A necessary pedantry

We often speak loosely about "the Church". I fear I do it myself. In a prim, schoolmasterly fashion, I would like to sugest some rather important precisions.

(1) The Church, the Body of Christ, consists of the Church Triumphant; the Church Exspectant; the Church Militant. Heaven; Purgatory; Earth. We use "the Church" so commonly when we are talking only about the Chrch Militant.

The tempter Screwtape writes to a junior tempter: "One of our greatest allies ... is the Church itself. ... I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That ... is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished sham Gothic erection ... the local grocer with an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad ... When he gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided..."etc., Letter 2.

The awareness that the Church is so much more than merely the Church Militant, owes, I think, a lot to the appropriation of this important truth by Anglo-Catholic writers of the twentieth century  from Orthodox writers.

(2) Sometimes we talk about "the Church" when we mean, within the Church Militant, the Latin Church. Latin Christianity is  not the only cultural, theological, liturgical tradition, even among those Christians who are in full communion with the See of S Peter.

"Ecclesial"?

Speaking about the "Dubia" some little while ago, PF said that these questions had been published in the Press before being submitted to him. He described this action as "not ecclesial".

(Here we have to decide whether Cardinal Burke and his associates are liars for saying that the text was sent to PF long before its publication, or PF the liar for claiming the opposite. Having on a number of occasions had the privilege of Cardinal Burke's company, I have my own judgement about who the liar is. Others will naturally have their own good reasons for judging differently. But this little detail is not what I am discussing this morning.)

We now have a former Nuncio to these kingdoms reported as saying that a strong letter will be sent to the Pope "tomorrow" urging the pretended ordination of women to sacerdotal ministries.

Presumably, PF will draw this person's attention to the teaching of S John Paul II, expressive of the infallible Ordinary Magisterium, in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

Presumably he will also point out how "unecclesial" it was for this initiative to be be made public before being sent to him.

Presumably some of the venom unleashed upon another retired Nuncio, Archbishop Vigano, who went "off-message", will be be made generously available to this retired Nuncio, who has rubbished the infallible teaching of the Church he was ordained to serve.

Valentia Island

For fifteen years of our lives while we were still in the Church of England, we would still, in late August, be spending seven weeks at one of the loveliest places I have ever known: the island of Valentia, off County Kerry near the bottom left hand corner of Ireland. The sort of jokes the English make about the Irish, are, in Ireland, made about the people of Kerry; and, in Kerry, are made about the people of Valentia. But they are, in my view, marvellous people, friendly, articulate, ever curious. We went there because, during the summer months, the Church of Ireland opened up a church there for the holidaymakers (there being no Church of Ireland parishioners permanently living there), and provided a chaplain's house.

I am reminded of Valentia every morning as I say my Latin (EF) Mass; you see, during our visits I got to know, very well, the Parish Priest, Fr John Shanahan, a gracious, generous, and well-read man. Having mentioned to him that I stood in need of an Altar Missal, and Did he have a very old one that his church wouldn't miss, I found a very nice 1950s missal in a bag on my doorstep. It must have been bought back in the glory days of the Irish church; during the Marian Year of 1954, commemorating the centenary of the Proclamation of the Dogma of the Immmaculate Conception, when the then Parish Priest had a derelict slate quarry transformed into a very creditable representation of the Grotto at Lourdes. On Assumption Day Fr John and I used to go there and lead his congregation (with the addition of one or two of my Church of Ireland people) in the Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary.

If you want to go to a holiday spot with fishing, water sports, regattas, ogham stones, ancient monastic sites, fossilised tetrapod footprints, choughs, razorbills, gannets, fulmars, puffins, seals, dolphins, oysters, scallops, lobsters, subtropical gardens, fantastic walks ... you can't do better than Knightstown, Valentia. And don't forget to say your rosary in the Grotto.

Calendars

Recently, I rejoiced on a rare Monday actually to be able to say the 'green' Mass of the Sunday. And then, on the Tuesday, I said a Mass of a local Beatus, Dominic of the Mother of God (who received S J H Newman into the Church) ... with a commemoration of S Joseph Calasanctius, the Saint on the Universal Calendar.

I would like to say those grand old Roman Masses, with their superb collects, more often. As far as the Divine Office is concerned, I think it is deplorable that, in the Novus Ordo, even on the surviving ferias one is not allowed to use the Sunday Collect (only allowed at the Office of Readings; elsewhere collects relating to the time-of-day are provided).

There is a perennial tendency for calendars to get cluttered; this is accentuated by the unnecessary Novus Ordo prohibition of what we used to call 'commemorations'. And day after day, we repeat the hymn Iste Confessor as we celebrate the endless succession of  'confessors', especially 'confessor bishops' who founded orders or congregations.

The older strata of the Roman Calendar have very many more Martyrs. As, indeed, it seems to me the Byzantine Calendar does. Perhaps this is because for centuries the Western Church was dominated by confessor bishops and founders while the Ottoman Empire offered to God New Martyrs.

I don't think that either the 1962 calendar, or that of the Liturgia Horarum, have quite got things right. As an interim remedy, perhaps the Novus Ordo Calendar should admit commemorations; perhaps the twentieth century martys canonised by S John Paul II should be among those allowed onto the 1962 Calendar ... and more saints should be made optional.

Things to do in church

In Ickford church in Buckinghamshire, where Pam and I once went for a walk, one of the window sills is marked with a design for the ancient game of Nine Men's Morris [according to OED, a corruption for merrells]. In fact it is marked twice; one design neatly cut, another rather crudely.

Who played this game there, and when? I know we mustn't assume that medieval worshippers were always devout and well-behaved, but the sill concerned is rather near the site (indicated by an adjacent piscina) of an ancient altar ... and accordingly probably inside the confines of a parclose screen and perhaps within a chantry. Were the merrells players active in the age of box pews ... my Victorian predecessor at S Thomas's, Canon Chamberlain, when he was evicting the box pews from S Thomas's, claimed that such things went on within them as were an offence to female modesty. Or should we deem the perpetrators to have been parishioners at leisure, amusing themselves in church when worship was not occurring?

Romantic Anglicans sometimes forget that before the unjustly reviled Victorians got down to their sometimes admittedly heavy restorations, some of our churches were almost derelict and many were in a state of near collapse.

Any thoughts?

Cineres

Enixe commendatur ut quilibet sacerdos quotidie unam Missam Votivam offerat pro Cineribus Recuperandis.

De Laszlo and eyes

I wonder if the canonisation of Blessed John Henry Newman will be welcomed by any thematically associated exhibitions? I might nominate a  picture which appeared in London in 2010 from Budapest and had also featured in a very jolly little exhibition put on by Christie's in 2004: a fine portrait by Philip de Laszlo of Leo XIII, who rehabilitated Newman after the Pio Nono years by giving him (despite the machinations of Cardinal Manning) a Cardinal's hat.

I never forget a Laszlo, because right beside my door in Great School at Lancing hung a superb portrait by Laszlo of a former head master ... he did it cheap because he had a couple of boys at the College. Laszlo rendered Dr Bowlby's eyes very well: haunted and disappointed. Evelyn Waugh commented that it was while he was at Lancing that Bowlby must have realised that he had been passed over for a bishopric ... he ended up sacked after a SCR coup ... one of life's unachievers?

I have been told that Laszlo's first attempt at a portrait of the Pope made him look disastrously like the late Voltaire; but the artist was very young at the time! Laszlo recorded that, during his four sittings with Pope Leo, the Holy Father conversed about "a great variety of subjects; political, religious, social, artistic and scientific". The eyes are those of an old (he was in his nineties when he died), kindly, highly intelligent, and intellectually lively man.

Pope Leo was no slouch when it came to composing Latin hymns.

Shrewsbury College flattened usque ad fundamenta

Pam and I took a walk the other day which I don't think we've done since we were undergraduates. We strolled along South Parks Road, to see how the devotees of Natural Philosophy are getting on. And the verdict is: splendidly! Readers will recall the 1938 chapter of Let Dons Delight, where Roberts, the venerable and aged science don at Simon Magus College, is inclined to complain that "the labs are being starved". Not any more, they're not. Unbelievably, a great brutalist monstrosity on the corner of South Parks Road and Mansfield Road, temp. 1970, which in a sane world would be demolished, is being refurbished for another phase of its misbegotten life!!

We hurried past it to revisit the redbrick building with pretty Queen Anneish gables on the other side of the road: in our, happier, times a convent, but now describing itself as Linacre College. I was wondering what has become of all the clever nuns who were such an adornment to intellectual life in the 1960s ... when the penny dropped in my mind: clever nuns are now largely a thing of the past. The Spirit of Vatican II has phased out such unwanted anomalies.

So we passed the desolate site of Parsons' Pleasure, where Sir Maurice Bowra once so famously adjudged his os to be magis pudendum than his inguina, and approached Mesopotamia. But lo! there is a new path on the West side of the Cherwell ... which led us to S Catherine's College, a building described by 'Bauhaus' Pevsner in 1974 as "a perfect piece of architecture ... if young people don't like it, that may be an argument against them rather than against the college". Ah ... the facile arrogance of a cultural elite ...

The Medieval monks, in their crabbed way, devised the concept of the quadrangle or cloister, wherein the members of a scholarly (or any) community can most comfortably relate to each other, and enjoy the shelter afforded by this enclosed design against the worst demonstrations of our weather. In so devising they were, of course, simply reinventing the old Roman convention of the urban house looking inwards to its sheltered interior peristyle garden.

The Enlightenment of the 1960s knew so much better than monks and Romans. "Cat's" follows a quadrangular design but wisely leaves open the North and South ends of its neo-quadrangles, thus skilfully chanelling cold North winds so that they sweep refreshingly down through the entire complex.

We returned to Mansfield Road hoping to pass by the little house where, six decades ago, Pam used to go for tutorials with Miriam Griffin. Horror!! Not only have nearly all those coy little donnish houses been demolished, but the entire site of Shrewsbury College has been flattened! 

"Shrewsbury College" ... its very dedication calls to mind a happy era of strong and clever women, long before the advent of the whinging Sisterhood. "... Mary Countess of Shrewsbury ... the queer, strong-featured face, with its ill-tempered mouth and sidelong secretive glance ... Bess of Hardwick's daughter ... a great intellectual, indeed, but something of a holy terror: uncontrollable by her menfolk, undaunted by the Tower, contemptuously silent before the Privy Council, an obstinate recusant, a staunch friend and implacable enemy and a lady with a turn for invective remarkable even in an age when few mouths suffered from mealiness. ...  Her husband, the 'great and glorious Earl of Shrewsbury', had purchased domestic peace at a price; for, said Bacon, there was 'a greater than he, which is my Lady Shrewsbury'".

On the boarding surrounding the demolition site, there is one of those deliciously deceitful "Architects' Drawings". It demonstrates what is even now being built in place of Shrewsbury College. In the middle there will be Scone College Cricket Ground, and round it accommodation for undergraduate and postgraduate members of that eccentric collegiate institution. The drawing shows men in white, vigorously playing Cricket within, er, a few feet of plate-glass windows.

Ah, well, I'm sure the Master of Scone ("First come I. My name is Jowett / There's no knowledge but I know it") knows best.

We scuttled off down Jowett Walk ("I am the Master of this College / What I don't know isn't knowledge") to the Covered Market, and stocked up with Levantine goodies ... no; not in Palm's delicatessen; that, like Fuller's Walnut Cake, now only exists as a Platonic Idea ... but at Manos's  Greek Restaurant (admirable, but not as admirable as his magnificent first emporium still flourishing up in Jericho).

That cheered us up enough to enable us to stagger to our 'bus-stop outside Cardinal College.

Pedantries

I don't know if you you feel this ... a stirring of irritation when somebody uses words in a just slightly "incorrect" way ... incorrect, that is, to my rather narrow little mind.

One of my examples is hearing people referring to a priest "putting on his robes".

For me, there is a world of difference between 'robes' and 'vestments'. 'ROBES' signify a laudable status which someone by laudable exertions has laudably achieved. Examples: Judges; Mayors; Doctors of Philosophy ...

This last example is a comparatively new introduction in this University. In the Old Days, when lovely clean-cut American youths came here to further their academic careers, they were told to read for one of the tried-and-tested Honour Schools. This they did. But problems arose. When the little fellows went back 'state-side', people asked them what they had achieved. "Bachelor of Arts", they proudly replied. "But you already had that from X University over here before you went across to England" was the wondering reply.

So Oxford introduced the 'Doctor of Philosophy' degree. Soon, not only Americans but everybody who had academic ambitions was taking it. When we were undergraduates in the early 1960s, the younger lecturers and Fellows tended to have one; older dons jealously, zealously, guarded the title "Mr Smith' and spluttered angrily when the well-meaning mistakenly addressed them as "Dr Smith".

To such dinosaurs, the only doctorates that meant anything were the rare old medieval doctorates in Divinity, Law, Medicine, Music, Letters, and more latterly Science.

The gown of the Doctor of Philosophy is a vulgar red and blue without proper sleeves. Nothing like the stately medieval gowns. If you will forgive a Bergoglian expression, they look like overgrown butterflies. For all I know, the gown may be based on transpontine archetypes (what are New England Butterflies like?)
 
Doctoral garb distinguishes the achievement of, er, achievers.

'VESTMENTS', on the other hand, negate the individuality and achievements of the wearer. He wears them to indicate that he is nothing; that he is acting solely in the name of Another. He is a man who was not honoured but humiliated, when, at his Ordination, he lay prostrate on the ground. He now acts clothed in the Priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Far from gaining or achieving anything, he has lost individuality. 'Initiative' is, quite simply, not his job. Nor is 'personality'.

He is a man whose hands and voice are not his own because his sacramental words and deeds are those of the Redeemer.

When you see him emerging, chasubled, from the Sacristy, you should say to yourself "Ah ... jolly good ... another of these Nobodies ..."

Salveteatquevalete

A very good piece , on that blog, from the redoutable Fr Allan Hawkins.

The Papal Tiara

A few days ago, Fr Zed wrote an interesting piece about papal liturgy and its adjuncts ... including the papal tiara.

Perhaps it is time for me to revive the Hunwicke Proposal for the Restoration of the Tiara.

In 1800, the papacy was under enormous threat. Pope Pius VI had been arrested by the forces of the Enlightenment, and had died in exile. Many thought that he had been the last pope. However, eventually a Conclave was held in Venice, and Pius VII was elected. But the tiaras of his predecessors were unavailable ... because they were all in occupied Rome.

So an instant, papier-mache tiara was made for him!

It still exists.

Wonderful! This cheap-o tiara symbolises a persecuted Church; a Church Militant at the mercy of her enemies. A Church without the capacity to draw upon the physical riches of an opulent past.

An ideal piece of headgear for a Holy Father called to preside over a persecuted, a slenderer Church.

And here is another Hunwicke Proposal.

Let a law be enacted
(a) prohibiting the acquisition for use by the Roman Pontiff of any new liturgical garb; and
(b) mandating that any monies which anybody desires to use for giving the pope new liturgical garb must instead be given to the poor. Let the pontiff 'slum' by wearing the left-overs in the Vatican sacristies ... the vestments worn by his predecessors in the Roman See. Vestments still impregnated with the snuff used by B Pius IX! The very vestments in which Pius XII hiccupped his way through his final years!

This law should last for, say, 300 years. By then, perhaps these inherited vestments would indeed all have been used up.

And the poor might not be poor.

"HYMNARIUM SUPPLETIVUM"

Happy times, when I used to go a couple of Sundays each year to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the Latin Mass group in Copenhagen when they did not have a regular priest! Days when my friend Ulf, whose eyes see everything, who understands everything, took me round the palaces and parks, the museums and galleries of that most exquisitely civilised city! And introduced me to its culinary delights ... did you know that it possesses probably one of the half-dozen best Italian restaurants in the world?

Ulf has most kindly sent me a present: Hymnarium Suppletivum: Hymni Sacri recentiores compositi a Ioanne Georgio Bertram (this second edition, 2017, has the ISBN numbers 10:3-86417-088-5 and 13:978-3-86417-088-1). This is a profoundly interesting volume in which every page one turns elicits a "Wow"!

Bertram begins his Praefatio ad secundam editionem by remarking, justly, that Leo XIII was a hymnodus ingeniosus et entheos. He laments that, since that time, the Muses have been silent! He makes an exception for Dom Anselmo Lentini ... who, he says, composed some new hymns for the Benedictine Saints. True: but Dom Anselmo also composed quite a number of other hymns for the Liturgy of the Hours to supply exactly the want which Bertram pinpoints -- the lack of proper hymns for Saints, particularly including the newly canonised.

So, for example, Bertram provides a fine composition for the Visitation of our Lady on July 2. But Lentini had already composed a new hymn for this feast (on its Novus Ordo date), so it is not quite accurate to say that the Muses had been entirely silent. When one compares the two, I think it has to be said that Lentini's has the instinct for sobriety which, as Edmund Bishop pointed out, characterises the Roman Rite. Bertram portrays S John Baptist loudly complaining that he is still confined in the darkness of the womb! (Lentini's work can be found in two volumes, Hymni Instaurandi of 1968 and Te decet of 1984.)

Bertram's compositions seem to me often to breathe the exuberant spirit of the Middle Ages (and I do not say this in a sneering or pejorative spirit). He is not scared of starting a hymn with Westphalicum illud praecipuum genus ... . Medieval in spirit is his detailed refutation, in a hymn he composes in honour of Pius XII, of the accusations concerning papal policy towards the persecution of the Jewish people. He even works in an account of how Rome's Chief Rabbi received in Baptism the name Eugenio! His admiration for Cardinal Midszenty elicits a hymn in honour of that great pontiff; and a hymn starting Habsburgensibus goes on to apostrophise Sic te, Carole, sic te Zita ...

I am not sure that this collection is, so to speak, oven-ready to be added to the (pre-Conciliar) Breviarium Romanum. But it will undoubtedly be a stimulating volume for the clerus Latinus to keep close at hand, perhaps on the prayer-desk or beside the bed.

Thank you, Ulf, for this gift and for the friendship of the years!