DIX and the Jesuit

 Today is the obit of our great Anglican Catholic liturgist and mystagogue and wit, Dom Gregory Dix.

Dr Eric Mascall criticised the common Anglican assumption that everyone will "to the end of our earthly days ... perform discursive meditations on the Ignatian model, with all the multiplicity of acts that are peculiar to its many variants", and gives this anecdote about Dix: "Some years before Vatican II he was, rather daringly, invited by Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon to give a lecture on Anglican spirituality. In the discussion he was asked by an unidentified priest whether the Anglican clergy were taught Ignatian spirituality. Dix replied that it was the only kind that most of them were taught, and that this was very unfortunate, as it was a type that was very unsuitable to English people, so that most of them, having tried it without success, abandoned prayer altogether.

"There was a burst of laughter and the questioner, somewhat disconcerted, sat down with the remark, 'Father, that is a truly Benedictine sentiment'. 

"The chairman whispered to Dom Gregory, 'That was the Father Provincial of the Society of Jesus'"

His book The Shape of the Liturgy, amusing and stimulating and immensely influential in the days immediately after the War, gave rise to a set of verses [written by Mascall???] including this stanza:

"Gloom in the Athenaeum,/ Darkness and dirty looks!/ Bishops huddled in corners,/ Reading their Contact Books,/ Flickers the flame of Fisher,/ Waver the words of Woods,/ Faint and vague is he voice of Haigh,/ Garbett's not the goods,/ The glory that was Pollock,/ The grandeur that was Hicks,/ Gone to a monk at Nashdom,/ Gone to Gregory Dix."

Dix would not have been favoured in this dark Age of Bergoglianity and of the poor arthur roches. He liked to be able to say that "This very morning I [said Mass] with a set of texts which has not changed by more than a few syllables since Augustine used those very words at Canterbury on the third Sunday of Easter in the summer after he landed."

CAPD

Pope Francis attacks Sant Francis. (How high do ostriches fly?)

 PF took the name 'Francis' as a way of implying "I'm not like any other pope there has ever been". After this memorable if unsubtle piece of arrogance, you may think that is is strange for our Holy Father now to attack the Poverello.

Yet he has by implication done exactly that.

Fact is so often stranger than Fiction!!!

He has told us that proclaiming the Scriptures in a non-vernacular language is "like laughing at the Word of God".

It is a good thing that, some years ago now, after reading S John Henry Newman on the Suspense of the function of the Ecclesia docens, I concluded that we now must be in precisely just such a period of Suspense. I cannot see how else one can analyse PF in terms of any sort of Catholic ecclesiology.

You see, S Francis was a deacon. This means that his own particular liturgical ministry at Mass was to sing the Gospel. In PF's world of rich fantasy, whenever S Francis sang Sequentia Sancti Evangelii secundum ... he (presumably) felt the laughter welling up inside him. After singing In illo tempore ..., his mirth (we conjecture) was just too much for him. He must have sunk helpless to the ground with great sobs of tearful laughter. I hope there was a doctor in the house.

You find this scenario "improbable"? You may say that, Maddy; I couldn't possibly comment. But my aged memory does recall hearing, some six decades ago, Eduard Frankel (one of Adolph Hitler's greatest benefactions to the Oxford Honour School of Litterae Humaniores) referring to Robinson Ellis as "A man viz a remarkable instinct for ze improbable." I think he may have been referring to Ellis's words about Queen Arsinoe II's Flying Ostriches.

(I wonder if we should discern a connexion with an address PF once gave to servers, in which he recalled that, as a boy, back in the time of the Usus Authenticus of the Roman Rite, he himself loved to make a mockery of the Most Holy Eucharist by changing the words and ceremonies in order to render them risible. By implication, PF apparently urged his youthful hearers to perform similar amusing sacrileges.)

Gaia, Natura, and all the Earth Mothers

"The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our siater. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved."

SOME OXFORD MARTYRS

Recycled from a previous year.
Once a term (on the Saturday, I believe, in Seventh Week, which is this week), the authorities of S John's College in this University open their gates to those who wish to look at their unique collection of late Medieval vestments. These vestments date from the foundation of the college in the reign of Good Queen Mary as part of the reform movement which she, Cardinal Pole, and their bishops were sponsoring. After the dark days of Henry VIII and Edward VI, it must have seemed to right-thinking Christians that all was back to rights again; but Mary's reign was not just a restoration of the old. New standards of clerical professionalism were part of its nascent policy, together with new schemes for instructing the laity in their Catholic Faith (Mary's collaborators were not afraid to use some of those precise methods which were used in the previous reign to disseminate heresy). This is England's aborted but briefly glorious Counter-Reformation. Duffy, of course ...

I wonder if there will ever be a national exhibition of what remains of this period - one of the most sparkling quinquennia in our history. If there were, S John's could provide some spectacular exhibits; and in my view the two banners which they possess would have the greatest interest. One is of their Patron, S John Baptist, and shows him in a distinctly baroque style. The other is of our Lady Assumpta; an idiosyncrasy is that the crescent moon on which she stands has, on top of it, a face - the Man-in-the-Moon (another of the vestments on display also shows our Lady upon the crescent Moon; I wonder how early this Baroque commonplace is found in late Medieval English iconography? I have seen it circa 1450 ... can anyone push it earlier?).

But the most remarkable thing about this banner is the name, at the top, of its donor: Thomas Campion. Was this Thomas a relative of the future Jesuit martyr S Edmund Campion (martyred 1581)? A supporter of Sir Thomas White, the wealthy Founder of S John's (he had been Warden of the Merchant Taylours)? We know that S Edmund entered S John's upon its foundation and, being an able Latinist, very soon became a Fellow. In those brief, happy years before the Queen's death, S Edmund must have worshipped in Chapel and looked at the banner of our Lady which his kinsman had given. At the bottom of it among other shields is a shield of the Five Wounds of our Redeemer (the other banner also bears this device). It is difficult not to feel the significance of this: the Tudor rebellions in defence of the old Faith had marched behind this banner; it represened the devotional heart of Catholic England. Even Cranmer knew the popular votive of the Five Wounds so well that in his 1549 Prayer Book he incorporated the text of most of its Collect into his Prayer for the Church and used it twice in his Burial Service. Less than a decade before S Edmund entered S John's, there had been executions in Oxford and throughout Oxfordshire (these Troubles are less well known that the West Country insurrection, possibly because they lacked a chronicler) at the conclusion of the 1549 Rising against Protestantism. The device of the Five Wounds was a mark of identity, of commitment to the historic Faith, and S Edmund must have felt this as he saw it carried.

Readers of this blog will know that the banner of the Five Wounds can sometmes be seen flying over the Catholic Chaplaincy in Cardiff!

Those banners, surely, represent the tipping point between a Catholicism that looked back to the old, and the 'new' Catholicism of the seminary priests; between the culture of Marian priests surreptitiously saying the old Sarum Rite and that of the young men who brought the Missal of S Pius V back with them to England (at Douay, the students were taught the Missal of S Pius V between December 1576 and April 1577; presumably the Protomartyr of the seminaries, S Cuthbert Mayne, another S John's College man, ordained in 1575, had used the Sarum Rite).

Campion and Mayne were not S John's only martyrs. If you penetrate to the back quadrangle, you will find baroque architecture as fine as any in England: even the dreadful Nikolaus 'Bauhaus' Pevsner saw it as of European significance and quality. The two entrances are framed by statues of blessed Charles Stuart, King and Martyr, and his Queen Henrietta Maria. This building was done in the 1630s*, the decade in which England and Rome were most nearly reunited; and the builder was our martyred archbishop William Laud ... he and his King both parts of the glorious baggage of the Anglican Patrimony. The St John's exhibition includes blessed William Laud's zucchetto, and a dark satin cope linked with his name (he was President of the College).
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*A pilgrimage to this fascinating decade would include this quadrangle, the glass in Magdalen Chapel, and the Porch of the University Church with its statue of our Lady. What else? The 1640's, of course, would bring in all the colleges used when Oxford was the administrative capital of Royalist England, and the monuments to dead royalists in the Lucy Chapel in the Cathedral.

Victory in Europe?

 One of our best-loved Catholic novelists, Evelyn Waugh, once wrote about 1945 as "the drab and sour period of victory".

In his partially autobiographical World War Two trilogy, the final volume is entitled Unconditional Surrender.

Why?

Waugh himself (and his creation Guy Crouchback) at first saw that war as a Crusade; with Hitlerite Germany in alliance with Stalinist Russia, how could the battle against the pair of them be other than romantically heroic? We were up against the combined Modern World in all its horror.

In his 1946 Scott-King's Modern Europe, the experience of a dim, passed-over schoolmaster is: "[A]s the face of Europe coarsened  and the war, as it appeared in the common-room newspapers and the common-room wireless, cast its heoic and chivalrous disguise and became a sweaty tug-of-war between teams of indistinguishable louts ...".

Waugh was not a pacifist. Indeed, the degree of his personal courage under fire was sometimes regarded as inappropriate by colleagues who did not share it. After the War, his military duties obliged him to be complicit in the decidedly non-Catholic policies of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, as it persecuted Catholic clergy and mistreated Jews. His own profound disillusionment became the basis of his post-war fictional writing. 

When I was very small, I somehow got my hands on a romantic account of the Finnish war with the Soviet Union. Heroic, courageous Finns, ski-born, descended through the soundless snows upon the Russian aggressor. How could one not be moved by their exploits? How I hungered to read more about their successes ... about their inevitable and deserved triumph, elegant Davids against such a monstrous Goliath ...

It was quite a few years before I discovered what really happened.

When we found ourselves allied with Uncle Jo Stalin, we (I mean, this 'United Kingdom') ... yes ... we declared war on plucky little Finland.

I think one of Waugh's finest pieces of oblique and symbolist writing concerns the Sword of Stalingrad, a piece of metalwork given by George VI to Stalin to commemorate his military prowess, and exhibited like a sacred relic in Westminster Abbey before it made its journey Eastwards.

The heraldry on the scabbard was upside down. 

Married priests

When ... happy, far-off days ... I used to spend my Anglican summers in the Kingdom of the West, County Kerry, chaplaining a couple of Church of Ireland churches ... kindly Roman Catholics in Ireland, anxious to sound friendly, often sought to show their soundness by telling me why they were in favour of allowing married clergy in the Catholic Church. 

"It will solve the problem of paedophile priests", they confidently asserted. They tended to be surprised when I explained that allowing married clergy does not achieve this end. I could tell them so much about Anglican priests - and bishops - who have laboured vigorously to disprove this assumption. The English Independent Inquiry into sexual abuse recently described mercilessly the situation in one specimen Anglican diocese. My own Anglican ministry was overshadowed by the proximity of a bishop whose sadistic abuse of epheboi was at an industrial level.

And I could go on to tell jolly tales galore about Anglican priests - and bishops - who have been sacked for adultery. And to point out that clergy wives can create their own scandals by running off with the Curate or the Rector or the chairman ... or chairwoman ... of the Parish Council. A priest who is trying to look after three young children singlehanded after his missus has done a bunk with a deft and friendly organist is not best placed to devote himself singlemindedly to the care of his people. 

 "And a married priest will understand marriage ... and women ... so much better", the Irish cheerfully added. There's a great load of nonsense in this. An unmarried priest has, does he not, experience of the marriage in which he was nurtured? And does he not have a mother, sisters, nieces? And yet ... there is a tiny something in this argument. But not, necessarily, quite what the speaker might confidently assume. Take this example: "Father, I can't get to Mass regularly; I've got young children". A celibate, hearing this, might feel intimidated. If he replies "Rubbish; pull the other one", there is a risk that he might get an abusive earful about how he has no personal experience of being up all night with sickly or cantankerous children, and of being stared at by censorious worshippers when the kiddies start screaming in church. 

If, however, someone has tried that nonsense on me, I have always been able to say "I remember when my wife had four small children and the latest in the carry-cot and I never heard a squeak out of any of them all through Mass. And you have your husband sitting beside you to help, so that you're not - as my wife was - coping singlehanded while your husband liturgised and preached. And you've only got two. I wonder why that is." (No; I don't think I ever really did say that last bit.)

But, strangely, Pope Francis has slightly mitigated my views on this matter of married priests.

If he had a wife, his equal who could Frankly point out to him his failings and misjudgements and unfairnesses and inconsistencies and hypocrisies ... that marvellous officium with which wives are so richly endowed ... would he be so cruel, spiteful, and hate-filled? 

Do we need to rethink this matter? Perhaps, by confining the Apostolic See to ordained widowers?

Henry Manning might have been Pope!

You know it makes sense. 

Wokery upon wokery upon wokery

 It was a newspaper quiz that first got my mind going ... I have never been to Accra, or the Gold Coast, but a picture of a simple neo-Classical Triumphal Arch, with the date "AD 1957" and the words "Freedom and Justice", gave me an obvious answer. I recognised the black star on top ... the symbolic 'lode star' of black African liberation which Kwame Nkrumah took as the symbol that Ghana was the first British colony to become an independant nation. I'm glad it's still there: Colonel Wozname and Brigadier Thingummy did follow up on the Brit tyranny with a succession of coups designed to nuance both the Freedom and the Justice with the help of the never niggardly operatives of the CIA, yet they've never pulled down the black star.

But then I found myself wondering: A[nno] D[omini] ... isn't that a bit Christocentric? And those three English words: aren't they a little Anglocentric? 

I remember the Sixties when anti-Apartheid demonstrators used to march through my parish chanting "One Man One Vote". How totally fashions do change.

So statues, plaques, go up; and then, as certainly as night follows day, statues, plaques, will have to come down. What seems depressingly permanent is the human appetite for moral posturing and the lack of even the dimmest suspicion  that today's fashions may themselves ever come to be objects of stern condemnation. When did you last hear a suggestion that all new monuments now being erected ought to be so constructed that their removal will, when the moment comes, be cheap and easy?

S Teresa of Calcutta went from being a secular international saint  ... almost overnight ... to being a figure of hate when the chattering classes discovered that she opposed abortion. Now, some UN committee has awarded David Attenborough a florid title ... was it 'Saviour of the Solar System'? ... or 'Champion of the Planet'? ... or 'Glorious Gauleiter of the Galumphing Galaxies'? ... I can't remember which it was. But, if the man has any significance whatsoever, his fashion will, surely, pass.

Wozzat? Transpontine readers have never heard of him? He is a Brit "Environmentalist", one of our Great and Good, with an immensely oily and condescending I-know-best style of speaking; after hearing his voice I tend to feel like a gamma-minus sewer rat into whose subterranean paradise a rabid restauranteur has just poured a load of poor-quality past-its-use-by-date cooking oil.

I don't suppose I shall live long enough to see his statues being angrily pulled down by the ethically-certain cult-followers of the next fatuous piece of neo-wokery but two. 

But you can't stop me imagining it, can you?

S Pius V and the liars

Today, his Feast Day, is the 450th anniversary of the Heavenly Birthday of Papa Ghislieri, Saint Pius V, Bishop of Rome.

Two BIG UNTRUTHS in particular are told about him, poor fellow.

Lie Number 1: he issued a radically revised version of the Roman Missal, just as S Paul VI was to do after Vatican II.

Fact: S Pius's edition of the Missal was so light a revision that it was still possible, after its promulgation, to continue to use your old Missal.

Lie Number 2: although permitting some exceptions, S Pius ordered his edition to be used by everybody.

Fact: he ORDERED all rites older than 200 years to be kept in use. (He only permitted churches with 200-year-old-or-more rites to change over to his own new edition if the Diocesan Bishop and the unanimous chapter agreed).

I hope that is clear enough. But ... so many people ... Popes ... Cardinals ... Bishops  ... have such trouble with all this ... so ... here's another simple way of explaining the difference between S Pius V and Pope Francis:

(a) Pope Pius V ORDERED Rites older than 200 years to be RETAINED; 

(b) Pope Francis is TRYING TO EXTERMINATE a Rite which is centuries more than 500 years old. 

If people you are talking to really are so thick that they can't understand the difference when you've tried both these ways of explaining things, give up.  

"PORNOGRAPHY" and the FORTY ENGLISH MARTYRS

Fr Bryan Houghton writes about his tastes when he was ten years old: "Now, I hated hymns. I do not know why. It is just a fact.When grown-ups talked about 'pornography' I thought they were talking about 'hymn-singing."

But, in later life, he was converted. " ... when Paul VI canonised the forty English Martyrs ... I wrote a beautiful poem for the occasion. Unfortunately it was not sung, as I had intended, in Saint Peter's--but it was in many churches in England, including Saint James's, Spanish Place, in London."

To be sung to the tune of 'The Church's One Foundation' or 'I'll Sing a Hymn to Mary'.

The Church's transformation/ By Paul the Sixth our Pope/ Has left for contemplation/ A void deprived of Hope,/ Where Charity is wanting/ And Faith is fled as well./ One hears above the chanting/ A little hiss from Hell.

Four more stanzas to be found in Unwanted Priest.

   

BENEDICT XIV

Yes; wise readers will have remembered, from their frequent use of their glorious and capacious Fr Zed mug, that May 3 is the obitus of the greatest pontiff of the Second Millennium, Benedict XIV, Prospero Lambertini. But what is it that makes him such a great figure, and one so relevant to our own degenerate days?

In my opinion, it is his combination of the virtues of Enlightenment scholarship with his understanding of the normativeness of Tradition; and a hefty dollop of fine judgement.

As a Enlightenment man, respected as such even by English Whig intellectuals (ex. gr. Horace Walpole), he was aware that 'Tradition' does not mean "How I'm almost sure things probably were in Grandmother's time". His immense erudition ensured his profound awareness that the Past is a country of very considerable complexity. He combined with this understanding an extremely sound sense of judgement, enabling him to discern what really matters in 'the Past'.

The story of his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to reform the Breviary exemplifies this. He was aware that things needed to be changed ... not least, in some of the 'historical' lections. But did this mean that the whole shooting-match had to go into the melting pot?

He gathered a group of 'consultators'. They, also, were discerning and adept historians. Their report reminded the Pontiff that some of these questions had arisen under Clement VIII (1592-1605), when that pope's advisers had concluded that the distribution of the psalms in the Divine Office should not be changed. The reasons they adduced were those advanced by S Gregory VII ('Hildebrand'; 1073-1085). "Is igitur  qui nunc in Ecclesia Romana viget divinae psalmodiae ritus vetustissima antiquitate utitur, a qua sine aliqua novitatis nota ac sine periculo recedi vix possit." The central words here are, of course, vetustissima antiquitate ... 'the very oldest ancientness'! 

The Pope's experts surveyed the views of the learned men of the medieval and renaisasance periods; and ended up with a quotation from Radulphus de Rivo: "Stick with (it is far safer) what foresighted antiquitas et auctoritas teach, rather than what reckless novitas et infirmitas have dreamed up."

Readers will have no difficulty understanding the Latin words I have left in Red!

This was the sound and well-judged liturgical culture over which Papa Lambertini presided. It is a shame that S Pius X, and his successors, poor poppets, did not have rather more of those instincts!

NATIONALITY

 As I write, the TV journalists are busily discovering nice old ladies and gentlemen in Central Europe who have brothers and sisters the other side of the border which divides Ukrainia from the Russian Federation and/or Belorus. The old dears can't understand why their siblings don't understand the current war in the way they do. Manifestly, they themselves don't see things as their estranged siblings do.

At the North end of Lake Garda, there was, until the aftermath of WWI, an international border. To the North, called 'South Tyrol', was a province of substantially German culture and language, part of the Austrian Empire. As Italy's reward for selecting the right side in the War, the entire kaboodle, lock stock, and barrel, was transferred to Italy. It still is part of Italy, although German-language newspapers are on sale. 

Josef Mayr-Nusser was born in the 'South Tyrol' in 1910 as an Austrian citizen. He declined the possibility of leaving for Germany in 1939. 

After the collapse of Italian Fascism, the Germans occupied the South Tyrol. Josef, now an Italian citizen but considered an Ethnic German, was drafted into the Waffen-SS. But, being a devout Catholic Christian, he declined to take the oath of allegiance to the Fuehrer and Kanzler of the German Reich. Accordingly, he was sentenced to death. Loaded onto a cattle wagon, he was sent off to Dachau. But damaged railway lines at Erlangen meant that his wagon could go no further. He died there on February 24, 1945, of pneumonia and hunger.

He was beatified on March 18, 2017; his liturgical commemoration is on October 3. 

There was much about the "European Union" which merited criticism; for me, its lowest point came with the Brussels proposal to adopt a constitution which glorified Antiquity and the 'Enlightenment' and made not the slightest reference to the common Christian centuries which came in between.

But there was and is one saving grace in the EU ... enormously saving and very much a Divine Grace.

National borders slowly but surely started to ... melt; those borders which were so bound up with the Passion and Martyrion of Blessed Josef.

A character in Evelyn Waugh remarked: "I am a Croat, born under the Habsburg Empire. That was a true League of Nations. As a young man I studied in Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, Vienna - one was free, one moved where one would; one was a citizen of Europe. Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated again and put under the Russians. And always more police, more prisons, more hanging."

When I hear politicians glorifying Nationalism and British Values and all the rest of that stuff, I ask myself Cui bono?

The happy birds ... Mary's Month of May

The happy birds Te Deum sing,/'Tis Mary's month of May;/Her smile turns winter into spring,/And darkness into day;/And there's a fragrance in the air./The bells their music make,/And O the world is bright and fair,/ And all for Mary's sake. 

Number 936 in the English Catholic Hymn Book! The hymn was written by Father Alfred Gurney, 1843-1898, Vicar of S Barnabas Pimlico. Anglican Patrimony!

Those were the days!

I am, of course, using today to urge readers both laic and cleric to realise in the worship of their churches the exuberant joy of pre-Conciliar Catholicism ... especially during Mary Month. The thought of the processions, the flowers, the Crowning of the statue of our dear Mother ... What a loss it has been; of a culture well worth the effort of restoration. Especially in days such as these.

And those Victorian hymns carry a lot with them. A later stanza of Fr Gurney's hymn goes:

How many are the thoughts that throng/On faithful souls today;!/All year we sing our Lady's song,/'Tis still the song of May:/Magnificat! O may we feel/ That rapture more and more;/And chiefly, Lord, what time we kneel/Thine altar throne before.

Thine altar throne!! When did you last hear that wonderful phrase, either in a homily or in the music of of a 'main-stream' Catholic church? The centre of our Faith! Here is another piece of Anglican Patrimony, a stanza from a hymn in use a century and a half ago in (what is now) our great Ordinariate Basilica of S Agatha in Landport:   

Thou, God and Man, art in our midst,/The Altar is Thy throne;/We bow before Thy Mercy Seat,/And Thee, our Maker, own./My soul, fall prostrate to adore,/In lowliest worship bent;/Each day I live I love Thee more,/Sweet Sacrament! Sweet Sacrament! 

Who, even in these dark days of lofty oppression and pontifical disapproval, could try to exclude such devotion? Great Heavens, these hymns are even in the vernacular! And, lest anybody damn them with the faint praise of being 'rather Father Faberish', here is a stanza of a hymn by a rather different Victorian cleric (Westminster Hymnal 118):

They tell us of that Paradise/Of everlasting rest,/And that high Tree, all flowers and fruit,/The sweetest, yet the best./O Mary, pure and beautiful,/Thou art the Queen of May:/Our garlands wear about thy hair,/And they will ne'er decay. 

And that is by the greatest, most precise, theologian of the 19th century, S John Henry Newman. How characteristic, his deft insertion of patristic themes into popular devotion.

Hymns! Flowers! Processions! Homilies! Love! You know it makes sense!

The Mary Month of May!