Relics

I rejoice in the facility of offering the Holy Sacrifice on an Altar sealed with Relics; it is a relief to be able to be ecumenical, to conform to the consensus of the Latin West and the Byzantine East, that one should sacrifice over, as it were, the tombs of the martyrs. If a custom was good enough for the shell-shocked Church which in the fourth century emerged, metaphorically, from the catacombs with an overwhelming sense of being surrounded and supported by a great crowd of witnesses, martyres, then that custom is good enough for me. Even if the post-conciliar Church has gone a bit soggy on relics. I commend to those whose breviaries contain the old Appendix pro aliquibus locis the fine collect and the superb reading from S John Damascene they will find on November 5.

Not that the veneration of relics is as late as the fourth century. The contemporary account of the martyrdom of S Polycarp, the disciple of S John, embodied in the Encyclical which his Church at Smyrna sent to the  Catholic world in the middle of the second century, links the desire of the faithful for his relics with the doctrine of the Communio Sanctorum, the Communion of Saints: "they hoped to koinonesai* with his holy flesh". So, although the hatred of the local Jewish community drove the Romans to burn his body, his people gathered up even the ashes and placed them where they could meet for Mass annually on the genethlion* of his martyrion*, for a mneme* of those who had proathlekoton* and the askesis* and preparation of those who were going to bear witness.

Most immediately pre-conciliar local calendars made November 5, the Feast of the Holy Relics; according to Sarum it was on the Sunday after the Translation of S Thomas, i.e. in July; at Exeter on the Monday after Ascension Day.

Greek key: *share fellowship with; *birthday; *act of witness=martyrdom; *monument; *previously competed as athletes [a regular term for martyrdom]; *training. [I cannot restrain myself from two catty comments: that the current post-conciliar Roman regulations do not permit the use within altars of such relics as the tiny fragments gathered up by those who loved S Polycarp; and that, for sola Scriptura people, Acts 19:12 appears to encourage the use of Secondary Relics; and II Kings 13:21 the use of Primary Relics.]

Christ the KING: Tom Wright's view

Many readers of this blog will not have heard of Tom Wright. A former don in this University, he was made Bishop of (the prestigious see of ) Durham, because of his formidable academic reputation. After ... I think ... seven years he joined that distinguished number of heavyweight Anglican intellectuals who've either turned down episkope or else abandoned it after a short trial to return to academe. He is an Evangelical but has 'broadened' (when he was Chaplain of Worcester College in this University, he used to waggle incense around). He tries to understand the Catholic Faith, but, not having experienced it from the the inside, often gets things wrong. His books on S Paul and Pauline doctrine are very well worth reading. (Don't bother with For all the Saints, because he gets the Catholic/Orthodox cult of the Saints wrong.)

Tom is no fool. Writing about the adoption by the Church of England of the feast of Christ the King on the Sunday Next Before Advent, he objects because "this particular novelty ... gets it completely wrong. It presses all the wrong buttons. It completes the job of pulling the Church's year out of shape. Once again, more is less. This "feast" devalues other feasts and occasions ... by concluding the implicit story-line at the wrong point, thereby throwing out of kilter the narrative grammar of the whole story. It implies that Jesus Christ becomes King at the end of the sequence, the end of the story, as the result of a long process". So it devalues Ascension Day. It is, he opines, "like trying to eat the Christmas pudding first and stir it afterwards".

Archbishop Lefebvre wrote a very fine book pointing out the importance of the Social Kingship of Christ.

Incidentally, I wonder if the Feast of Christ the King may be up for review in more circles than one. Traddies very naturally prefer the intention manifested by Pius XI, that the Festival should be closely associated with the Feast of All Saints. I gather that all this stuff about Kingship appeals less and less to some Trendies, because they would rather think of the Lord as a Servant and all that sort of stuff. And people soaked in good old Anglican Patrimonial traditions miss Stir up Sunday. And people whose Patron Saint is S Andrew can't celebrate their Patron when he occurs on a Sunday and, of course, are prevented every year from celebrating his External Solemnity on the Sunday.

Does the current Novus Ordo treatment of Christ the King really make anybody happy? Pragmatically, you're more likely to have good enough weather for a procession of the Blessed Sacrament at the end of October. And the Pius XI date at the end of October would help to provide a bit of an antidote to the commercially-inspired 'Hallow'een' spookfest. Best of all, it provides a Christian alternative to Reformation Sunday.

Rather like Pius XII's clever idea of making May 1 the feast of S Joseph the workman, the November date for Christ the King has never really bedded down into the mentality and popular culture of ordinary Christians. Clever ideas quite often don't. Because Liturgy is, after being the property of the Almighty, the property really of the plebs sancta Dei, God's common ordinary folk, not of chaps with clever ideas who write learned papers about Inculturation but treat Liturgy like a gamesboard on which they and their chums are entitled to move the counters around.

Newliturgy has made such an appalling mess of liturgically proclaiming the Lord's kingship that it simply confuses and misdirects ... it does more harm than good.

Patrons in the Ordinariates.

1. The titles of Our Lady of Walsingham, of the Chair of S Peter, of our Lady of the Southern Cross, do not function as titles of Patrons. (They can be described as Titulars.) 

2. The Patrons of the three Ordinariates are, according to the Decrees of Erection of the respective Ordinariates, Blessed (now Saint) John Henry Newman (UK); Our Lady of Walsingham (USA); Our Lady of the Southern Cross (Australia).

3. I make no remarks about the liturgical status of these obervances in the Novus Ordo.

4. But, as far as the 1962 rules are concerned ... i.e. in the Vetus Ordo or Authentic Form ... these festivals, being festivals of Patrons, are First Class.

5. This means that they have a First Vespers in the Old Rite;

6. and that, if they collide with a Sunday, their Mass and Office supplant those of the Sunday.

If I have got this wrong, I would be glad to have matters explained to me, with full references to the appropriate legal documents.

UNITY BY INCLUSION IN 2009

The Church of Holy Trinity, Reading, was formerly the very Protestant proprietary chapel which owed its later adornment to Fr Brian Brindley. I am told by friends that the pulpit in 'Georgian' baroque was thrown out of the City Church of All Saints in Oxford when Old Mother Damnable flogged it to Lincoln College for a library. The screen, from Pugin's Cathedral in Birmingham, was thrown out when the papists depuginised that building. The retro-altar was the famous Belgian baroque altar with the reversible tabernacle from (a one-time daughter church of S Thomas's) S Paul's Walton Street in Oxford, thrown out when OMDamnable sold it to the entertainment industry. Also once in S Paul's was the monumental scagliola-like portico-style entrance into the church from the Sacristy. And in the North Chapel was the baroque altar inscribed 'PAX' from the ballroom at Nashdom, which, when that House was our principal Benedictine Abbey, will often have been used by our great scholar, wit, and mystagogue Dom Gregory Dix. The shell of the building now stands, lonely, surrounded by buildings with the names like The Blavatnik School of Government.

The service was mixed; a sermon in a very rasping voice by the then bishop of Dorchester, who, they tell me, was once one of us but, like so many of that generation lot of episcopabili, changed his mind on The Issue not so very long before he got the letter from Downing Street. He later scarpered to Chelmsford and now has an address in Bishops Auckland. He tried to ingratiate himself to his hearers by basing his homily upon the Pope Benedict's Year of the Priest. This provided a happy opportunity for thirty-or-so birettas to flutter above thirty-or-so heads at every use of the nomen sacrum 'Benedict'. His accent took me back to my childhood in Essex. Yes, I am an Essex Boy too, from those selfsame marshes, and proud of it, but I don't feel the need to flaunt it whenever I open my mouth. Bishop Andrew's face remained totally impassive when Reading referred to him as his "beloved brother".

The Mass was Novus Ordo, very much Reform-of-the-Reform (remember all that?) with the Canon Romanus covered, except for qui pridie, by the singing of Sanctus and Benedictus.

I don't think PF would have felt at home.

My memories are imperfect, but I think we may have had Drinks.

HUMANAE VITAE

I am unwilling to stop referring to the teaching of Cardinal Mueller.

He has recently spoken, for example, about the error of replacing the Cross with the rainbow flag; about how "one must not obey an obviously heretical bishop for formal reasons in matters of the deposit of the Faith. Faith comes above obedience." 

"The Holy Father has this obligation and this duty to put in good bishops with intellectual and spiritual competence who are faithful to the doctrine of God, because bishops are the successors of the Apostles. They are not masters, the bosses of our faith, but they are only ministers of Revelation".

The frequent return of His Eminence to these themes suggests strongly to me that, from his vantage point in the Church, he discerns that there is here a locus of depraved praxis. And I have no reason to suppose that his discernment is mistaken.

We must not give an impression that certain sexual themes are over-important, or are the only ethical consideration. They are not. And we should never forget the Christian obligation to accord to all people ... whatever their sexual 'orientations' ... both charity and courtesy. 

And, doctrinally, it behoves us to remember that those of us who might categorise ourselves (or be categorised) as 'straight' or 'normal' or 'heterosexual' are equally subject to the Church's teaching; and to the truth that nobody is entitled to use sexuality outside the bonds of lawful matrimony between one male and one female; or in ways that exclude the openness of each genital act to procreation. 

If we do so, we are open to the perfectly fair accusation that we are ourselves living a libertarian life-style which we unjustly and illogically attempt to forbid to others.

And ...

... were PF, or any other prelate, to appear to down-play or to undermine the immemorial teaching summarised in Humanae Vitae, we would need to recall His Eminence's important teaching (supra) about our strict duty of disobedience towards heretical bishops (popes are bishops).

Perhaps I should iterate the wise and learned suggestions offerred by S John Henry Newman, about the question of a Suspense in the Teaching Office of the Church?

 

Much binding in the marsh ... (q.v. in Wikipaedia)

 The President of the American Confederacy, Mr "Biden", has just very wittily referred to our new British Prime Minister, Mr Sunak, as "Mr Sanook".

Lovely!!

Shall we retaliate by referring to the President chappie as "Mr Binding"?

This Binding went on to talk about something or other as "a ground-breaking Milestone."

What a Fracker!

No wonder the poor old apostate has cognitive problems distinguishing a live baby from a dead one.

Farewell to Neasden

Since the Ordinariates were erected, I have sometimes wondered if we should have made rather more of a Negotiation of it, rather than just gratefully accepting the crumbs that fell from Vatican tables. 

For example ... and this suggestion follows on from my two previous pieces about Cardinal Nichols and Neasden ... we could have sought, as our bit of the bargain, that the English Catholic Bishops should agree ... for, let me suggest, fifty years ... not to commit Idolatry. Instead, we took up a suppliant position. 

Well I remember the joy with which we individually welcomed the nulla osta which came so easily and generously from Cardinal Mueller's CDF. (Not, of course, that this was the only hurdle to get over. After my own nulla osta came hurtling back from Rome at break-neck speed, there was the attempt by a couple of English bishops to put a spoke in my own wheels because of my attitude to the Mass of S Pius V ... but that's another story.)

Not that Idolatry is the only thing we might usefully have negotiated about. We could have asked that, in each country destined to have an Ordinariate, the local hierarchy should undertake not to encourage Adultery or Sodomy. Again, the agreement could have been for fifty years. And the question of Ordination of Women to Major Orders could have been on our shopping list.

Who knows ... had we gone for such agenda in subtle, crafty ways, we might have been able eventually to get entire local hierarchies signed up to the entire decalogue!!!!

Seems incredible now, doesn't it?

Lost opportunities ...

Nichols in Neasden

I do not think Cardinal Nichols is or was a bad man or a bad pastor. I strongly incline to the opposite judgement. And I felt that he was not given a fair hearing at the Paedophile Enquiry. So, rather than attacking or mocking him, I would rather approach the broader question of how such a man could behave in the way he did in Neasden.

Archbishop Vincent was admitted to Major Orders when the Roman Breviary was just about to be replaced by the Liturgy of the Hours. This means that, for more than three decades, his priestly and Christian identity had not been fed and sustained by the old Breviary readings.

So what?

The 'unreformed' Breviary had a calendar characterised by Martyrdom. Its earlier strata, stretching back to the Ages of Persecution, had not been completely obscured by the emphasis, in the Counter-Reformation centuries, on those 'Confessor Bishops' who were Founders of orders and whose well-resourced Congregations could secure canonisations. In this regard, the earlier Latin West was still in step with the Byzantine Calendar, where the profusion of Martyrs of the early centuries had been joined by the New Martyrs of the Ottoman oppression (S Chrysostom of Smyrna, pray for us).

I have just opened my Pars Autumnalis at random ...

... inanibus diis sacrificare jussus, constantissime renuit. Cumque variis artibus ad Christi fidem ejurandam fustra tentaretur, una cum uxore et liberis leonibus objicitur. Horum mansuetudine concitatus imperator, aeneum in taurum subjectis flammis candentem eos immitti jubet, ubi divinis in laudibus consummato martyrio ...

So, in the preconciliar Roman Office, day after day, there were gruesome accounts of the physical sufferings of our Christian martyrs. Sometimes the accounts are so similar that one suspects contamination. Sometimes there are serious grounds for suspecting the historicity of some details ... or even, of more than just details. Since the Enlightenment, the erudite had been calling for revisions of the Lections in the Sanctorale. Read all abaht it in Batiffol. But extensive revision seemed to elude savants and pontiffs alike ... even the august and erudite figure of Benedict XIV. Tradition assisted inertia.

And in England, the old Roman Calendar was augmented by the accounts of 'the English Martyrs'. English Catholic Clergy were given an extensive education, as they opened their Breviaries daily before God, of the consequences which can follow a refusal to commit idolatry.

After the Breviary was replaced by the Liturgy of the Hours, the 'viral load' of gruesome martyrological narratives was lightened; and the unwillingness of those who edited the new texts to lay  emphasis on details of physical tortures introduced a significant cultural shift.

Dom Anselmo Lentini, revising the old hymns after the Council, felt that the words of S Ambrose Nudata pendent viscera/ sanguis sacratus funditur ... would be too strong for a generation which had witnessed the Second World War.

Those nurtured by the post-conciliar texts are not likely to be anything like as instinctively horrified at the very thought of idolatry as their unenlightened predecessors were. Visceral revulsion at the apostasy of laying offerings (even just flowers!) upon or before the altars of pagan deities has, I suspect, become attenuated.

Hence, the gentle and kindly and dangerous elegance of the Age of Nichols.

Whatever might be said about the details or even the spirit of the old Breviary, its overwhelming, cumulative effect must have been powerful to fortify the clergy against the enticements and the cultural attractions of new and newly fashionable syncretisms. 

There may be more subtle methods of securing a tradition than by painstaking historical accuracy. Providence may know of more than one way of killing a cat.

Like Benedict XIV, I see no alternative to sticking with what we had in place before the "reform". That older culture may now seem flawed to some parts of our minds ... to those parts upon which 'Enlightenment' assumptions have most strongly encroached.

But ...

Christ is King ... but not in Neasden

There is an Internet record (Independent Catholic News November 23 2009) recording a visit made by Archbishop Nichols to a Hindu Temple in Neasden on Saturday 21 November 2009, the Eve of the Novus Ordo celebration of Christ the King. Here is a paragraph.

"Yogvivek Swami guided the Archbishop around the Mandir complex, including the sanctum sanctorum where the Archbishop offered flowers at the altar to the deities. He then moved to the deity of Shri Nilkanth Varni (Bhagwan Swaminarayan) where he joined Yogvivek Swami in praying for world peace and harmony".

The account, which is long and detailed, reads like an official statement or communique. I don't know my way terribly well around the Internet ... can any reader clarify whether this is an official account which perhaps appeared on the Westminster or CBCEW websites before being, er, removed?

If it were accurate, it would interestingly illustrate the difference between the Christus Rex of Pius XI (Quas primas 1925), with its emphasis on the exclusive Lordship of Christ, and the Novus Ordo Christ the King of Bugnini, which would apparently be compatible with idolatrous/syncretistic cultic activity. If it is indeed true that Bugnini belonged to the syncretistic 'Masonic' cult, this would hardly be surprising..

Pius XI quoted the words of Leo XIII: "His empire includes not only Catholic nations, not only baptized persons who, though of right belonging to the Church, have been led astray by error, or have been cut off from her by schism, but also all those who are outside the Christian faith; so that truly the whole of mankind is subject to the power of Jesus Christ."

Canonisation?!?!

I have recently taken an interest in the willingness of Diocesan Bishops ... or Vicars Apostolic ... to make interesting liturgical interventions within their jurisdictions without, apparently, the consent of the Roman See. 

In 1441, I think, King Henry VI wrote to Pope Eugenius IV enquiring how the Cause for the Canonisation of King Alfred the Great was proceeding. Since then I have been daily on tenterhooks wondering whether the Holy See has responded, or, if it hasn't, when it will.

Throwing out some encumbrances from my library, I hit upon an old Northampton ORDO (2007, I think) in which October 26 shows "Feria; or St Alfred the Great, King and Confessor - op.mem. (white)".

Does this mean that the Court of S James's has received the much-delayed reply from Rome canonising ... I suppose, equipollently ... King Alfred? Or did the then Bishop of Northampton decide that since Alfred was a first millennium worthy, it would be licit for him as a diocesan bishop to canonise Alfred despite the legislation of Pope Urban VIII reserving such decrees to Rome? Is this eventuality covered by the treatise on the subject by Benedict XIV?

Oh! ... I've just noticed another odd thing ... Alfred is decribed in that ORDO as "King and Confessor". But since the post-conciliar reforms eliminated the title 'Confessor' from the descriptions of Saints in the Sanctorale and Calendar, this canonisation, whether it happened in Rome or in Northampton, must predate the 1960s. Turning the clock back here, aren't we?

Very mysterious. Can anyone help? Has anybody got a Northampton ORDO later than 2007? If so, can you let us know ... has that Daring Diocese continued to observe "S Alfred" on October 26? 

Liturgical Vicars Apostolic: Bonventure Giffard

Fr Richard Whinder has very kindly provided the extremely interesting information that Bishop Richard Challoner, of whose liturgical interests I wrote recently, was not the first of our Vicars Apostolic to have a hand in the provision of a National Proper for this Kingdom of England. His predecessor, the great Bonaventure Joseph Giffard, Bishop of Madaura, sometime President of Magdalen College in this University, bombarded Rome with requests for a National Proper; his particular devotion was to S Augustine. He found that Rome lacked proper urgency in this matter. Angrily, he wrote:
"I shall trouble them no more on this account, but doe by my own authority, what they neglect. If this displeases the fault is theirs. If I have not their approbation by the end of October, I will order the keeping of this Feast, and signify the same in our Directory".

Clearly, a reply was not forthcoming; because in his 1733 ORDO S Augustine duly appears, as a Greater Double, with the defiant note "De Mandato Reverendissimi Madaurensis". (Incidentally, presumably in honour of his Patron Saint, he ordered S Joseph to be added to the Litanies after S John Baptist.) The Proper orationes and the Second Nocturn Readings are the same that, in the nineteenth century, we find given for S Augustine in the Propers for England.

(Fr Whinder found the Ordo in the Westminster archives; other information came from Dom Basil Hemphill's 'The Early Vicars Apostolic of England'.)

Manifesto?

I find it hard to express adequately the great debt I feel I owe to Cardinal Mueller for his unfailing and continuing defence of the Catholic Faith during these dark days of papal apostasy. It fills the need that many of us feel for the sort of sound, and intelligent, teaching we received in the last two pontificates.

May I, today, remind you of the Magisterial "Manifesto of Faith" which his Eminence issued on 8 February 2019.

Remarkable was the fact that in Section 2 of this Credo  ... "The Church." ... it did not mention the Petrine, Papal, ministry.

I venture to suggest that a reason for this may be as follows.

" ... the [Vatican I] definition of infallibility has a logical status quite different from that of any other definition; it is a second-order definition, a definition about definitions, whereas they are first-order definitions, definitions about the faith. Thus to be told that, under certain conditions, the Pope is infallible, is not to be told anything about the Christian faith at all; it is only to be told something about the conditions under which you may be told something about it."

I think that this is a valuable insight with regard to the exercise of the papal ministry as a whole, and not only those exercises of it which directly involve the question of formal Infallibility. 

It comes from The Recovery of Unity, 1958, by the Reverend Professor Doctor Eric Mascall, of this University. He was a logician, a mathematician, a theologian, whom Fr Aidan Nichols, O.P. praised in 1993 as a 'separated doctor' of the Catholic Church. 

Dr Nichols, by the way, before his most interesting relocation to Jamaica, very importantly drew to our attention the need, during the post-Bergoglian pontificate, for serious theological work on the exercise of the Petrine Ministry. 

Rather than centring embarrassingly upon the particular disasters of this unfortunate pontificate, it might be more useful (as well as more tactful) to concentrate on the identification of different types of papal intervention. Helped by a few miracles of taxonomical wizardry, we might identify ways of wriggling out of "the mess" in which PF will have left us, while still retaining a Petrine Ministry.