Development

Almost at the very end of the press conference to 'present' Amoris laetitia, a young woman, who, I think, was sitting next to the erudite Professor Roberto de Mattei, was allowed to ask a question. Unlike most of the hacks and hackettes, Diane Montagna asked a question ... an appeal for "clarification" ... "everybody wants to know" ... which was very short and totally to the point. She just wanted to know whether there was anything in this new document which contradicted paragraph 84 of Familiaris consortio. The question went for answer to some Austrian called von Schoenborn. He repudiated strongly the idea that there could possibly be a contradiction. But he proceeded to explain that Doctrine develops.

The Austrian gentleman referred us instead to Blessed John Henry Newman's Essay on Development. I think anybody who wants to be up-to-the-minute should reread that brilliant tour de force. Remember, incidentally, that the Blessed did not write it as a guide to how future curial spokespersons, by a neat conjuring trick, could present Change as Non-change; but as an analysis of how in fact Catholic Doctrine had in the past developed while remaining true to type.

Newman shared with S Paul the advantage of not being an Austrian aristocrat.

When Pope Francis was later asked about the coherence of Amoris laetitia, he replied by referring us all to this 'Introduction' by von Schoenborn, whom he described as a great theologian and a former secretary of the CDF. (It is a mercy that Vatican I, in defining the Primacy and Infallibility of Roman Pontiffs, did not claim that they had good memories with regard to the Curricula Vitae of their associates.)

I have recently been repeating some previous posts making clear what the Church has formally taught about DEVELOPMENT, in a Magisterium which begins with a phrase of S Paul's which was then taken up by writer after writer, pope after pope, Council after Council, until our own time.

The phrase is

                                EODEM SENSU EADEMQUE SENTENTIA.

People ought to chant this at PF whenever he .... er ... 

New readers might like to read back over these old articles of mine, which I usually published at 5 in the afternoon.

REJOICE, MOTHER CHURCH! THE TRUTH WILL PREVAIL!

Gaudet Mater Ecclesia was the address to the Council on its opening day, the Feast of the Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 11 October1962. Fr Zed, on his unfailingly fantastic blog, has pointed out that the Vatican website still does not carry an English translation of this important document. I can explain why ... indeed, I think I have touched on this topic before and more than once.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I will [shall?] begin.

This business goes back to a failed jesuit called Hebblethwaite, who regarded himself as an expert on the The Council. He promoted a story that the original text of GME as read out by S John XXIII contained a relativising sentence of questionable orthodoxy. According to Hebblethwaite, crafty conservatives then got together to substitute their own 'corrected' form of this passage. This narrative ... the tale of good, liberal pope John being subverted by wicked traddies ... then became the standard 'liberal' version of history. Basil Hume, incredibly, or perhaps credibly, accepted it and repeated it.

Until Professor John Finnis took matters in hand. By deft examination of the evidence (including a recording of S John XXIII reading the text, and the text as printed in Osservatore Romano the following morning), this dogged Oxford academic, a law professor, demonstrated that Hebblethwaite's narrative was comprehensively wrong ... from beginning to end. The Pope's 'official' words were authentically spoken by him in the aula and were accurately recorded by Vatican radio ... and the Failed Jesuit's account is ... whether intentionally or by accident or by virtue of the black-is-white-and-white- is-black trick  ...  mendacious. Smoke and Mirrors!

The crucial words as spoken by the pope were eodem sensu eademque sentententia. The holy Pontiff was emphasising the unchanging nature of the Faith. The Faith may be expressed in different ways, he said, as long as this is done keeping the same meaning and the same judgment.

Finnis explained all this in The Tablet, 14 December 1991 ... detail by detail, proof by proof.

What a glorious and heavenly hoot this simple, wholesome English story is! The authentic text of what the pope said in 1962 is still such a hot potato for the Vatican!! Ridete quidquid est domi cachinnorum ... Tee Hee, as Alison might have said ...

What is it that the trendies are afraid of? Still ... after all this time?

A five-letter Anglo-Saxon word?

TRUTH.

The Miraculous Medal

 A week ago ... well, August 22, to be pedantic ... Octave Day of the Assumption ... Pusey's Birth Day ... Saint John Henry Newman, weeks before his Admission to Full Communion in 1845, began to wear the Miraculous Medal.

Months later, his closest woman friend, Maria Giberne, painted a portrait of Newman and St John in their room in Rome, with Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal between them. 

There's a longish three-year-old article by me on Newman and the Miraculous Medal in the Archive of this blog; my intent is si vivo to reprint it in November at the time of the Festival of the Medal. 

But ... well ... I take this opportunity again to nag you to wear the Medal. If the practice was good enough for the finest mind of the nineteenth century, it ought to be good enough for us.

 

But I urge you also to remember blessed Edward Bouverie Pusey, a great (in Fr Aidan Nichols' phrase) 'Separated Doctor of the Catholic Church'. Like many 'Tractarians' and post-Tractarians, he wrote extensively on Typology: he may never have worn the Medal, but its spirit was in him. 

You won't have forgotten that Typology as a word comes from the Greek verb tuptein: what you do when striking a coin or medal or seal so that it has corresponding images on both the obverse and the reverse.

I wonder how Pusey, with his distinctively Anglican and Patristic mindset, would have explored the themes of the Miraculous Medal, and its Antitypology. For myself ...

... I might have attempted to begin through those haunting words in the last chapter of the Song of Songs: "Set me as a seal upon thy heart, for love is as strong as death" (htham ...leb; sphragida ... kardian; signaculum ...cor)

Can Black really be white?

Are you up to date on Bulverism ... google it if you don't know about it. I suppose we could coin a cognate verb and say that PF was Bulverising when he waxed eloquent last year on the deep and dark psychological maladies of all those ghastly young people who have Incorrect and Unbergoglian Tastes in liturgical matters.

It seems to me a term with possibilities. One could say "Don't you Bulverise me, you ..." in a very hostile tone of voice.

A thing I do not quite understand is PF's purpose in quoting before Christmas from the Commonitorium of S Vincent of Lerins.

The passage he alluded to also includes, though PF did not quote it, the phrase eodem sensu eademque sententia. Derived by S Vincent of Lerins from the text of S Paul, it was used by B Pius IX, incorporated in the decree on the papal ministry at Vatican I, and contained in the anti-modernist oath. Very significantly, it was used by S John XXIII in the programmatic speech he gave at the start of the Council ... What the Council taught, so he laid down, was to be in the same sense, the same meaning, as the teaching of the preceding Magisterium. S John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor made clear that it applied to questions of morality as much as to those of dogma. Benedict XVI used this same sanctified phrase in his 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia about the Hermeneutic of Continuity. I have recently repeated a series of mine on this phrase which you could find via the search engine on this blog.

Eodem sensu eademque sententia: because the teaching of the Church cannot and does not change.

If this phrase means anything at all, it must mean that the teaching of Familiaris consortio (1981; paragraph 84) and of Caritatis sacramentum (2007; paragraph 29), that divorced people who, having gone through a civil form of marriage, are in an unrepented sexual relationship with a new "spouse", should not approach the Sacraments, cannot already ... in less than a decade! ... have metamorphosed or "developed" into its exact and polar opposite.

Even Jesuits, even the Austrian aristocracy, whether or not adorned with umlauts, cannot really expect to get away with black being white, with non-X and X being identical. Come off it, chaps ... Magnum Principium stat non contradicendi!

Four Words

Recently, attempts to change the Church's Teaching have been justified by appealing to some words of S Vincent of Lerins about development. 

I have been writing about this subject since at least 2009. Henceforth, I shall repeat some of these old posts, with threads.



Four words of S Vincent of Lerins: 'Development' in the Christian Church and in her Doctrine: Development must take place eodem sensu eademque sententia [keeping the same meaning and the same judgment/opinion]. (In the Liturgy of the Hours the whole passage can be found in Vol IV.)

This phrase has a big place in the Conciliar Magisterium. It appeared (para 62) in Gaudium et Spes, and even before that it lay at the heart of the address by B John XXIII at the start of the Council. But here it is necessary to avoid a dangerous tripwire. In the popular English paperback collection of Conciliar documents (Chapman) edited by W M Abbott, a misleading paraphrase of this speech is given in which the phrase is totally omitted. This became the occasion of an important correspondence in the Tablet in December 1991, in the course of which Professor John Finnis of this University demonstrated conclusively that Peter Hebblethwaite's Pope John XXIII (p 432) is guilty of gross errors. Hebblethwaite, a failed Jesuit, fabricated a story about how some 'brave' and liberal words of John XXIII in his adddress to the Council were distorted, in a curial plot, by the later addition, in publication, of the words I quote. The papal address did not, according to Hebblethwaite, originally contain them. This gross distortion of events promptly became part of the mythology of the 'liberals', being cited as fact by Basil Hume and [the later Bishop of Guildford] Christopher Hill.

This passage by S Vincent lies at the heart of Newman's Essay on Development, which straddles his life as an Anglican and as a Roman Catholic (Chapter 5 Section 1). Its presence in the post-Conciliar Liturgia Horarum marks it as a part of the Conciliar documents which remains the everyday Magisterium of the modern Chuch.

Blessed Thomas Percy

 Today, in those Northern Catholic English dioceses which experienced the Northern Rising of November 1569, is the festival of Blessed Thomas Percy, nobleman and English magnate beheaded in York on August 22, 1572, after the Tudorette's hatchet men had suppressed the Rising. Fr Thomas Plumtree, of Corpus Christi College in this University, chaplain to the insurgents, had been executed in Durham in January of 1570.

Both of these were among the English Martyrs whose portraits, with emblems of Martyrdom, were painted in the church of the Venerable English College in Rome in 1583. This provided a legal basis for Leo XIII to beatify them equipollently per modum cultus.

Interestingly, the Masses Proper to England and Wales provide Bl Thomas with the same Mass (mutatis mutandis) as Bl Adrian Fortescue: Venditum iustum. I wonder if anybody has evidence as to for which of the pair of them this very elegant Mass was first composed ... was it produced in Birmingham or Hexham?

There is a sweet little window of Bl Thomas in the former, sweet little Regency, Catholic Church in Alnwick, under the shadows of Alnwick Castle (the church was sold off, of course; the Catholics bought instead a former Anglican church; dereliction has also visited the adjacent convent).

Sadly, the Percys, Earls of Northumberland, did not persist in recusancy. 

But foreign tourists to this land can visit their Castle at Alnwick  ... crammed full of wonders. The Percy Family continues from generation to generation, deserving as ever of our respect because of its incredible uninterrupted antiquity ...

... or, rather, it doesn't. The Percys failed in the male line in the mid-eighteenth century. An heiress was scooped up by a Yorkshireman called Smithson, who changed his name to Percy, and his Arms accordingly. An ancient Earldom was not good enough; the government eventually created a "Dukedom of Northumberland" for him.

There is an anecdote that Smithson ("Percy") asked George III for the Garter, observing that he was the first Percy who had not been given it. 'Farmer George' is reported to have commented that he was the first Smithson to have asked for it.

American visitors to these shores should not be taken in by our grand old English aristocracy. Nearly all these families are parvenu and, in any case, a fair number of them are people people of poor taste and shallow culture.

And their "castles" (Windsor; Arundel; Alnwick ...) nearly always turn out to be largely Victorian.

Whenever these folk are short of cash, they either (a) marry an American heiress; or (b) sell off yet more heirlooms (often to America); or (c) both. 

But I bet Blessed Thomas, Martyr, faithfully prays for us all.

The Revd Bartle Starmer Hack

A century ago, you might have noticed a  very large clergyman in Oxford, pretty well any day of the week,  hurrying along the Broad Street and then down the Cornmarket; books under his arm.

He will have been in transit from 53 Broad Street to the Boots store in the Corn. 53 Broad Street was the last private residence in the Broad, squashed between Trinity and Blackwells (Trinity bought the Vicar out by providing instead the present Mags Vicarage in Beaumont Street). 

No; this was not Dr Jalland and so the books did not relate to Jalland's researches on S Leo the Great or the Papacy. And the cleric was not heading for pharmaceutical reliefs; because, until 1966, Boots the Chemists maintained a Lending Library. (One might, of course, have ordered up anything one chose to read in Bodley, but both Town and Gown found Boots very handy.)

On my own shelves, I have a First Edition of Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night, with the evidence of it having been in the Boots Library. No; there is little point in burgling me and liberating the book; it has been so intensively used as to be totally disintegrated and without monetary value; indeed, it was rebound while still owned by Boots. But considering the Oxonian themes of the novel, I cherish it. 

And I feel pretty sure that it must have been handled by Fr Hack.

He was Vicar of my own S Thomas's; and subsequently of Mags. He is still remembered for observing, as he walked in either direction along the Broad, "This hill will be the death of me"[it is totally flat], and for hating to be called 'Father'. He affected 'Tractarian' mannerisms; he always wore a frock coat on the grounds that it was improper for a priest to show his bottom. (I shall not enable indecorous comments.)

He felt that the role of women in Church was to be on their knees praying or scrubbing; he felt it important for "Children's corners" to be equipped with birch rods. 

Quite rightly, he took food seriously. And he had an agreeable habit of leaving his churches more baroque than he had found them.

I invite your comments ... your elucidations.

Can it be that, as nuptial fidelity declines throughout society, Matrimonial Ritual becomes ever more complex?

I have recently read a newspapaer account of the 'wedding(s)' of a 54 year old woman and a 49 year old man. I will conceal them behind the names Jack and Jill.

They had their "legal ceremony" in a Town Hall; their "big wedding" later and in a "creative space".

Jill had twelve bridesmaids, "Three had been bridesmaids at her first wedding".

A friend "sewed a ribbon with the names of Jill's single friends on to the hem of her wedding dress. "Some people were newly single so I added their name in pen", says Jill. 

I suspect that "newly single" may not necessarily mean widowed/widowered.

'The couple wrote their own vows' (I presume this refers not to the "legal ceremony" but to the "big wedding").

There were "six groomsmen". They made a formal musical entry.

I particularly invite elucidation of the following detail:

"In 2016, Jack gave Jill a commitment ring but marriage was not on his horizon until last year".

If marriage had been on Jack's "horizon" I suppose a 'traditional ' "Engagement Ring" would have been appropriate?

But what does a "commitment ring" symbolise? Is this now a common modern custom, a common piece of nomenclature?? Since when?

Noxious?

" There is a story of some Bishop or important person who got his way in Rome rather unexpectedly over an appeal, and when asked by his friends how he did it, replied, Fallendo Infallibilem".

RAK, 1927.

Is this a well-known anecdote? 

The Evocable One

I don't suppose many people nowadays read the Sermon of S Bernard given in old breviaries for the middle nocturn today, the Octave Day of the Assumption ... but I was struck by this bit: Mary is "digna plane quam respiceret Dominus, cuius decorem concupisceret Rex, cuius odore suavissimo ab aeterno illo Paterni sinus attraheretur accubitu."

Daring stuff, eh?

And, in today's Sarum Sequence, " ... propitiationis agnum, regnantem coelo aeternaliter, revocamus ad aram mactandum mysterialiter."

Even S John Henry Newman, possibly, thought it more reverent to leave such talk dramatically on the lips of 'Willis': the Mass "is, not the invocation merely, but, if I dare to use the word, the evocation of the Eternal. He becomes present on the altar in flesh and blood, before whom angels bow and devils tremble ...".

That He Himself should so set Himself at the beck and call of humans ...

 

My Breviary??

 So what did Fr Faber, what did Dr Newman, do after opening their breviaries each day?

Firstly, I think, they must have reached for their spectacles. Victorian breviaries were often only 3 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches and your spectacles in those days were less vast than today. 

So, bespectacled, you now turned to the end of the volume, where there would be a fine section headed Officia propria Sanctorum Angliae. I suspect this may have dated from after the Restoration of the Hierarchy.

But, as you leafed through the relevant quarter ... let us say, for the month of October ... what next?

Each Sunday in October had a special Mass of our Lady. Sunday 1: The Holy Rosary (that, in fact, was printed in the main body of the breviary); then Sunday 2: the Maternity of the BVM; Sunday 3: the Purity of the BVM; Sunday 4; the Patronage of the same Virgin. These three latter celebrations were simply marked by the notice omnia ut in fine brev. and you found them in the earlier appendix headed Supplementum pro aliquibus locis. I.e., they were only for the places for which they had been granted by indult. 

Clearly, they had been so granted for England.

Then you could get on with your Office. And, in October, you did not, in England, say the Sunday Office on a single one of those Sundays in October. During these last decades of the nineteenth century, after the election of Papa Pecci in 1878, you had the great age of Rosarian devotion: pretty well every year, the Pontiff issued a new Encyclical encouraging devotion during the Rosary Month of October.

So these were the great days of what I rather loosely called recently ... I think, on August 16 ...  "High Triumphalist Baroque".

I estimated its length at about 175 years.

Those were days which came to an end when Fr Adrian Fortescue's prayer "for such a pope who will give us back more of our old Roman Calendar again" was answered. Because, around the turn of the century, S Pius X did restore more of the old Roman propers (and made iffy changes to the Order of Christian Initiation: but that's another matter.)

Those changes lasted all of half a century, until they were all smashed up again in the 1960s and the old Roman propers snatched away again. Just to make sure we noticed what they were up to, the b*ggers smashed up thesanctuaries of churches at the same time asthey did the liturgical texts. 

Now, it's another half century since the 1960s, and the poor silly poppets ... the PFs and their Roches ...  wonder why the liturgical scene has grown restless again.

Liturgical fad don't last for ever. Not even if some liar has stuck a label saying "Made at Vatican II" on a title page. Anybody who thinks they do is ignorant of liturgical history.

The PFs and the Roches and their dim acolytes should try to grow up into big boys. 

They should ask Mummy to put them into long trousers.

D L Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh ... a 'thirties and 1998 philological detection (2)

 In 1998 Jill Paton Walsh 'completed' the unfinished Sayers novel Thrones, Dominations. The text published declines to say where the 'join' between the two writers occurs; but cover blurbs make claims such as "The first thing to be said about this extraordinary book is that it is impossible to tell where Dorothy L. Sayers ends and Jill Paton Walsh begins".

I think that is mistaken.

On page 114 of the paperback edition (Chapter 7; see also page 213), an upper servant says "May I recommend, your ladyship, that the gentleman does not sit too close to the fire, for fear of chilblains, your ladyship, and that I should bring a tot of brandy immediately".

I contend that the vocative would normally be "my lady"; and that "your ladyship" in thirties contemporary usage does not generally function as a vocative but expects with it a third-person verb (e.g. "Your lordship will bear in mind that we are conveying the port?" in Busman's Honeymoon). I presume that is why, in modern Italian, the third person singular has evolved into being used as a second person singular.

In Busman's Honeymoon we find Sayers anxious to be precise about usages which give clues and pointers to class-distinctions; for example, the gardener says in Wimsey's presence "It's all one, I daresay, to my lord.", which the hypercorrecting Miss Twitterton corrects to "to his lordship".

Does this matter? I think it does. Sayers' novels are fascinating windows into the language and the underlying fashionable preoccupations and assumptions of the 1930s (for example, Eugenicism). I think it is unfortunate that we have, very probably, been deprived of accurate, unexpurgated texts of what she wrote.

Just how wokiefied is Paton Walsh's edition?

In my view, Sayers' text has expired before page 114.

I am suspicious.