July 31st - Saint Germanus, Bishop and Confessor - Smoke signals?

This piece from my Archbishop has just come in on the Messenger site (Primate's Announcements) :

Indeed, it behoves us priests to intensify our spiritual lives and meditate on the meaning of our sublime vocation to be the Other Christ and the bearer of the sacred. St. Jean-Marie Vianney was a nineteenth-century country priest here in France and had spiritual gifts like the Startsi in Russia, a famous example being St. Seraphim of Zarov. He saw into souls and was transfigured by divine light. The Orthodox don't have a monopoly on théôsis! Above all, he was a faithful priest and pastor of souls. I have a bust of this great Saint in my sacristy - and I look at his face each day before leaving the sacristy to go to the altar and say Mass.

I bought this statue at Ars during a pilgrimage there in 1984. I had already read the incredible book of Msgr Francis Trochu on the life of the Curé d'Ars. My little statue is a copy of a bust that was discreetly sculpted in wax under the artist's hat during the Curé's Sunday afternoon catechesim. This plaster bust has been broken and repaired a few times, with all the moves, having been with me to Rome, Fribourg and my seminary near Florence - and then a few parishes where I was on pastoral placement. Now, the statue takes its place next to a former tabernacle I use for keeping the Holy Oils. In front of the bust, a couple of rosaries and the key to the chapel door. The little unit of three drawers contains a stock of clean purificators, finger towels and corporals.

I spent some time yesterday with some French traditional Catholics in Paris, since I was invited to be interviewed about the TAC on Radio Courtoisie. Many traditionalists have difficulties in understanding the meaning of the priesthood - married or celibate - which should not be confused with the monastic life.

I received an e-mail a few days ago in which a person said:

What edifying simplicity - we need holy faithful as much as holy priests!

Taking my niece sailing

Here's my niece Innès (9 years old) about to get onboard my boat just a few days ago - a nice calm day, so nice and safe for kids. I managed to find a good child's lifejacket in the club house, and borrowed it for her. She has just had a week's course of Optimist (child's dinghy) sailing and did very well. She needs encouragement! Launching from a beach is an art. The waves come in sequences of three or four. You just find a gap, and away you go without a drop of water in the hull!

July 29th - Felix and Faustinus, Martyrs - Internet Gossip

Comments about the TAC on http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2009/07/slow-posting-continues-till-mid-august.html. I give no commentary other than drawing your attention to the sensible and well-informed comments by P.K.T.P., a Canadian traditional Catholic layman who is sympathetic to the TAC being received into corporate union with Rome without reliquishing our Anglican identity. Some other comments are written by bigoted and pig-ignorant knuckle-heads. Despite the diatribes from conspiracy-theorists and cranks, fundamentally Donatists, attitudes are slowly changing in a positive direction.

Read with a critical spirit and don't believe everything you read.

PS. I received this in a private e-mail: "With Damian's post today, I would be tempted to say that the "chatter" (as the security types here [in the US] are wont to say) is increasing, suggesting something really might be afoot". This is what happened when the Pope lifted the excommunications from the SSPX bishops last January, and when the Summorum Pontificium motu proprio about the liturgy come out in July 2007.

July 28th - Saint Sampson, Bishop - Forward in Faith in Talks with the Vatican

From Damian Thompson. I don't know what to make of this, but Bishop Broadhurst is friendly enough with us and was with our TAC Bishops in Portsmouth in October 2007. He also spent time with us at the hotel, and I found him pleasant and sincere - and a gentleman with an endearing London accent.

The posting is followed by 46 comments (as of the time of writing), many of them being of positively asinine stupidity. Don't bother reading them. Damian Thompson seems sure enough of his "source" and his facts to print this stuff. We'll see, but something seems afoot. I have no idea.....! Have you?

The Vincentian Canon and Development of Doctrine

Another article from the Continuum. It's getting tedious as the "classical Anglicans" bring out the arguments to justify not joining the effort to unite Continuing Anglicanism with Rome.

It is like the old Jansenist instinct for loking for "pure" Catholicism in history, presumably at some point during the first millennium. I don't think such a point ever existed, and any move to reproduce the distant past results in something that has nothing more than a "pseudo" feeling about it. One example is Bugnini's liturgy that is still the official rite of the Roman Catholic Church (not for much longer we hope). The imperfection of Bugnini's scholarship has been demonstrated by more recent scholars including the present Pope. By no stretch of the imagination could I be brought to believe that the 1928 American Prayer Book is a restoration of an ancient liturgy. Like 1549 and 1662, it is an "artificial fabrication" which did not respect any notion of organic development or a hermeneutic of continuity. Of course these notions of Newman, the ressourcement theologians of the 20th century and Pope Benedict XVI are foreign to "classical Anglicans".

The Vincentian Canon - Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, What is to be believed is from everywhere, from all periods of history and from all believers. I would be inclined to say that if that test is applied strictly, nothing would survive. The Church of the period of the Apostles and the Fathers is held up as something perfect. Even the Epistles of St. Paul attest the existence of serious disputes and deviations in the early Church. The sub-Apostolic Church was ridden with heresies such as Docetism and Gnosticism. The Ecumenical Councils were needed because there was trouble. Who would want to restore that state of affairs? Without a notion of development, the Church has no credibility.

So the argument becomes tit-for-tat. Heresies in the 16th century Church against Ultramontanism, the Crusades & Inquisition and compulsory clerical celibacy. These three problems are relative. The present Pope is not an Ultramontanist!!! The Crusades are no longer a Catholic missionary method. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does its job and rightly so, without using constraint or torture. There are dispensations from celibacy for pastoral reasons, and maybe this too will change once priests are capable of integrating marriage and family life into priestly life without becoming secular humanist activists.

A book I warmly recommend is Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, Cambridge 1957 (first edition). "Bossuet in the seventeenth century represented the opinion that Christian doctrine [and praxis] never or hardly changed: Newman in the second half of the nineteenth century saw that its expression necessarily changed in a changing society".

The immobilist conservative idea, for me, lacks credibility and intellectual appeal. Archaeologism is just as much an error as trying to bury history and build up an entirely new church like the secular-minded Christians want. The Catholic way is the true Via Media - In medio stat virtus. The Vincentian Canon plays a capital role in guiding the principle of development. There are rules by which legitimate "organic" developments are distinguished from pure inventions, artificial entities and errors. Read Newman, Ratzinger and so many others.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. It all looks like self-justification for particular agendas rather than the common effort to reunite Christians and make Christianity credible to the world. It's as simple as that.

July 25th - Saint James, Apostle - A splendid afternoon on the sea

The wind was forecast as a little on the strong side, 15-16 knots, and a choppy sea. I rigged the boat and put on my sailing gear, and got talking with Le Guad, the kind fellow who looks after our sailing club. He was repairing an aluminium mast as I arrived, and I saw that it was a welding job that was needed. He was thankful to have the address of a firm that repaired my rudder at a reasonable cost. Aluminium welding is highly specialised.

As the rolling waves died down to an acceptable level for launching a frail dinghy from the beach, I went for it. I was away from the beach without a drop of water in the boat! Centre board in, rudder and sail hauled in for reaching. To "warm up" I did a succession of tacks and gybes to get the feeling of the wind and the swell, and lo and behold, I saw two single-sail boats on the quay. Le Guad had already mentioned that the President of the Club, a lady called Sophie would be going out in her Europe (which she handled like Rachmaninov playing the piano) and someone would be in his Laser. They soon launched their boats and we met up. I always feel safer when we are several, for sailors help each other at sea if there is the slightest problem. My Tabur 320 was nowhere like in the same class as the Laser and the Europe, but I was never far behind. We went the furthest I had ever been from the coast in a dinghy.

The sea is dangerous, and one does well to respect it. It's much safer in a little group, even though we had no motor boat accompanying us. Be safe at sea - and you live longer!

We first went on a long close-hauled run in the direction of Saint-Valéry-en-Caux and found that the receding tide current (a coefficient of 105 today) was carrying us a little further out than we wanted to go. Running with the wind enabled us to beat the current and get a little further to the east, and then we went on a long reaching run, which took us at higher speed well out to sea. This time, we amply compensated for the current. The coastline of the Côte d'Albâtre was magnificent, and on such a clear day, we could see Dieppe in the distance and the car ferry arriving from England. Oh! How God shows His wonders in creation and the beauty of the earth! We went forward, feeling the power of the wind in our sails, riding the waves and hearing only the gurgling of the water and the rush of the wind. It was wonderful! We lived the little verse I quoted for you a few days ago:

It was almost surreal how three boats hove to several miles offshore so that we would have a conversation and get to know each other! They were so impressed to meet an English sailor, even though I had my training here in France with Christophe Falon, a lengend in our area for teaching generations of children and adults and for coming forty-seventh behind the world Laser Champion in a regatta in Brittany of more than two hundred boats. As we set off for another couple of long runs before beaching, they said to me - A vous l'honneur. Off you go, because we'll soon overtake you. My Tabur 320 is clearly not a regatta boat! But this was no regatta, just a friendly outing of three boats with good sincere characters at their helms.

We beached at about 7.15 in the evening, having been at sea for about three hours. We helped each other get our boats up the ramp to the quay. There must have been an "audience" of tourists watching us sail, because they brought our launching trolleys to where we were with our boats. It's amazing how people can still be kind and ready to be helpful. Then it was the usual hosing down and rinsing of our boats and gear, everything stowed away, boat back in its place in the Club's boat yard, and time to go home.

There are few more relaxing things in this life than the sea air and the joy of sailing. If you feel up-tight about what is going on in the Church, I recommend you buy a boat and get some lessons. Then discover a whole new world of God's beautiful creation!

Uncritical Papalism?

I greatly appreciated the article Uncritical, moi? by the good Fr Hunwicke, parish priest in Oxford.

This is someone who has really understood things - and he is outside the "ideological box" (as I call it), and is - as an Anglican - neither an uncritical Papalist or a Protestant. Anglican Catholic identity, as Jonathan Munn puts it, is intangible within the usual ideological in-the-box categories of our times. Simply, I assimilate the idea some of us have of Anglican identity with the pre-Reformation Church in England, the pre-Revolution Church in France, the German tradition in the wake of the Council of Constance. It is a vision of ecclesiology that pre-dates modern ecclesiastical or political totalitarianism - a notion built upon collegiality and conciliarism, on the consensus of the clergy and the laity - and dare I say it, in Christian charity. This was Newman's notion of the Church, and why he pressed for moderation at the 1870 Vatican Council.

We are simply Catholics - but without the mind-numbing ideology!

Anglicans, like the few of us who actually do a little thinking, have been very unhappy with Roman Catholicism in the 1970's and 80's and 90's, like in our 'native' Anglicanism. We would also have been unhappy under the fanatical regimes of Pius IX and especially Pius X, seeing what happened to George Tyrrell, the convert who became a 'Modernist' (I'm sure the same would have happened to Newman had he lived just another 20 years!). Do you want to know something about that kind of Catholicism? Just look up some of the SSPX and sedevacantist sites on the Internet with their stuff on the Great Conspiracy and Freemasons under every bed!

At last, a man like Joseph Ratzinger has become Pope, and is doing all he can to change things, both from the old Ultramontanism and from the new Ultramontanism. Throughout my university days in the 1980's and as a 'closet modernist' at seminary, I saw the new 'third way', the neo-Platonic vision that has now become mainstream under Pope Benedict XVI. This might be only a brief ray of hope before John Paul III or Richard-Dawkins Primus gets elected and the leaden cloak falls again upon us to bid us good-night. Or we can muster all the optimism we have and go for it.

Individual conversions, even en masse, are to no avail, because the Roman Catholic ideologists will be encouraged to think they are perfect and have no need to modify their opinions in any way in order to foster the visible and human Unity of the Church (already realised in the Church under her sacramental and ontological aspect). Only bodies coming to Rome will have the strength to make things change in the right way, and this is as true of the Latin liturgy traditionalists as with us Anglicans and the Orthodox.

We will come when we are welcome!

July 23rd - Saint Apollinaris, Bishop and Martyr - Could the Latin Mass Save Western Civilization?

Go and read the article and come back here. I would be quite sceptical about the idea of western civilisation being saved by a liturgical rite. But, the article makes the point that without the liturgy, the Church is as good as invisible, irrelevant - dead.

The title is a little misleading, since the issue is not the language. We Anglicans use the vernacular as do most Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church. The issue is that of a sacred liturgy, as opposed to a banal entertainment show in imitation of TV variety shows.

Read this:

The question of an Anglican rite with its majestic classical English idiom is a part of the same question of the Catholic liturgy in general.

One fact is clear from this article - if the Church goes down, so will our civilisation and all that will await us will not be a new Enlightenment (as Dawkins would have us believe) but a new Dark Age of intolerant and fanatical Islam, terrorism, nihilism, Frankenstein-style science and medicine, a new form of Nazism, cloning, abortion, euthanasia, the world as envisaged by Orwell and Huxley, and greater evils we could not imagine in our worst nightmares. The Church, with a divine miracle, could turn everything around - and we would have a future to look forward to.

That is the importance of the liturgy. As Fr. Zuhsdorf has put it "Save the liturgy, save the world".

July 22nd - Saint Mary Magdalene, Penitent - Breaking....

The Messenger (our official TAC news feed) has a number of new things to announce, and also see the Primate's Announcement. There is also an interesting article in the Catholic Reporter. The source of the information is Archbishop Hepworth himself.

Let us re-double our prayers for the visible Unity of the Church.

July 21st - Saint Praxedes, Virgin and Martyr - Cultural Catholicism

A new post by Arturo Vasquez. I have often agonised about this. The only contact many French families have with the Church is at baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals. This might shock many, as the same people of often ignorant of the rudiments of the catechism and a frustration to the clergy. Cultural Catholicism is simply a device by which a person of a given background finds and affirms his identity.

Is it a bad thing that religion is not restricted to the elite of the clergy and "clericalised" laity? I appreciate the idea - "The strength of a faith, like the strength of many things, is based on its weakest link". That weakest link is the slender thread that distinguishes the average country dweller from hard-line atheism and formatted ideology.

This is often what we see in the cities. Msgr Ronald Knox identified a phenomenon called Enthusiasm, a strain of spirituality and religious attitude that began with Tertullian and Montanism, threaded its way through history (eg. the Convulsionaries of St. Médard - Jansenist enthusiasts who opposed the papal condemnation of 1713 and exhibited supposedly miraculous phenomena in witness of their cause. The phenomena were first observed, together with cures and prophecies, at the tomb of the Jansenist François de Paris in 1731, at St. Médard, Paris. They continued in various parts of France to the end of the eighteenth century.) and is served up to us today in the form of charismatic Pentecostalism and traditionalist fanaticism.

It is tempting to desire a Church of the elite as the world falls away and becomes ever more distant from Christianity. We do need to know what we want - Christianity as a leaven in society, influencing its morality and culture, and inciting people to a spiritual life to suit their level of maturity - or a quasi-monastic sect of the "pure". I am not sure I would want to be a priest of the latter, otherwise I would have become a monk. We Anglicans can tend to be stiff-assed (especially when we are British), but the Catholic movement does a lot of good. I would also advise Americans to get a taste of what things are like here in Europe and the young Churches of Africa and Asia - that might soften up attitudes a little.

What are we left with? A Church that asks very little, and which indeed throws pearls to pigs, the Blessed Sacrament to dogs? A Church that would deign to give Holy Communion to a child without the full three-year catechism course? Did not Christ allow himself to be killed at the hands of legalistic Jewish priests and lewd Roman soldiers?

Perhaps it is "cultural catholicism" that is the most stable and abiding element, exactly what will make it possible to restore the Church's liturgical life and find that it will be accepted. Priests and "clericalised" lay people should observe and heed the real thoughts and aspirations of the real laity.

Above all, charity and kindness in all things....

July 20th - Saint Margaret, Virgin and Martyr - 40 years ago

Everyone is talking about it - "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind", as Neil Armstrong printed the first human footprint into the dusty surface of the moon. About a year ago, my sister Wendy sent me a DVD of some old Super 8 films taken by my father in 1969. Those were days when I would run round the campsite with a butterfly net (as my father captured on film, with his 12-seater Land Rover and the large white caravan in the background), enthusiastic that our family had arrived in Spain for our annual holiday. I was ten years old in my schoolboy shorts, green pullover, cap and pudding bowl haircut.

Those were also the days when I rigged up a child's tricycle with a mast and a sail. It didn't work very well, but it was my invention (even if someone else had invented sailing karts). I was also rushing to the TV at the right times to hear Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra as the mighty Saturn V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral. I have a vague recollection that I was off school suffering from some minor childhood illness, and was allowed to watch the space programme on TV in my dressing gown and pyjamas.

Those were magic days, and we really believed in those words of the American astronaut, his small contribution to man's progress. That is how we were brought up in the 1960's, to do our bit and be inventive about it. Those were the days when my youthful imagination was fired by such films as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea - the original and best 1954 version with Kirk Douglas. Most boys love fast cars and planes - but I was much more for ships and submarines, and this recently returned to me in my love for sailing.

I had not yet discovered the finer things of life, but I was already fascinated by churches and the organ. I mentioned the music of Richard Strauss to accompany the rocket launch. The last chord of this piece is the organ - and that is the moment I waited for! I was yet three years from singing in a choir or taking any real interest in the Christian faith

All that was forty years ago. I have difficulty believing it. Some people say the moon landings were a hoax. Think about the difference between computer technology then and now! The 1960's were not the stone age, and computers could yet calculate the trajectories and everything else needed to send a rocket to the moon. A couple of days ago, I saw a photo of a part of the moon where the Eagle lunar module can be made out, though somewhat blurred. I believe these landings were for real, and I'm not an American!

July 18th - Saint Arnulph, Bishop and Martyr - Nobody expects the Greek Inquisition!

From the Church Times:

I see this whole thing in simple terms. The Christian world has been torn between relevance to the world and its specific identity. Ultimately, the whole thing goes back to the Donation of Constantine and “if the salt loses its savour”.

This is a problem that is intrinsic to Christianity. If a religion is to expand and assume a missionary vision, then it must be prepared to compromise its identity and inculturate. Western Catholicism is a missionary religion and addresses itself to the world. Eastern Orthodoxy, like Judaism, is a vast “monastery” and keeps its identity by keeping the infidel out and at arm’s length. The latter vision is coherent if it considers, like Jansenism and Calvinism, that the majority of humanity is nothing more than “hell fodder”. Islam is both "missionary" and medieval hard-line, and will continue to make inroads until it falls victim of its missionary ambitions and goes - - - secular.

I see these two visions as oscillating throughout the history of the Church:

The Orthodox, like the Roman Catholic traditionalists (especially the sedevacantists) have come to this out of an instinct for survival. We traditional Anglicans also to an extent, because we can only survive by our difference from secular humanism. When you look at the historical pattern, we can begin to understand. All this is to say that I understand those Greeks who have had enough of relativism and liberalism. But, where is the love and charity or the will to share the Gospel with the world as Jesus asked of his Apostles?

Veritatem facientes in caritate. Not easy.... I would even say that we all seem to have got it wrong.

July 17th - Saint Kenelm, King and Martyr - The Strange Creed of the American Episcopal Church

I don't usually write on the subject of what really amounts to a secular humanist association in the USA sporting the title of a Christian Church forming a part of the Anglican Communion. I imagine that millions of pages of paper have already been blackened by both liberals and conservatives. It began with the ordination of women in the 1970's and the "consecration" of Ms. Barbara Harris in the 1980's. Then came the militant homosexual agenda and their aggressive way of trying to get themselves accepted in society. The reality of all this, looking at the big picture, is the secular "gospel" of Bishop Spong. Here are his twelve theses (source). Everything is clearly resumed here:

In short, there is no personal God, no Christ or Redemption. There is no sin, so I suppose I can steal and kill and suffer no moral consequences (even though I have my country's penal law to fear). There is no objective standard of morality and there is no life after death. The is the Newchurch "gospel" that can bring us no hope or love. It is no better than atheism and death.

An article in Virtue Online describes how the Episcopal Presiding Bishop says individual salvation is "heresy," "idolatry". Ms. Schori, the presiding fake "bishop" denies individual salvation calling it 'the great Western heresy: that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.'

She is not entirely wrong in that salvation in the afterlife is the continuation and consequence of a life that is sanctified by Christian living in the community, faith, prayer and a positive concern and empathy for other people. No one is saved alone and no one is damned alone. We are responsible for each other, and we are in communion with the Saints and with the souls of the departed on their way between where they were at the moment of death and the celestial spheres of heaven. It would indeed be folly to embark on a life of selfishness and evil, and to bank on escaping hell just by reciting a particular formula at the right time. Every person who dies survives the death of his or her physical body and brain - but every culture and spiritual tradition affirms that the quality of the afterlife depends on the morality and spiritual development of that person in earthly life. In every religion and spiritual philosophy in the world, we find some notion of heaven and hell with some transitory state between the two.

But, for Ms. Schori, is it all about a more subtle approach to a lifetime's sanctification and integration in the Christian community? Is there not a new finality that has nothing to do with the Gospel? Perhaps the condition is being politically correct, being concerned about one's carbon footprint, attending the right bla-bla meetings about Millennium Development Goals or some other rehash of the 1960's view of society.

Indeed, I saw some photos on David Virtue's site depicting a big meeting of the TEC - the General Convention in Anaheim, California. They seem a friendly bunch of people. The bishops are mostly dressed in violet shirts with dog collars and pectoral crosses - so, surprise of surprise, one has the impression of Christian clerics. There is a hall with loads of tables and chairs, and there is some kind of symbol for the participants coming from different states. The prayer space has an altar with a Laudian-type frontal and three parasols - the symbolism of which is obscure. For the various liturgies celebrated by Ms. Schori and others, times have not changed since the 1970's. How conservative they are!

It seems that those people are going to go ahead with satisfying the demands of the militant homosexual lobby, including the ranks of the bishops. The TEC (former ECUSA) has been losing members and clergy at an alarming rate for many decades, beginning with the Continuing Anglicans who subscribed to the Affirmation of Saint Louis in 1977. The Anglican Church in North America under Bishop Duncan is an interesting development. I know too little about them to say much about them. I only hope they find ways to be of interest to the older Continuing Churches.

As an Englishman, I have never had anything to do with Ms. Schori's secular humanist association in America. A couple of days ago, I alluded to something I had read about some of the English bishops swinging around to a more traditional Christian outlook. I can only hope this is true before the Church of England goes the same way. The idea is coming in that the Church is a community of believers and spiritual people, more or less coherent with their professed principles - saints and sinners alike. And it is on this basis of faith and prayer that we are brought to express our concern for other people. And, we should not forget that atheists and agnostics are often more involved in philanthropy and empathy for those who suffer. The Church is an icon of the Communion of Saints and the community of the Trinity.

Not so for the TEC crowd, so it appears...

July 16th - Translation of Saint Osmund, Bishop and Confessor - More from the Sea

O, brave white horses! you gather and gallop,
   The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins;
Oh! brave white horses! you gather and gallop,
   The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins;
Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop
   In your hollow backs, on your high arch'd manes.
I would ride as never [a] man has ridden
In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden,
I would ride as never man has ridden
To gulfs foreshadow'd thro' strifes forbidden,
   Where no light wearies and no love wanes,
   No love, where no love, no love wanes.

I was sailing this afternoon at Veules les Roses. How true it is how the "white horses gather and gallop", as they cross and occasionally form waves that spray water into the boat. The boat rides the waves, especially when running with the wind and surfing. To have this song in one's mind when sailing is truly magic!

Listen to the song and imagine being at sea on an old sailing ship.

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.

Pray for those who go to sea, not for pleasure like myself, but those who work on fishing boats in extremely dangerous conditions, those who are up against the wildest seas in the world where the stoutest ship trembles to go. And finally, let us pray for those who have perished at sea doing their duty.

Anticipating things a little, Blessed John Henry Newman

A few bits and pieces from Whispers in the Loggia :

I hope some nice statues in good taste will be made - and I for one will buy one for our chapel.

Dealing with tyranny and evil

Arturo Vasquez has come up with another article, On the abuse of ecclesiastical power. Paul IV, like SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler several centuries after, turned Rome into a concentration camp. It would seem that this Pope of the Counter-Reformation was a particularly nasty piece of work, as was the canonised Dominican Michael Ghislieri / Pius V.

Some might say that it is irreverent to compare a reforming Pope with a Nazi war criminal. Hitler also thought his mission to enslave the world and kill all the Jews and other "sub-humans" came from God!

This is why I am not terribly keen about Counter-Reformation Catholicism as opposed to the hermeneutic of continuity from the Patristic and medieval Church. There is no lack today of persons and groups claiming the title of Christian who commit terrorist acts, murder, damage of property in the name of opposing abortion and other medical and scientific evils. There are many who remain within the law, but who advocate political systems that would revive absolute Monarchies or regimes similar to the totalitarianism of the early twentieth century.

The Church has made a considerable amount of progress in accepting the notions of human rights and mercy to temper the rigours of justice. Evil cannot be opposed by evil. Darkness can only be dissipated by light. Now, we can understand why Benedict XVI has not gone on a reforming rampage, and prefers rational explanation and the example of celebrating a beautiful and sacred liturgy. Simply, liberal neo-orthodoxy is now optional instead of being compulsory, and it no longer enjoys institutional favours. It will wither away and die as the light of real Christianity shines on it. Let the light of God's beauty, goodness and truth shine out, and these will attract those who have had enough of evil and darkness.

There will always be wickedness and vice, and the penal law in most countries keeps it within limits by putting the worst offenders behind bars. States being run by criminals? That is always a possibility as happened in Germany in 1933 and in Irak under Saddam Hussein. This war between the light of God and the darkness of the fallen angels and bad humans has been a feature of human history. Sin cannot be eradicated by force. Psalm 37 expresses it beautifully:

July 15th - Translation of Saint Swithun and his Companions, Confessors - An amazing article

I have just found this, courtesy of the Young Fogey. This sums it all up:

Saint Swithun and Summer Weather

Copied from Fr. Zuhsdorf's blog WDTPRS:

The weather here in Normandy, just across the Channel from Winchester, has been fine and bright with strong wind (too strong for my boat, which stayed on the quay at Veules les Roses), but no rain. So, apart from Friday and Saturday this week when we are going to get 30-knot winds (at sea) and hard rain according to Windguru, it should fair up. I might even get some sailing in on Sunday afternoon when it calms down a little!

A posting in O cuniculi! Ubi lexicon Latinum posui? on the recent polemics in the Continuum Blog

Another biretta tip to Dr Jonathan Munn in his article Pondering Polemics. If, in order to be an Anglican, my reference has to be the Reformation, the Thirty-Nine Articles, all the other polemical writings against the abominations of popery and suchlike, the formulation of the 1662 Communion Service complete with the Black Rubric, I would simply have to conclude that Anglicanism is not Catholic. What will make me revolt that much more is when the so-called Prayer-Book-Fundamentalists try to monopolise our tradition by saying this is the one true Anglicanism, and if you're not happy with it - go over to Rome.

Like Jonathan, I get as fed up of these people as with rude drivers on the road who will not respect rights of way or even the right of the other vehicle to be on the road! They blast their horns and push until they get their way, they tail-gate on the road until you move into the slow lane to let them past. How different it is on the sea - where we are concerned for each other's safety, always attentive to the possibility of a vessel in distress. Only a couple of days ago, I sailed in my dinghy towards a motor boat whose engine had broken down. There's not a lot a sailing dinghy can do in the way of towing a motor boat, especially if I have to close-haul - but I was ready to give it a try. Finally, a Zodiac with a powerful engine got there before I arrived, and did the tow-home job. The people in the motor boat thanked me all the same, just for noticing them and for having reacted like a seaman in coming towards them. That's what we do - we help each other, whether we are in a sailing dinghy, a fishing boat, a Zodiac supervising some learners in catamarans. After beaching and unrigging my dinghy, I got back into my van to drive home - and it was back to the ways of land vehicles: Me first! Me first! Me first! You don't exist! Mors tua vita mea!

Whether they are Prayer Book fundamentalists, fanatical Roman Catholic traditionalists, young and zealous converts to Orthodox for whose everyone else are graceless heretics - the effect is the same. The secular humanists of the ilk of Richard Dawkins would do well to use these people to demolish Christianity and faith in God! The Devil himself couldn't do better.

Saint Augustine once said, In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas. This is difficult to translate, but the usual way of understanding this saying is in what pertains to the doctrine of the Faith as taught by the Tradition and authority of the Church, we need to be together and in full agreement. In matters where discussion is possible and needed, we all should be free from being cowed or browbeaten by others. Let us reason things out and discuss according to the classical rules of logic, epistemology and good debate. Finally, in all things, we should love each other as Christians and fellow human beings.

A comment

Here is a comment addressed to me from Fr. Hunwicke's blog.

If you wish to send comments, please e-mail me (see the header of this page).

July 14th - Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Confessor - Bastille Day

The American revolution recognised that man's rights were bestowed by God. The French Revolution brought human rights and a rational system of law. It also brought violence, death and mob rule. In the 1790's, France was busy shaving its human stubble with the National Razor as the guillotine came to be nicknamed.

There were many evils and injustices in the old regime, but the Revolution brought in relativism, modern secularism, the rejection of God and the mob. The killing was no better than under the Nazis, only the scale was smaller.

I am realistic enough to know that the Monarchy will never be restored in France, but may the Republic acknowledge God as the one author of human rights, and the only true principle of humanity and law.

July 13th - Feria (Feast of the Holy Relics) - More from the Continuum Blog and 'Prayer Book Fundamentalism'

I know about the position of a number of continuing Anglicans like Fr. Robert Hart (a priest I esteem and respect) that affirms the idea that you cannot be a real Anglican unless you adhere to the Prayer Book and the Thirty-Nine Articles. This subject comes up from time to time on the Continuum Blog. The tone is usually very cordial and tolerant, but I felt quite iced when I read Fightin' Words that appeared just a few days ago.

Fr. John Hunwicke seems to have become something of a whipping boy as being representative of the Anglo Papalist tendency in the Church of England. That is of course because he blogs. My reaction is that stability may be found with the Church being firmly established under a Christian Monarch as in England - or under the Pope. Anything else, and everything tends to fragment and break up into an ever-increasing complexity of the "alphabet soup" acronyms of the larger and smaller Continuing Anglican jurisdictions. Apart from our duty to uphold Catholic unity, we have to think about the future. As things stand, we have no future.

It almost seems to come out as a 'litany':

I have been into all this before. The Roman Church is no longer a tyranny, the vernacular is used in the liturgy alongside Latin (it actually went from one extreme to the other), there is no more superstition among Roman Catholics than among any other Christians of our times. The theology of the Sacraments and the Eucharist has progressed a little <English understatement> since the time of the 16th century polemics! The question of merits and the theology of grace has also evolved and has encountered the influence of Eastern Orthodox and Patristic theology (théôsis or deification by grace / divine energies, etc.).

One who seriously continues with the old Reformation / Counter Reformation polemics is really a bigoted Protestant. For me, being Anglican is not being Protestant or trying to reconstruct some vision of the Church as she might have been in the third or fifth centuries - but it is rather about placing the emphasis on a Conciliar (cf. Council of Constance of 1414-1418) or moderate Gallican ecclesiology without negating the sanctifying, governing and teaching authority of the Pope as recognised throughout the whole history of the Church.

Fr. Hunwicke replies to this article on his blog. Anglican identity is a matter of English Catholicism referring to the pre-Reformation Church and the rediscovery of pre-Tridentine Catholicism to offset certain unhealthy tendencies that evolved above all in the baroque period and the mid nineteenth century. I speak particularly of Ultramontanism, the tendency with its origins in Liberalism (Montalembert, Lamennais, etc.) that goes far beyond the actual intentions and teachings of the Vatican Council of 1870.

What I might be tempted to name as Prayer Book Fundamentalism is a destructive force in Continuing Anglicanism and is certainly much more an American thing than our English way. The Prayer Book is certainly a monument of English literary culture, and its beautiful and homely choir Offices of Matins and Evensong have for many decades been the envy of the continental Liturgical Movement, as one can read in Louis Bouyer's works. The rite of the Eucharist is another matter - it is explicitly Protestant and cannot be interpreted any other way. English Anglo Catholics have strained against the Prayer Book for a century and a half, publishing the English Missal, the Anglican Missal and English translations of the Sarum Use, and have split hairs to try to come to terms with cognitive dissonance between the 39 articles and the mainstream Catholic Tradition. When the strain was too great, they became Roman Catholics. It would simply have been better to put the 39 Articles into a museum where they belong - and seek a broad and wide vision of Catholic Tradition.

I am uneasy with exaggerations in the Anglo Papalist tendency, and I prefer the aesthetic style of Dearmer Sarum or the early 20th century liturgical movement inspired by the Order of St. Benedict - full vestments, a curtailing of lace in favour of embroidered cloth for things like apparelled albs, altar frontals and riddel curtains. I find no fault with the Renaissance style that was much more sober than the later baroque and the rococo. But these are aesthetic and artistic variations that can surely be tolerated when the basis is solid Catholic spirituality and doctrine.

I like Fr. Hunwicke's definition of an Anglo Catholic mission principle: First among our Mission Principles is the conviction that the Lord willed his Church to be one, and that God has given the Apostolic See of Rome to be the centre and principle of unity in the world-wide Church. This unity already involves liturgical diversity, between the 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' forms of the Roman rite, explicit recognition of the legitimacy of the Ambrosian and Mozarabic rites (non Bugnini-ised), and of course the venerable rites of all the Oriental Churches. We are on another planet from that of the Prayer-Book-Fundies!

We are simply Catholics, perhaps with an adjective or two and not yet in canonical union with Rome, but we are Catholics.

July 12th - Fifth Sunday after Trinity - Sundays after Trinity and Sundays after Pentecost

When the Sundays after Easter have run out, there is Trinity Sunday, and possibly a Sunday celebration of Corpus Christi. In some places, the feast of the Sacred Heart gets its transfer to the following Sunday - but the long succession of green Sundays is never far. From 1962, the Roman rite became more absolute in the principle according to which a feast had to be of particular importance to take the precedence over a green Sunday.

Fr. Hunwicke has come up with an article on this subject - Post Trinitatem, Post Pentecosten. I celebrate according to the Use of Sarum from which Cranmer took the Collects, Epistles and Gospels for the long sequence of Sundays and weekday ferias between the first Sunday after Trinity until the last Sunday before Advent. Quoting from this article:

This was also the case for many of the French Uses, at least until they began to be 'rationalised' and brought into line with the Roman rite - Paris in 1737, Rouen in 1752, etc. I always found it odd in the pre-Novus Ordo Roman rite that Trinity Sunday and the First Sunday after Pentecost clashed, so that the latter would never be celebrated on a Sunday (but only on a spare Feria during the week). I find the Sarum and Prayer Book system more rational.

The Novus Ordo Roman rite has yet another system, that of beginning the Sundays of Ordinary Time after Epiphany and stopping them after the Sunday that is our Quinquagesima, then resuming them from the first Sunday after Trinity. Celebrating Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart are only allowed as pastoral measures. Perhaps if Bugnini had thought of our system of Sundays after Trinity, that ghastly system of 'ordinary Sundays' might not have been adopted!

Through Bishop Williamson to Ecumenism, the Red Herring of Conservatism

Another article from Fr. Blake. I listened to the interview with Bishop Williamson yesterday. I wanted to understand him. He centres his argument on the inability of modern people to think. I disagree with the idea that, social class for social class, people think less today than in 1909 or in 1859 or 1459, to give three years picked out of a hat. Comparing the intellectual elite of 1950 with the popular class of today is like comparing apples and oranges. The Bishop's thinking is flawed, much as he tries to convey the idea of Thomist epistemology with the word he keeps using - truth.

The reflection of many conservatives is that everything was good in the past (ie. the year when the Bishop came down from Cambridge - 1961). There was evil in the past as there is good today, and vice versa. We often romanticise about other more 'cultural' eras, but there are no fewer artists today than in the Renaissance - and many good ones - and the corrupt Popes in the late 15th century like Alexander VI (Borgia) were no more moral than the priest pedophiles of today. That is putting it mildly!

But there is the point of whether the entire output of Vatican II should be purely and simply discarded, and for the hermeneutic of continuity to take the eve of the Council (ie. the era of Pius XII) as its starting point. Bishop Williamson, for all his English eccentricity, is not a fool, even if we do not agree with all his conclusions. He was intelligent enough not to talk too much about his favourite conspiracy theories, or about the Holocaust - which would have got him instantly kicked out of his Society.

Much as liberalism is a poison that erodes the very existence of faith and the supernatural, conservatism robs the faith and the Christian spirit of its life.

“I have sung in this choir man and boy for forty years. I’m not changing now” – not even if it means singing flat and out of time with the rest of the choir. Human beings are creatures of habit, both good and bad habits. I certainly am, as someone whose morning routine almost never changes! Once we are accustomed to doing things a certain way, and have been doing so for a number of years, we don’t like to change. This is the foundation of the conservative spirit. We keep on doing things as we have always done them because we find certitude and security. To change is to take risks.

A person who is motivated by the conservative spirit will accept a proposition or a custom, not on the basis of its intrinsic goodness or truth, but on the basis of its being the established thing, or what used to be done in the old days. It is founded on fear of the future and change, which is understandable when we are asked to exchange something good and wholesome for something that is objectively questionable. If we do not wish to see that lovely medieval church demolished to make way for a fast-food restaurant, we need to ask about our motives! Is it because we are opposed to change and the fact that more people like fast food than going to church, or because the church has a greater intrinsic good than the fast-food eatery?

Conservatism needs to be questioned, not because it seeks to conserve things that are historical or old, but because the reason for doing so is not always well founded. It has difficulty is distinguishing what is objectively true, good and beautiful from things that depend on subjective taste or preference. Conservatives often take their youth or childhood for the “golden age” of the “good old days”. I shall relate something that illustrates this point. I was with my wife and a niece and a nephew, respectively nine and eight years old. I found myself quite shocked by the lack of respect these children seemed to have for adults – and my reaction was “If they tried that at the time when I was their age, they really would have got a good hiding”. Is this objectively true? I consider my grandparents who were children in the 1900’s, my parents in the 1930’s and during the war, and myself as a child in the 1960’s. I found myself idealising my 1960’s like someone of about 80 would idealise the 1930’s, or someone who has been dead for about 25 years would have remembered La Belle Epoque. The idealising is the one constant. Humans have been around for thousands (perhaps millions) of years. Now if each generation was really worse than the one that preceded it, why are we not worse than we are?

The reality is different. Children have always done everything possible to defy authority and bend the rules, adults too. It is true that there are relatively peaceful and harmonious periods in human history – I have lived through one, born just fourteen years after the end of the war, and have not been subjected to any real hardship. Other generations were much less lucky: they lived through both wars and the Great Depression. Were those “good old days”? The mechanism is simple. The past is known and “safe”. The future is unknown and uncertain – risky. If we really think about it, things are just different. People were more religious in the past, but we have better medical treatment today – and we have gadgets like the computer I am using to write this.

Conservative Christians seek authority, whether in the persons of Popes, philosophers, ancestors, etc. or in formulae as found in the Scriptures and liturgical texts. This is the tendency we have to be so careful about. In the same way as I would not have liked to be a twenty-year old man in 1915, since I would have been recruited into the Army and sent “over the top”, I can also ask myself if I would have liked to be an enterprising theologian under the repressive regime of Pius IX or Pius X – or in the days when you were fined a week’s wages for not going to church on Sunday. Life in the Catholic ghettos of America or the sectarianism between Dublin and London were no light thing to consider. Some of the clergy and schoolteachers I knew had more consideration for their own self-importance than care for their pupils or their flocks. I was in my teens in the 1970’s, a decade I loathed as much for its conservatism as for its progressivism.

Had we lived in the fifteenth century, we would have been in an ecclesial system that would have frustrated intellectuals and those inspired by the Renaissance. If you were nabbed by the Inquisition in those days, you might have got away with a whipping or a spell in the stocks for a first-time offence, or you might have got your fingernails torn out and finished up as charcoal among the last embers of the smouldering faggots!

I would not like to go back to the “old days” of any era, not that I particularly find cause for excessive optimism in our beginning of the twenty-first century. Each age has, or had, its pros and cons, but an objection realisation inevitably brings us to part ways with the conservative spirit – to look further and deeper for the sabbath of the soul.

Conservatives are often unable to dialogue, listen and learn. The more narrow-minded are on the defensive against the “evil” world in which they are forced to live. We will find that conservatism has been the most powerful force behind reactions against secularism and the refusal of history and tradition. The problem with that is that conservatism contains the seeds of its own destruction. It cannot redeem and transfigure but only exacerbates the natural tendencies of man to seek wealth and power is his quest to escape from determinism.

Thus, traditionalist organisations tend to become preservation societies. Their characteristics are over-reliance on authority, blind liturgical conservatism, an idealised notion of the past, a fundamentalist hermeneutic of Biblical, liturgical and ecclesiastical texts, the apocalyptic mentality (the spoilt child will break the toys over which he no longer has control), hatred of the contemporary world and an exaggerated esteem of external trappings.

This would be a splendid subject for a psychological study, together with the conspiracy theories one sometimes finds accompanying the conservative mentality, but that would be for another time.

Finally, laying aside reason and evidence, there is a feeling one (or at least I) gets from Bishop Williamson. Despite the Thomist epistemology and notion of truth the Bishop professes, there is a sense of confusion and inner conflict. I would be inclined to believe him when he said that he did not intend to make trouble by talking about his interpretation of twentieth century history and issues concerning the Nazis and the Jews. There is something profoundly childish and naive, rather than the "conceited intellectualism" others attribute to him.

July 9th - Octave of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary - Imagine if this were a motu proprio for uniting us Anglicans!

What a wonderful definition of the role of the Pope!

July 7th - Translation of Saint Thomas, Martyr - Magic

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 5).

We Christians usually cringe when we hear the word "magic", as either the stuff of children's fairy tales or the sinister doings of people who have commerce with the Devil. If we have rationalist tendencies, we just brush it off as irrelevant superstition, and no longer think about it.

I came across an article in the blog of my good friend Arturo Vasquez called Common Magic:

I am not a scientist, but some articles about quantum physics have made me doubt the 'traditional' understanding of reality. We are so used to the materialist worldview and the idea that entities are radically separate from each other in our ambient Nominalism. Now what if we consider that buses and bank buildings in cities are no more real than dreams and desires? Quantum theories are even proposed as a scientific basis of life after death, or in other words, the existence of consciousness independently from physical organs like the brain. An Australian retired lawyer has studied some of these discoveries - and here is a page with some links to some scientific articles.

For example, one such scientist wrote:

Perhaps the philosophy of idealism isn't so stupid after all. Wish or desire something hard enough and it will or may come true. Prayers are often 'heard' on this basis, and man is part of an 'all' - and God is the intelligence and oneness above and in everything. There is prayer and there are prayers. Jesus himself said - Ask and ye shall receive. Miracles were always accomplished on the basis of faith. St. Peter walked on the water, and when he began to doubt, he began to sink. O man of little faith! I have been educated in a Thomist perspective, and tend to be suspicious of German idealism, but it certinly captures the imagination - and Romanticism has been a major force behind culture and human inspiration.

Let's keep our minds open...

July 6th - Octave Day of Saints Peter and Paul - Entertainment Liturgy?

This came up on several e-mail lists:

At first sight, this observation would seem to hit the nail on the head - liturgy should not be entertaining whether the 'inspiration' be that of TV variety shows, the modern equivalent of 'music hall', cinema, sports, jazz or pop music, opera, classical music concerts, ballet or whatever. The Eucharist appeals to man's spirit and not his senses. The problem with this reasoning is that it goes from one extreme to the other, the thinking of a 'gung-ho' traditionalist, the kind who would run the Church like Franco's Spain or Mussolini's Italy or how Senator McCarthy in the 1950's would have conceived a conservative and anti-Communist America. The idea is quite ghastly, something like what might happen if the SSPX took over the Roman Curia and the dioceses of the world!

Indeed, we are brought to consider the Low Mass as the 'normal' Sunday parish Mass, chapel veils, no music or Gregorian chant only, only the servers answering the priest, much of the Mass inaudible and a totally passive congregation absorbed in individual devotions. We are brought to the very minimalism that caused people to seek entertainment in the Mass, appealing to a high-brow culture or something similar to popular TV shows or the circus.

There is participation and participation. We Anglicans have always insisted on celebrating the liturgy in a language that people can understand. The archaic classical English we use is the same language as what we speak today, save the use of the old thee and thou, corresponding with the French tu or the German du and some differences of vocabulary and syntax. We hold that Latin can also be used if either the people have acquired this language, or have a translation they can follow (hand missals are in use since the mid 19th century). Congregational participation is primarily through prayer and 'offering themselves' with the Eucharistic action. It is also singing in the choir, serving as acolytes, thurifer and MC, playing the organ and other musical instruments, and all the practical tasks like making and maintaining vestments, flower arranging, cleaning the church, reading the liturgical texts before Mass to get a better spiritual understanding. It all goes together as a whole. I have no objection to lay people being allowed to read Old Testament lessons and the Epistle, if done so reverently and in a well articulated fashion - and of course if they are properly dressed. However, I would not have anyone not ordained a deacon or a priest giving Communion. Silence is important in church as we consider the hymn of the Liturgy of St. James we often sing in our churches:

It is the first condition of any spiritual life as St. Benedict says in his Rule for monks: To speak and to teach becomes the master, to be silent and to listen beseems the disciple. Wisdom is not found in many words. Most of us live in cities and become accustomed to noise, and 'modern' liturgy has largely done away with silence. Result: those who go to sea or those who live and work in the country are disconencted from the Church, for they are often more contemplative even than monks! Silence is not merely an absence of speech or sound, but is a whole attitude of mind and spirit.

Silence in the liturgy would therefore not be the abolition of music, chant, beauty and ceremonial - but the people turning from their daily occupations - yea, even the thoughts and distractions of the mind - to turn to God. For the priest too, it is a sound practice to stop for a while after putting on our vestments (even if the traditional prayers are said) to make the conscious act of putting aside our profane thoughts to enter the world of the divine.

It is true that if we value the old Roman rite (in its Latin or English Missal forms) or the traditional local Uses, it is not in the first place because of aesthetics, but beauty in the liturgy is essential and vital. The beauty of the liturgy and its 'culture' speaks of the meeting of heaven and earth, the intertwining or perichoreisis (a Greek term coined by St. Gregory Nazianzus and other Church Fathers meaning the mutual inter-penetration and indwelling within the threefold nature of the Trinity) of the human and divine. Properly used, liturgical music, art and architecture are not there to entertain us, but to captivate us through the five senses and bring us to the Idea and heavenly Kingdom they represent.

July 4th - Translation and Ordering of Saint Martin - Blogging as an instrument of Church reform

Archbishop: "Bloggers not part of the Church" by Fr. Tim Finigan

It's a good point, provided that bloggers are responsible people who are aware that calumny and detraction are serious sins and libel is against the law in most countries. One is brought to think about the liberty of the Press in the days of Fr. Felicité de Lamennais in the heady days of Liberalism and when Gregory XVI called it madness in his Encyclical of 1832. Strange how the first Ultramontanists were Liberals! Nothing new under the sun.

But it could just well be that the Church will be reformed by bloggers. As Oscar Wilde said : In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. I wonder what he would have said about the Internet and the Blogosphere...

All right, Torquey, get the Cyber Rack out and we'll clean up the town !

The traditionalists and Vatican II revisited

Article in the Catholic Herald. Rome and the SSPX: a very puzzling dialogue When Moyra Doorly began to wonder if the SSPX is right about Vatican II she asked leading theologian Aidan Nichols to address her doubts.

This journalist essentially addresses the issue of the liturgy. As I have written elsewhere, the Liturgical Movement goes back to the writings of Dom Prosper Guéranger, founder of Solesmes Abbey near Le Mans. The movement continued and produced fine liturgical art and a healthy liturgical spirit through the 20th century up to the late 1960's. The conciliar constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium of Vatican II dealing with the liturgy did little other than 'canonise' this liturgical movement and the aspirations towards a more 'medieval' liturgy in its noble simplicity.

The 'arch villain' of liturgical reform, Archbishop Annabile Bugnini, started his work in 1948 with the project of reforming the Holy Week rites and the Missal in general. The plan for a form of the liturgy based on radical archaeologism was already formulated then, and found sympathetic ears in the person of Pope Paul VI who promulgated the so-calle 'ordinary form' of the Roman rite in 1969.

I find that the most balanced and sound criticisms of the Pauline liturgy were written by Monsignor Klaus Gamber, and no less than Cardinal Ratzinger wrote prefaces to the two best known books on the liturgical reform in general and the orientation of the altar.

Much of what came out of Vatican II was vacuous and verbose, but mixed with the 'liberal time-bombs' were many fine aspirations to break out of the cocoon of the Counter Reformation to rediscover the Patristic and Medieval traditions of the Church. I think it is true that the new rites of the liturgy facilitated the process of secularisation in the Roman Catholic Church, but it is also true that if the liturgy had not been reformed - if the Tridentine books remained the official norm - the liberals would still have gone ahead with their creations and 'entertainment shows' for bored agnostics.

If one day Vatican II were to be declared irrelevant and akin to the Pseudo-Synod of Pistoia (1786), it would be regrettable if the SSPX would entirely get its way and go back to the 1950's and the 'conservative' vision. This is not the character of Pope Benedict XVI, who would perhaps be tempted to envisage the rolling back of the entire Counter Reformation period (containing the seeds of the Enlightenment and Liberalism) to enable the rest of the Church's history to be seen in the light of day. In reality, Vatican II - like it or not - remains a landmark in the history of the Church and it is not all bad. There are aspects that can genuinely be considered as organic developments of Tradition in a vision of continuity and not rupture.

American Independence Day

Making abstraction from all the current political difficulties and incoherences, I wish my American readers a happy Independence Day.

July 2nd - Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary - Modern Liturgical Art

Writing yesterday's article made me think of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement and an article published shortly ago in the New Liturgical Movement.

Continuity, Beauty and Dignity within the Liturgical Arts and their Development by Shawn Tribe. Go and read the article and then come back here. (...)

I have known a number of priests here in France ordained in the 1940's and 50's. They played their role in the pastoral liturgical movement of their time, though when the post-conciliar euphoria swept over the west in the 1960's and 70's, they stopped and refused to follow the movement when it ceased to be pastoral and began to be a secularising and destructive influence.

The present Pope is of that generation of men born in the years following World War I and the 1920's. They were often very forward and "advanced" for their time in promoting a pastoral and modern approach to the liturgy and their priestly ministry. I give you two examples of priests who were of this generation and had a tremendous influence on me, since I spent time in their presbyteries.

Fr. Quintin Montgomery Wright (1914-1996). He was an Englishman of Scottish ancestry who was of Anglican origins, studied theology at Kings College in London and was ordained for the Diocese of London in the late 1930's. He was curate at Holy Trinity, Hoxton, and lived in London throughout World War II. He converted to Roman Catholicism shortly after the war and became a seminarian in the Archdiocese of Westminster. In the late 40's, he asked to be transferred to a French diocese in Normandy, on account of the more "pre-reformation" spirit rather than the counter-reformation spirit he found in the English Church. He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1952 for the Diocese of Bayeux, and shortly afterwards tried his vocation with the Little Brothers of Jesus founded by Fr. Charled de Foucault. In 1955 he was sent to the parishes of Le Chamblac, La Trinité de Réveille and La Roussière in the Diocèse of Evreux where he remained until his death in 1996 following a tragic car accident. He was remarkably forward for his time and had a free-standing altar made at Le Chamblac by Eric Gill. He based his ceremonial on old Norman usage (very similar to Sarum). He followed the movement until the early 1970's, and celebrated according to the Paul VI reforms. When it was suggested to him that fewer faithful would cease to practice their religion if he celebrated a more worthy liturgy, it occurred to him to compare the Pauline reform of the Mass with 16th century iconoclasm in England. He then sympathised with the traditionalist movement of Archbishop Lefebvre. All the same, he was still using the 1965 rite and parts of the Mass in French, together with a looser interpretation of the rubrics. I spent some months with him in 1982.

Fr. Jacques Pecha (1920-2002). He was of Bohemian ancestry but born of several generations of French ancestors. He was born at Le Mans and went to the minor seminary of La Flèche in 1934 and to the major seminary at Le Mans under the great Cardinal Grente, Bishop of the Diocese. He was ordained in 1943 by the Cardinal after a decision to advance the ordination due to the threat of his family being deported to Germany for slave labour. This was averted through suspicions of tuberculosis in the family. From his ordination under the Occupation, he ministered to young people and children at the parish of Notre-Dame de la Couture not far from the Cathedral. After having being parish priest in a small country parish, he was appointed to Bouloire, a small town near Le Mans, in 1955. Cardinal Grente had intended for Fr. Pecha to have a career in the Church - A Bouloire, on passe - Bouloire is just a short stepping stone. The Cardinal died in 1959 and Fr. Pecha was forgotten by the next Bishop who had other concerns, and remained in Bouloire until 2002 when he died. Fr. Pecha was also a very modern priest for his time, following the pastoral liturgical movement, and joyfully accepted the 1965 reform with a loosening of the rubrics and the possibility of saying parts of the Mass in French. When the Novus Ordo came in in 1969, that is where he stopped. I met Monsieur le Doyen in 1991 whilst a seminarian in Italy, and installed an organ in his church in July 1992. We remained friends since then, and he was of great help to me when I was in certain difficulties in 1996-97, and he acted as Archdeacon at my priestly ordination on June 24th 1998. One very striking thing he said to me about the SSPX priests - Ils ne sont pas ce que nous étions - They are not what we were. That means a lot - just reflect on those words.

The second of these two priests was a cradle Roman Catholic, but influenced by the French monastic movement begun in the 19th century at Solesmes. Between the first priest of Anglican origins and he, there was something in common, a spirit - which is now again being made mainstream by Pope Benedict XVI.

Perhaps we might get somewhere if we learn from those great men who lived through the war and the post-war years, when mankind hoped for something better - and those men had guts!

July 1st - Octave of Saint John the Baptist - Feedback on one of my articles

I came across an article by Arturo Vasquez in his blog, On consigning Vatican II to the dustbin of history. At least, as an American, he says "dustbin" and not "trash can"! He comments on my article in my June column under the 27th.

Being a little more serious, the great taboo looks as if it is being broken. When I was a little boy, I found myself in a harbour near a big moored fishing trawler. I wondered if I could move it with the strength of my legs by pushing from the dock. I was surprised - the vessel moved a few inches until it was restrained by its moorings. Oh! He's on about boats again! No, my little anecdote was similar to that of David and Goliah (cf. Samuel I 17,4). What's all this about? The Society of St. Pius X has challenged Rome to engage in doctrinal discussions about Vatican II. The little insignificant group of traditionalists seems to have got away with taking on the might of the official Church with its more than a billion faithful. The whole idea is to bash a hole in the Great Lie - that lie being the idea that Vatican II was all about some crappy agenda like that of liberal Episcopalians and the "let's take down the Church and religion and let us be one happy politically-correct family".

Well, are we going to go back to extra ecclesiam nullus salus and the Counter Reformation? In a way, it looks like it to me. The kind of ecumenism aimed at the convergence of all Christian churches to liberal protestant standards is worn out, done with, finished. The joke has grown stale. Political religion is also discredited as are the great ideologies and "meta-ideas" of the past century. What made the Church great, and what made her stand up to all and everything was - - - her Christian identity. That means the priesthood, the liturgy, spirituality, holiness and learning.

Many of the positive things achieved by Vatican II were already there before that hugely expensive gathering of most of the world's Catholic Bishops from 1963 to 1965. The pastoral liturgical movement of the 1940's and 50's, inspired by Romano Guardini and the ressourcement, was ministering to the faithful of all cultures and pastoral situations. There was no need for a new rite, but simply some flexibility in matters of culture (ie. the vernacular to replace Latin where it was needed) and even a diversity of rites. The corporate reunion of the Orthodox and the Anglicans was already an accepted principle from the late 19th century. As for religious freedom, the Church of the 20th century had already learned to tolerate and listen whilst affirming the truth of the Gospel and the Mystical Body of Christ. Was there really a need for a "pastoral" Ecumenical Council? Many sensible folk think not.

As for making Christianity relevant to modern man, everything has been tried, from desacralised and secularised "entertainment" liturgies to heretical theology and Marxist politics. The experiment has failed, indeed much like the Reformation that was tired-out by the early 18th century, and the Marxist Communism that collapsed in the late 1980's. Perestroika and Glasnost have arrived in the Church. Pope Benedict XVI's thought is in many ways similar to that of Newman.

So, what happens if Vatican II ceases to be relevant and is consigned to the annals of historical curosities like the English Reformation? Do we go back to Pius XII or Pius X like the Catholic traditionalists? Not necessarily. We cast away our ideologies and "crowd thinking" and take a quiet and serene look at the wealth of the entire Tradition of the Church. We look at our old church buildings, the scars of the old rood screens and ruined sanctuaries. And like the early 19th century Romantics, we let our imagination and inspiration run wild. Great days are coming for those who are worthy of them.

Would it be a crime for the Church to be elitist and geared for the bourgeoisie? Perhaps the Church needs to be less "catholic" than to be "holy". She was extremely elitist at the beginning, with the three-year catechesis programme for catechumens to test their sincerity of conversion and sift out traitors and spies. It took the Church four centuries to "come out" under Constantine. The Church adapts to each age and situation with the same truth of Christ's Gospel.

The post Vatican II years reflected the spirit of the 1960's and 70's, not a period at which I look with nostalgia. We were children in those days, and the "revolution" robbed our innocence and tried to pervert our sense of good and beauty. For me it didn't succeed! This period will certainly prove a scar on history like the Reformation and the bloody persecution under Elizabeth I - but the Church and humanity can recover from anything.

As we arrive at this first day of July, may this be our prayer and hope!

Read this link. Especially (emphasis in blue in mine):