"Join the Ordinariate! Join it now!! The Game is Up!!!"

A very good piece by Mgr Edwin Barnes, emeritus Bishop of Richborough, on his blog Antique Richborough.

Incidentally, Mgr Andrew Burnham, emeritus Bishop of Ebbsfleet, in a splendid piece on the Catholic Herald blog, appears to imply that he swam the Tiber in 2008. Can that really be right?

Christine Mohrmann (2)

 "Father Mars, I pray thee that thou wouldst forbid defend-against avert diseases seen and unseen dearth and ravage calamities and disorders". " I beseech solicit and seek favour of thee that thou desert this people and state and leave the sacred defined spaces and their city and go away from these ...". The first was a prayer for the lustration of fields used in ancient Rome centuries before the age of the Caesars; the second the text of a prayer by which the Romans attempted to persuade the Gods of an enemy city to desert it. Here are the original texts; and I ask those who do not understand Latin to spot at least the parallelism, the wealth of words, the alliteration, the rhyme, the lawyer-like precision. "Pater Mars, precor uti tu morbos visos invisosque vidueritatem vastitudinemque calamitates intemperiasque prohibessis defendas averruncesque". "precor veneror veniamque a vobis peto ut vos hunc populum civitatemque deseratis loca templa sacra urbemque eorum relinquatis absque his abeatis ...".

These pieces of archaic Latin were used by the great Christine Mohrmann (the towering intellect of liturgical scholarship in the generation before the Council, whom the Conciliar generation ignored or chose to forget) to explain the nature of the Latin of the Canon of the Mass. She has in mind, to offer but one example, the words of the Quam oblationem: benedictam adscriptam ratam rationabilem acceptabilemque [blessed written-up ratified reasonable and acceptable]. What she is demonstrating is that there is nothing vernacular about such language, nothing simple and clear, nothing that the-man-on-the-top-of-a-Clapham-or-Aventine-omnibus could understand.

Mohrmann argues that Christian liturgical Latin is a hieratic dialect deliberately created in the image of the liturgical Latin of pagan Rome centuries before Christ. The rhythmically balanced flow of words, the juridical precision, the monumental verbosity, combine with scrupulosity towards the Gods.

Forget the idea that when the Roman Church replaced its Greek liturgy with the Latin, it was trying to be more understanded of the people and comprehensible by the man in the street. It was trying to do exactly the opposite. It was trying to be dignified and obscure.

Continues ...

Recent liturgical shenanigans in Rome; this blog revisits Mohrmann (1)

Unhappily, there are still people who wish to involve the Anglophone Catholic Church in new Liturgy Wars ... not least with regard to the English translations to be used in Novus Ordo worship. Again, we shall hear ... we already hear .. the same spurious arguments paraded in the pages of anti-intellectualist periodicals such as the Tablet. And now, this morning, Riposte Catholique tells us more about a probably iffy Commission which has been set up in Rome.

So, with apologies to those of you who are bored with all this, I am going to dive back in!

Here is a narrative which I think is often at least implicit:

In the Early Church, Worship was always in the same everyday language that common people used all the time. So, in Rome, as soon as Greek became less common as a language, Latin, the prevailing vernacular, replaced it. Sadly, as the centuries passed, Latin in turn became incomprehensible to most. So, happily, the Second Vatican Council decreed that all worship should be in the vernacular again. And in the simplest possible language so that the greatest number of people could understand it. Because this would serve the cause of Active Participation.

You are waiting impatiently to explain to me that the last three sentences represent a complete travesty of what Vatican II decreed. Well done. But I think it is important to understand that the whole of this narrative is completely erroneous, and constitutes a deception.

One of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century was a Dutch Classicist called Christine Mohrmann. In a long series of articles and books in all the main European languages, she demonstrated that Liturgical Latin (and, indeed, Liturgical Greek) were never intended to be be vernaculars; that, indeed, they were deliberately designed to be formal, archaic, and hieratic. I will let her speak to you in her own words (1957):

"Liturgical Latin, as constituted towards the end of Christian Antiquity and preserved unchanged - in its main lines at least - is a deliberately sacral stylisation of Early Christian Latin as it gradually developed in the Christian communities of the West. The Latin Christians were comparatively late in creating a liturgical language. When they did so, the Christian idiom had already reached full maturity and circumstances rendered it possible to draw, for purposes of style, on the ancient sacral heritage of [pagan] Rome ... As regards the plea which we hear so often for vernacular versions of the prayer texts, I think ... that we are justified in asking whether, at the present time, the the introduction of the vernacular would be suitable for the composition of sacral prayer style. As I have pointed out, the early Christian West waited a long time before adopting the use of Latin. It waited until the Christian language possessed the resources necessary to create an official ecclesiastical prayer language. ... the modern, so-called Western languages ... are less suitable for sacred stylisation. And yet we must realise that sacral stylisation forms an essential element of every official prayer language and that this sacral, hieratic character cannot, and should never, be relinquished. From the point of view of the general development of the Western languages - to say nothing of the problems raised by other languages - the present time is certainly not propitious for the abandonment of Latin".

Much Mohrmann follows.

Married Priests?

A reader has asked my views.

I am trying to train readers to use the Search Engine, top left hand corner of the screen. Tap in Married Priests.

Folliott Sandford (Anglican Patrimony) Pierpoint: his centenary today. The need to anathematise the modern Arians.

No, I will not comment on the hounding of Bishop Philip North from the See of Sheffield. What the Church of England does is no business of mine. We have enough problems in the Catholic Church!! Instead, I will look back into our wonderful Anglican Patrimony; a Patrimony which, bidden by Pope Benedict, we have been privileged to carry intact into full communion with the See of S Peter in the Ordinariate. And today, I wish to share with you the little-known figure of Folliott Sandford Pierpoint.

Pierpoint (vide Wikipedia) was a Tractarian, a teacher of Classics, and a hymnographer. He died one hundred years ago today, on 10 March 1917.

On 3 March this year, five stanzas of his best known hymn, For the beauty of the earth*, constituted the opening hymn in the services provided for Anglophone participants in the Women's World Day of Prayer. That is the Good News. From here on ... yes, you've guessed ...  it's all down-hill.

Pierpoint equipped that beautiful hymn with a rousing chorus to follow each stanza: Christ our God, to thee we raise/ This our sacrifice of praise.

I think I understand his reasons for doing this. Even in his day, the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is, quite simply, without any ifs and buts, totally and unambiguously, God, was beginning to wear thin within late liberal Protestantism. Deists, of course, had never liked it. Evangelicals, officially, still asserted this truth, but even here it was in effect somewhat underemphasised because Evangelicals were much more preoccupied with Soteriology ... individual Soteriology ... than they were with the Trinity and the Hypostatic Union. Byzantines, happily, have a robust liturgical habit of calling our Lord "Christ our True God". Not so we Latins.

So Pierpoint provided this memorable refrain so as to fortify in congregations the Truth of the Incarnation. Christ our God to thee we raise/ this our sacrifice of praise. To be sung seven times! They would, surely, get the point!


He cannot (I hope!) have forseen the brazen and heretical impertinence which would mark the centenary of his own death!



It is true that the phrase Christ our God had already long since been variously bowdlerised. 'Lord of all'; 'Father, unto ...'; 'Holy God'; 'God creative ...'; 'Holy Spirit ...'. Few phrases can have been more creative in stimulating Arians and other varieties of heretics to confect alternatives ... anything, apparently, to avoid the appalling horror of applying the G** word to God Incarnate. (Although, to be fair, some effort has also gone into eliminating the term sacrifice.)

So, a few days ago on March 3, Christ our God was bowdlerised to Gracious God. 'Gracious' is currently a favourite divine epithet among many modern heretics.

Perhaps I have been unfair to Arians. The more 'high church' of the Arians were happy to call Christ 'God' as long as it was understood that He was not quite Consubstantial with the Father. But their sour-faced modern representatives, women and men Rigid in their heterodoxy, will have none of it.

Pierpoint is in very good company in falling victim to the officiously emending pens of illiterates and heretics. Blessed John Henry Newman wrote some stanzas in Gerontius (later used as the beautiful and popular hymn Praise to the Holiest in the height) in which he described "God's presence and his very self/ And essence all-divine" as "a higher gift than grace" ... which it most certainly is. Various self-confident  heretics have cheerfully emended that phrase to "God's highest gift of grace". There is also a suggestion that they were terrified lest someone might think that the words applied to the Most August Sacrament of the Altar. Alas ... poor, scared, timorous, wee things, these heretics; the Enemy has been so successful in robbing them of Joy; in stealing from their hearts and minds all that is wonderful and strong and joyful and beautiful in the Christian Faith.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to invite our heterodox Partners in Ecumenical Dialogue to engage in frank discussions about Trinitarian and Incarnational doctrine, instead of just assuming that ... they are anything other than thorough-going heretics! Something useful for ARCIC to do!!

ENVOI
In Pierpoint's original, the hymn ended as I print it below. This had already been changed by hymn books for, I think, metrical reasons:  Thyself prefixes a syllable to the trochaic dimeter catalectic and hence risks precipitating a disaster in unrehearsed congregational singing.

                                        . . . . . . . .
For thyself, with hearts aglow,
Jesu, Victim undefiled,
   Offer we at thine own shrine
   Thyself, Sweet Sacrament Divine! 

An attractive hymn ... see yesterday's post ... for Benediction or Exposition?

*The hymn first appeared in the second edition (1864) of Lyra Eucharistica, (pp 340-342) compiled by the Fr Orby Shipley SSC MA. This volume, accessible via the Internet, is a fine monument to the piety and learning of the Tractarian and Ritualist movements.
  

Anathema! Anathema! Anathema!

I expect many of us read, a couple of days ago, Fr Zed's piece on Orthodoxy Sunday, with the beautiful video showing the proclamation of the Anathemas against heresy in a Russian Church. Gracious me, how immensely happy they all looked and sounded, and how gloriously joyful the music was! And how superb the Anathemas themselves! The one towards the end, against Ecumenism, I found bewitching in its beauty.

My first thought was: why don't we take over such a useful, beautiful and moving ceremony. But then I recollected my own principle, that what we do should emerge organically within and from our own Western Tradition. So ... ... ...

In a rough and ready sort of way, our Trinity Sunday can be thought of as our equivalent to Orthodoxy Sunday. And we do have, in our Western arsenal, the Quicunque vult.

Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith. Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholick Faith is this ... etc..

It is currently left to the Anglican Patrimony and to the SSPX (with the smaller Traditionalist groups) to keep alive, just about, this superb proclamation of true doctrine. But the devotion needs to be brought back into the full consciousness of the whole Latin Church. For B John Henry Newman, it was "The most simple and sublime, the most devotional formulary to which Christianity has given birth".

On Trinity Sunday, we could have the Athanasian Creed, Quicunque vult, solemnly sung before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. Why not carry on the Exposition until Solemn First Vespers of Corpus Christi on Wednesday? Perhaps on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the QV could alternate with the Niceno-Tridentine Confession. Could the Syllabus Errorum have a place found for it, punctuated ... why not ... by the Byzantine threefold chanting of ANATHEMA!

Is all this, I hear you objecting, overkill? Definitely not. TOMORROW I will offer you, in a discussion of a beautiful Tractarian hymn now horribly bowdlerised by heretics, proof that such acts of witness are both necessary and badly needed; dreadful proof of the widespread abandonment of classical Trinitarian and Christological dogma..

International Women's Day

International Women's Day ... how very interesting. It is now 100 years to the day since this celebration emerged from the events leading up to the Bolshevik revolution.

And how engagingly old-fashioned it all now seems. A day for a ceremonial rereading of The Female Eunuch? Or even of The Rights of Women?

But perhaps we are forgetting the cottage industry of blurring gender distinctions, of making all things fluid and deliciously 'intersexual'. I wonder how much longer the 'International Day' will be allowed to survive.

I bet it will be Politically Incorrect in a decade's time. Because these fashions are so transient.

When I was young, anti-apartheid demonstrators marched chanting "One Man One Vote". Tut tut.

In the 1970s, Bad Old ICEL mistranslated Deus as Father. Nowadays, at the hands of a Bergoglian Neo-ICEL, Father may be at risk of being mistranslated as God.

Tempora mutantur ...

But Germaine Greer, dear old Ozette, is still immensely readable.

Alternative Moralities (2)

So what we want is Balance. And we got it from Papa Ratzinger:

"The human being will be capable of respecting other creatures only if he keeps the full meaning of life in his own heart. Otherwise he will come to despise himself and his surroundings, and to disrespect the environment, the creation in which he lives. For this reason, the first ecology to be defended is 'human ecology'. That is to say that, without a clear defence of human life from conception until natural death; without a defence of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman; ... we will never be able to speak of authentic protection of the environment."

Some of the writings of the current Roman Pontiff could be read with the help of such a hermeneutic; for example Laudato si (ex. gr. paragraphs 118; 120; 155).

A Hermeneutic of Continuity, involving the reading of Bergoglio's many, long, straggling, incoherent and opaque statements against the background of  the Regula Fidei succinctly established in so many areas by his two greater predecessors, would sift out the idiosyncratic dross from the Papal Magisterium. I do not mean to diminish the binding force of the Magisterial statements of all the Pontiffs over two millennia; but the last two popes were manifestly engaging with a 'modern' world recognisable as the world of Bergoglio, so that a claim of "changed circumstances" could have little plausibility.

Alternative Moralities (1)

Human Nature, apparently, craves a morality. The Church has insistently offered and prescribed a moral system to the People of God.

It is not always noticed that when HWHY delivered a code of morality, Ten Words, to Moses for the People of Israel, He did so in the singular: "Thou shall ...  Thou shalt not."

This 'singular' aspect of Morality is essential. I will not say that it is the whole of the story. Most of the Torah is in the plural, addressed to the People. Perhaps some readers will not share my approval of certain aspects and expressions in Liberation Theology, but I am quite sure that Sin is embodied in immoral corporate structures. And in those corporate structures Sin is indeed to be resisted. The doctrine of Original Sin expresses the truth that our Sin is a Corporate, species-wide, Sin; inherent in what it is to be a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve.

But any morality which excludes individual obligation is phony. Which is why we must resist the modern tendency to down-play individual Sin and to elevate the corporate aspects of Sin so high as to obscure individual responsibilities.

Quite possibly, in a culture which emphasised, as 'Victorian Morality' perhaps did, the lapses (particularly sexual) of individuals, Christian witness obliged us principally to condemn corporate structures of Sin. But such a situation, if it existed, is now reversed.

So, among other things, I am talking critically about a culture which ignores the precepts of the Decalogue, addressed to each individual, and lays great emphasis on corporate Sin. In our own day, Thou shalt not kill is ignored when it is matter of the life of one inconvenient child in the womb of one inconvenienced mother, but a genocide happening thousands of miles away, or two or three generations ago, is a matter of great moment and of self-righteous moral posturing.

Thou shalt not commit adultery is reduced to very small proportions by a prescribed obligation to demonstrate against Global Warming. And what is left of it is demolished by emphasis on the newly-minted 'Sin' of failing in Inclusivity and Diversity and Non-judgementalism.

It is only if my feet are firmly planted on my obligation not to kill or to commit adultery, that I have any locus standi to say to my fellows "We must do, or must not do, such-and-such".

To be concluded.

Sandford and Faber (2)

The gracious archivist of Sandford Church (see yesterday's post) tells me that she has discovered, in a mouldering chest, a Prayer Book and a Bible inscribed by Fr Faber as given to the church while he was serving there; and that their stone altar, very like that at nearby Littlemore, is conjecturally ascribed to Faber.

This puts me in mind of Chapter 2 of Loss and Gain, Newman's novel of Tractarian life in Oxford. Here Bateman, a young Ritualist clergyman, proudly shares his pride in the renovation of a country church near Oxford ... which is in the very latest Ritualist style (even though he does not anticipate it having an actual congregation). 'It was as pretty a building as Bateman had led them to expect, and very prettily done up too. There was a stone altar in the best style ...'. ''We offer our Mass every Sunday, according to the rite of the English Cyprian, as honest Peter Heylin calls him; what would you have more?'' explains Bateman; an explanation which mystifies his hearers all the more. Not that I am suggesting that Loss and Gain is directly satirising Faber; the details do not fit and, in any case, it is not that sort of book. Its relevance is in the accuracy with which it describes the fashion of a particular moment.

Mind you, if Fr Faber did put that stone altar into Sandford church in 1839, it would have been one of the earliest to enter an Anglican church after the 'Reformation'.

PS Those interested in the historical details about Our Lady of Sandford should look at Professor Tighe's exciting comment attached to my previous blog on the subject. The standard Art History reference to the statue is in a 2003 number of Apollo, which has not caught the Recusant side of things.

Sandford and Faber and Mamma (1)

Just down the road from where we live, and across the flood-plain of the Thames, is the Church of Sandford upon Thames: which has a marvellous piece of undamaged medieval sculpture which survived by being carefully buried face-downwards so as to look like a paving stone in the Churchyard. Disinterred in 1723, it is Maria Assumpta, her aureole clutched by some very determined angels and at the bottom two angels holding a carved stone reliquary (empty). I wonder how many churches in England tried to protect their treasures in this way, and when. We shouldn't assume that it had to be in 1546/9; there is evidence that a great deal survived until the Civil War.

The officiating priest in 1839 was that admirable (why is there no cause for his beatification?) missionary for Jesus and hymnographer, Fr Faber, composer of so many of the lovely hymns in the English Catholic Hymn Book (see the post of February 4). Of course he was still an Anglican at the time he was at Sandford. A devoted client of our blessed Lady, it is recorded that after one particularly moving Marian Extravaganza at Brompton he asked, in tears, 'Do you think Mamma was pleased?'

He is now interred in the Brompton Oratory, which he founded; the only church in London where I feel really at home. I wonder how his spiritual journey was affected by his years at Sandford, looking at that early sixteenth century carving of Mamma's Glory; and whether, amidst the Baroquery which he assembled for his Oratory (built after his death), he ever thought back to his days under our Lady's care in a little church by the Thames.

I include below a comment made some years ago by my friend Professor William Tighe, who seems to stroll in and out of the prosopography of the Tudor Court with distracting familiarity.

To be continued. 

Mugs! Popes! Jesuits!!

They have arrived!! I am immensely grateful to two kind and generous benefactors who have made me possessor of a mug and of a stein commemorating Papa Ganganelli, alias Clement XIV. Thank you! They are very fine indeed; I would encourage all readers to avail themselves of these impressive monuments to a great pontiff.

I have recently read a 1914 biography of Cardinal Allen, and some chapters in Eamon Duffy's new collection of his papers, both treating of the Jesuits. We all know and deeply admire such Jesuit martyrs as the erudite, sparkling, courageous S Edmund Campion, but it is fascinating to peruse the internecine warfare which existed between the Jesuits  and the secular clergy in the recusant period of English Church History.

There must have been many people, down the centuries, who have longed for the Society's suppression! When Papa Ganganelli did suppress them, many brimming steins must have been raised to him in many countries!