Happy times!

 Happy times!

The 2024 Calendar has arrived from the Redemptorist House on Papa Stronsay, in the Orkney islands. It is, as always, truly magnificent. Here we have a thoroughly modern house, but with the liturgy and piety of the days before the Wreckovation. They are now also present in New Zealand an America, and there seem to be a lot more of them than when I went to lecture on Stronsay a few years ago.

When they showed me round, and opened a large heavy farm gate for me to walk through, one of the young men observed "Bishop Fellay just jumped over that". I was assured that the guest bed I was occupying had been slept in by his Lordship, and, more recently, by Fr Aidan Nichols, when he was there to help with the canonical rectification of the Community's situation. (I hope, by the way, that lots of readers have benefitted from Apologia a Memoire, in which Father brings the story of his life down to the present with his account of his treatment under the Pope Of All Mercies.)

Among the spendid photographs in the Papa Stronsay 2024 Calendar, I particularly enjoyed the picture of Fr Seelos Maria being ordained to the Sacred Priesthood. Ordinations are such wonderful, joyous occasions, aren't they? The picture, I think, captures the moment when he is receiving the second laying on of hands ... when the Bishop tells him that whosoever's sins he remits are remitted ... a ceremony which the wreckovators, of course, eliminated in the 1970s. (When I received the Sacred Priesthood in Oxford's Anglican Cathedral Church of Christ in 1968, the Anglicans still kept it, and the Cathedral Chapter imposed hands together with Bishop Carpenter.) A few pages later, we see Father offering his first Solemn Mass. (I am just a tadge surprised that S Patrick, whose statue is  few feet to South, looks perhaps a trifle disapproving.)

Please don't say that you already have 17 Calendars for 2024. I bet you won't find the masses of material in any of them that you will be given in the Papa Stronsay Calendar. For example: July 24 will be the the 800th anniversary of the Passing of of S Christina the Astonishing. I gave up reading that after the first few lines ... but was much edified to read that in 2024 we get the 1400th anniversary of the transitus of s Mellitus, first bishop of London, third Archbishop of Canterbury; commemorations of S Columba's biographer Adomnan, Abbot of Iona; and of S Angela Merici, product of that magical piece of real estate, Lake Garda; founder of the Ursulines.

I can never think ofMother and her 'Ursulines', without recalling Waugh's account of the escape of Mr Scott-King, a dim Classics Master in a dim English Public School, during the European confusions just after the end of the War. " ... a large and antiquated saloon car was bumping towards the sea. In it sat in extreme discomfort seven men habited as Ursuline nuns. Scott-King was among them."

 

Golgotha Monastery Island 

Orkney

KW17 2AR

United Kingdom 

contact@the-sons.org

www.papastronsay.com

www.papastronsay.blogspot.com

Pio Nono, Papa Pacelli, and Liturgy

 Intermittently, the 1854 propers for December 8, the Immaculate Conception, have worried me. 

You see, dumping a whole structured day of liturgical propers is so Pacellian, Moniniian, Bugninian; so anti-traditional.

And one has to admit that this, precisely, is what Pius IX did do.

But ... the propers for her Conception were so similar to those for her Nativity that all we need to do is to recover those First Vespers for her Nativity (of course, they were lost during the slashburnandslaughter liturgical policy of the mid-twentieth century).

And, perhaps, there are arguments for retaining what was put in place during the 1850s. These formulae responded to a liturgical culture which had grown up over more than half a millennium of piety, prayer, and art, both private and public. Everybody knows about Duns Scotus and his campaign for the Immaculate Conception; I am quietly confident that everybody knows the poem by Fr Gerard Manley Hopkins about the Duns Scotus "Who fired France for Mary without spot". All readers of this blog will remember the piece I published last October 10, about how Edmund Lacey (Bishop of Exeter 1420-1458)  provocatively preached a sermon to a Dominican Chapter (he subsequently transcribed it into his episcopal Register) in which, with no hestation or indecision, he required those who besmirch her Conception to Shut Up.

[Things are, of course, rather different with regard to the formulae put in place after the Definition of 1950. Hitherto, the teaching of the Assumption was that the Heavenly Woman should be the great Intercessor. Under Papa Pacelli, this was replaced by a determination to demonstrate that her Immaculate Conception logically required her immunity from death.]

Treading the Serpent underfoot

Dom Gueranger commends, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Hymn Ante cibum by Prudentius. I didn't inflict it upon you yesterday because I didn't want to put you off your food. 

But ... if it's a matter of finding early 5th century verse ... well written ... to go with baroque and rococo art ... say, with Tiepolo or Rubens  ... Prudentius is indeed your one-stop place to visit. modo cernua femineis/ Vipera proteritur pedibus. The stuff of a thousand counter-reformation paintings, and hymns! All good mega-triumphalist fun. But ... he takes the imagery further, and describes the Serpent and its vomit: virus inerme piger revomit/ Gramine concolor in viridi. If you don't know Latin, follow your nose, follow your instinct ... revomit means ... yes ... And Gramine means grass and concolor means same-colour-as.

Prudentius moves on from Serpentine Vomit to other animals. The Wolf ... trepidat. And why should a Wolf be terrified? Because of the sweetie little flocklet of white lamblets ... they are so dangerous. They are impavidae, so the mournful wolf blunders (obambulat) about amongst them ... and obambulat is an interesting word.

Prudentius has Vergil in mind: Geo iii 538. But what about Ovid: in Met ii Juppiter, disguising himself as a bull so as to ravish Europa, mugit et in teneris formosus obambulat herbis. What a good thing that the beast is sexy and the grass so soft! And in book XIV, the blinded Cyclops totam fremebundus obambulat Aetnam/ praetentaque manu silvas, et luminis orbus /rupibus incursat, foedataque brachia tabo, in mare protendens gentem execratur Achivam ...

Yes; for Naso the verb suggests slapstick; and blind-man how-amusing-you-bumped-int-that rock-slapstick. Nasty?And so on. A nice picture of the lambs bossing around (imperitat) the lions.

Enough of pre-lapsarian images. In the next day or two, I hope to explain to you why I have sometimes been a bit doubtful about what Pius IX did to the Immaculate Conception Liturgy.

 

Authentic Anglicanism

"You bade me read the Anglican divines; I have given a great deal of time to them, and I am embracing that creed which alone is the scope to which they converge in their separate teaching; the creed which upholds the divinity of tradition with Laud, consent of Fathers with Beveridge, a visible Church with Bramhall, a tribunal of dogmatic decisions with Bull, the authority of the Pope with Thorndike, penance with Taylor, prayers for the dead with Ussher, celibacy, asceticism, ecclesiastical discipline with Bingham. I seek a Church which in these, and in a multitude of other points, is nearer the apostolic Church than any existing one; which is the continuation of the apostolic Church, if it has been continued at all. And seeing  it to be like the apostolic Church, I believe it to be the same. Reason has gone first, faith is to follow."

Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompei

 The Italian original of the following prayer received an Imprimatur from the Milan Curia on 11 Jun 1913.

O Virgin Immaculate and Queen of the Holy Rosary, Thou, in these times of dead faith and of triumphant impiety, hast wished to set thy place of Queen and of Mother upon the ancient land of Pompei, dwelling place of dead pagans. And from this place where the idols and the demons were worshipped, thou dost today, as Mother of the divine graces, scatter upon all the treasures of the mercies of heaven. I pray thee! From this throne where thou dost reign in mercy, turn, O Mary, your kindly eyes upon me also, and have mercy on me, who have so great a need of thy succour. Show thyself also to me as thou hast shown thyself to so many others, as true Mother of Mercy: Monstra te esse Matrem, as I with all my heart salute and invoke thee as my Sovereign and Queen of the Most Holy Rosary.

Salve Regina, Mater

BASTARD FOXES?

 So often one has a brilliant idea which, if one runs it to ground and digs it up, turns out to be totally illegitimate and wrong. I would like to share an idea of mine ... and if the philologically literate shoot it down in howls of mirth, I shall simply be grateful that my education is continuing. Honest!

As fanatical reders of this blog will know, the Catholic Church in Clacton on Sea, the town where my parents and I spent years when I was small, contains a beautiful Shrine of our Lady of Light. The Revd Cyril Wilson published a very useful (except for its lack of footnotes) little book in 1953 in which he gave a lot of the 'back-history' of that Shrine and that devotion ... which is Cornish and involves  S Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort. He gives the title of one Breton shrine as INTRON VARIA AR SKLERDER.

The first stage in my dodgy(?) hypothesis involves textual emendation. Yes; sneer if you must! My knowledge of the Breton language is minimal; but my little (2002) Breton Dictionary leads me to the belief that the N in INTRON is a typo. Without it, the word means Lady. So: ITRON. Yes??

From what I do know of the "Celtic" languages, in which weird things can happen to some consonants (not least M) in some positions in a word, I am convinced that VARIA is a 'mutated' form of MARIA.

But the word SKLERDER interests me most. That little dictionary suggests that SKLER- and SKLAER- carry the meaning LIGHT. I recall reading somewhere that, as far as Breton is concerned, a initial S may be etymologically insignificant.

KLERDER.

When Pam and I spent quite alot of our time in Cornwall, we read (the whole of) the surviving Middle Cornish literature; I was constantly surprised by how much Middle Cornish vocab appears to be derived from highly 'evolved' late Latin terms (I'm not referring to medieval loan-words, which also proliferate whether via French or English). 

I think KLERDER is a corruption of CLARITATE. Readers will recall how often, in the Vulgate, terms with clarus for their root seem more popular than those from gloria.

While browsing around on the feast of All the Saints of England, I found myself looking at one of Canon Doble's calendars of Cornish saints. He lists, on November 4, S. Cleder Conf., and adds 'Clarus, P & M'. He cites in a footnote Baring-Gould, and adds the information that "S Clarus, P & M in Normandy, is honoured on 4 November (also on 18 July.) N.R. may have identified S Cleder with S Cleer."

Cleder, Clarus, Cleer ...

My case rests!! Is it a pure-bred fox, or ...

The dangers of the Adonius

That great mass of fine Neo-Gothic buildings which you pass in the train or along the A27 just by Shoreham's exquisite Art Deco Airport, is dedicated to the Assumption of the Mother of God, and to S Nicolas, despite its local nickname Dracula's Castle. It is very punctilious about retaining a proper spelling of NICOLAS without the H. These things matter. Don't ask me Why ... but they do.

When the College Office Book was reissued in 1914, it contained two new English hymns for the Co-Patron, both in the Sapphic metre. The first was composed by the Wykehamist Adam Fox, Master at Lancing 1906-1918, subsequently Warden of Radley College, Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College and Professor of Poetry; finally Canon, Archdeacon, and Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey.

I had no success in urging upon my then colleagues the restoration of his hymn to regular use. It was the adonius at the end of this stanza

Teach us to honour Nicolas of Myra,

Foeman to error in the Church's Councils,

Lover of sailors, and above all other

     Lover of Children.

which raised their trembling eyebrows, poor poppets. 

The second hymn was by Athelstan Riley. In his hymn, the adonius was again the problem; in this case, the adonius which concludes the following stanza which, around the time of  'Princess Di's' demise, wrecked my passionate crusade to get it back into the repertoire:

Rouse thee, great goddess of th'Ephesian temple,

For, lo! the offspring of a greater Virgin

Armeth his servant to destroy thine oak tree

     Dumb, dead Diana. 

Fr Fox had kippers for brekker, lunch, and tea. Not many people know that. We live in a world rife with culpable ignorance.

He had wanted his memorial in Westminster Abbey to read "A Fox gone to Earth", but his executors had as little humour as my one-time colleagues.

Jocosity ... mere jocosity ... I do not really criticise or sneer at either Fr Fox's Executors or my former colleagues; or, indeed, at the People's Princess alias Queen of Hearts.

 

ACTUOSA PARTICIPATIO ... bring it back ...

"Reding thought he never had been present at worship before, so absorbed was the attention, so intense was the devotion of the congregation. What particularly struck him was, that whereas in the Church of England the clergyman or the organ was everything and the people nothing except so far as the clerk is their representative, here it was just reversed. The priest hardly spoke, or at least audibly; but the whole congregation was as though one vast instrument or Panharmonicon, moving all together, and, what was most remarkable, as if self-moved. They did not seem to require anyone to prompt or direct them, though in the Litany the choir took the alternate parts. 

"The words were Latin, but everyone seemed to understand them thoroughly, and to be offering up his prayers to the Blessed Trinity, and the Incarnate Saviour, and the great Mother of God, and the glorified Saints, with hearts full in proportion to the energy of the sounds they uttered. 

"There was a little boy near him, and a poor woman, singing at the pitch of their voices. There was no mistaking it; Reding said to himself, 'This is a popular religion ... How wonderful ... that people call this worship formal and external; it seems to possess all classes, young and old, polished and vulgar, men and women indiscriminately; it is the working of one Spirit in all, making many one.'" 

Benedictus XVI Revisited

 Pathetic ... but I discerned a suggestion of a tear as I looked through the Winter Number of  Mass of Ages, the free magazine of my country's Latin Mass Society. There were pictures of Pope Benedict. Memories; memories.

And how Anglican some of it is. The Pope is shown carrying a cross, of a type which will be most familiar to 'middle-of-the-road' Anglicans. At the extremity of each of the Cross's four arms, there is an emblem of one of the Four Evangelists. And in the middle, instead of the Figure of the Lord, there is the Lamb of God. Even today, there must be hundreds of Anglican churches where it was felt that a Crucifix would be too high church, too popish. So a cross such as I have just described found a place upon the altar instead. 

Not so extreme!!

Those interested in the niceties of liturgical garments will be interested to see Benedict wearing a fanon over his amice ... the fanon was a simple covering garment ... did it, perhaps, originally, protect the collar of the chasuble from a pontifical wig?

And the pallium ... Benedict XVI changed the colour of the crosses from black to the original papal red. Francis I promptly changed it back! 

 

And Anglicanism gets its elbow in again as Mass of Ages advertises a reprint of Enid Chadwick's My Book of the Church's Year.

Chadwick was an Anglican artist who did most of the artwork in the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham. This little book is a very fine example of where Anglo-Papalist popular art had got to in the 1930s. Children be ... er ... damned; you'll enjoy this little art-history gem yourself!

Joining the British Latin Mass Society is a splendid step you can take in these hard times to uphold the Faith. I beg you to do so ... or, if your membership has lapsed, to renew!

Books and Voices

 It is such a natural and universal thing that we do not notice it; although Catherine Pickstock wrote a fine book on it. I mean: the essentially oral rather than literary nature of Liturgy (After writing. Blackwell 1998). Although we know that the officiant is, almost certainly, reading from a text, we accept as normative the fact that he doesn't keep on telling us this. Nor, usually, does he inform the addressee of his book-references, or belabour him with source-information.

Most readers will also be aware that, before the drastic reduction in the number of prefaces in the 'Gregorian Sacramentary' to about 10, many if not most Uses offered at least one preface for every single Mass. In the Corpus Praefationum (Brepols 1980), no fewer than four are provided for S Birinus alone.

S Birinus? He is a local saint who is currently in my mind because his festival is approaching. It used to be on December 3, but now it comes on December 5, and S Francis Xavier has sole possession of December 3. He ... Birinus ... set up his episcopium  at Dorchester on Thames, in the remains of a Roman town which sits astride the confluence of the Thames and the Thame, and the Roman road linking Calleva (Silchester) and Lactodurum (Towcester). 

It was in the Thames that S Birinus baptised King Cynegils of Wessex (635).

Incidentally ... or BTW ... the nut-cases who 'reformed' the Roman Rite in the 1960s chose to lay it down as an unbreakable rule that the Preface must never contain a request. Most earlier prefaces, however, did precisely that ... of the four prefaces for S Birinus, three contain requests. 

I give now the text (and a partial translation) of a Preface which seems to me to put a (red) 'literacy' toe inside an 'orality' door.

"VD ... aeterne Deus. Qui beatum Byrinum confessorem tuum nobis doctorem donare dignatus es, per quem a tenebris ignorantiae liberati, aeternae lucis fieri filii meruimus. Qui, quod ore docuit, exemplo monstravit, cuius vita moribus effulsit egregiis, atque miraculis illuxit. Quae etiam antiquis libris leguntur inscripta, etiam nova cotidie videntur in facto*. Cuius praesenti patrocinio gaudentes, tuam super nos praedicamus gratiam abundantur effusam. Per Christum."

[*Miracles read written in ancient books, even now are daily seen in deed.] 

A nice piece of Latin, yes? Deftly deployed alliteration?

The area had a significant Recusant population: Fr John Osman has beautified a tiny Victorian gothic church down by the river; you would need to travel far to find anything as lovely.

Slaves and Togas

 So there I was, in the CODRINGTON LIBRARY, peering down at a Renaissancevolume, the Lumen Animae by Matthias Farinator. Not that I had theleast interest in that: I was more taken by its owner.

But I am jumping ahead rather. Why should I be in the splendid CODRINGTON LIBRARY of All Souls College? My quarry was Master Patrick Holyborton, Rector of Lifton in the Diocese of Exeter, whom I was researching and who had owned the book. You (and I) would probably spell his name Haliburton. And why am writing about him now, decades later?

two or three weeks ago, the Saturday Times Newspaper suggested some jolly, autumnal, walks; and it caught my eye that one such walk was Gullane and Dirleton, East Lothian. And Dirleton was the seat, centuries ago, of a minor boble family, the Haliburtons of Dirleton. Andso Dirleton was where Master Patrick came from! And I had never been there!

Well, I'm too old and ill now. But things stick with one. Master Patrick was a follower of the Ninth Earl of Douglas, who had to flee to England after his defeat by James II of Scots. After an advantageous marriage to an English heiress, Douglas found himself in the upper circles of Yorkist England, and was able to reward adherents ... such as Haliburton. And the volume (one of only two identified volumes from Haliburton's library) revealed that he had been Archdeacon of Totnes. This was new information: the records of the Diocese are rather lacunose at this point. The next Archdeacon was collated in 1491 ... so what happened to Master Patrick, who seems to go absent about thenfrom the Chapter records?

Here I had another spot of luck. An Exeter Cathedral inventory survives of 1506: and it lists "two sudaria of violet or purple colour, of the gift of Patrick Holyborton, which he brought (portavit) from the Holy Land Jerusalem". [I think sudaria means humeral veils.]

So that's where he was during the missing year.

And here was I, musing occasionally on the statue of SIR CHRISTOPHER CODDRINGTON, who was presiding over the whole splendid architectural extravaganza dressed like a member of the Roman elite.

CODRINGTON ... I don't think I 've mentioned this ... is currently under a bit of a shadow. His fortune was, we are informed, based on the Slave Trade. I'm not sure if his library still bears his name. Or, if it does, how much longer it will be allowed to do so. If you go to admire is Library, I hope you you will keep mentioning his name ...

BTW: It's only a (slightly long) Stone's throw to the Oriel statue of Rhodes, and his Chronogram.

The Holy and Blessed Martyrs of Oxford

In the handlist of the English Martyrs, I have counted some 58 whose witness honours this (now apostate) University. Today is their combined liturgical commemoration; the day having been chosen because it was on December 1 1581 that three of them were martyred at Tyburn: S Edmund Campion, scholar and fellow of S John's College and Public Orator; S Ralph Sherwin, fellow of Exeter College; and S Alexander Briant, of Hart Hall, now represented by own college. 

[I think it right to regard this day as a Greater Double, or Second Class feast, because, since it was entered on the Calendars of some English dioceses, many Beati have been canonised.]

"We have no slight outfit for our opening warfare. Can we religiously suppose that the blood of our Martyrs, three centuries ago and since, shall never receive its recompense? Those priests, secular and regular, did they suffer for no end? or rather, for an end which is not yet accomplished? The long imprisonment, the fetid dungeon, the weary suspense, the tyrannous trial, the barbarous sentence, the savage execution, the rack, the gibbet the knife, the cauldron, the numberless tortures of those holy victims, O my God, are they to have no reward? Are Thy Martyrs to cry from under Thine altar for their loving vengeance on this guilty people, and to cry in vain? Shall they lose life, and not gain a better life for the children of those who persecuted them? Is this Thy way, O my God, righteous and true? Is it according to Thy promise, O King of Saints, if I may dare to talk to Thee of justice? ... And in that day of trial and desolation for England, when hearts were pierced through and through with Mary's woe, at the crucifixion of Thy body mystical, was not every tear that flowed, and every drop of blood that was shed, the seeds of a future harvest, when they who sowed in sorrow were to reap in joy?"

S John Henry Newman.