Sounds Unfamiliar

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School holidays mean changed patterns of life for parents. This week I found myself using the bus to get to and from work most days. I noticed that Fr Z (whom God preserve!) had a podcast interview with Fr Tim Finigan so I decided to download it for the journey.

A minor point is to download Fr Z's podcasts to an mp3 player which has a fast forward facility (mine doesn't), otherwise having heard his introduction to a piece by the Seraphic Doctor and then the reading itself in English, you then have to listen in Latin as well; if you press "next track" you skip the rest of the piece completely and then have to start again from the beginning.

However, the greatest shock was that neither Fr Z nor Fr Finigan sounded like themselves. I've never heard the voice of either of them, of course, but "knew" what they sound like from having seen their pictures and having read what they've written. And they sound completely wrong.

This must have been a lot more common in the days before radio and TV - that you build a 3D image of somebody from their words, or maybe their words and a picture - and I find it's rather nice that the Internet takes us back, rather than forwards.

I suppose it would make a good meme: describe five well known bloggers (or their voices and accents) whom you've never met based purely on what you've seen in their blogs; but the possibility of offending people (however unwittingly) would never be far away.

More From The Suppository

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Fr Mildew is as close as I come to reading The Suppository. He includes a wonderful paragraph:

"'Taking a stand' is the title of a provocative article by Fr Shaun Middleton who is amongst those who object to what the Holy Father is doing in the way of his vestments, the prospect of a new and better translation of the Missal, and of course, the return of the Old Rite. You may be surprised to learn he is thinking about having a new society 'The Society of Pope Paul VI' for those who have a particular affection for the 1964 missal and the present ICEL translation. They wish to encourage rubrical flexibility which will reallow priests to leave the sanctuary for the sign of peace, that communion in the hand is reverent and altar rails are an anachonism. He says that the conscience of many Catholic priests is being tested by the subtle reform of the reform that seems to be going on at the moment."

I wish sometimes that priests like this would have the same courage of their convictions - stand up, tell the Pope he's wrong, get kicked out - that the SSPX, the Lefebvrists, had. That way we can get shut of all of them until they come to their senses and realise that their opinion and God's Holy and Revealed Magisterium don't have equal value.

Incidentally, I tried from the website to find out who owns The Tablet. The only thing for sure is that it is owned by the same people as own The Pastoral Review (another sink of 1970s Stalino-Catholic mire). We're not payingfor it from the collection, surely!

Problems With Blogger At The Weekend

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Did anybody else who uses Orange as their ISP have problems accessing Blogger at the weekend? I couldn't get on at all except via a proxy, even with disabling the software and hardware firewalls, and I wasn't going to trust my username and password to a proxy.

Orange is a wonderful ISP, right up to the very rare instance when there is a problem. At that point it gets dire: one day last year I rang up to ask for confirmation that there was a problem at the exchange and was told to reinstal my operating system! When I contacted them yesterday to ask if there was a problem, they sent me instructions on how to disable a firewall ...

Still, when I complained last year that after years with Freeserve, then Wanadoo, then Orange, that I had had two problems in a couple of weeks and had received dismal customer support, they offered me an exceptionally good package to stay with them.

A New Blogroll

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I'm trying out Blogger's new blogroll facility. The only choice is "most recently updated" or "alphabetical order". I don't like either!

I've done some addition and subtraction as well.

Why I Like Living Here

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Did anybody watch the last episode of the current series of Dr Who? If so you might have seen this picture.

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Now, you probably didn't try ringing the number, but if you had, what would you have found?

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That it is a sort of real number. Ofcom has reserved a large series of numbers for dramatic purposes and has published them on the Internet, here.

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So, if you ever see a programme which has an advert asking you to ring an 01632 number, or an 0161 496 xxxx number, you know that it's officially fake, and not pretend fake.

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I like living somewhere where people care enough to make sure about this sort of thing.

The Fight Not Yet Begun

I spent much of the last week or so amidst the arguments of the Universe's forum, and was left with little energy to blog. But the anniversary of the Motu Proprio, and some of the comments on the forum led me to reflect on where we are, and just how far we have to go.
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The Pope's concession is a lifeline to traditional Catholicsm, but, by itself, little else. There are two reasons why.

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First, it isn't 1962 in the world. The world has moved on significantly since 1962, and the kind of parish life, indeed, the kind of parishioner, who was around in 1962 has gone for ever. People are richer and are less used to doing what everybody else is doing, whether that means watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium or going to Church. The idea that the PP in most parishes could get fifty men to Church each Wednesday evening for a Men's Confraternity meeting followed by Benediction and a trip to the Catholic Club is an idea about the faraway past or the distant future.

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It isn't 1962 in the Church either. The ecclesiology of the Catholic Church in 2008 will cope with the odd celebration of the 1962 Liturgy but it cannot allow large communities to live the 1962 Liturgy: that would be an open challenge to those whose world view is expressed in "the spirit of Vatican II". An ecclesiology which admits lay people to the Altar during the Mass to do things proper to the priest in 1962 is so different as to be antithetic.
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This is one way the SSPX have got things so badly wrong: they have tried to organise themselves as though it were still 1962: well, it isn't.
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The second reason is 1962: why the 1962 Liturgy? That 1962 represents the last point at which the Liturgy, however hacked about and mutilated, was still the hacked about and mutilated but recognizably the 1600 year old Gregorian Liturgy is no reason to hold that version as some sort of high point in the History of the Church in the West. When will the competent authorities look at the reforms of Pius XII and wonder whether, after 50 years of experiment, they were perhaps not such a good idea after all.
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At which point, we would be, effectively, back to the time of Pope St Pius X, and the 1911 reform of the Breviary. This reform was the first significant liturgical fruit of the active ultramontanism enshrined in Vatican I, and included the abandonment of the recitation of the Laudate psalms at Lauds, a practice believed to be inherited from the synagogue itself, because le Pape le veult.
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This is only a point of view. But it looks to me that the fight ahead is one of mindset, and we need to realise that the Pope, by reauthorising the general use of the 1962 liturgical books, is buying time rather than answering any of the very big questions that are raised if there is anything at all in my point of view.

Wuthering Heights

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Courtesy of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (one of our underpraised, underappreciated national treasures).

Prime Minister Heathcliff

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So, Gordon Brown compares himself to Heathcliff. According to the Telegraph, the owner of the Bronte Paronsage Museum in Yorkshire says:

"Heathcliff is a man prone to domestic violence, kidnapping, possibly murder, and digging up his dead lover. He is moody and unkind to animals."

Two more years ...

O Felix Culpa!

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Adam lay y-bounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long;
And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took,
As clerkes finden written
In their book.

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never Our Lady
A-been heaven's queen.
Blessed be the time
That apple taken was!
Therefor may we singen
Deo Gracias!

Bob Geldof on Liberty

H/t to Iain Dale for copying an excerpt from the speech Bob Geldof made for David Davies at Haltemprice & Howden. The full text, which is even better than this excerpt, is available here.

Let us be grand for once then, for we talk of great subjects. Let us ask ‘what is the point of England “ now that Parliament, whose primary purpose is to defend the liberties of the people have so gratuitously, so wantonly, so casually betrayed that trust and taken from us that same liberty which above all else defines this country and its constitution, and that which has been its greatest gift to the world its freedom, its tolerances, its civilisation which William Wilberforce so forcefully argued from this town so many centuries ago.Melville claimed for America “that it bears the Ark of the liberties of the world.” It could be better said of that Britain which invented and codified those freedoms.

Are Magna Carta, and Habeas Corpus not to mention the Anti-Slavery laws, to be traduced in one brief sad moment of political expediency. When a 800 years ago Britons told the state in words that still ring true and through the ages: “To no man will we deny, To no man will we delay, Justice and Right”. 42 days detention denies and delays Justice and Right. It is a clear breach of ancient right, of Magna Carta itself.

So what great existential threat does this country now face that did not face our forefathers of the past 1000 years. What is so grave the emergency now that neither civil war nor world war nor various terrorisms were considered so dangerous to our security that our oldest statutes -and few have lasted the 400 years relevance of habeas corpus - could be upended for such a ha’pnworth of momentary contemporary panic. If authority is to be respected it must be just. When it is not, then the greatest threat to that authority is its own instinct to authoritarianism.

These new security measures, these new limitations on our liberties are not the thin end of the wedge We’re way past that now. This is now, already, the bulkier mid way point of that authoritarian block. For we have in the past few years so mauled our ancient defended rights, rights for which bloody battles were fought and heroes lived and died for, as to seriously consider whether the constitution is today much more than a cartoon of its essential meaning. And what moral authority resides any longer in a lawmaking body that acts against the liberties of its own people? Is it not true that the willingness to use intolerable means to achieve impossible ends shows the political mind at its most deluded?

Meanwhile our supine press gulled by political complicity, lull the population to apathy by banging on with their trivial irrelevancies while the constitution is quietly turned aside. Shame on them. Alas they are shameless.

What terrorizes the terrorists is our civilization. What those unthinking fools of fundamentalism fear most are the very freedoms our representatives strip from us. Essentially this ‘war on terror’is a conflict waged against Islamist forces that claim to reject the Enlightenment. If that is so, then how can we ever succeed if we side with our opponents in rejecting those same ideals? Every moment we are spied on by the invisible watchers. Every time that we are recorded and monitored at every turn, on every purchase. Every time we are mandatorially logged, noted, tagged and followed on databanks and files because “it is in our best interest” They win. And every time we accept it, we lose. We must not hold this attitude of passive acceptance to these restraints on justice, rights and liberties that ultimately amounts to nothing more than complicity with intolerance.

Remember ...

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Courtesy of the Classic Canadian

A Shortage Of Seminarians?

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A couple of weeks ago, or so, Fr Dwight Longenecker in a combox mentioned casually, when asked why he had not become a Catholic Priest in England, that there were Bishops in England and Wales who were turning away perfectly good orthodox candidates for the priesthood to suit their own ecclesiological point of view. This is clearly nonsense: there is no way that a Catholic Bishop would do any such thing. I waited for the Priest bloggers to respond, or at least for the seminarians to do so. None did. It was still obviously nonsense: as if a Bishop would do that sort of thing!

Except, of course, for the (now gone to his eternal reward) Metropolitan Archbishop (whose nickname was "Slimy") who did exactly that to one of my very close friends - bearing false witness to do so: but that was a one off.

As was the example of a young man who had been told that believing that he had such a clear vocation to the priesthood at the age of 16 was a sign of hysteria, a sign that would only be shown to have cleared up when he married.

Or the University student who told the Diocesan Vocations Director that he said the Rosary every day and was answered "Get real!"

And then I reassured myself that these examples were from the 80s and early 90s and that I hadn't heard anything like that since. (Mind you, I don't mix with people of an age and condition who are likely to be opting to respond to a vocation to the priesthood at the moment.)

And I start wondering again about what Fr L wrote.

The Westminster Stakes: Confusing Signals

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I am sure that Paddy Power is as convinced today as he was a week and a half ago that Archbishop Nichols has this in the bag but this afternoon, the Archbishop's odds have lengthened to 13-8, and nearly every other runner's odds have lengthened as well, most to the point where reality about their prospects is finally reflected in their price. However Fr Ignatius Harrison of the London Oratory has entered the running at 10-1: this is somebody taking the mickey, paying Paddy a few bob to get their friend's name on to the list.

Who is advising Paddy on this one? Is changing the odds simply about raising interest and attracting money? Or is he on to something?

And if the latter, why do Fr Timothy Radcliffe's odds remain so frighteningly and stubbornly short?

Rt Rev Vincent Nichols 13-8 (5-4) (2-1) (7-4) (2-1) (7-2)
Fr Timothy Radcliffe 6-1 (10-1) (6-1)
Dom Hugh Gilbert 8-1 (6-1) (4-1)
Rt Rev Kevin McDonald 8-1 (6-1) (5-1) (7-2)
Bishop William Kenney 10-1 (9-1) (8-1) (15-2) (6-1)
Rt Rev Malcolm McMahon 10-1 (8-1)
Very Rev. Fr. Ignatius Harrison 10-1
Rt Rev Alan Hopes 12-1 (10-1) (8-1) (6-1) (11-2)
Rt Rev Arthur Roche 12-1 (10-1) (12-1) (10-1) (12-1)
Fr T Finegan 16-1 (10-1)
Cardinal Pell 16-1 (12-1) (10-1)
Rt Rev Peter Smith 16-1 (12-1)
Fr Aidan Nichols 20-1 (14-1) (12-1) (11-1) (5-1) (6-1)
Bishop George Stack 20-1 (16-1)
Rt Rev Michael Evans 22-1 (20-1) (16-1)
Rt Rev Patrick Kelly 25-1 (16-1) (14-1) (12-1) (10-1) (12-1)
Fr Christopher Jamison 25-1 (20-1)
Bishop John Rawsthorne 25-1 (20-1)
Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald 25-1 (16-1) (14-1) (12-1) (10-1) (12-1)
Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue 33-1 (20-1) (16-1)
Rt Rev Bernard Longley 33-1 (20-1) (16-1) (14-1) (12-1)
Bishop John Patrick Crowley Non-runner (33-1)

A Tirade Of Abuse After A Hard Week

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It was a hard week, honest, but it was punctuated one day by a farewell lunch at Champagne Charlie's underneath Charing Cross station which I left at half past seven after nearly eight hours!

Anyway ...

Four teenage boys who were confirmed asked the curate if they could become altar servers, and he asked them to serve one particular Mass, and while keen, reverent, and obviously trying hard, they were absolutely useless because while they had observed servers serving, they had never been trained. So, the curate asked me to take them in hand.

They have responded very well. We set as our aim that the best served Mass was one at which the congregation was unaware of how many servers there were, and during which the priest was never distracted or made to wait by something he needed's not being at exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

I also introduced, where possible, some of the things altar boys used to do: things like passing the cruet to the priest from the right hand and receiving it back in the left hand; or the triple ring of the bell at the elevation. The curate and the PP like it; the boys are happy (and keen to do more); and the congregation, insofar as it notices the servers any more, approves.

Until the weekend when the person with whom I had a disagreement a couple of weeks ago caught me outside the porch on the way out of Mass and, in a tirade of abuse, told me I was indoctrinating these boys to become Tridentinists, and to be like the priest's servants; for once the modern came to my rescue and I was able to ask why she thought they were called altar servers. "They are there to serve God, not the priest." But it was the three rings of the bell which most riled her: "it's mediaeval" she shouted.

I behaved properly, and didn't enter the discussion. This isn't a madwoman: she is highly educated and has a senior and responsible position. She is a Tabletista and a member of the Bishop's lay advisory group. And I think she is seeing her image of the Church slowly being toppled and knows that there is nothing she can do about it.

The Westminster Stakes: Archbishop Nichols, Says Paddy Power

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Archbishop Nicols is now as close to evens as we are likely to be going to see. Nobody else has moved. My guess is that this means one very big bet, or a reasonable number of medium-sized bets on the Archbishop of Birmingham.

REMINDER: the odds quoted below don't tell you what the Pope is thinking, as he looks at the possibles for Westminster: they tell you what "insiders" think is going to happen.

If I had ever put anything on Archbishop Nichols, I think I would be trying to lay it off: I can't think of anything that has happened recently that might advance his cause, other than a bunch of pious supporters punting at Paddy Power's.

The "Cardinal Pell for Westminster" movement seems to have gone very quiet: why?

I hope for his sake that Paddy isn't going to be as rash as he was in Ireland, paying out on a "Yes" referendum result before the count had even started.

Good fun, this, isn't it!

Rt Rev Vincent Nichols 5-4 (2-1) (7-4) (2-1) (7-2)
Fr Timothy Radcliffe 6-1 (10-1) (6-1)
Dom Hugh Gilbert 8-1 (6-1) (4-1)
Rt Rev Malcolm McMahon 8-1
Rt Rev Kevin McDonald 8-1 (6-1) (5-1) (7-2)
Bishop William Kenney 9-1 (8-1) (15-2) (6-1)
Rt Rev Alan Hopes 10-1 (8-1) (6-1) (11-2)
Rt Rev Arthur Roche 10-1 (12-1) (10-1) (12-1)
Fr T Finegan 10-1
Cardinal Pell 12-1 (10-1)
Rt Rev Peter Smith 12-1
Fr Aidan Nichols 14-1 (12-1) (11-1) (5-1) (6-1)
Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald 16-1 (14-1) (12-1) (10-1) (12-1)
Rt Rev Patrick Kelly 16-1 (14-1) (12-1) (10-1) (12-1)
Rt Rev Bernard Longley 20-1 (16-1) (14-1) (12-1)
Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue 20-1 (16-1)
Bishop George Stack 20-1 (16-1)
Fr Christopher Jamison 20-1
Rt Rev Michael Evans 22-1 (20-1) (16-1)
Bishop John Rawsthorne 25-1 (20-1)
Bishop John Patrick Crowley Non-runner (33-1)

Pope Rage

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Fr Ray posted about Pope Rage and while I knew I had never met it, I recognised the sort of character who might be infected by it.

Then, this evening, I met one: somebody whose Parish now hosts Extraordinary Rite Mass; where, once a month - "every damn month" - the priest celebrates ad orientem: "the ******* turns his back on all of us and expects us just to watch his back"; and "says the Consecration bit in Latin whenever he wants to".

Her family has abandoned the parish, her husband has complained (though to whom is not quite clear), and anybody who disagrees with her is one of those "bad Benedictines" who want "to go back and pretend that Vatican II never happened".

She had thought that all present were Suppository readers.

She learned differently.

Books For Father's Day

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The sort of thing you wake up to on Father's Day in this house looks like this, though the books are all more or less the same size.

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"Amazing Tales for making Men out of Boys" is compendium of stories that we all used to know: Captain Scott; Sir John Moore; the Birkinhead; Rorke's Drift; but adds some new stories: the Penlee Lifeboat, for example; and some worth adding to the canon: Dien Bien Phu. These are the stories which evoke manliness and heroism.

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"Madresfield" is the story of a house and family, best known nowadays as the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited, but of genuine interest in its own right.

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"Terror and Consent" is the hard one. "He sets out with clarity and courage the first really comprehensive analysis of the struggle against terror" according to Tony Blair, and, for one, I agree with the ex-PM: as far as I've got in the book so far, he does.

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Inspiring, interesting, important: it's hard to better than that in three books.

Aliens Need Christ's Redemption Too

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In an article in this week's Catholic Herald, "American science fiction writer John C Wright, a recent convert to Catholicism, considers how the Church should react to the discovery of alien life forms".

I used to read science fiction almost to the exclusion of all other fiction, other than that which was set for me at school or university. I had thought I had grown out of it - until I read this article.

I'm not going into the arguments about what sort of alien could be christened: there are cleverer people than me to do that. Read Wright's article.

What thrilled me in this essay was this image:

"Here we can see, once again, what seems to be a theological question is really a question of the poverty of imagination. It is hard to imagine in a cosmos so wide that God would incarnate in one small world. But this is really no harder than to imagine that in a world so wide, that God would incarnate in some humble dung-ridden stable in the poorest and remotest province of the Roman Empire, and that the herald angels would seek out, not the wise and great, not the senators of almighty Rome nor the philosophers of Athens nor even the learned Levites in Jerusalem, but a band of unwashed and unlettered shepherds from the hills, to announce the heavenly tidings. Why a little world like Earth on the ragged outskirts of the galaxy? Well, why a poor province like Judea, on the ragged outskirts of the empire?

It is no cause for pride if Earth should turn out to be the only world where the Incarnation took place. God often selects the younger son, the poor fisherman, the tax-collector, the harlot and the sinner, the weakest and humblest things in the wor