. She expresses herself in them; she is the mother and not the offspring of the particular Churches. Furthermore, the Church is manifested, temporally, on the day of Pentecost in the community of the one hundred and twenty gathered around Mary and the twelve apostles, the representatives of the one unique Church and founders-to-be of the local churches, who have a mission directed to the world. From the beginning the Church speaks all languages.
"From the Church, which in its origins and its first manifestation is universal, have arisen the different local Churches, as particular expressions of the one unique Church of Jesus Christ. Arising within and out of the universal Church, they have their ecclesiality in her and from her. Hence the formula of the Second Vatican Council: The Church in and formed out of the Churches (Ecclesia in et ex Ecclesiis), is inseparable from this other formula: The Churches in and formed out of the Church (Ecclesiae in et ex Ecclesia*)."
__________________________________________________________________________
*Translation based on the Libreria Editrice Vaticana translation. I have corrected two printers' errors in the last parenthesis. There are also two typographical errors in the references given in the appended footnotes.
2 August 2019
An unobserved Anniversay for CORNWALL
On this day*, in 1595, the forces of our late Sovereign Liege Lord King Philip, commanded by Carlo de Amesquita, landed in Cornwall in the area of Penzance and harried the neighbourhood. They burned a number of churches defiled by dissident worship, but left unburned the chapel of S Mary in Penzance. They did this because an English Catholic captain, Richard Burley of Weymouth, who was guiding them, informed them that it had been used for Catholic worship. Since the same could be said for the other churches which were burned, in as far as they were medieval churches used for Catholic worship before the Schism, the captain presumably meant that the chapel in Penzance was still being used for Catholic worship. This would fit in with a body of evidence for continuing Recusant activities in Cornwall until quite late in the reign of Bloody Bess.
At Paul the church was burned; and an interesting detail survives. The Spaniards, devout and exemplary Catholics, were horrified to discover an idol in Paul church: a wooden horse. The realisation that Protestants were even more abandoned to error than they had suspected ... that they actually sacrificed to horrible hippomorphic heathen deities ... increased their pious wrath and they made a special point of burning it. (I have a theory here: that what they found may have been preserved from the early Middle Ages when, in many places, a wooden donkey gave dramatic verisimilitude to the Palm Sunday Procession.)
Then, on August 3 or 4*, Mass was solemnly sung on a hilltop near Paul, and the Commander of the expedition before sailing away vowed that when the Faith had been restored to England, a chapel would be built there ex voto.
___________________________________________________________________________
*Well, they landed on August 2 Old Style. Of course, this was July 23 New Style. So if it was August 4 Old Style when the Spaniards celebrated their hilltop Mass before departing, that would have been July 25 New Style, the Feast of S James, a not insignificant day. See my post for July 25.
At Paul the church was burned; and an interesting detail survives. The Spaniards, devout and exemplary Catholics, were horrified to discover an idol in Paul church: a wooden horse. The realisation that Protestants were even more abandoned to error than they had suspected ... that they actually sacrificed to horrible hippomorphic heathen deities ... increased their pious wrath and they made a special point of burning it. (I have a theory here: that what they found may have been preserved from the early Middle Ages when, in many places, a wooden donkey gave dramatic verisimilitude to the Palm Sunday Procession.)
Then, on August 3 or 4*, Mass was solemnly sung on a hilltop near Paul, and the Commander of the expedition before sailing away vowed that when the Faith had been restored to England, a chapel would be built there ex voto.
___________________________________________________________________________
*Well, they landed on August 2 Old Style. Of course, this was July 23 New Style. So if it was August 4 Old Style when the Spaniards celebrated their hilltop Mass before departing, that would have been July 25 New Style, the Feast of S James, a not insignificant day. See my post for July 25.
1 August 2019
Liberation Theology (2)
(The continuation of the piece which was begun on May Day.)
Briefly, I will single out just one or two of the differences between the '1984' and the '1986' documents. Liberation Theology made much of the concept of institutionalised Sin. Sin, many Liberationists argued, should not be seen as an individual delict committed by an individual, but something embedded in the structures of societies; particularly in those of exploitative capitalist societies. Against this view, '1984' argued that the war against Sin was primarily to be found in the internal conversion of the individual. But '1986' saw the work for internal conversions and the improvement of structures as simultaneous. And, two years later in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, S John Paul wrote: "The principal obstacle to be overcome on the way to authentic liberation is Sin and the structures produced by Sin as it multiplies and spreads".
'1984' deplored any use of Marxist analysis; '1986' did not repeat this grumble. Indeed, some of the writings of the early Marx (Grundrisse) about Alienation and Reification might arguably be illuminating to a Catholic thinker; and some of the anthropological writings of Guevara on the New (Socialist) Man would bear interesting comparison with S Paul's anthropology if Guevara's views were not so sadly limited (I might go so far as to say vitiated) by his simplistic unawareness of the existence and nature of Original Sin.
'1986' actually used the controversial phrase "Option for the Poor"; because the man who affirms poverty is worth more for what he is than for what he has; so that the Option "excludes nobody". And S John Paul II used the phrase with approval in his Redemptoris Mater of 1987.
Marxist ethics notoriously have their roots in the dogma of the Primacy of Praxis. This found expression among the Comunidades de base of Latin America, often led by their revolutionary clergy. There had therefore been natural suspicion in the Church of these Base Communities, arising from their behaviour and the writings of some of their proponents; but '1986' actually favoured them as long as they did not "go beyond" Christ and His Church.
The Church, the World, and Latin America, have come a long way since the 1980s. But it is still, I understand, true that the gap between rich and poor in many places has widened rather than narrowed. Plutocratic self-interest still uses its wealth to attempt to bully 'Third World' countries into enforcing abortion and contraception, on the wholly mendacious grounds that the planet cannot sustain a growing population. We abort a large percentage of our own population and then wonder, firstly, why there seems to be a strange vacuum in our labour market which attracts foreigners to come and fill it; and, secondly, how an aging population profile can possibly be supported by a diminishing working population. Some 'Green' movements seem to me to inherit the ideologies of the Nazi, American, and Scandinavian 'Eugenics' and 'Racial Hygiene' movements of the 1930s; the racism is now covert rather than overt but the leopard's spots have in fact changed very little: the cry is still essentially that Subhumans Breed Too Much. And still we find it easier to try to work out how to stop them getting to Lampedousa than to take much interest in the structural causes of demographic instability.
Is there not a vacuum here for the Teaching Authority of the Church to re-enter; in which to establish a new bridgehead? Ecclesiastical teaching on global warming and rain-forests can be so simplistic. Vitally important here is the phrase 'human ecology', first used by S John Paul but memorably deployed by the august emeritus pontiff Benedict XVI: "The human being will be capable of respecting other creatures only if he keeps the full meaning of life in his own heart. Otherwise he will come to despise himself and his surroundings, and to disrespect the environment, the creation, in which he lives. For this reason, the first ecology to be defended is human ecology. This is to say, that, without a clear defence of human life from conception until natural death, without a defence of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, without an authentic defence of those excluded and marginalised by Society ... we will never be able to speak of authentic protection of the environment". Just as goodness cannot authentically come from an evil and corrupted individual heart, so authentic 'environmentalism' cannot come from an evil and corrupted human society. A Church which makes her peace with those who promote abortion and disordered sexual acts (whether heterosexual or homosexual) on the grounds that 'we may disagree about some things but we can co-operate because we find common ground with regard to the ozone layer', is a Church which has been deceived by the Evil One.
We are told that, immediately after his Election, PF had this message whispered into his ear by a close friend among the Patres purpurati, Cardinal Hummes: Do not forget the Poor. I cannot help wondering if the priorities of this Pontificate have been subverted by noisy Northern European cardinals who belabour the papal ear with demands generated among the comfortable (if sexually incontinent) Kirchensteuer (Church Tax) paying congregations who fund them.
Such people ... either the bishops or the tax-payers concerned ... are not exactly what Holy Scripture means when it talks about hoi ptokhoi toi pneumati, "the Poor in Spirit".
Briefly, I will single out just one or two of the differences between the '1984' and the '1986' documents. Liberation Theology made much of the concept of institutionalised Sin. Sin, many Liberationists argued, should not be seen as an individual delict committed by an individual, but something embedded in the structures of societies; particularly in those of exploitative capitalist societies. Against this view, '1984' argued that the war against Sin was primarily to be found in the internal conversion of the individual. But '1986' saw the work for internal conversions and the improvement of structures as simultaneous. And, two years later in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, S John Paul wrote: "The principal obstacle to be overcome on the way to authentic liberation is Sin and the structures produced by Sin as it multiplies and spreads".
'1984' deplored any use of Marxist analysis; '1986' did not repeat this grumble. Indeed, some of the writings of the early Marx (Grundrisse) about Alienation and Reification might arguably be illuminating to a Catholic thinker; and some of the anthropological writings of Guevara on the New (Socialist) Man would bear interesting comparison with S Paul's anthropology if Guevara's views were not so sadly limited (I might go so far as to say vitiated) by his simplistic unawareness of the existence and nature of Original Sin.
'1986' actually used the controversial phrase "Option for the Poor"; because the man who affirms poverty is worth more for what he is than for what he has; so that the Option "excludes nobody". And S John Paul II used the phrase with approval in his Redemptoris Mater of 1987.
Marxist ethics notoriously have their roots in the dogma of the Primacy of Praxis. This found expression among the Comunidades de base of Latin America, often led by their revolutionary clergy. There had therefore been natural suspicion in the Church of these Base Communities, arising from their behaviour and the writings of some of their proponents; but '1986' actually favoured them as long as they did not "go beyond" Christ and His Church.
The Church, the World, and Latin America, have come a long way since the 1980s. But it is still, I understand, true that the gap between rich and poor in many places has widened rather than narrowed. Plutocratic self-interest still uses its wealth to attempt to bully 'Third World' countries into enforcing abortion and contraception, on the wholly mendacious grounds that the planet cannot sustain a growing population. We abort a large percentage of our own population and then wonder, firstly, why there seems to be a strange vacuum in our labour market which attracts foreigners to come and fill it; and, secondly, how an aging population profile can possibly be supported by a diminishing working population. Some 'Green' movements seem to me to inherit the ideologies of the Nazi, American, and Scandinavian 'Eugenics' and 'Racial Hygiene' movements of the 1930s; the racism is now covert rather than overt but the leopard's spots have in fact changed very little: the cry is still essentially that Subhumans Breed Too Much. And still we find it easier to try to work out how to stop them getting to Lampedousa than to take much interest in the structural causes of demographic instability.
Is there not a vacuum here for the Teaching Authority of the Church to re-enter; in which to establish a new bridgehead? Ecclesiastical teaching on global warming and rain-forests can be so simplistic. Vitally important here is the phrase 'human ecology', first used by S John Paul but memorably deployed by the august emeritus pontiff Benedict XVI: "The human being will be capable of respecting other creatures only if he keeps the full meaning of life in his own heart. Otherwise he will come to despise himself and his surroundings, and to disrespect the environment, the creation, in which he lives. For this reason, the first ecology to be defended is human ecology. This is to say, that, without a clear defence of human life from conception until natural death, without a defence of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, without an authentic defence of those excluded and marginalised by Society ... we will never be able to speak of authentic protection of the environment". Just as goodness cannot authentically come from an evil and corrupted individual heart, so authentic 'environmentalism' cannot come from an evil and corrupted human society. A Church which makes her peace with those who promote abortion and disordered sexual acts (whether heterosexual or homosexual) on the grounds that 'we may disagree about some things but we can co-operate because we find common ground with regard to the ozone layer', is a Church which has been deceived by the Evil One.
We are told that, immediately after his Election, PF had this message whispered into his ear by a close friend among the Patres purpurati, Cardinal Hummes: Do not forget the Poor. I cannot help wondering if the priorities of this Pontificate have been subverted by noisy Northern European cardinals who belabour the papal ear with demands generated among the comfortable (if sexually incontinent) Kirchensteuer (Church Tax) paying congregations who fund them.
Such people ... either the bishops or the tax-payers concerned ... are not exactly what Holy Scripture means when it talks about hoi ptokhoi toi pneumati, "the Poor in Spirit".
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