Deutschland verboten!

A correspondent writes to me from Germany ... mentioning the next "International Liturgical Conference". He reminds me that my own Ordinary Mgr Newton was there two or three years ago and celebrated what is thought to have been the first Pontifical High Mass in the Ordinariate Form on the Continent. Apparently our good friend Mgr Lopes, Ordinary of North America, will be there next time. My correspondent writes: "We were all deeply moved and impressed by the beauty of your [Ordinariate] Liturgy".

Nice to know! A man of Taste!!

Next comes the odd bit of which I simply can't make head or tail. He says that the Holy Father made critical remarks about Tradition on October 10; and that on October 13 Cardinal Sarah, who had been booked to be at the next Conference, and had confirmed his acceptance several times, wrote to say that he now couldn't come.

Can anybody explain this to me?

Fear

Readers will have read the news, at Fr Z and Rorate and Sandro Magister, about the Letter of the Four Cardinals to the Holy Father, seeking clarity on certain aspects of Amoris laetitia.

It must be a matter of sadness to all Catholics, whatever their 'political' complexion, that the Roman Pontiff apparently decided not to reply to their Letter.

It must be a matter of grief that other Cardinals and locorum Ordinarii have felt unable to join this initiative because they still have diocesan or curial responsibilities. I have heard from several sources about the atmosphere of fear that exists in Rome and elsewhere. It reminds me of the cruel attempts at intimidation which followed the publication of the Letter of the 45, of which I felt honoured to have been invited to be a signatory.

Apparently, it is now to be the particular ministry and calling of the elderly or the retired or the sacked, because they have nothing to fear being sacked from, to speak with Parrhesia.  

Reliance upon fear is not Christ's way to govern His Church.

If this pontificate was not already in crisis, it most certainly is now.

Apologies

Last night a couple of pieces I had in storage for the future escaped and elicited some admirable comments. Sorry. They're both back in storage.

Pelagianism and Prayer for the Departed

May the Souls of the Departed, especially of those who died in the wars between 1914 and the present day, by the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ and the prayers of his Immaculate Mother, rest in peace.

Some time ago we took buses to Shipton-under-Wychwood (don't we have entrancing place-names in England?) and did a walk in the valley of the Evenlode (and beautiful river names?). In Shipton church is a palimpsest brass (the search engine should enable you to find my account of the palimpsest brass at Waterperry).

The 'front' bears an inscription about a woman who died in 1548. Interestingly, it bears no hint of expectation that it might be appropriate to pray for the repose of her soul. This calls for explanation: out in the Oxfordshire backwoods in 1549 the people rose in rebellion against the Prayer Book. So you don't expect to find there evidence of a Protestantism which by then had made little progress beyond some very small areas in the East of England. But the inscription cheerfully assured us that her virtues and her virtuous deeds had undoubtedly brought her straight to heaven.

You don't need to remind me that this assumption is not quite what poor dear Brother Luther thought he meant when he was plugging Justification By Faith Alone. But it is in line with the tens of thousands of funerary inscriptions dating from the ensuing Protestant centuries, postulating certain and immediate sainthood for every deceased person on account of their unbelievably virtuous lives (there is that old story about a little girl who read the gravestones in a churchyard and asked "Mummy, where are all the bad people buried?"). I wonder if anyone has ever written an interpretative account of how the academic doctrinaire Protestantism of Luther and Calvin led with such immediate and apparently automatic ease to its precise and polar opposite, a practical popular Pelagianism.

I do have a theory about this. It is that it was precisely the much-derided 'chantry' system, with its financial link between clergy remuneration and masses for the welfare of the souls of the Faithful Departed, which de facto reminded common unacademic medievals that we are all sinners who depend upon God's gracious mercy for our salvation. De facto, take that away and common unacademic folk, needing to fill a conceptual vacuum, will replace it in their own minds with the assumption that since the recently departed Mary Smith doesn't need masses said for her soul - the government has just declared this and has sequestrated all the assets of all the chantries - ergo if we love Ms Smith we need to be convinced that her good deeds outweigh any sins. It becomes psychologically important to shy away in our minds from the disturbing consequence that, if this is not so, then she is, er, in Hell. Moreover, if there is no Purgatory, then she is already in Heaven ... or Hell. So ... this is my tentative hypothetical proposal ... the paradoxical emphasis in popular Protestantism upon salvation by works (which is ultimately to feed into a facile Universalism which assumes that everybody except probably for Adolf Hitler and Myra Hindley will end up Saved), emerged from a mass crisis of popular rethinking about soteriology and the Departed in 1548.

On the back of the brass, in the reused original dating from 1492, we have a potent reminder of the complex and deeprooted system which was destroyed by the suppression of the chantries. It is an account of bequests to the Guild of our Lady in Aylesbury for Masses and Dirges. Presumably it came on to the market in the despoliations which followed the suppression of the chantries (statute of December 1547). It reminded me of the manuscript* description of endowments made by Sir John Percival, Lord Mayor of London in the reign of the first Tudor, which hung by his tomb in the London City church of S Mary Woolnoth; presumably such public declarations were at least partly intended to ensure the compliance of future generations in fulfilling the dispositions.



*Recently rediscovered at the back of a cupboard in S Mary Woolnoth; the interested can find an account in a piece I published in 2007 in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association (they might also reread Duffy Stripping pp 515ff.). Sir John's document survived because, amid all the provisions for masses for his soul, which will have become obsolete in 1548, there were a few other provisions for benefactions which did not thus become obsolete. A later hand has marked these surviving provisions with an arrow in the margin.

New Papal Condemnation!!

Pope Francis breaks his silence!

A "In authorising regular use of the older Mass, now referred to as the 'extraordinary form', now retired Pope Benedict XVI was 'magnanimous' toward those attached to the old liturgy, he [Pope Francis] said. 'But it is an exception'.

B "Pope Francis told Father Spadaro he wonders why some young people, who were not raised with the old Latin Mass, nevertheless prefer it. 'And I ask myself: why so much rigidity? Dig dig, this rigidity always hides something, insecurity or even something else. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid'".

Marvellously magnificent stuff from the Roman Pontiff!!! I'll try to get in with my comments on it before Fr Z does with his!! Here goes:

A This is splendid: an authoritative declaration that the word "extraordinary" means "exceptional". Let us hope that an appropriate Authority very soon makes it clear that the employment of "Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion" must only ever be a tremendously rare "exception". Perhaps a simple rule such as this would suffice: "Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion may only be used in parishes in which there is at least one Sunday Mass in the Extraordinary Form." Could anything be more equitable than that? Anything more ad mentem Summi Pontificis?

B This is even better!!! Liturgical "rigidity ... always hides something"!! After Cardinal Sarah made his splendid and exemplary call for a return to versus Orientem, various hierarchs whom out of respect I am most certainly not going to name got very excited about his words, and even mistranslated some Latin in their Rigid anxiety to discourage clergy from taking His Eminence's laudable advice. So, if we are to assume consistency on his part, Pope Francis thinks that hierarchs with a "rigidity" about liturgical Orientation, are "insecure"!!!

Now: here's a diverting question for readers to mull over. Our beloved Holy Father, having asserted that the "Liturgically Rigid" may be "insecure", gives as an alternative: "or even something else". What is this "even something else", which is clearly "even" worse than "insecurity"? Is he suggesting that the "Liturgically Rigid" may be guilty of a tendency towards Homicide? Or Pride? Or Racism? Or Idolatry? Or Theft? Or Paedophilia? Or Genocide? Or Dishonesty? Or Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Or merely the preferred sin of this pontificate, Adultery?

I think we should be told! I am certainly very keen to know of what, without even knowing it, I am probably, in the Holy Father's view, guilty!! So, surely, are those hierarchs who are with such "rigidity" opposed to versus Orientem!!! 

Dig! Dig! 

11 November

The 1700th Anniversary of the Earthly Birthday of the Patriarch of the Western Monks, S Martin.

Perhaps an occasion to give hearty thanks for the solid revival of traditional Monasticism in recent decades ... Papa Stronsay ... Silverstream ... Norcia ... Lanherne ... and to pray for the still-persecuted brothers and sisters of the Franciscans of the Immaculate as well as for the dispossessed brothers of Norcia.

And we should not forget that recent legislation from Rome appears designed to inhibit the flourishing of traditionalist religious, and to do so by restricting the previous freedoms enjoyed by bishops in their own dioceses to erect communities.

How peculiar that Cardinal Marx and his lookalikes have not protested against this piece of bureaucratic Roman centralisation. I thought they were against that sort of thing.

No I didn't ... I have just been a little untruthful. Does the fact that I was writing ironically make it all right?

Ah well, at least we can be glad that the oppressive burden of being supervised by the CDF has been lifted from the back of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in America.

Oh dear. I've just done it again. Why is it so difficult to write about any news during this unhappy pontificate without stumbling into irony?

Two Vestimental and Pontifical queries

Query Number One: A correspondent asked, a few weeks ago, how vestments of the mighty (fourteenth century) Bishop John Grandisson of Exeter ended up in the Azores.

In general terms, I am sure the answer to this is to be found in the despoliations by the regime of Edward Tudor. Exeter Cathedral had its goods inventoried in the first decade of the sixteenth century; and then again less than fifty years later, on the eve of the Great Confiscations. The latter list, in my unchecked recollection, was less than a tenth of the length of the former. Clearly, people knew what was just around the corner; there must have been a cut-price selling-off of plate and vestments to English and foreign merchants on an industrial scale (Duffy in Stripping reproduces a Protestant cartoon of precisely this). I have sometimes wondered if the escape of our Lady (de Gratia) of Ipswich to Nettuno, cast into a piously romantic account, might really have happened in some such rather more prosaically commercial sort of way. Perhaps, indeed, an under-hand commercial way, since the 'burning' of the statue is actually documented. One can imagine the royal officers charged with the burning discerning in subterfuge a mercenary opportunity.

Fast-forward now, please, to the twentieth century: the Bishop of Oxford from 1937 to 1955 was another mighty pontiff, Kenneth Kirk, who, together with Dom Gregory Dix, was one of the 'leaders of the Catholic movement in the C of E'. I think I have shared with you, before, the jolly ditty which circulated during those enchanted but distant years:

How happy are the Oxford flocks
How free from heretics
Their clergy all so orthodox
Their Bishop orthoDix.

In his will, the pontiff bequeathed his pontificalia to any son-in-law of his who might become a bishop (how exquisitely, delightfully, Anglican!). They were duly in time so inherited and used by Eric Kemp, Bishop of Chichester (1974-2001) during that seemingly endless bright and balmy Indian Summer of the Church of England in Sussex, when it was so tempting just to live for the moment and to enjoy sine cura the corn, the wine, and the oil, daily lifting up a rococo chalice or a Puginesque monstrance as the sun slanted through the Comper glass; those years when so many of us carefully kept our eyes away from the writing on the wall. Years before Benedict XVI came to our rescue and, by calling our bluff, made everything come right ... cui pius amor.

This morning's second query: does anybody know what happened to the Kirk/Kemp vestments after Bishop Eric's death?

American Cretics

It is not for me to comment on Foreign Politicks. But I may say how diverted I was by the neat rhetorical device ... or do I mean demagogic trick ... of priming an audience to respond to certain simple stimuli with trisyllabic chants in the form of what Classicist metricians term a 'Cretic' (long-short-long).

"Lock her up."

"Yew Ess Ay."

"Drain the Swamp."

Perhaps the President-elect is a Yale Classicist by training? This would make him a formidable player on the World Stage.

Ecce Sacerdos Magnus

In 2003, Remembrance Sunday fell on November 9. I was the house-for-duty Curate of seven Devon country churches, under a full-time stipendiary Rector - except that he had taken early retirement nine days before on account of health problems caused by those who hated him for his opposition to the sacerdotal ordination of women. But I still had the help of a retired bishop, who lived a few doors away and who, in two years, had become a very dear friend. So, that Sunday, at one end of the United Benefice I said Mass and did the village Act of Remembrance; at the other end, Bishop John Richards did the same. After brunch, he went for a walk with his family; a couple of hours later, after a sudden stroke brought on by his years of selfless service, he was dead.

John Richards was a former Archdeacon and a very establishment man who was made one of the first two flying bishops, and in those days after 1993, days heavy with the danger of despair, built up and strengthened a people faithful to the Lord within the apostate body still called the Church of England. The skills which he had used as Archdeacon (and he was a Church Commissioner) to chivvy parishes who were late with their quota were now brought into play to defend the Faithful Remnant against the bullying and cruelty of the liberal establishment.

Going around with John Richards, I soon realised that he had created a new style of episcopal ministry, free from pomposity and prelacy and animated only by the love of God and a perceived calling to strengthen his brethren. PEVs, like ante-Nicene bishops, had no jurisdiction in the modern sense. I think it was Bishop (now Mgr) Edwin Barnes who acutely remarked to his clergy 'Fathers, remember that the only jurisdiction we have is what you give us'. I thank God that one part of the patrimony which we carried into the Ordinariates was this vision of pastoral and unprelatical episkope.

John Richards was an Anglican to his fingertips. As we settled down together in the train for the long haul back to Devon after some meeting in London, and I started (in those days) murmuring the Latin of the Liturgia horarum, he would be fishing out a battered Prayer Book and Bible for O Lord, open thou our lips. But he was far too busy and too big a man to waste his time on anti-Romanism. Whatever he was or did, it was positive and Christ-driven. I think that, had he lived, he would have had no doubts about accompanying his former fellow Archdeacon Robin Ellis and joining the Ordinariate. But he would have done things in a distinctively Anglican way and in his own inimitatively combative way. He would probably have got down straightaway to enthusiastically devising ways of showing those bloody papists how much better we could do things in the Ordinariate. "Now look here, boy, now we're in the Ordinariate, what we've got to do is  ..."

I can almost hear his voice saying it. He was a dear man.

Cuius animae propitietur Deus.

That Election: C S Lewis comments

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons that under omnipotent moral busibodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some time be satisfied; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own consciences."

Family life in Limerick

A pity: I was unable to get to the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy last week because of a clashing invitation to talk in Limerick, which I had not visited since the mid-1990s. But the Conference there held under the auspices of Catholic Voice and the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest was ...

The Conference was everything ... informative, moving, and happy, and very efficiently organised. If, this year, you were in two minds, and ended up not going, I urge you not to make the same mistake next year! I was glad to meet friends ... from a fortnight ago when I visited Connecticut and New York; from my annual jaunts to Pantasaph in Wales for the LMS Latin Course (I hope people are signing up to that). And to make new friends.

The star speaker was Raymond Cardinal Burke, whom I had not met before. Naturally, I was intrigued by the thought of getting to know him; and I was impressed by what an unaffected, affable and kindly man he is. And by how well he knew how many people. He clearly has a profoundly important world-wide ministry among people and groups who are concerned to restore Catholic authenticity ... for example, after the very taxing Conference he drove off to visit my friends at Silverstream ... whose Prior, Dom Mark Kirby, will by then have got back from the Colloquium of the English Confraternity of Catholic Clergy, at which he was a speaker. And at which my Ordinary and Father in God was one of the Celebrants. A small world ... no! a big and growing world of prayer and sanctity and orthodox witness, but yet with an engagingly 'family' feel to it. How can one not be full of optimism about the future of the Church?

Cardinal Burke was, of course, the Eucharistic Celebrant on Sunday, Feast of All the Saints of Ireland, at the Institute Church of the Sacred Heart. It was originally Limerick's Jesuit Church, back in the generous days before Vatican II when the religious orders all had their city-centre churches and so the lucky Faithful had a rich and generous choice of varying charisms. The Church is beautifully restored, although the Clergy House must still be an immensely spartan environment in which to live. They are at the top of a rather grand street of nineteenth century houses, largely unspoilt, and the Church possesses a fine renaissance facade in rose-coloured stone. Unusually for today, it is kept open for visits and prayer (as all Catholic churches were when I was a boy and learned so much by browsing through the CTS pamphlets at the back). I wonder what O'Connell Street was called before it was called O'Connell Street ... his statue outside the Church reminded me of happy days visiting the Liberator's family home nestling beside Kenmare Water at Derrynane in Co Kerry.

I was grateful to Canon Lebocq, and his brethren, for their Eucharistic hospitality, and for the genuine warmth of their welcome. Having watched video clips of some very accurate marksmanship, I now understand why it is a bad idea to tangle with the Institute! And what a memorable meal! This was my first experience of the Institute, and it was an impressive one. It must be a missionary experience in itself for the people of Limerick to see young clergy in their streets wearing cassocks!

No longer over the water

Tomorrow, November 8, is the Anniversary of the day when HRH the Prince Regent, later HM King Charles III, entered the Kingdom of England at the head of his army. An occasion for a loyal toast?

When the family was young, we used to have fireworks, and a bonfire on which an effigy was burned.

All things shall be well, when the King shall have his own again. Vivat Rex!