Sermons In Stone

The manor was taken from its owner at the time of the Conquest and the new Norman lord commanded that a church be built. Above the door to to the church, somebody began to carve a tree of life, but gave up after completing a bird pecking at the branch.








On some of the capitals of the pillars of the chancel arch, somebody tried to show a man struggling with the serpent, and of a woman holding it to her chest.





The window has been dated to around 1100: the capitals don't match.

It's not much of a success from an artistic or architectural point of view, but the imperfections have come because men lifted their eyes high and tried to achieve things that ended up being beyond them.

And 900 years later, it's still there.

Polonia Semper Fidelis

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The cruellest of ironies is that the Poles who have died were finally being given permission to commemorate what the Soviet Union did seventy years ago, and that they died in Russia. All we can do is pray.

In Purdah

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Being a particular sort of civil servant, I am forbidden from blogging about anything that might be construed as politically partial and tending towards affecting the election result, for at least the next four weeks.

And I didn't have to pay a penny ... !
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To Africa With Brother James

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What happens when you take a bunch of English teenagers to Senegal?

Look here to find out.

The kids are great, and Bro James, who is leading them there, is pretty inspiring himself.
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Opus Dei Bishop For Los Angeles!

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Bishop Gomez of San Antonio.

Cat, pigeons ...

Out Of The Mouths ...

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Via Love Undefiled, I found three videos on YouTube in which a twelve year old boy about to die meditates on his life and his faith. I've copied the links below.




Part One



Part Two



Part Three

I reflected while watching this that this is the sort of child some very, very, bad priests and religious preyed on. Defend the Pope, defend the Church, but at the same time remember the sort of filth that has defiled something we love, and some people we should love.
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Fr Z and the Goldfinch Coincidence

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No sooner does the first ever pair of Goldfinch come and start feeding from the feeder in the magnolia than Fr Z posts about the Holy Week symbolism of goldfinch here. This pair is so timid that they can even be frightened by the blue tits that come round.

I'd never before heard the story about these birds getting their red faces from trying to remove the thorns from Our Lord's head. I wish I had children young enough to tell.

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Lucky Old Brentford Diocese

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Not only must the diocese must be loaded with money, but the whole diocese is going to reap the benefit of how it's spent.

H/t to Catholic Commentary here who broke the news that Brentford sent a team of 19 people to the Los Angeles RE Conference. I'd guess about £750 a ticket and £750 per head for subs while there: about £30,000, and the money must have come from somewhere - unless people actually paid their own money to go there.

But just think how the life of the diocese will be transformed!
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Standing Up For The Pope

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Fr Hunwicke, here, is absolutely spot on.

I do wish he'd become a Catholic and stop protestantly deciding for himself what he should do from day to day. But I shall refrain from saying anything negative about him for some time after reading this incisive post!

If he takes advantage of the Ordinariate provisions, I wonder which Catholic Bishop will find himself with Fr H ministering in his territorial diocese.

Can we get a petition up?
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How To Avoid Having To "Marry" Gays In Church

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Easy

Don't "marry" straights in Church. Separate the Sacrament of Marriage from the civil contract.

Embrace the French model. The state does what it believes in at the Mairie. The Church does what it wants at Church.

Priests aren't registrars of birth or death; they don't have to be of marriage.

We're not Anglicans: we don't need an ecclesiastical Civil Service.
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More Support To Our Apologetics

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Fr Dwight has posted here a set of facts demonstrating that the Chuirch is not a paedophile institution, and that paedophilia is not particularly prrevalent in the Church.

My apologies for not crediting whoever linked originally to the posting on Fr Abberton's blog here. His argument about the reality of the presence of the Devil in this crisis is thought provoking, to say the least, and should be something we address in Catholic circles.
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Countering The Narrative

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The tactic being used by the Times at the moment is as old as the hills. Establish a narrative, then keep repeating it, until it becomes received wisdom. Is there anybody in the English-speaking who soesn't know that Joseph Ratzinger was in the Hitler Youth? But how many people know that he stood up to a CO who wanted all his charges to become soldiers by saying that he wanted to become a priest? Next to nobody.

If the narrative is never challenged, it becomes what everybody believes, and even ten years ago, the media's narratives were impossible to challenge unless you happened to have a media organisation of your own.

But that's not true any more: nearly all sources of information on the Internet, be they press sites, or social media sites like this, offer the opportunity to comment.

We are all Internet-savvy people: I must be to be writing this; you must be to be reading this and commenting on it. So get commenting. Every time you see a piece about the Pope that is not true, challenge it. Use for example the Pope's letter to Ireland, available here, to challenge anybody who says "the Pope didn't apologise" by cutting and pasting the sections where the Pope apologises. Some of you will want to do so politely, others will take on the tone of the milieu in which they find themselves. It doesn't matter too much as long as we are accurate, and cite our sources.

This is a poor man's Internet version of the Catholic Evidence Guild going out to Speakers' Corner: but we can all do it.

God Bless Our Pope ...

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... because few of the children of this earth will.

But let's keep a count of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales who leap up on to the parapet to bless, support and defend the Pope.

Equally, let's keep a list of those who by omission or commission let the Pope take the flak, especially the ones who damn him with faint praise.

And do we need Paddy Power to open a book for us to guess which list will be longer?
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Cardinal Pell, Again

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I was alerted by the wonderful Schutz that a debate between Cardinal Pell and an American atheist had been placed on line. The two mp3s are available here.

It's a proper debate, not a TV debate, so don't expect fireworks. Expect hmms and haaas; listen to ideas unfolding while the speaker is speaking; note the respect that the two speakers show for each other as individuals; and note that, while they both really care about what they believe in, Cardinal Pell happens to believe in what we believe in.

Cardinal Pell is a standing challenge to the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales: he is a product of a British educational system and has developed a confident and assertive voice that our Bishops should be able to draw on and develop in their turn around the particular circumstances they face.

So why do we not have a Bishop who will engage as Cardinal Pell engages? Not all of them: "What if ten shall be found there?"

1890 And All That

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In an 1890 Calendar, today isn't just the feast of St Cyril of Jerusalem: we also celebrate St Gabriel as the Octave of his feast would be the Vigil of the Annunciation, Little Christmas. And a week tomorrow, on 26 March, at least in Salford, Middlesborough and Shrewsbury, we would have the feast of the Good Thief. We would commemorate the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ on the Friday after the Fourth Sunday of Lent (we did capitals then).

Calendar reform is as fraught with difficulty as reform of any other bit of the Liturgy. However much you talk about "pruning", as though you were seeing to the roses, every time you suppress something, you put an end to it. So the replacement has to be something better, not something older, unless you can show how it was superseded by something worse.

Why did we lose the feast of the Good Thief, who exemplifies the best hope for many of us? Why did the dioceses lose so many proper feasts? Salford's (separate to those common to all of England and Wales) were (chronologically) the Finding of the Child Jesus, St Kentigern, the Flight into Egypt, The Good Thief, the Humility of the BVM, Our Lady of Grace, and All the Holy Roman Pontiffs.

The other day, Patricius posted here a schedule of Mass times for Westminster Cathedral's 1939 Holy Week. Why does it feel right, organic, whole, consonant?
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Papal Visit: Big Mass - Time To Plan

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Among the scanty information released about the Pope's visit, one fact shines out; Coventry! The Pope will visit Edinburgh, Birmingham, London and Coventry.

That means Coventry Airport for the stadium Mass, a site big enough for as many people will come, and a site big enough to allow any sort of Catholic to start planning now for how his or her type of Catholic will prepare for the visit of His Holiness.

So: we have months to plan for (for example) a station along the way with a beer tent, brass band playing pre-1960 hymns, refreshment for pilgrims on their way to Mass ...

Do you get my drift?
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Grumble, Grumble!

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I have said several time that I don't understand what Bishops' Conferences are for, what they add to the life of the Church. If you read the Bishops' Engagements column in this week's Catholic Herald, you'll start to get an idea what the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) is for: it's to allow Bishops to get away from their diocesan work and have meetings.

This week Archbishops Nichols and Smith, and Bishop McMahon (Nottingham) will attend a meeting of the Standing Committee. This might be what Bishop Conry is doing on Monday as well.

On Thursday, Archbishop Kelly and Bishops Arnold, Hollis, Kenney, Lang, Lynch and Burns will spend the day at a meeting of the International Committee of the CBCEW.

Now, leaving aside that the CBCEW has a Department of International Affairs which appears to employ four people, apart from the one employed by its subsidiary agency, the National Justice and Peace Network (which "encourages work for justice and peace throughout the Church by promoting liaison and communication between Diocesan Justice and Peace groups" - in other words, somebody is paid to persuade diocesan J&P groups talk to each other), Catholics in England and Wales are losing ten Bishop-days' worth of pastoral care from the episcopate so that the Bishops can talk to each other, seven about a subject that only with immense difficulty might be described as any of their business. I pointed out here that the International Department alone cost £188,074 in 2008. And why: so that the Bishops, behaving like very expensive third-rate lobbyists, can convince themselves that they are players on the world stage.

We gave the CBCEW £1,743,040 in 2008: let's stop encouraging them.
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Pope Gets It Right - Sea Still Wet

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From Zenit:

"The Pontiff expressed his satisfaction that the community "wishes to promote, in regard to the vocations and the role of consecrated persons and the laity, the co-responsibility of all of the members of the People of God."

To do this, he said, "demands a change in mentality, above all with regard to the laity, 'moving from considering them "collaborators" of the clergy to recognising them as truly "co-responsible" for the being and action of the Church, promoting a mature and dedicated laity in this way."'"
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Just A Utilitarian Thought

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If the father of a child is allowed no say in whether or not the child's mother aborts it or not, how can a mother who chooses not to abort demand that the father support the child financially?

It can't be "his" in any meaningful way if the primary question - life or death - is one in which he has no say and no vote.

Or am I missing something?
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Rehabilitation

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Whatever Jon Venables has or hasn't done, the fact that he has or hasn't done it just before an election means another blow to the idea that prison should be about rehabilitation as well as about punishment. His case will be held up as proof that rehabilitation doesn't work.

Crimes against children awake the most primaeval passion in us, especially, I guess, if we are parents ourselves. All of the instincts that we experience in a new way at the sound and feel of our own new-born children: nurturing, protecting, defending: are animal instincts, and can overcome our reason. I don't think it's fair to criticise James Bulger's mother for her relentless campaign to see her son's murderers locked up: she is at the mercy of her instincts, in a place where no rational call on her to change will get through to her. Forgiveness has to be considered and rational because it's not a simple transaction. My forgiveness of the person who trespasses against me marks the point at which my relationship with God is healed.

This is separate from the punishment that the trespasser deserves. My forgiveness of somebody else says something about me: their crime says something about them, and they must pay an appropriate penalty for their crime. In a humane and civilised society, the conditions in which the penalty is paid must be humane and civilised, but shouldn't disguise the fact that the trespasser is paying a penalty.

Separately again, there are both moral and practical reasons to try to ensure that people who commit crimes should not commit them again. But this is difficult to achieve, in part because it is a further expense on top of the expense of punishing the perpetrator, in part because the moral and practical reasons for carrying out rehabilitation are different, and most attempts at rehabilitation end up being merely confusing.

In the case of Venables and Thompson, it looked as though, for once, an expensive rehabilitiation had worked. In spite of the relentlessness of James' mother's campaign to have the two boys locked away for ever, their removal from a dysfunctional community, their separation, and determined efforts by child psychologists and educationalists managed to turn them into different people from the ones they were and would have grown into. So successful were the efforts that it became possible to return them into society. They were not normal members of society: new identities, a falsified life story, one eye always on their back; and I imagine that as men they are now fully aware of what they did all those years ago. That is part of how forgiveness works for them: they are forgiven when they accept the enormity of what they have done and accept the punishment, and the lifelong consequences of their action.

How many other success stories are there that we don't hear about? How many lives are turned round, transformed, because enough effort of the right sort is made available at the time when it can make a difference?

I don't know. But it will be a brave politician in the next few weeks who puts the case for increasing effort in this area, and the temptation for any candidate will be to throw something to the baying mob: Venables, maybe Thompson; maybe just more "prison must not be a holiday camp" (as though it is!), "life must mean life", and all of the other tired cliches.

Another step backward.

And also, a feeling, every time I see James' mother, of "there but for the Grace of God".
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What Is This?

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Does anybody know anything about the Resurgence Party? A quick flick through another sterile argument on Damian's blog threw it up. A Catholic political party!

I've never heard of it before, and know nothing beyond what's posted there.

I wish them very well, but suspect that non-"Spirit of Vatican II" Catholics are about as capable of organising a united political movement as post-Soviet Marxist-Leninists.

But even if now be not the time, it is interesting and positive that a couple of people are prepared to raise their heads above the parapet and stand for something outside the current political stasis.

The Partisan

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Two Other Reasons Not To Sign Online Catholic Petitions

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The first is practical: there aren't enough Catholics in E&W who use the Internet as part of their Faith. It means that we get a few hundred signatures to a petition, which enables opponents to dismiss our views as representative of a minority only.

The second is that by putting up a petition we accept that the game is won by numbers: we are accepting the premise that if 100 people sign one petition and only 50 another the first one has earned some form of superiority.

The Bishops have made a wrong decision; even worse, it may be that they are wrong and are teaching wrong doctrine: I don't know enough to know.

But I know that signing a petition won't change the decision they've made: it will simply move the debate to "Do we obey Bishops or do we obey wild-eyed bloggers on the Internet?" and the result will confirm the "rightness" of the Bishops' initial decision.

Fr Ray's reason is holier than mine are. So there are two practical and one holy reason not to sign.

There is no reason not to oppose, though.

The Pope's visit feels like an opportunity made in Heaven.

Resignation

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The act, not the gift.

I have resigned from every post I hold by virtue of my being a Catholic: diocesan this, parish that, school the other. I offered to remain in post to help break the law, assuming the Bill being debated today becomes law, but my generous offer has been politely declined.

Is this what Henry's time felt like?
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Some Good News

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I'm not much of a joiner, mainly because joining something implies signing up to a checklist of things, and I often find that while I'm happy with some of them, I'm not with the rest; or it might be that the tone of the list is a bit too peremptory or too didactic. I blogged ages ago about looking for a successor to The Spectator and I've still not found one, because nothing really talks straight to me: I buy the Catholic Herald most weeks, but it's a mixture of duty and to read Stuart Reid, Mary Kenny and Dear Fr Tim; I buy The Oldie, but I end up wishing Alan Coren was still editing Punch.

This is a long-winded way of explaining why I'm considered a bit of a lukewarm Tridentinist, and why I've never joined, for example, the Latin Mass Society. I love the EF, and in particular I love serving it (something I do increasingly regularly as I seem to have become a "cotta for hire" locally, especially as the hire is free) but I'm not a proselytiser for it: my family have never attended an EF Mass and show no interest in ever doing so, and I can't get too bothered because they show a reciprocal interest in attending OF Mass. The LMS feels like an organisation that is after people a bit more militant than me: people who will take a stand, people who are prepared to be apologists and stand at some version of Speakers' Corner; that's not me.

The priests I serve for tend to come from a different starting place. There isn't one of them who will entertain a question like "Which form of Mass do you prefer?" if the question expects a binary OF versus EF answer. These are priests who say Mass reverently, in accordance with the rubrics, and whose job is to re-present God's Sacrifice of His Son at the Altar every day. Some masses are quieter, and verging on the silent; others are louder and verging on the completely sung. Some Masses have a choir and organ; others have a "music group" and an infinity of instruments. Some Masses have many people in the congregation; at others the priest might have nobody but his server. OF or EF just doubles the variety of possible answers (though to be fair, I've not yet attended EF Mass with a folk group). There are two forms of the Roman Rite, and they say them both, and ordinarily they use the OF, and extraordinarily they use the EF.

This, to me, seems like a healthy way of escaping from the prison of thinking that the "Spirit of Vatican II" is the way that VII has to be defined. This is Benedictine Catholicism (and might in fact, if I were to really study the matter, be a fruit of JPII Catholicsm which loosed off new movements left, right, and centre, in an apparent bow to the spirit of VII, but really in a way of guaranteeing a rainbow of orthodox and unliberal witnesses to the Catholic Faith, but let's save that for now) and the way ahead, in that we learn about how we have come to where we are, and understand what we have brought with us. It also removes the Mass from the battlefield of "liberal versus trad" dialogue, and moves the discussion towards the degree to which we have to engage with the modern world, based on a foundation of sound Liturgy in both forms.

So what is all this wittering about? Well, I was talking to a mate earlier, who asked me if I had seen this from Fr Michael Brown, or this from Fr Bede Rowe. It turns out that more than 5% of the active diocesan priests from the Clifton Diocese have just come back from an FSSP retreat, and that this number does not include all of the EF-celebrating priests from that Diocese. Every single one of these priests is like the ones I serve for: they say OF Masses in their parishes for OF-loving Catholics all the time; yet they have also understood that the Church in England and Wales has been heading further and further into a cul-de-sac in which social action has replaced worship as the shibboleth for Catholic identity.

Look at the picture accompanying both of these articles: the priests aren't all young; they aren't all dressed like nineteenth century French PPs: they are just priests, and magnificently so. But in one of the south coast Dioceses, the clergy are on the march.

The future's bright, and the future isn't orange.

Why I Don't Subscribe To Sky

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Yes, it's Joe Biden, but it's Sky I'm talking about. (Hint: the segment was from yesterday, Ash Wednesday.)

Imagine paying these people!
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A Cold Day Out

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Goodness only knows what the temperature was, but the cold, damp, north-easterly tore into us as we walked up through the village towards the hill
Walking back down much later we noticed that we had changed quarter, but the wind hadn't.

A cup of tea in a cafe was very welcome.

What's this walking lark all about?

The Long Arm Of The Pope

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About a year and a half ago I posted here a YouTube video of a bunch of young men who defended by saying the Rosary and by not allowing themselves to be provoked the Cathedral of Neuquen in Argentina from a major demonstration of pro-abortion feminists. Their Bishop had shouted at them (the men, not the demonstrators) to go away, but they stood their ground heroicly.

It turns out that some time later the Bishop, Marcelo Melani, a Salesian who is not due to retire until 2013, was told that if he wanted to present his resignation early Rome would not stand in his way.

He didn't take the hint.

He now has a Coadjutor.

How do we find out who was responsible and persuade him to look at some dioceses of the south of England?

Usus Antiquior

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I had decided that it was time to stop posting about matters liturgical or theological that I had thought about when I realised that whatever illumination I had just had was something Michael Davies had written about in 1986, and had expressed far better than I ever would. The other dawning realisation was that I was coming across what was wrong with the way the OF was being performed: all the negative reasons for believing that there are real problems with the way the OF is being celebrated.

And there was no alternative: I can read Fr Fortescue's "The Mass" and learn a lot, but he was writing in 1912 and a) our knowledge has moved on a lot since then, and b) it's not 1912 any more: it's 2010.

This b) is my beef not just with the SSPX but also with quite a few of the in-communion-trads one comes across: you can't turn the clock back and pretend it's 1962, or 1955, or 1911, or whenever. What has gone has gone for ever, and if you try to reconstitute it, you have to accept that what you have is something new, however much it looks like what was there before. (Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote by Jorge Luis Borges says all of this much better in one of the best short stories of the twentieth century, by the way.)

So a subscription to Usus Antiquior was a bit of a gamble: would it have anything new to say, or would it be a rehash of the battles of the sixties and seventies? The answer, loud, triumphant, and clarion-like is"the former".

The articles are not for the faint-hearted: they take no prisoners. This is not "Noddy goes to Trent". They made me work hard to ensure that I understood what point they were trying to make. But what riches! Among the things I particularly valued were the slops that overflowed from the great depths of learning on display: things you all no doubt know, but that I didn't; why and how the binatarianism of the Roman Canon reflects its extreme antiquity, for example. But the depths are profound: learning what Octaves are for is a major piece of knowledge I now have which I never had before: a starting point for future journeys deeper into my Faith.

This journal will become an essential catechetical resource for anybody who wants to explore and learn about the traditional Roman Rite from a non-polemical 21st Century viewpoint. And, if you are like me, it will help you pray the Mass more, and better.

Why SU4V2 Might Win

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You'd think that a bunch of self-confessed wrinklies with heretical attitudes would be bound to fail, wouldn't you. This is what the Chair of the meeting has written as part of a discussion:

"The meeting looked and felt like an inclusive church. There were religious and priests, women with priestly vocations, gays, justice and peace activists, Catholic women activists and, most importantly, laity from the pews. Without rancour, without bitterness, without polemics, with wry humour, with committment to and love for their church, they spoke up about the way parishes are run by one man only; about the lack of adult formation in the faith; about the infantilisation of the laity, and about how that and other aspects of current catholic 'churchianity' affect the Church's apostolic mission to the world. "

It's not hard to deconstruct, especially as religious, priests, women with priestly vocations, gays, justice and peace activists and women activists are contrasted with laity from the pews. Their Church is divided into the "doing" class and the "done to" class, and from this point of view, their checklist of beliefs and aims becomes coherent.

Barking! Howling! Let's have a good laugh at them and then carry on regardless. Well, we can, but if we do, they'll win. "We" here means JPII and B16 Catholics: not Vatican I, but not Vatican III either. We are indefinable as a group, other than by some statement such as "Orthodox Catholic". (There's no such thing as "just Catholic" unless you want to pretend that the FSSP and SU4V2 are the same thing.) We are actually a vey loose coalition of separate groups.

What shall we call them? Inspired as they are by the spirit of Vatican II, can I call them Spiritualists? I doesn't matter: they have many names, many guises, but they are united. Disunited, they will perish, so they will stay united, for as long as they are allowed to do so.

They control the levers: the diocesan curias, Catholic education, Catholic charities, everything to do with the Bishops' Conference; they control the Catholic press, with the exception of the Herald (but they infest the Herald's letters page). All of this apparatus is aimed at furthering their spiritualist agenda; none of it is aimed at furthering the Pope's.

The only way that "orthodox Catholics" are going to win is if we can persuade our Bishops to take the lead and live and breathe the Pope's agenda and inspire us with it.

Waiting For News

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Until the Bishops start "writing their news" about what they did while they were in Rome, we won't have much of an idea about what happened or about how it happened. My guess is that the "narrative" still has not been agreed; that some faces might need more saving than was first thought.

Nevertheless, Archbishop Nichols' widely reported slapdown of The Tablet suggests that at the very least he is beginning to feel confident that he is in command, that he has a staff which will support him. Is that just in Westminster or is it throughout E&W? In a sense it's good news either way. Either the Hierarchy has seen the writing on the wall, and ++Vincent can lead them back together to where they should have always been; or we have a real split, and he can lead us out of it, showing up the stuck-in-the-seventies enemies of progress for the problems that they are.

So Pastoral Letters first, and then the arrangements for the Papal visit. Things are beginning to move.
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First Report From Stand Up 4 V 2

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THEY say that they are all old!!!

See here.
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Catholic Amish? Catholic Distributists?

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Have a look at this:

"Plain Catholics seek to separate themselves from the values of the secular world and to live their lives in the simplicity of the Gospels both in attitude and gratitude as well as faithfulness to the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus ... so that in all things, God may be glorified. Plain Catholics seek to preach the Gospel with their walk and do not engage in doctrinal debates nor door to door evangelization.

When asked, they obey 1 Peter 3: 15-16

... Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who defame your good conduct in Christ may themselves be put to shame."

H/t to the Joyful Papist.

Double Good News

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First, I found that a favourite Spanish blogger is still active and has moved here, and second, that he has done his sums and that not only is a Consistory due, but that another is due next year.

Four Cardinals will lose their right to vote in the next couple of months; that will leave twelve vacancies in the Sacred College; seven more will lose their right to vote by the end of the year. And next year six will go before Easter. This should mean a Consistory this year, and another at the back end of next year.

Only three Cardinals will have to present their resignation this year from their episcopal sees, but next year another eleven will be off. This will mean the possibility of starting the great process of change in places like Los Angeles, even if there are five more years before Cardinal mahony loses his voting rights in the Conclave.

Imagine what opportunity this gives to the Holy Father to shape the Church for the reform of the reform! And imagine the insignificance of the Hierarchy of England and Wales, faced with this catclysmic set of opportunities.

Details available in Spanish here.

The Suppository

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I got hold of a copy of last week's Tablet to see if I could work out how it turns a profit: I couldn't.

It suffers from the same problem as all other serious weeklies as the world moves to rolling news: it has nothing original to say about the news that wasn't said within 24 hours of whatever happened happening. And as its USP is left wing, there aren't many people around who are prepared to read ten days late what Peter really said to Gordon.

So the only area in which it has anything original to say is about religion, and Gosh! it's tedious. It is relentlessly on message where the message is a particularly English interpretation of the Spirit of Vatican II. If it met Wir Sind Kirche, both sides would need interpreters, ambassadors, intermediaries: because if you don't understand the UK of NuLabour, you won't understand the Catholic Church of the Tabletistas.

I even read the tendentious, lying, drivel written by Fr Michael G Ryan about the new translation of the Mass to see if it was as bad as everybody said it was: it wasn't really. It was just banal, tendentious, lying, drivel.

I had wondered if we were subsidising the rag by our parishes' overbuying vast quantities of it, but according to Valle Adurni here, everything comes on sale or return.

So we have to face up to the fact that some way or another, enough people are prepared to shell out money to allow the Suppository to turn sufficient profit to allow it to fund scholarships in Spirit of Vatican II liturgical activity (I kid you not).

"The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms."

It is rich too.
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How To Support Compassionate Farming

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Stand Up 2 Stand Up 4 Vatican 2

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Text talk, eh? How kewl and down with the kids was it to write "4" and "2" instead of "for" and "two" (or "II")? Anyway, although this mob is being done to death, two commentsfrom me that I haven't seen elsewhere: money and age.

The first meeting was originally going to take place in property belonging to the Church (St Vincent's, Carlisle Place), but has now moved to a suite in the Westminster Thistle Hotel. That will cost money: so who's paying? Are the CAFOD adverts generating that much money?

Why can they find nobody under seventy to speak at their meeting? Michael Winter is a 79 year old who preferred marriage to the priesthood; Myra Poole has been a Notre Dame de Naumur sister for over 50 years; she said "I have always said in my life I gained more understanding of the real Gospel when Ken Livingstone was in charge of the former London authority in the 70s and the 80s than from any church". The Chair of the meeting, Frank Regan, is, I assume, the former Columban Father whose belief in Liberation Theology led him to be a trade union activist in South America before he married and retired to Devon, though he is still called on by Catholic Dioces like Clifton to run Justice and Peace, and Ecology shindigs (see here and here (the latter "here" is a link to that rarest of thing, a drippingly progressive "Spirit of Vatican II" blog)).

The final speaker, the assistant editor of The Suppository, Robert Nowell, is "merely" a translator of Hans Kung. In the company of the others, he probably passes for a Trad!

This being an open meeting, anybody who can spend two hours of a Tuesday evening in Central London can attend. The problem is that we are too polite: this meeting should be packed with people who are prepared to protest loudly, not just every time that a heterodox or heretical opinion is uttered, but every time the message of Vatican II is traduced.

But it's probably only old age pensioners who don't have to work the next day who will be able to attend.

Home Economics

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Neo-con?

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Neo-trad?

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The sort of thing that anonymous posters post?

Usus Antiquior

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One advantage of being off work is being at home when the postman comes. All the more so today, when the satisfying thud on the doormat heralded the arrival of the first number of Usus Antiquior.

Obviously I can't pass any comment yet other than to say three things:

It looks good: noble simplicity and all that.

Just the contents tell you that this a serious journal: it is not a trad Tablet.

And the footnotes are footnotes, and not endnotes, normally the bane of the life of the reader of academic journals.

See you whenever!

Stamp For Pope's Visit

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What do you think of this as the stamp for this year's visit to the UK by the Pope?

It's available now, in a sheet at £13.83 for 20.

Guess what? I made it myself.

Go to the Royal Mail's website and look for "Smilers".

Anybody can make any stamp they like.

We could have a lot of fun AND annoy Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee. What are we waiting for?

The Anglican Patrimony

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I was thinking about what parts of the Anglican Patrimony I'd like those who become part of the Ordinariates to bring with them, and which not and decided in the end to make it a bit meme-like.

Which single item of the Anglican Patrimony would you like to see Anglicans bring with them, and which single item would you like them to leave behind?

My positive would be public praying of the breviary, or at least of Mattins and Evensong. I've never attended (Catholic) sung Vespers in my life nor lived anywhere where it was a feature.

The bit I hope they leave behind is synodal government. Bossy middle class people will always dominate any elected body from Parliament to a school's Governing Body, and they will always believe that being elected gives them the right to impose their bossy middle class opinions - hence the C of E! (Not to say that the Catholic Church in E&W isn't heading inexorably in that direction.)

Does anybody else want to play? (You can't say things like "reverent liturgy", because we should have those anyway.)

Not Quite Fr Z's Display But ...

The birds sit hunched in the tree against the snow.

The thrush looks miserable.

The robin wants me to go.

The sparrows don't care.

A solitary marsh tit condescends to visit the feeder.

A finch looks for shelter.

The blackbird takes some bread to eat in peace.

And the thrush eventually makes its way to the bird table.

The jays, barn owl, magpies, ravens and something I might have sworn was a redwing refused to be photographed.

Musings About Priesthood

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It was HJMW, here, who articulated better than I had that I was disturbed by what I might describe as a leaning towards liturgiolatry: a devotion to the performance of the Liturgy rather than the veneration of the Liturgy as an eikon of Christ's sacrifice. An MC reminding a server in private after Mass about the order in which to light and put out the candles on the altar is a good example of the latter; two middle-aged men complaining that it isn't being done properly five minutes before Mass starts could be an example of the former.

My musings have taken me off in another direction, however: why does Newchurch so eschew the term "priest" to describe the man at the center of the liturgical action? Minister, Celebrant, President, Pastor - why not Priest?

I speculate that the reason is not that the NO Mass was to become as like a Protestant service as possible, as some always try to argue, but that the notion of "priest" was foreign to the minds of the reformers, who considered it a relic of mediaevalism.

The Priest at Mass doesn't just re-present Christ's sacrifice: he stands in the line of priests who stretch back through the Old Testament and whose job was to offer sacrifice by slaughtering animals on God's Altar. Even if Christ's Sacrifice is once and for all, and the activity of the priest no longer encompasses such sacrifices, it nevertheless remains the fact that sacrifice is what priests do.

It is hard to think of the way in which sacrificial priesthood is being made manifest by the President of a communal meal. And while I am sure that most priests still believe in the Real Presence, if they do not have an adequate conception of priesthood and sacrifice, then their belief about the change in the species effected by the words of consecration turns them into magicians: the Eucharistic Prayer becomes one long "Abracadabra", and the opening greeting ought to be "You'll like this". And all of a sudden it's no longer difficult to imagine: that priests have no need to be set apart; that their nature is unchanged by their ordination; that celibacy is irrelevant to their condition; that they should necessarily be masculine; for their function has changed. They are no longer sacrificial priests.

"Save the Liturgy, Save the World"; "Do the Red, Say the Black"; are, I'm afraid, inadequate as rallying cries.

"Priests: Be Priests!"

So What Are Our Bishops For?

You could look up the Catechism of the Catholic Church here, but why bother, since our own Bishops tell us what they are for in the annual statement of their accounts, here.

"The Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales is a permanent body within the organisation of the Catholic Church that brings together the Bishops of England and Wales. As a Conference the Bishops "jointly exercise certain pastoral functions for the Christian faithful... in order to promote the greater good which the Church offers to humanity, especially through forms and programs of the apostolate fittingly adapted to the circumstances of time and place".

So note, from the word go, that certain pastoral functions of the Bishops are exercised jointly: sovereignty has been pooled, so that forms and programmes of the apostolate fittingly adapted to the circumstances of England and Wales at the beginning of the 21st Century may be carried out.

“All the Bishops of England and Wales meet together twice a year to decide policies for the Church at a national level. These week-long gatherings occur soon after Easter (Low Week) and in November. Each bishop chairs a committee of experts dealing with a specific area of concern for the Church. Committees are grouped into departments for practical purposes. ”

Accommodation and other costs for Bishops’ Conference Meetings in 2008: £236,975 (about £15,000 per diocese!)

International Affairs
The Department Bishops continued work on their five main priorities: migration and asylum; the global common good, European issues, the environment and religious freedom. These themes have been identified by the bishops as priorities after a careful analysis of needs and resources. Progress continued in all these areas throughout the year. Some example include the work of the Holy Land Coordination which gathered in Jerusalem and the West Bank for its annual meetings.

This year the Bishops also met in Rome with Secretary of State Cardinal Bertone as well as Cardinal Sandri and Archbishop Mamberti to endorse the coordination and to discuss its strategy. The Friends of the Holy Land (FHL), a partnership between the Department and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre underwent successful trials in two dioceses and will be launched in 2009. The FHL will enable the Department to incream its support for the Local Church and to raise awareness about the challenges it faces.

The Department document The Mission of the Church to Migrants in England and Wales was published in 2008. This represented the culmination of a process of pastoral reflection and consultation and will provide the framework for the Department's future work in this area.

Liaison with the European Bishops' conferences continued, mainly through the work of COMECE in Brussels and CCEE in St Gallen. One successful outcome was the hosting in Liverpool of the SECAM-CCEE meeting of European and African bishops. The Department also continued to work with the Zimbabwean Church. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor and Bishop Hollis visited Harare in January and then welcomed Archbishop Ndlovu and Bishop Munyani as guests when they came to London and Leeds in the autumn.

The objectives for 2009 include the national launch of the Friends of the Holy Land and increasing the Department's collaboration with Caritas Social Action on migration and asylum.

Cost of International Affairs in 2008: £188,074

Ecumenism isn’t cheap. The subscription to Churches Together cost £117,767; to CBTI Interfaith £3,737; to CTBI Racial Justice £7,913; to Churches Commission on Mission £22,941; and to Churches Commission for International Students £392.

And how much has it cost you? Well, it depends on your Diocese:

Arundel and Brighton £91,447
Birmingham £141,169
Brentwood £91,100
Cardiff £35,813
Clifton £58,415
East Anglia £31,816
Hallam £22,254
Hexham and Newcastle £108,659
Lancaster £43,985
Leeds £81,712
Liverpool £124,827
Menevia £348
Middlesbrough £31,294
Northampton £55,112
Nottingham £69,715
Plymouth £38,075
Portsmouth £86,580
Salford £122,220
Shrewsbury £85,536
Southwark £151,596
Westminster £263,390
Wrexham £3,477
Bishopric of the Forces £4,500
Total £1,743,040

Now, apart from a quick shout of Floreat Menevia!, what comes next?

Remember, that each one of those pounds comes from a pound that went into the collection plate in your parish. Find out how much of your parish's collection goes ditrect to the diocese: its 45% in mine. Then ask what proportion of the diocesan income is represented by the totals above, and ask why that much of your local Church's money is compulsorily levied to go on things such as those listed above. (There are lots of other things the Bishops' Conference does too.)

Point out to your Parish Priest that if this is where your money is going, then you will take steps to ensure that it heads elsewhere. Three quarters of your normal offering to him to be split between a Mass stipend, and repairs to the Church fabric (especially if there is a building fund) will ensure that the Parish doesn't suffer. The other quarter to the Catholic charity of your choice ensures that the extra-parochial aspect of your giving is taken care of.

Is there a problem with this?

A Hiatus

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I'm not blogging again, at least until after Christmas. There are three main reasons:

First, I can rely on the blogosphere, or even the Internet for fellowship, but not for communion, and if I cannot find any way to articulate the manner in which I am in full and proper communion with either my parish priest or my Bishop, while each of them claims to be in communion with the Pope, I need to spend time looking for why somewhere other than here.

Second, I want to reflect on trad Catholic blogging from the outside: the LMS created a fortress of insularity because it needed to. I think that time has gone, but I sometimes sense a new insularity online, that seems to value an idea of ultratrad heteropraxis. "My praxy is better than your praxy" is less bad than "my doxy is better than your doxy", but it isn't good.

(First and second leave me wondering what exactly the Catholic blogosphere is: not national exactly, and not a comunion; not a movement, even if "New"; unguided, unshepherded, even if blessed with a really rich crop of posting pastors; what is the sense in which it is "Catholic" when it consists of lots of people expressing their own interpretation of things?)

Third, I'm not convinced that I'm keeping up with the Zeitgeist: lot's of you are racing off while I feel quite happy at rest. The fact that I can go to EF Mass every week if I try, and so can lots of others, while we can also go to OF Mass every day, feels like a decent start, and one worth bedding in, especially if the alternative involves lots of arguing. I have some big things to argue about with my spiritual betters, but the availability of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass isn't one of them.

I'll still haunt you: I'll comment when I feel moved to. But a pause for reflection might throw up an idea about whether I have anything unquerulous to say, and about how to say it.

God Bless you all, and be assured of my daily prayers.
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Prayers, Please, Times Three

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Once, for the family of a dear friend and commenter who has just become a grandfather.

Secondly, for Fr Hunwicke, faced with a big choice.

Third, for a Catholic priest who, up to the limits with his Bishop, took the Anglican option to maintain, as he thought, his opportunity to be Catholic. A Motu Proprio and an Apostolic Constitution later, and he is in a very difficult position indeed, and needs lots and lots of prayers.
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Iconoclasm

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Over in the valley of the River Adur, Fr Sean posted something really good about the manner in which those attached to more traditional forms of Catholic worship should celebrate. He didn't say that 1962 Missal is perfection, just that messing about with the rubrics at this time would be a really unsensible thing to do. I agree wholeheartedly with him.

The best way, perhaps, to think of what happened in the Roman Church after Vatican II and until the election of the current Pope, is to compare it with the iconoclasm which shook the East in the eighth and ninth centuries, not least because one of the arguments the iconoclasts used was that only in the Divine Liturgy itself could Christ Himself be truly seen, and Mass itself, and the manner in which it is celebrated is an icon.

Our iconoclasts have not given up: they are bent on maintaining their austere vision of a communal gathering in a whitewashed hall and will fight for it. They are tremedously powerful, and are cornered, so their victory over a disunited opponent is almost assured: their victory over a united opponent is much less so.

Let's not tryto unpick the reforms of Pius X or Pius XII just yet: let's concentrate on placing 1962 in opposition to "the spirit of Vatican II", and defeating that. Let's behave like Catholics and think in centuries: few of those of us alive today will see the way the Church rights herself after such a turbulent century as the twentieth, so let's not try to bring the Millennium about by ourselves. And let's make sure that we don't make of ourselves a focus for disunity by deciding that the rubrics are for others, and not for us.

Something Latvian For the Weekend

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Some years ago, I was in Mons in Belgium representing my country and had left an interminable reception to go outside for a smoke. I met a Latvian colleague there and told him that I remembered hearing a beautiful Latvian song once years before, and that the tune had never left me, and sang it for him. "You mean 'Saule Perkons Daugava'" he said, and fished out a CD from his pocket and gave it me there and then. It is one of the most evocative pieces of music I know, and sung here by 10,000 people, it sounds good (though I will confess I prefer the non-electric version I have on disc).

Fr Hugh Thwaites

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I had been looking for some new mp3s to listen to on the bus and went to the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice website to see if they had anything. Nothing much inspired me, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the following quote to download a couple of talks:

War Memoirs of an Amateur by Rev. Hugh Thwaites SJ

"In that first letter home I told my parents I had become a Catholic since leaving England, and that, in spite of everything (42 months in Changi gaol) I'd had the happiest three and a half years of my life".

The first talk was better recorded than the second, but, that apart, this is an experience separate to any I have ever had. I have heard many stories of captivity by the Japanese, but none before that have been inspired by Christian Joy. This story has been a life-changing experience for me. I have never so wanted a story not to end since childhood.
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The Future In Clifton ...

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I posted a few days ago about the forthcoming reorganisation of the parishes of the diocese of Clifton: the draft report is here.

What irks me (well, one of the things that irks me) is the assumption that the decline in vocations to the priesthood in their diocese is inevitable. Their "best case scenario" assumes that the number of priests will decline by 30% in the next fifteen years (the ridiculously implausible worst case shows a 75% decline, the "median case" - the management-speak is all-pervasive - shows a 40% decline). Do a search on the word "vocation" however, and nothing is found.

If you pentrate the opaque language, however, then some of what this is all about becomes clearer:

"Part of our preparation for the future was the diocesan-wide consultation process “Seeking the Face of Christ” during which a very strong sense emerged that, though we recognise an incredible richness in our past and present, there are aspects of how we operate as a diocese, especially with regard to how we are organised for evangelisation and pastoral care, that need to be reconsidered. This need to reconsider our structures was taken into account in our Diocesan Guidelines “Called to be a People of Hope”, where, tellingly, it has been included in the section ‘Church as Communion’. We are reminded that:

“The root of our understanding of Church as Communion is not ensuring efficient management but understanding what sort of Church God is calling us to be. Pope John Paul II in his letter to mark the beginning of the new millennium reminded us that when the structures of the Church reflect the self-giving love of the Trinity then this: “spirituality of communion supplies institutional reality with a soul”. (NMI 45)

We trust in God that he will give us all that we need to achieve the mission he entrusts to us."

"... what sort of Church God is calling us to be ...": in other words "We are Church".

Linz am Avon?