... writes in a paper called the Catholic Times, passed on to me occasionally by a friend.
The man is a complete charlatan in the way he uses misinformation to deceive. I have just read a piece about how Rome subverts the desire of Vatican II for a vernacular liturgy. In this he fails to mention what V2 actually says ... and supports this assertion by a rhetorical trope of Paul VI, the word Dammit, and a claim that V2 is all about ecclesia semper reformanda.
Goodness gracious me.
31 August 2010
Auctoritas
A liturgical form can have full canonical status; and when it does, it is clear that a cleric is (for example) fulfilling his obligation to the Office by using it. But the Latin term auctoritas has a more subtle sense than mere canonical liceity. It might suggest the personal influence which a player in Roman politics had, quite distinct from any imperium which he might enjoy as a result of a magistracy which he held. Or a sense of authoritativeness or impressiveness, of personal prestige or repute; we all know the sort of person who, perhaps in a committee or gathering, is listened to the moment he opens his mouth and whose interventions are out of all proportion to his mere legal status. It is a characteristic of the Good Woman in Proverbs that her husband is great among the elders at the gate; when such people are moved to utterance, other people put their hands to their mouths. In our secular politics, the policies which were embodied in the manifesto of a government which has won power by a sweeping majority have auctoritas greater than the ideas dreamed up last night by a premier who is holding onto power by his fingertips ... although the constitutional power may be formally the same in each case.
Auctoritas as opposed to mere canonical liceity has always had a place in Liturgy. When manualists such as the admirable O'Connell talked about a custom which is even contra legem achieving by its longevity not merely liceity but even prescription above the letter of the rubric, it is in a way auctoritas that they are talking about. But I contend that the radical changes that followed Vatican II (a similar radical process happened at the same time in the Church of England) raise the question of auctoritas in new, difficult, and acute forms. The basic reason for this is the most striking novelty involved in post-Conciliar liturgical texts: multiple choices facing a celebrant or a worshipping community as they prepare to celebrate a rite. What every celebrant said daily at every altar of the Roman Rite throughout the world for centuries obviously had enormous auctoritas. A novel formula which has just been put on some menu from which choices are to be made, manifestly has very much less. Whereas, before the Council, something that auctoritas urged one to do was broadly in line with what was canonically licit*, after the Conciliar 'reforms' auctoritas and liceity might find themselves standing very far apart from each other.
In recent posts I have made clear my agreement with Joseph Ratzinger's view that there is something highly questionable about the idea that a Roman Pontiff can do anything especially if backed by a mandate of an ecumenical council. I would contend that what is wrong with that idea is, among other things, its forgetfulness of liturgical auctoritas. And, in those recent posts, I went further and contended that in many and important respects the 'reforms' went beyond the conciliar mandate (praeter concilium) and, even more problematically, in some cases directly contradicted it (contra concilium). In my view, changes praeter concilium have less auctoritas than those which do rest on a conciliar mandate; and changes contra concilium raise extremely acute difficulties with regard to their auctoritas.
I expect some Roman Catholic readers may feel uneasy about the path I am treading. This is because the Roman Catholic Church, more than most, has a deeply ingrained sense of Law. This makes it easy for Roman Catholics to underestimate of the force of auctoritas (although Benedict XVI nodded towards it when he wrote "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful"). Orthodox and Anglicans, on the other hand, are instinctively influenced in liturgical matters much more by auctoritas than by mere law on its own. As, I suspect, was the medieval West before the invention of printing. The Sarum 'Rite' spread in England more because of its auctoritas than because of any legislative enactments. Among Anglican Catholics, a propensity to Romanise their Liturgy has, for 170 years, rested essentially on an instinct that the ancient liturgy of the Western Church has an auctoritas greater than that of a system compiled by a Zwinglian and embodied in an Act of Parliament (I commend the relevance of Dix's words at SL pp 586ff. and 716ff.).
I venture to suggest that this instinct is part of our patrimony. Did I hear you say something about cats and pigeons? Surely not.
___________________________________________________________________
* Fr Adrian Fortescue gave expression to the possibility of auctoritas being in tension with Law when he called for the old Roman Sunday collects to be liberated from (what before Pius X was) the constant rubrical risk of supersession.
I am grateful to the Reverend Prebendary Michael Moreton, hypermystagogos, for setting my mind thinking along these lines some years ago. Those who know and admire Fr Michael will not need to be informed that the importance of such logic to him was ... the immense auctoritas of the Canon Romanus!
Auctoritas as opposed to mere canonical liceity has always had a place in Liturgy. When manualists such as the admirable O'Connell talked about a custom which is even contra legem achieving by its longevity not merely liceity but even prescription above the letter of the rubric, it is in a way auctoritas that they are talking about. But I contend that the radical changes that followed Vatican II (a similar radical process happened at the same time in the Church of England) raise the question of auctoritas in new, difficult, and acute forms. The basic reason for this is the most striking novelty involved in post-Conciliar liturgical texts: multiple choices facing a celebrant or a worshipping community as they prepare to celebrate a rite. What every celebrant said daily at every altar of the Roman Rite throughout the world for centuries obviously had enormous auctoritas. A novel formula which has just been put on some menu from which choices are to be made, manifestly has very much less. Whereas, before the Council, something that auctoritas urged one to do was broadly in line with what was canonically licit*, after the Conciliar 'reforms' auctoritas and liceity might find themselves standing very far apart from each other.
In recent posts I have made clear my agreement with Joseph Ratzinger's view that there is something highly questionable about the idea that a Roman Pontiff can do anything especially if backed by a mandate of an ecumenical council. I would contend that what is wrong with that idea is, among other things, its forgetfulness of liturgical auctoritas. And, in those recent posts, I went further and contended that in many and important respects the 'reforms' went beyond the conciliar mandate (praeter concilium) and, even more problematically, in some cases directly contradicted it (contra concilium). In my view, changes praeter concilium have less auctoritas than those which do rest on a conciliar mandate; and changes contra concilium raise extremely acute difficulties with regard to their auctoritas.
I expect some Roman Catholic readers may feel uneasy about the path I am treading. This is because the Roman Catholic Church, more than most, has a deeply ingrained sense of Law. This makes it easy for Roman Catholics to underestimate of the force of auctoritas (although Benedict XVI nodded towards it when he wrote "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful"). Orthodox and Anglicans, on the other hand, are instinctively influenced in liturgical matters much more by auctoritas than by mere law on its own. As, I suspect, was the medieval West before the invention of printing. The Sarum 'Rite' spread in England more because of its auctoritas than because of any legislative enactments. Among Anglican Catholics, a propensity to Romanise their Liturgy has, for 170 years, rested essentially on an instinct that the ancient liturgy of the Western Church has an auctoritas greater than that of a system compiled by a Zwinglian and embodied in an Act of Parliament (I commend the relevance of Dix's words at SL pp 586ff. and 716ff.).
I venture to suggest that this instinct is part of our patrimony. Did I hear you say something about cats and pigeons? Surely not.
___________________________________________________________________
* Fr Adrian Fortescue gave expression to the possibility of auctoritas being in tension with Law when he called for the old Roman Sunday collects to be liberated from (what before Pius X was) the constant rubrical risk of supersession.
I am grateful to the Reverend Prebendary Michael Moreton, hypermystagogos, for setting my mind thinking along these lines some years ago. Those who know and admire Fr Michael will not need to be informed that the importance of such logic to him was ... the immense auctoritas of the Canon Romanus!
30 August 2010
Vatican II Reforms: So what?
These pieces have demonstrated that there is a an auctoritas* problem about LH. As Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, the idea that a Pope can muck around as he likes with the Liturgy if he has the mandate of an Ecumenical Council, is mighty dodgy. Even more flawed is a reform which was not mandated by a Council, and which in many respects went contrary to the explicit words of a Council: I mean the instruction that "There must be no innovations unless the good of the church genuinely and certainly requires them; and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing". No innovations, indeed! Certainly, indeed!
It seems to me that, ideally,what we need is a revision of the Breviary which evolves organically from what was in place before the Council in the ways mandated by the Council. Ideally, it would go behind the revision of the Psalterium by Pius X and of the Hymnarium by Urban VIII, and would reconsider elements of the rubrical changes under Pius XII in 1955 which built on those of Pius X. However, to hope for this would, at the moment, be optimistic and beyond the realms of any likelihood. What would be comparatively easy for Authority to provide would be a decree which enabled one to use preconciliar books to say the Office in broadly the way mandated by the Council. In my view, this should leave Lauds and Vespers basically unchanged; diminish the obligation to recite the lesser hours in accordance with SC; and reduce the length of Mattins while permitting it to be used, as the Council suggested, at any hour by those not bound to say it in choir. Perhaps it would also permit ad lib the use of the Lentini Hymnarium. I recall once reading a comment on this blog the effect that there is a 1960s Decree broadly along these lines. Can anyone pin it down for me?
Are there practical ways ahead which the individual can take while remaining within the bounds of what is lawful? I would also remind readers that there is nothing illegal in saying some hours from the LH and others from the Breviary. This is in effect what happens in the English Oratories, and there is already an established praxis in those places, or in some of them (details?), of adapting the old form of Vespers to the modern calendar. (I am not sure whether one would describe that as contra legem or praeter legem.)
I admit that there are problems (mostly arising from diversity of Calendar) about - for example - saying Lauds and Vespers from the Breviary, and the rest of the Office from LH. But might it not be the best interim measure, or at least a viable option, for a generation or two?
______________________________________________________________
*I hope to return to what I mean by auctoritas.
It seems to me that, ideally,what we need is a revision of the Breviary which evolves organically from what was in place before the Council in the ways mandated by the Council. Ideally, it would go behind the revision of the Psalterium by Pius X and of the Hymnarium by Urban VIII, and would reconsider elements of the rubrical changes under Pius XII in 1955 which built on those of Pius X. However, to hope for this would, at the moment, be optimistic and beyond the realms of any likelihood. What would be comparatively easy for Authority to provide would be a decree which enabled one to use preconciliar books to say the Office in broadly the way mandated by the Council. In my view, this should leave Lauds and Vespers basically unchanged; diminish the obligation to recite the lesser hours in accordance with SC; and reduce the length of Mattins while permitting it to be used, as the Council suggested, at any hour by those not bound to say it in choir. Perhaps it would also permit ad lib the use of the Lentini Hymnarium. I recall once reading a comment on this blog the effect that there is a 1960s Decree broadly along these lines. Can anyone pin it down for me?
Are there practical ways ahead which the individual can take while remaining within the bounds of what is lawful? I would also remind readers that there is nothing illegal in saying some hours from the LH and others from the Breviary. This is in effect what happens in the English Oratories, and there is already an established praxis in those places, or in some of them (details?), of adapting the old form of Vespers to the modern calendar. (I am not sure whether one would describe that as contra legem or praeter legem.)
I admit that there are problems (mostly arising from diversity of Calendar) about - for example - saying Lauds and Vespers from the Breviary, and the rest of the Office from LH. But might it not be the best interim measure, or at least a viable option, for a generation or two?
______________________________________________________________
*I hope to return to what I mean by auctoritas.
29 August 2010
Vatican II Reforms: Psalter
As far as the text of the psalms is concerned, we need to recall that the Council met in the aftermath of the disastrous Translation of the Psalter commissioned by Pius XII and authorised by him for use in the divine Office (yet another example of the fact that major errors in the methodology of liturgical reform had already gripped the Latin Church before the Council; the Council was merely one episode in a flawed process which was already under way, and even under some of the same personel). The departure of the Pian psalter from the characteristics of Christian Latin - and this at a time when Christine Mohrmann's researches were still fresh in the minds of learned readers - meant that there was a very widespread unease about it. Tactfully, SC decreed that the "work of revising the psalter, already happily begun, is to be finished as soon as possible, and is to take account of the style of Christian Latin, the liturgical use of psalms, also when sung, and the entire tradition of the Latin Church". Thus the psalter included in the LH can decently claim to have been mandated by the Council, even if one's personal preference would have been to keep the words which had sanctified the lives of latinophone worshippers for a millennium and a half.
As far as the distribution of the psalter is concerned, the Council mandated that the psalms were to be distributed over a longer period than one week. LH, of course, distributed them over four weeks. One may have one's own views about the wisdom of what was done, and the opportunities that were missed of returning to something more traditional. In only one matter, however, is it clear that LH innovated without a conciliar mandate. Into the Psalterium, which by long tradition had included Old Testament canticles in Lauds, were now introduced New Testament canticles at Vespers every day. They were taken from S Paul's purple passages and from the songs of the angels in the Apocalypse (the production of the latter category of canticle required some use of scissors and paste). To introduce without a conciliar mandate a feature which increased the amount of psalmody to be arranged at a time when the reformers were under orders to reduce the burden on the clergy, seems perverse. Objectively, it is another example of the dynamics of a process in which those driving the engine slipped, perhaps even without noticing it themselves, from implementing a mandate, to giving themselves free rein to innovate 'creatively'.
As far as the distribution of the psalter is concerned, the Council mandated that the psalms were to be distributed over a longer period than one week. LH, of course, distributed them over four weeks. One may have one's own views about the wisdom of what was done, and the opportunities that were missed of returning to something more traditional. In only one matter, however, is it clear that LH innovated without a conciliar mandate. Into the Psalterium, which by long tradition had included Old Testament canticles in Lauds, were now introduced New Testament canticles at Vespers every day. They were taken from S Paul's purple passages and from the songs of the angels in the Apocalypse (the production of the latter category of canticle required some use of scissors and paste). To introduce without a conciliar mandate a feature which increased the amount of psalmody to be arranged at a time when the reformers were under orders to reduce the burden on the clergy, seems perverse. Objectively, it is another example of the dynamics of a process in which those driving the engine slipped, perhaps even without noticing it themselves, from implementing a mandate, to giving themselves free rein to innovate 'creatively'.
Ratzinger on Liturgical Law (5)
Continues
Chad Glendinning quotes A S Sanchez-Gil as feeling that the Roman Missal, along with other liturgical books, cannot be reduced to a collection of liturgical laws. This is along the right lines, but does not, I feel, go nearly far enough. The great Anglican liturgist, Prebendary Michael Moreton, now striding eruditely through his nineties, sees the Canon Romanus - if I understood him aright in the six years during which we conversed - in a position not unlike that of the Canon of Scripture; a given in the Tradition which it is not for us to treat as disposable. He speaks of the Canon as having auctoritas given to it by tradition, which far surpasses the merely canonical, legalistic, authorisation, which fly-by-night 'Eucharistic Prayers' composed by the Top Experts of one single decade might have. I think it may be a coincidence - because Fr Michael, unlike me, is not a pedantic papalist who tries to keep up to date with the documents which flood out from Roman dikasteries - that his term auctoritas occurs also in John Paul II's instruction Ecclesia Dei. It is a profound term with roots deep in the sense of the Orthodox as well as of Traditionalist Catholics that there are weightier imperatives than Canon Law. I remind you of the startling fact that the Patriarch of Moskow welcomed Summorum pontificum as an ecumenically positive action.
Glendinning informs us that Summorum pontificum, if it is not an "imprecise use of canonical terminology" (really, Chad, who is the Supreme Legislator?), is "a rather overt denunciation of the pope's predecessors and of the praxis curiae". In a funny sort of way, I think this last bit is right. Benedict XVI is superseding the assumptions underlying the enactments of his predecessor Paul VI, and, unobserved by Glendinning, he is doing so on grounds which he had previously, before his election to the See of Peter, explained thoroughly lucidly in the two passages which I copied from his works in the second post of this series. Our Holy Father even restates the views of Cardinal Ratzinger, in the Letter to Bishops which accompanied Summorum pontificum: "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden forbidden". Note Cannot! We are talking about non potests rather than non licets. As for curial enactments, well, I think it has to be pointed out that the pope is not only, as Glendinning concedes, the Supreme Legislator, but, as Vatican I defined, also the Supreme Judge of the Church. If his statements in Summorum pontificum go contrary to what Roman dikasteries have prescribed or implied, this is surely analogous to a court of appeal overriding an earlier judgement by a legislator of inferior jurisdiction. (Or, if it isn't, why not?) J Baldovini, quoted by Glendinning, wrote that "even someone with supreme legislative authority cannot undo historic facts". But Benedict XVI is not misdescribing (or even describing) historical facts, I suggest, but defining what the deepest law of the church is. He bases himself upon a view of history, Theology, and law which is broader than the juridical bases of those previous enactments. That is in fact what makes his declaration so significant; so much more in line with a Catholic - and Orthodox - and Anglo-Catholic - concept of Liturgy.
I can't help wondering if Papa Ratzinger is subconsciously sketching, with a few strokes of his pencil, what an Orthodox Latin West might look like - and how an Orthodox papacy might function. It is all very well to have ecumenical commissions; but nothing would promote the unity of the two lungs of Christendom more than for Orthodox to be able to look at the actual life of the Roman Magisterium ... and to feel an uncanny sense that they were to a degree looking into a mirror. Of course, in human terms the odds are that few here in the Latin West will really understand his project; that the liturgical and moral anarchists, the homosexual ideologues and the feminists, will continue their frenzied denigrations of the old Bavarian gentleman; that in a few years he will be dead and his vision forgotten as the vaticanologists feverishly speculate on the 'policies' of his successor. But, in my eyes, for as long as it lasts it is exhilarating; Benedict's Age is a good age in which to be alive, an age of the very truest instauratio catholica. And, just possibly ... who knows ... after all, there is a God ...
Concluded.
Chad Glendinning quotes A S Sanchez-Gil as feeling that the Roman Missal, along with other liturgical books, cannot be reduced to a collection of liturgical laws. This is along the right lines, but does not, I feel, go nearly far enough. The great Anglican liturgist, Prebendary Michael Moreton, now striding eruditely through his nineties, sees the Canon Romanus - if I understood him aright in the six years during which we conversed - in a position not unlike that of the Canon of Scripture; a given in the Tradition which it is not for us to treat as disposable. He speaks of the Canon as having auctoritas given to it by tradition, which far surpasses the merely canonical, legalistic, authorisation, which fly-by-night 'Eucharistic Prayers' composed by the Top Experts of one single decade might have. I think it may be a coincidence - because Fr Michael, unlike me, is not a pedantic papalist who tries to keep up to date with the documents which flood out from Roman dikasteries - that his term auctoritas occurs also in John Paul II's instruction Ecclesia Dei. It is a profound term with roots deep in the sense of the Orthodox as well as of Traditionalist Catholics that there are weightier imperatives than Canon Law. I remind you of the startling fact that the Patriarch of Moskow welcomed Summorum pontificum as an ecumenically positive action.
Glendinning informs us that Summorum pontificum, if it is not an "imprecise use of canonical terminology" (really, Chad, who is the Supreme Legislator?), is "a rather overt denunciation of the pope's predecessors and of the praxis curiae". In a funny sort of way, I think this last bit is right. Benedict XVI is superseding the assumptions underlying the enactments of his predecessor Paul VI, and, unobserved by Glendinning, he is doing so on grounds which he had previously, before his election to the See of Peter, explained thoroughly lucidly in the two passages which I copied from his works in the second post of this series. Our Holy Father even restates the views of Cardinal Ratzinger, in the Letter to Bishops which accompanied Summorum pontificum: "What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden forbidden". Note Cannot! We are talking about non potests rather than non licets. As for curial enactments, well, I think it has to be pointed out that the pope is not only, as Glendinning concedes, the Supreme Legislator, but, as Vatican I defined, also the Supreme Judge of the Church. If his statements in Summorum pontificum go contrary to what Roman dikasteries have prescribed or implied, this is surely analogous to a court of appeal overriding an earlier judgement by a legislator of inferior jurisdiction. (Or, if it isn't, why not?) J Baldovini, quoted by Glendinning, wrote that "even someone with supreme legislative authority cannot undo historic facts". But Benedict XVI is not misdescribing (or even describing) historical facts, I suggest, but defining what the deepest law of the church is. He bases himself upon a view of history, Theology, and law which is broader than the juridical bases of those previous enactments. That is in fact what makes his declaration so significant; so much more in line with a Catholic - and Orthodox - and Anglo-Catholic - concept of Liturgy.
I can't help wondering if Papa Ratzinger is subconsciously sketching, with a few strokes of his pencil, what an Orthodox Latin West might look like - and how an Orthodox papacy might function. It is all very well to have ecumenical commissions; but nothing would promote the unity of the two lungs of Christendom more than for Orthodox to be able to look at the actual life of the Roman Magisterium ... and to feel an uncanny sense that they were to a degree looking into a mirror. Of course, in human terms the odds are that few here in the Latin West will really understand his project; that the liturgical and moral anarchists, the homosexual ideologues and the feminists, will continue their frenzied denigrations of the old Bavarian gentleman; that in a few years he will be dead and his vision forgotten as the vaticanologists feverishly speculate on the 'policies' of his successor. But, in my eyes, for as long as it lasts it is exhilarating; Benedict's Age is a good age in which to be alive, an age of the very truest instauratio catholica. And, just possibly ... who knows ... after all, there is a God ...
Concluded.
28 August 2010
Barberini, Sarto, and liturgical law (posted January 2010)
While looking through the library of the late and learned and very lamented Fr Michael Melrose, Successor Martyris as Vicar of S Giles, Reading, I spotted an unusual little volume (well, there were plenty of those: what a Library!): very slender, published in 1912, it gave the Psalter as rearranged by S Pius X. In other words, you didn't have to buy a new Breviary; you bought the Slender Volume and used it in conjunction with your old Breviary.
But you did have to make some such provision. The Decree Divino afflatu makes clear that if, after a certain date, you fail to fall in with the new order of things, you are not fulfilling your obligation to say the Divine Office. In this, it differs considerably from the decree Divinam Psalmodiam of Urban VIII (1631; it imposed the text of the hymns confected by the Pontiff and his fellow admirers of Horace in place of texts in the Latinity which had been good enough for the likes of Ambrose and Venantius Fortunatus). Urban's decree is full of fire-breathing menaces for anybody who shall print unamended texts after the decree, but allows books already printed to go to the booksellers ... and books in the bookshops to be sold ... and books in use to continue to be used. In other words, Urban was content to rely on a gradual process of books wearing out and being replaced.
S Pius V, as we all know, did not impose his revised texts on any Church which had its own local 'dialect' (the term is Fortescue's) of the Roman Rite which was more than 200 years old. But he did take a rather fierce line with those not in that position. In effect, the Bishop of Rome was saying, not unreasonably, that if you use the Roman Dialect of the Roman Rite, you shall use it in the form in which I have revised it. This, of course, was in the period of retrenchment when the Latin Church was on a war-footing against Protestant enemies who delighted to find corrupt or indefensible texts in popish service books. In the circumstances, it is rather remarkable that the Pope was prepared to tolerate local 'dialects' at all. It probably demonstrates that, despite all his centralising bubbles and froth, S Pius was not certain that he could afford to get embroiled with powerful local primacies which had their own entrenched usages.
It is my view that a rough but good rule of thumb as to whether a 'reform' is or is not 'organic' is the consideration: does it render all existing liturgical books totally obsolete after a certain date? When people defend the process of imposition under Paul VI of his new books by reminding us that changes not inconsiderable had been made before (as some fool in the Tablet did a couple of months ago), I don't think they realise the depth and rapidity of the Pauline rupture, compared with (undeniably real) earlier discontinuities.
And yet, curiously, although the Pauline decree Laudis Canticum was so explicit in displacing and suppressing the Breviary hitherto in use, Missale Romanum did not state that the Old Mass would be illegal after the New came into use. Was that an oversight? Did the canonists drafting it think that it was too obvious to need saying? I suspect so. But I presume that their funny little lapse was the ground upon which that Commission of Cardinal canonists decided by a majority vote that the Old Missal was not abrogated - a verdict finally published and confirmed in the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.
But you did have to make some such provision. The Decree Divino afflatu makes clear that if, after a certain date, you fail to fall in with the new order of things, you are not fulfilling your obligation to say the Divine Office. In this, it differs considerably from the decree Divinam Psalmodiam of Urban VIII (1631; it imposed the text of the hymns confected by the Pontiff and his fellow admirers of Horace in place of texts in the Latinity which had been good enough for the likes of Ambrose and Venantius Fortunatus). Urban's decree is full of fire-breathing menaces for anybody who shall print unamended texts after the decree, but allows books already printed to go to the booksellers ... and books in the bookshops to be sold ... and books in use to continue to be used. In other words, Urban was content to rely on a gradual process of books wearing out and being replaced.
S Pius V, as we all know, did not impose his revised texts on any Church which had its own local 'dialect' (the term is Fortescue's) of the Roman Rite which was more than 200 years old. But he did take a rather fierce line with those not in that position. In effect, the Bishop of Rome was saying, not unreasonably, that if you use the Roman Dialect of the Roman Rite, you shall use it in the form in which I have revised it. This, of course, was in the period of retrenchment when the Latin Church was on a war-footing against Protestant enemies who delighted to find corrupt or indefensible texts in popish service books. In the circumstances, it is rather remarkable that the Pope was prepared to tolerate local 'dialects' at all. It probably demonstrates that, despite all his centralising bubbles and froth, S Pius was not certain that he could afford to get embroiled with powerful local primacies which had their own entrenched usages.
It is my view that a rough but good rule of thumb as to whether a 'reform' is or is not 'organic' is the consideration: does it render all existing liturgical books totally obsolete after a certain date? When people defend the process of imposition under Paul VI of his new books by reminding us that changes not inconsiderable had been made before (as some fool in the Tablet did a couple of months ago), I don't think they realise the depth and rapidity of the Pauline rupture, compared with (undeniably real) earlier discontinuities.
And yet, curiously, although the Pauline decree Laudis Canticum was so explicit in displacing and suppressing the Breviary hitherto in use, Missale Romanum did not state that the Old Mass would be illegal after the New came into use. Was that an oversight? Did the canonists drafting it think that it was too obvious to need saying? I suspect so. But I presume that their funny little lapse was the ground upon which that Commission of Cardinal canonists decided by a majority vote that the Old Missal was not abrogated - a verdict finally published and confirmed in the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.
Ratzinger on Liturgical Law (4)
Continues.
In 1999 Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: "Rites ... are forms of the Apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places of the Tradition." ... He had in the same book previously observed that these places, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, all are "connected with Petrine traditions" ... it is not only in Rome that Peter speaks in the Paradosis. He goes on: "The liturgy cannot be compared to a piece of technical equipment, something manufactured, but to a plant, something organic that grows and whose laws of growth determine the possibilities of further development". Notice that he uses the term 'laws' in a way which has nothing whatsoever to do with enacted legislation. He is discerning principles of ecclesial life which go deeper than Canon Law. As Ratzinger continues, it seems to me that he shows a markedly limited enthusiasm for the intrusion into Liturgy, in the West, of the juridical authority of the papacy."The more vigorously the papacy was displayed, the more the question came up of about the extent and limits of this authority, which, of course, as such had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the consciousness of the West [observe his emphasis that he is speaking of Western phenomena]. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not 'manufactured' by the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity."
Ratzinger pauses briefly to say that "Here again, as in the questions of ikons and sacred music, we come up against the special path trod by the West." The significance of this is that, when he was dealing with those topics in his previous chapter, the cardinal was far from viewing East and West through equally benign spectacles. On the contrary, he gently chided the West for never having achieved a 'real reception' of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II. Here, as there, the balance of his sympathies appears to rest with what he understands to be the Eastern tradition. ("We come up against ..." is a significant phrase.) He admits a place for the more innovatory instincts of the West, but concludes: "it would lead to the breaking up of the foundations of Christian identity if the fundamental intuitions of the East, which are the fundamental intuitions of the early Church, were abandoned. The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition."[My italics.]
It seems to me that Cardinal Ratzinger's concerns are less with Canon Law than with an unwritten law inscribed in the very nature of the Church (the embodiment of authentic tradition), which trumps the law embodied in transient canonical codes and enactments. He is not concerned to join in the scrimmage of canonists as they examine their manuals and gather their precedents in order to discover exactly how a particular decree of Paul VI might or might not be glossed. What he is writing is Theology. His subject is the Spirit-filled life of the Catholic Church.
Continues
In 1999 Cardinal Ratzinger wrote: "Rites ... are forms of the Apostolic Tradition and of its unfolding in the great places of the Tradition." ... He had in the same book previously observed that these places, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, all are "connected with Petrine traditions" ... it is not only in Rome that Peter speaks in the Paradosis. He goes on: "The liturgy cannot be compared to a piece of technical equipment, something manufactured, but to a plant, something organic that grows and whose laws of growth determine the possibilities of further development". Notice that he uses the term 'laws' in a way which has nothing whatsoever to do with enacted legislation. He is discerning principles of ecclesial life which go deeper than Canon Law. As Ratzinger continues, it seems to me that he shows a markedly limited enthusiasm for the intrusion into Liturgy, in the West, of the juridical authority of the papacy."The more vigorously the papacy was displayed, the more the question came up of about the extent and limits of this authority, which, of course, as such had never been considered. After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded from the consciousness of the West [observe his emphasis that he is speaking of Western phenomena]. In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the revealed word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not 'manufactured' by the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its lawful development and abiding integrity and identity."
Ratzinger pauses briefly to say that "Here again, as in the questions of ikons and sacred music, we come up against the special path trod by the West." The significance of this is that, when he was dealing with those topics in his previous chapter, the cardinal was far from viewing East and West through equally benign spectacles. On the contrary, he gently chided the West for never having achieved a 'real reception' of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II. Here, as there, the balance of his sympathies appears to rest with what he understands to be the Eastern tradition. ("We come up against ..." is a significant phrase.) He admits a place for the more innovatory instincts of the West, but concludes: "it would lead to the breaking up of the foundations of Christian identity if the fundamental intuitions of the East, which are the fundamental intuitions of the early Church, were abandoned. The authority of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition."[My italics.]
It seems to me that Cardinal Ratzinger's concerns are less with Canon Law than with an unwritten law inscribed in the very nature of the Church (the embodiment of authentic tradition), which trumps the law embodied in transient canonical codes and enactments. He is not concerned to join in the scrimmage of canonists as they examine their manuals and gather their precedents in order to discover exactly how a particular decree of Paul VI might or might not be glossed. What he is writing is Theology. His subject is the Spirit-filled life of the Catholic Church.
Continues
Blackwells
I strolled into Blackwells the other day to get the diary for the next academic year; and thought I'd just check what was on show to earn money for publishers on the back of the late Mr Newman. Well, there are several glossies, of which the only one that appealed to me was one published by Gracewing and done by the sisters of the Way, who are the guardians of Littlemore. I commend it. I suggest that you think twice before buying any of the others. If you need confirmation of my commendation, I need only say that this little book has a preface by Dr Ker, the expert on Newman.
There appeared to be no copies of Dr Ker's own definitive biography of Newman. This is perfectly ridiculous. I made enquiries of an attendant,who assured me that copies were on the way. This shortage may be the result of masses of sensible people having bought up the last print. More probably, it results from incompetence somewhere in the book trade. Conceivably, there is a plot to move a lot of the glossies by sparing them competition. This is tragic. People are surely more likely to be buying Newman books in the weeks building up to the beatification than just after it, and Ker's book, as Chadwick observed, could well be the Newman book for several generations.
And Ker's book is perfectly brilliant; it received a rave review from Henry 'Patrimony' Chadwick. It has the gift of telling the story of Newman and of his thought largely in Newman's own words. By the way: it used to be available in paperback. I trust that there will not be some seedy plot to unload lots of much more expensive hardback copies on the reading public.
In the next month, as our satanic media gleefully spread misrepresentations galore about Newman, it will be most unfortunate if intelligent enquirers do not have access to the definitive Newman biography.
There appeared to be no copies of Dr Ker's own definitive biography of Newman. This is perfectly ridiculous. I made enquiries of an attendant,who assured me that copies were on the way. This shortage may be the result of masses of sensible people having bought up the last print. More probably, it results from incompetence somewhere in the book trade. Conceivably, there is a plot to move a lot of the glossies by sparing them competition. This is tragic. People are surely more likely to be buying Newman books in the weeks building up to the beatification than just after it, and Ker's book, as Chadwick observed, could well be the Newman book for several generations.
And Ker's book is perfectly brilliant; it received a rave review from Henry 'Patrimony' Chadwick. It has the gift of telling the story of Newman and of his thought largely in Newman's own words. By the way: it used to be available in paperback. I trust that there will not be some seedy plot to unload lots of much more expensive hardback copies on the reading public.
In the next month, as our satanic media gleefully spread misrepresentations galore about Newman, it will be most unfortunate if intelligent enquirers do not have access to the definitive Newman biography.
27 August 2010
Ratzinger on Liturgical Law (3)
Continues
Sometimes a parallel is suggested between S Pius V, revising the Roman Rite after and by mandate of the Council of Trent, and Paul VI, revising it after and by mandate of Vatican II. This is, I believe, a gross misunderstanding (i) of what S Pius was about, as he describes his own actions in Quo primum; and (ii) of the considerable differences between those two events.
S Pius has been seen as suppressing variant dialects of the Roman Rite - such as the English Sarum Rite - in the interests of a centralising uniformity. This analysis does not fit the facts. In the later sixteenth century, there was a fair amount of liturgical experimentation - and S Pius intends to suppress such innovations in the Eucharist (just as he suppressed Quignonez' 'novum Breviarium'). He does not intend to suppress established rites with a couple of centuries' history. Let us look at his words enforcing his new edition "... nisi ab ipsa prima institutione a Sede Apostolica adprobata, vel consuetudine, quae, vel ipsa institutio super ducentos annos missarum celebrandarum in eisdem ecclesiis assidue observata sit: a quibus, ut praefatam celebrandi constitutionem, vel consuetudinem nequaquam auferimus; so there ... just my point ... but he goes on sic, si Missale hoc ... magis placeret ..." and ah!, you cry, so - with a nudge and a wink - S Pius is encouraging churches with a 200 year prescription to change over to his new edition! But No! ... he goes on "de episcopi, vel praelati, Capitulique universi consensu ...". "Capituli universi consensu!" So, apparently, even just one bolshie traddie Canon on a Chapter could veto the desire of some episcopal johnnie-come-lately to introduce the Pian edition of the Missal into the diocese! What we have here is not a policy of universal standardisation by an autocrat, but the mandated preservation of the old and sanctified dialects of the Roman Rite combined with a firm suppression of recent faddery.
There is some interest in comparing the legislation of S Pius with what could happen elsewhere in the West. In one province, a metropolitan Archbishop, who had secured the support of the secular state and control of the technology of printing, decreed that "whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in the Churches within this realm: some following Salisbury Use, some Hereford Use, and some the Use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln; now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use". Thomas Cranmer had little thought of subjecting his abolition of ancient uses - which certainly had a prescription of more than two hundred years - to a veto even by a majority of a Cathedral Chapter. When the Chapter at S Paul's, London, adopted his new rite but attempted merely to graft onto it certain features of their previous customs, a peremptory order by the Privy Council put an end to the attempt. One wonders whether the legislation of Paul VI, as that is understood and interpreted by Glendinning and other canonists whom he adduces in his support, resembles much more closely the actions of the Tudor regime than it does the precedents set by S Pius.
Add to this, the process which S Pius employed to produce his new edition: the examination of old versions in the Vatican Library; the collection of other exemplars; a reading of old liturgical authors. His missal was "recognitum iam et castigatum". It was not, like the Missal of Paul VI, a rite marked on every single page with revolutionary innovations. Nobody denies that the 'Tridentine' Missal differs very little from earlier editions. Nobody claims that alterations were made in the Canon which had no basis in its textual history; that a dozen or so alternative 'Eucharistic Prayers' were added; or that the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels of every single Sunday were changed. Nobody can deny that all this is true of the Pauline Missal*.
One pope publishes a very light standardisation with a 98% unchanged text; another pope publishes a vastly different rite. I now address an ad hominem argument to those who believe that the two events match each other: if that earlier pope deemed it wrong that variant dialects of the Roman Rite (not so very different from the Rite he had edited) should lightly be set aside when they had a couple of centuries behind them, then, a fortiori, it would be incongruous for the later pope to think it right, or inevitable, that all the earlier dialects of the Roman Rite (representing, in their developed forms, something like a thousand years of history) should be set aside ... without even a mention that he was mandating such an unheard-of revolution.
I do not like some propaganda of the SSPX which appears to suggest that Quo primum made the Pian edition immutable. Certainly no future Pontiff deemed it immutable; they presided over its organic evolution. But the Pauline missal was not just one more light, slight, evolutionary revision of the Pian Missal. Those who most strongly argue that the Pian events and the Pauline events were parallel and congruous can hardly avoid the conclusion that Paul did not desire ... any more than Pius intended ... to consign the traditional forms of the Roman Rite to the rubbish dump.
I offer these thoughts as my meditation upon the words I quoted in my last post from Cardinal Ratzinger: that it is contrary to the Spirit of the Church to abolish the rites which have served the piety and lives of generations of Christians.
Continues, and gets more ecclesiological.
_________________________________________________________________
*Well, I suppose that in the Pauline Missal two or three Sundays after Epiphany somehow managed to keep their collects. And Palm Sunday.
Sometimes a parallel is suggested between S Pius V, revising the Roman Rite after and by mandate of the Council of Trent, and Paul VI, revising it after and by mandate of Vatican II. This is, I believe, a gross misunderstanding (i) of what S Pius was about, as he describes his own actions in Quo primum; and (ii) of the considerable differences between those two events.
S Pius has been seen as suppressing variant dialects of the Roman Rite - such as the English Sarum Rite - in the interests of a centralising uniformity. This analysis does not fit the facts. In the later sixteenth century, there was a fair amount of liturgical experimentation - and S Pius intends to suppress such innovations in the Eucharist (just as he suppressed Quignonez' 'novum Breviarium'). He does not intend to suppress established rites with a couple of centuries' history. Let us look at his words enforcing his new edition "... nisi ab ipsa prima institutione a Sede Apostolica adprobata, vel consuetudine, quae, vel ipsa institutio super ducentos annos missarum celebrandarum in eisdem ecclesiis assidue observata sit: a quibus, ut praefatam celebrandi constitutionem, vel consuetudinem nequaquam auferimus; so there ... just my point ... but he goes on sic, si Missale hoc ... magis placeret ..." and ah!, you cry, so - with a nudge and a wink - S Pius is encouraging churches with a 200 year prescription to change over to his new edition! But No! ... he goes on "de episcopi, vel praelati, Capitulique universi consensu ...". "Capituli universi consensu!" So, apparently, even just one bolshie traddie Canon on a Chapter could veto the desire of some episcopal johnnie-come-lately to introduce the Pian edition of the Missal into the diocese! What we have here is not a policy of universal standardisation by an autocrat, but the mandated preservation of the old and sanctified dialects of the Roman Rite combined with a firm suppression of recent faddery.
There is some interest in comparing the legislation of S Pius with what could happen elsewhere in the West. In one province, a metropolitan Archbishop, who had secured the support of the secular state and control of the technology of printing, decreed that "whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in the Churches within this realm: some following Salisbury Use, some Hereford Use, and some the Use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln; now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use". Thomas Cranmer had little thought of subjecting his abolition of ancient uses - which certainly had a prescription of more than two hundred years - to a veto even by a majority of a Cathedral Chapter. When the Chapter at S Paul's, London, adopted his new rite but attempted merely to graft onto it certain features of their previous customs, a peremptory order by the Privy Council put an end to the attempt. One wonders whether the legislation of Paul VI, as that is understood and interpreted by Glendinning and other canonists whom he adduces in his support, resembles much more closely the actions of the Tudor regime than it does the precedents set by S Pius.
Add to this, the process which S Pius employed to produce his new edition: the examination of old versions in the Vatican Library; the collection of other exemplars; a reading of old liturgical authors. His missal was "recognitum iam et castigatum". It was not, like the Missal of Paul VI, a rite marked on every single page with revolutionary innovations. Nobody denies that the 'Tridentine' Missal differs very little from earlier editions. Nobody claims that alterations were made in the Canon which had no basis in its textual history; that a dozen or so alternative 'Eucharistic Prayers' were added; or that the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels of every single Sunday were changed. Nobody can deny that all this is true of the Pauline Missal*.
One pope publishes a very light standardisation with a 98% unchanged text; another pope publishes a vastly different rite. I now address an ad hominem argument to those who believe that the two events match each other: if that earlier pope deemed it wrong that variant dialects of the Roman Rite (not so very different from the Rite he had edited) should lightly be set aside when they had a couple of centuries behind them, then, a fortiori, it would be incongruous for the later pope to think it right, or inevitable, that all the earlier dialects of the Roman Rite (representing, in their developed forms, something like a thousand years of history) should be set aside ... without even a mention that he was mandating such an unheard-of revolution.
I do not like some propaganda of the SSPX which appears to suggest that Quo primum made the Pian edition immutable. Certainly no future Pontiff deemed it immutable; they presided over its organic evolution. But the Pauline missal was not just one more light, slight, evolutionary revision of the Pian Missal. Those who most strongly argue that the Pian events and the Pauline events were parallel and congruous can hardly avoid the conclusion that Paul did not desire ... any more than Pius intended ... to consign the traditional forms of the Roman Rite to the rubbish dump.
I offer these thoughts as my meditation upon the words I quoted in my last post from Cardinal Ratzinger: that it is contrary to the Spirit of the Church to abolish the rites which have served the piety and lives of generations of Christians.
Continues, and gets more ecclesiological.
_________________________________________________________________
*Well, I suppose that in the Pauline Missal two or three Sundays after Epiphany somehow managed to keep their collects. And Palm Sunday.
Vatican II Reforms: Hymns REVISED VERSION OF POST
SC, in Article 93, mandated that "the hymns, as far as seems expedient, are to be restored to their original (pristinam) form, those things being removed or changed which have a flavour of mythology or offend Christian piety. Also, as may be opportune, other hymns should be received which are found in the treasury of hymns".
The first part of this reform was long overdue. Urban VIII had ordered the correction or even total rewriting of the Breviary hymns so as to make them fit the canons of Augustan, classical, Latin poetry. The restoration of the original texts was one of the unambiguously good results of a conciliar mandate. It has the result that, as far as English translations are concerned, those done by Tractarian Anglican Catholics, who were rendering the texts found in the Sarum and other medieval breviaries, are much closer to the texts now restored in the LH than are the translations done by nineteenth century Roman Catholics such as Fr Caswall - who felt obliged to translate the Barberini texts.
In 1968, Dom Anselmo Lentini published an interim set of "Hymni instaurandi Breviarii Romani". One can quibble about details; I think he rather overdid the Reception of Other Hymns, providing whole sets of alternative cycles (recovered, indeed, from traditional sources) to sit beside the old hymns. But I think a fair general verdict would be that he did as he had been told. For a couple of decades, as I said the Prayer Book Divine Office, I used the hymns in this interim collection, and was generally satisfied with it. In particular, it is attractive not to have to read at Mattins a hymn which is a duplication of one appointed elsewhere in the same festal office.
However, the increasing radicalisation of the 'reform' process had shown itself by the time LH was published in 1971. Most notably, a new composition had been provided for the Lauds of each apostle. I wonder if I am the only one to find that the hymns in the Commons, particularly for Pastors, are not of sufficient merit to stand their constant repetition.
But, generally, Lentini* provided the most scholarly and traditional element in the new Office Books, and one that should influence any new edition of the old Breviary.
________________________________________________________________
*Rubricarius, in his comment below, is quite right. He usually is. Sometimes to aid singability, texts were changed by the Lentini coetus. The worst example is Ad coenam agni providi, which in the original is extraordinarily jerky. Lentini smoothed it out line by line. A shame; I think the original rhythmic effects are intentional and poetic. A lesser example is in Venatius Fortunatus. "ferre pretium saeculi" is a syllable too many; it is revised to "ferre saecli pretium". But we should remember that Latin was still a vernacular for VF and he undoubtedly pronounced "pretium" as "pretsum". [Elsewhere, "oculi" is deemed to have an excessive syllable; but it was probably pronounced "ocyi"; compare modern Italian.]
My point was to "pass" a general verdict, and I think it would be unfair to pass a negative one. But of course, we none of us would have done this revision in exactly the same way.
__________________________________________________________________
The answer to Albertus' query is that Dom Lentini's chums, like Albertus, felt that ne polluantur corpora "excultis nostris moribus non opportuna est, unde expunctam velimus". In its place they brought in two stanzas from a sixth century hymn in the Regula Caesarii Christe, precamur, adnue. Lentini kept the opening stanza from Te lucis because, being an Eyetie, he deemed it "ab ipso Alagherio quodammodo consecratam". Personally, I'm not too certain about our age being ethically so much more sophisticated than earlier Christian centuries. My instinct would have been to offer both hymns in their uncorrupted integrity as options. But you don't need to explain to me the problems about "option" liturgy.
The first part of this reform was long overdue. Urban VIII had ordered the correction or even total rewriting of the Breviary hymns so as to make them fit the canons of Augustan, classical, Latin poetry. The restoration of the original texts was one of the unambiguously good results of a conciliar mandate. It has the result that, as far as English translations are concerned, those done by Tractarian Anglican Catholics, who were rendering the texts found in the Sarum and other medieval breviaries, are much closer to the texts now restored in the LH than are the translations done by nineteenth century Roman Catholics such as Fr Caswall - who felt obliged to translate the Barberini texts.
In 1968, Dom Anselmo Lentini published an interim set of "Hymni instaurandi Breviarii Romani". One can quibble about details; I think he rather overdid the Reception of Other Hymns, providing whole sets of alternative cycles (recovered, indeed, from traditional sources) to sit beside the old hymns. But I think a fair general verdict would be that he did as he had been told. For a couple of decades, as I said the Prayer Book Divine Office, I used the hymns in this interim collection, and was generally satisfied with it. In particular, it is attractive not to have to read at Mattins a hymn which is a duplication of one appointed elsewhere in the same festal office.
However, the increasing radicalisation of the 'reform' process had shown itself by the time LH was published in 1971. Most notably, a new composition had been provided for the Lauds of each apostle. I wonder if I am the only one to find that the hymns in the Commons, particularly for Pastors, are not of sufficient merit to stand their constant repetition.
But, generally, Lentini* provided the most scholarly and traditional element in the new Office Books, and one that should influence any new edition of the old Breviary.
________________________________________________________________
*Rubricarius, in his comment below, is quite right. He usually is. Sometimes to aid singability, texts were changed by the Lentini coetus. The worst example is Ad coenam agni providi, which in the original is extraordinarily jerky. Lentini smoothed it out line by line. A shame; I think the original rhythmic effects are intentional and poetic. A lesser example is in Venatius Fortunatus. "ferre pretium saeculi" is a syllable too many; it is revised to "ferre saecli pretium". But we should remember that Latin was still a vernacular for VF and he undoubtedly pronounced "pretium" as "pretsum". [Elsewhere, "oculi" is deemed to have an excessive syllable; but it was probably pronounced "ocyi"; compare modern Italian.]
My point was to "pass" a general verdict, and I think it would be unfair to pass a negative one. But of course, we none of us would have done this revision in exactly the same way.
__________________________________________________________________
The answer to Albertus' query is that Dom Lentini's chums, like Albertus, felt that ne polluantur corpora "excultis nostris moribus non opportuna est, unde expunctam velimus". In its place they brought in two stanzas from a sixth century hymn in the Regula Caesarii Christe, precamur, adnue. Lentini kept the opening stanza from Te lucis because, being an Eyetie, he deemed it "ab ipso Alagherio quodammodo consecratam". Personally, I'm not too certain about our age being ethically so much more sophisticated than earlier Christian centuries. My instinct would have been to offer both hymns in their uncorrupted integrity as options. But you don't need to explain to me the problems about "option" liturgy.
26 August 2010
Traditionalism is not necessarily "Right Wing"
I do not approve of any priest who gives up his priestly ministry; so I certainly do not approve of Bruce Kent. But in view of the Damian Thompson recent piece about Kent's views on Nuclear Deterrence, I have decided to repeat this piece (from the beginning of July). If any defenders of Thompson's have anywhere taken up my challenge in the penultimate paragraph below, I would be glad to be pointed to it.
That nasty excrescence of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, the Times of London, has published a vicious and contemptuous attack on Archbishop Rowan Williams' view that the doctrine and practice of nuclear deterrence are immoral.
Traditionalists easily sneer at Rowan. The Damian Thompson mentality finds it easy to deride him as a soppy liberal. Needless to say, I do not agree with many of Rowan Williams' views. But I urge traditionalist Catholics to think twice before jumping onto this particular bandwagon.
More than two decades ago, Germaine Grisez, John Finnis, and Joseph Boyle wrote their definitive treatment of the ethics of nuclear deterrence. The important thing to remember about this trio is that they are the ethical thinkers who, in our time, most consistently, coherently, and vigorously have defended the tradional Catholic teaching on sexual matters, 'Life' matters, and every aspect of traditional teaching which has been attacked by the modern secular establishment. These writers not only subscribe to the whole gamut of Catholic teaching, but delve deep into philosophy, law, and every kind of moral discourse, to sustain it in the fora of modern discussion. They are not just yet another trio of wet modern lefty liberals mascarading as Catholics. They are firmly on the side of traditional Christian morality in all its aspects and irrespective of whether it is found attractive by 'modern' thought.
These writers concluded that the concept of Nuclear deterrence is indissolubly linked with a real intention, in certain contingencies, actually to use nuclear weapons. And they demonstrated, in my view conclusively, that such a contingent intention stands condemned by the traditional doctrine of the Catholic tradition with regard to the Just War.
I do not suggest that these three writers are infallible; or that the infallible magisterium of the Church has formally uttered such a judgement.
But I do suggest that, before joining the bought, chattering, exponents of the Establishment view (neatly expressed in this contemptuously unargued Times leading article), traditionalists should first have read the Grisez/Finnis/Boyle book, and be able to explain to themselves ... and hoffentlich to others ... exactly where (in their view) its logical faults lie.
Traditional Catholic morality often finds more common cause with political views of the 'Right' than it does with those of the 'Left'. But I hope that we are rather more than just chaplains to the 'Right'.
The first fifteen comments date from the first showing of this piece.
That nasty excrescence of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, the Times of London, has published a vicious and contemptuous attack on Archbishop Rowan Williams' view that the doctrine and practice of nuclear deterrence are immoral.
Traditionalists easily sneer at Rowan. The Damian Thompson mentality finds it easy to deride him as a soppy liberal. Needless to say, I do not agree with many of Rowan Williams' views. But I urge traditionalist Catholics to think twice before jumping onto this particular bandwagon.
More than two decades ago, Germaine Grisez, John Finnis, and Joseph Boyle wrote their definitive treatment of the ethics of nuclear deterrence. The important thing to remember about this trio is that they are the ethical thinkers who, in our time, most consistently, coherently, and vigorously have defended the tradional Catholic teaching on sexual matters, 'Life' matters, and every aspect of traditional teaching which has been attacked by the modern secular establishment. These writers not only subscribe to the whole gamut of Catholic teaching, but delve deep into philosophy, law, and every kind of moral discourse, to sustain it in the fora of modern discussion. They are not just yet another trio of wet modern lefty liberals mascarading as Catholics. They are firmly on the side of traditional Christian morality in all its aspects and irrespective of whether it is found attractive by 'modern' thought.
These writers concluded that the concept of Nuclear deterrence is indissolubly linked with a real intention, in certain contingencies, actually to use nuclear weapons. And they demonstrated, in my view conclusively, that such a contingent intention stands condemned by the traditional doctrine of the Catholic tradition with regard to the Just War.
I do not suggest that these three writers are infallible; or that the infallible magisterium of the Church has formally uttered such a judgement.
But I do suggest that, before joining the bought, chattering, exponents of the Establishment view (neatly expressed in this contemptuously unargued Times leading article), traditionalists should first have read the Grisez/Finnis/Boyle book, and be able to explain to themselves ... and hoffentlich to others ... exactly where (in their view) its logical faults lie.
Traditional Catholic morality often finds more common cause with political views of the 'Right' than it does with those of the 'Left'. But I hope that we are rather more than just chaplains to the 'Right'.
The first fifteen comments date from the first showing of this piece.
Ratzinger on Liturgical Law (2)
Continues.
I believe that Cardinal Ratzinger, the first Anglo-Catholic Cardinal, pioneered a new approach to the concept of what is, liturgically, licit. It is an attitude which has strong links with the views of Anglican liturgists such as Dom Gregory Dix and Prebendary Michael Moreton, with the attitude to liturgical liceity which was held by the grat Anglo-Papalist priests such as Fynes-Clinton, Baverstock, Hole; and is ecclesiologically significant. It appears also to have links with Orthodox ecclesiology. Here are two passages which the cardinal wrote in 1998.
"Pius V ... decided to introduce the Missale Romanum, the Mass book of the Church of the City of Rome, as indubitably Catholic, in all places where it could not be demonstrated that the liturgy was of at least 200 years'a antiquity. In other cases the liturgy in use could be retained, since its Catholic character could be considered certain. There was therefore no question of forbidding the use of a traditional Missal which had been juridically valid until that time ... " " ... It is good here to recall what Cardinal Newman observed*, that the Church, throughout her history, has never abolished nor forbidden orthodox liturgical forms, which would be quite alien to the Spirit of the Church. An orthodox liturgy, that is to say, one which expresses the true faith, is never a compilation made according to the pragmatic criteria of different ceremonies, handled in a positivist and arbitrary way, one way today and another way tomorrow. The orthodox forms of a rite are living realities, born out of the dialect of love between the Church and her Lord. They are expressions of the life of the Church, in which are distilled the faith, the prayer, and the very life of past generations, and which make incarnate in specific forms both the action of God and the response of man. Such rites can die, if those who have used them in a particular era should disappear, or if the life-situation of those same people should change. The authority of the church had the power to define and limit the use of such rites in different historical situations, but she never just purely and simply forbids them!"
______________________________________________________
*Can anyone provide a reference to this?
All italics are mine.
Continues later with my comments on these texts.
I believe that Cardinal Ratzinger, the first Anglo-Catholic Cardinal, pioneered a new approach to the concept of what is, liturgically, licit. It is an attitude which has strong links with the views of Anglican liturgists such as Dom Gregory Dix and Prebendary Michael Moreton, with the attitude to liturgical liceity which was held by the grat Anglo-Papalist priests such as Fynes-Clinton, Baverstock, Hole; and is ecclesiologically significant. It appears also to have links with Orthodox ecclesiology. Here are two passages which the cardinal wrote in 1998.
"Pius V ... decided to introduce the Missale Romanum, the Mass book of the Church of the City of Rome, as indubitably Catholic, in all places where it could not be demonstrated that the liturgy was of at least 200 years'a antiquity. In other cases the liturgy in use could be retained, since its Catholic character could be considered certain. There was therefore no question of forbidding the use of a traditional Missal which had been juridically valid until that time ... " " ... It is good here to recall what Cardinal Newman observed*, that the Church, throughout her history, has never abolished nor forbidden orthodox liturgical forms, which would be quite alien to the Spirit of the Church. An orthodox liturgy, that is to say, one which expresses the true faith, is never a compilation made according to the pragmatic criteria of different ceremonies, handled in a positivist and arbitrary way, one way today and another way tomorrow. The orthodox forms of a rite are living realities, born out of the dialect of love between the Church and her Lord. They are expressions of the life of the Church, in which are distilled the faith, the prayer, and the very life of past generations, and which make incarnate in specific forms both the action of God and the response of man. Such rites can die, if those who have used them in a particular era should disappear, or if the life-situation of those same people should change. The authority of the church had the power to define and limit the use of such rites in different historical situations, but she never just purely and simply forbids them!"
______________________________________________________
*Can anyone provide a reference to this?
All italics are mine.
Continues later with my comments on these texts.
25 August 2010
Vatican II reforms: Collects
I have been unable to find any conciliar mandate for the post conciliar treatment of the body of Collects; treatment, in one significant respect (Sundays), decidedly more ruthless than what a Zwinglian Reformer, Thomas Cranmer, did at the height of the English Reformation.
Sunday collects. The collects for the Sundays of Advent, Lent, and Eastertide were, almost to a man, replaced. What this means is that the old prayers were deemed inadequately to express the indoles of the respective seasons. Academic studies have revealed the hidden ideological basis of this revolution (often a sort of practical Pelagianism). There is a considerable danger in such radicalism. The true mystagogue - such as Gueranger - derives his mystagogy from his studies in the euchology which eighteen centuries have handed down. He does not form his views on a priori grounds, and then take a pair of scissors to the Tradition.
As far as concerns the collects for the 'green' Sundays, 17 of the 34 are new importations.
Festival collects. The new books reveal a massive campaign to rewrite the collects for festivals of the Lord and of his Saints. This has had a particularly vicious effect as far as the survival of the older collects in the previous books are concerned. Those older collects, many of them in continual use since the days of the early sacramentaries, were commonly terse formulae whose main purpose was a desire to secure a share in the intercessions of the glorified servants of God, especially the martyrs. In the Middle Ages, a different style of collect became dominant; one can analyse it as providing God with a biographical summary of the saint concerned, followed by a request that the worshippers might receive congruent graces. (The collects written by Cranmer for those saints who retained propers were all to this formula.) The post conciliar reformers were wholly committed to this medieval style. My own feeling is that the body of collects, on the eve of Vatican II, found its main strength in its variety. As the days moved on, one went from a Leonine or Gregorian form to a Carolingian and then to a Franciscan composition, and then to a product of the Baroque counter reformation. I see this pluriformity as healthy; it prevents the Church from being imprisoned in one euchological register. Which is what the post conciliar books give us; so that, now, all our eggs are in the basket of one particular style. I feel certain that this style will, in a couple of generations, prove to have dated considerably. Perhaps there was a case for replacing some of the more plodding of the old collects; I am not a fundamentalist -
- but Vatican II gave nobody any mandate even to do that much.
Sunday collects. The collects for the Sundays of Advent, Lent, and Eastertide were, almost to a man, replaced. What this means is that the old prayers were deemed inadequately to express the indoles of the respective seasons. Academic studies have revealed the hidden ideological basis of this revolution (often a sort of practical Pelagianism). There is a considerable danger in such radicalism. The true mystagogue - such as Gueranger - derives his mystagogy from his studies in the euchology which eighteen centuries have handed down. He does not form his views on a priori grounds, and then take a pair of scissors to the Tradition.
As far as concerns the collects for the 'green' Sundays, 17 of the 34 are new importations.
Festival collects. The new books reveal a massive campaign to rewrite the collects for festivals of the Lord and of his Saints. This has had a particularly vicious effect as far as the survival of the older collects in the previous books are concerned. Those older collects, many of them in continual use since the days of the early sacramentaries, were commonly terse formulae whose main purpose was a desire to secure a share in the intercessions of the glorified servants of God, especially the martyrs. In the Middle Ages, a different style of collect became dominant; one can analyse it as providing God with a biographical summary of the saint concerned, followed by a request that the worshippers might receive congruent graces. (The collects written by Cranmer for those saints who retained propers were all to this formula.) The post conciliar reformers were wholly committed to this medieval style. My own feeling is that the body of collects, on the eve of Vatican II, found its main strength in its variety. As the days moved on, one went from a Leonine or Gregorian form to a Carolingian and then to a Franciscan composition, and then to a product of the Baroque counter reformation. I see this pluriformity as healthy; it prevents the Church from being imprisoned in one euchological register. Which is what the post conciliar books give us; so that, now, all our eggs are in the basket of one particular style. I feel certain that this style will, in a couple of generations, prove to have dated considerably. Perhaps there was a case for replacing some of the more plodding of the old collects; I am not a fundamentalist -
- but Vatican II gave nobody any mandate even to do that much.
Ratzinger on Liturgical Law (1)
A valued and learned friend has copied to me a paper in the January 2011 number of Worship, by a North American canonist called Chad Glendinning. Because I believe that (a) it summarises lucidly and usefully the current state of opinion among experts about the subject with which it deals; and that (b) its conclusions completely misunderstand that same subject, I plan ... most unwisely, because I know nothing about Canon Law ... to deal with it in some detail. Needless to say, you are welcome to comment immediately, but this series of pieces is intended to stand as a whole and you might find yourself either making a comment which anticipates my future argument, or writing exactly what I shall rebut in the next piece. No harm, of course ...
The subject concerned is the statement in Summorum Pontificum that the traditional Roman Mass had never been lawfully abrogated. The problem about this is that the praxis of the Roman Curia since the promulgation of the Pauline Missal* appeared to have been based on an assumption of abrogation of the preceding rite. And Cardinal Ratzinger himself had once spoken with regret about that 'abrogation' ... and you can't regret something which has not been done.
Mind you, I have always felt, and have written in this blog about the fact that, there was an oddity about the failure of the Pauline Decree explicitly to abrogate the earlier Missal in view of the very clear abrogation in the corresponding document about the Breviary (and Summorum Pontificum did not claim that the old Breviary "had never been abrogated"). But I propose to accept, for the sake of argument, Gendinning's demonstration that supersession implies abrogation. Nor do I intend to write about the Commission of canonist Cardinals which is said to have delivered, some years ago, an opinion that the Old Missal had never been abrogated - although I would welcome information at this moment on the thread about this matter.
My intention is to examine the earlier teaching of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the post-Conciliar events and to suggest that his judgement as Pope upon the non-abrogation of the Old Missal is a theological statement as important as, and indeed very closely related to, his teaching in his justly celebrated Address to the Roman Curia about a Hermeneutic of Continuity. Unlike Glendinning and the canonists he quotes, I see Papa Ratzinger's pronouncement in this matter as another sign of his very considerable greatness. And as an ecumenical step of very profound significance.
Continues.
________________________________________________________________
*Glendinning points out the oddity of Paul VI (followed by John Paul II) promulgating a rite which had, at the point of promulgation, not quite been written.
The subject concerned is the statement in Summorum Pontificum that the traditional Roman Mass had never been lawfully abrogated. The problem about this is that the praxis of the Roman Curia since the promulgation of the Pauline Missal* appeared to have been based on an assumption of abrogation of the preceding rite. And Cardinal Ratzinger himself had once spoken with regret about that 'abrogation' ... and you can't regret something which has not been done.
Mind you, I have always felt, and have written in this blog about the fact that, there was an oddity about the failure of the Pauline Decree explicitly to abrogate the earlier Missal in view of the very clear abrogation in the corresponding document about the Breviary (and Summorum Pontificum did not claim that the old Breviary "had never been abrogated"). But I propose to accept, for the sake of argument, Gendinning's demonstration that supersession implies abrogation. Nor do I intend to write about the Commission of canonist Cardinals which is said to have delivered, some years ago, an opinion that the Old Missal had never been abrogated - although I would welcome information at this moment on the thread about this matter.
My intention is to examine the earlier teaching of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the post-Conciliar events and to suggest that his judgement as Pope upon the non-abrogation of the Old Missal is a theological statement as important as, and indeed very closely related to, his teaching in his justly celebrated Address to the Roman Curia about a Hermeneutic of Continuity. Unlike Glendinning and the canonists he quotes, I see Papa Ratzinger's pronouncement in this matter as another sign of his very considerable greatness. And as an ecumenical step of very profound significance.
Continues.
________________________________________________________________
*Glendinning points out the oddity of Paul VI (followed by John Paul II) promulgating a rite which had, at the point of promulgation, not quite been written.
24 August 2010
Mixed News ends
I always felt that there was something very bizarre about what is sometimes known as Kentish Town Liturgy, spread throughout England - and further - by the charismatic figure of Fr Graeme Rowlands of S Silas's: Baroquery, lace, birettas, as far as the eye can see; combined with those dreadful old, horribly unbaroque, ICEL texts. I suspect most 'Kentish Town' -style Churches will remain in the Church of England for a variety of reasons which I will probably delete from the thread if readers start amusing themselves too much with the topic. It will be interesting to see whether they stick with Old ICEL or go for 2010. The problem in many Anglican churches will be that Common Worship and Old ICEL could be fitted very well together, so seamlessly that congregations were bamboozled as to whether the service the Vicar was doing was Anglican or Roman. Now these poor dears will have to decide whether to stick with And also with you, or to stick their necks out with And with your Spirit. What they do will be interestingly indicative of their ecclesiology. Fun days lie ahead.
And the Bad News about 2010? Someone has done some nastinesses in 2010, rather reminiscent of the little corners of S Thomas's churchyard where the druggies have been. It is that bit less in accordance with the admirable prescriptions of Liturgiam authenticam than was 2008. Are we to presume that these are concessions to the Trautmanntendenz? I will pick ou just one: in the Memento, "vota sua" is translated as "homage". How this can be considered either an appropriate rendering of the Latin, or as in accordance with the rituals of modern culture? Homage is something that exists nowadays in the feudal customs which have survived in the English Coronation Service (and are probably eliminated even from that in the highly secret revision of it which has been produced for use with the Defender of All the Faiths). It is suggestive neither of the world of the fourth century sacramentaries nor of that of with-it Trautmannesque Americans who can't say "ineffaffable". Why on earth ...
I wonder exactly who was involved in the final tweaking of 2010 (except, of course, that it might not be final; an even more Binding and Definitive version may appear). But historians should be informed of the fool's name.
And finally: Christ has died ... has disappeared. Or I hope so. There couldn't be a risk of it surviving in some sort of Local Appendix, could there? Though mind you, I always use it at S Thomas's. My reason is a trifle eccentric: I profoundly dislike those 'Affirmations'; but to change them or vary them seems to me to draw attention to them. So I have stuck with what I inherited here, deeming it a formula that the congregation can say on autopilot and without thinking about it. Any ideas ...
And the Bad News about 2010? Someone has done some nastinesses in 2010, rather reminiscent of the little corners of S Thomas's churchyard where the druggies have been. It is that bit less in accordance with the admirable prescriptions of Liturgiam authenticam than was 2008. Are we to presume that these are concessions to the Trautmanntendenz? I will pick ou just one: in the Memento, "vota sua" is translated as "homage". How this can be considered either an appropriate rendering of the Latin, or as in accordance with the rituals of modern culture? Homage is something that exists nowadays in the feudal customs which have survived in the English Coronation Service (and are probably eliminated even from that in the highly secret revision of it which has been produced for use with the Defender of All the Faiths). It is suggestive neither of the world of the fourth century sacramentaries nor of that of with-it Trautmannesque Americans who can't say "ineffaffable". Why on earth ...
I wonder exactly who was involved in the final tweaking of 2010 (except, of course, that it might not be final; an even more Binding and Definitive version may appear). But historians should be informed of the fool's name.
And finally: Christ has died ... has disappeared. Or I hope so. There couldn't be a risk of it surviving in some sort of Local Appendix, could there? Though mind you, I always use it at S Thomas's. My reason is a trifle eccentric: I profoundly dislike those 'Affirmations'; but to change them or vary them seems to me to draw attention to them. So I have stuck with what I inherited here, deeming it a formula that the congregation can say on autopilot and without thinking about it. Any ideas ...
23 August 2010
Homage
Is it really impossible to get a reconsideration on Una Voce of the ludicrous decision to translate vota sua (in the Memento) as homage? Couldn't those better placed than me get some sort of roll going on this? This translation could be in use for several generations.
Query
If I were about to be ordained to the Diaconate, which I am not, and my Latin were rusty, which it isn't, where would I find on the Internet ... or any(accessible)where else ... an English translation of either the Tridentine rite for Diaconal Ordination; or of the rite in the Bugnini Pontifical; so that I could use it/them on my Ordination Retreat?
Invalidity
Fr Zed gives a splendid example of the phenomenon that some readers have criticised me for describing: the very strong tendency to call the Sacraments of those we disagree with "invalid" without any awareness of how difficult it is, according to the formal teaching of the Latin church, for sacraments to be invalid.
A writer had been assured by a RC priest that someone baptised in the SSPX would have to be conditionally rebaptised.
What nonsense. More: illiterate nonsense. That priest clearly had no satisfactory seminary training on the question of sacramental validity. Rather like the Vatican Press office when it declared that Archbishop Milingo's ordinations were invalid.
A writer had been assured by a RC priest that someone baptised in the SSPX would have to be conditionally rebaptised.
What nonsense. More: illiterate nonsense. That priest clearly had no satisfactory seminary training on the question of sacramental validity. Rather like the Vatican Press office when it declared that Archbishop Milingo's ordinations were invalid.
Mixed news ...
... from the American RC Bishops. The 2008 English translation of the Ordo Missae has now been published in a definitive version, which we can call 2010.
Mind you, the 2008 version was pretty definitive too, or, as Cardinal Arinze put it, "is to be considered binding". Non-RCs sometimes need to be reminded that when Rome says that something is Definitive and Binding, it only means that this is where we are until something even more Definitive and Binding is issued. I often wonder what legal jiggery pokery has to go on behind the scenes: for example, JP2 signed the Third Typical Edition of the Latin Missal; the Instructio generalis from it was published as a separate booklet; but then, when the printed version of the Missal appeared, it had been extensively changed (the directions for saying a Novus Ordo private Mass were completely rewritten). And the recent 'reprint' of that Missal contains, not just a correction of misprints, of which there are indeed several hundred; but substantive alterations.
I will give you the Good News first. The 2008 version has not been 'improved' (forgive the Anglican terminology) too much. It's main lines remain intact. Anglicans will give it a mixed reception. Those of us who, devoted admirers of Christine Mohrmann, believed in the importance of a specifically sacral dialect and accordingly valued the liturgical dialect associated with the name of Cranmer, will be moderately delighted. There are some actual Cranmerisms: notably, the use of "Hosts" to render "Sabaoth" in the Sanctus. But the main joy is that, since when Cranmer was translating canticles he did it quite literally, and since 2010 is also quite literal, the two versions (except that 2010 eschews thou/thee English) are often very similar, both in wording and rhythms. Thus 2010 will seem very unstrange to those brought up on the Prayer Book or its idiom.
Anglican Catholics, however, who out of slavish imitation of English Roman Catholicism adopted the old ICEL texts, will, like Anglophone RCs, have a great deal of rehabituation to do. And a category of Anglicans who will be chewing glass will be the Bubbles Stancliffes, who were dotty about the idea of common translations being used across the Anglophone ecumenical scene. They saw to it that the ICEL renderings were incorporated into Common Worship, and they even tried to be sexily ahead of the Roman game by incorporating formulae from the abortive ICEL version of the 1990s. That whole game is now definitively (er) over. It marked a particular ecumenical phase which is now also over. If the Stancliffes are irritated that it is over, let them ask themselves who killed it.
Concludes soon.
Mind you, the 2008 version was pretty definitive too, or, as Cardinal Arinze put it, "is to be considered binding". Non-RCs sometimes need to be reminded that when Rome says that something is Definitive and Binding, it only means that this is where we are until something even more Definitive and Binding is issued. I often wonder what legal jiggery pokery has to go on behind the scenes: for example, JP2 signed the Third Typical Edition of the Latin Missal; the Instructio generalis from it was published as a separate booklet; but then, when the printed version of the Missal appeared, it had been extensively changed (the directions for saying a Novus Ordo private Mass were completely rewritten). And the recent 'reprint' of that Missal contains, not just a correction of misprints, of which there are indeed several hundred; but substantive alterations.
I will give you the Good News first. The 2008 version has not been 'improved' (forgive the Anglican terminology) too much. It's main lines remain intact. Anglicans will give it a mixed reception. Those of us who, devoted admirers of Christine Mohrmann, believed in the importance of a specifically sacral dialect and accordingly valued the liturgical dialect associated with the name of Cranmer, will be moderately delighted. There are some actual Cranmerisms: notably, the use of "Hosts" to render "Sabaoth" in the Sanctus. But the main joy is that, since when Cranmer was translating canticles he did it quite literally, and since 2010 is also quite literal, the two versions (except that 2010 eschews thou/thee English) are often very similar, both in wording and rhythms. Thus 2010 will seem very unstrange to those brought up on the Prayer Book or its idiom.
Anglican Catholics, however, who out of slavish imitation of English Roman Catholicism adopted the old ICEL texts, will, like Anglophone RCs, have a great deal of rehabituation to do. And a category of Anglicans who will be chewing glass will be the Bubbles Stancliffes, who were dotty about the idea of common translations being used across the Anglophone ecumenical scene. They saw to it that the ICEL renderings were incorporated into Common Worship, and they even tried to be sexily ahead of the Roman game by incorporating formulae from the abortive ICEL version of the 1990s. That whole game is now definitively (er) over. It marked a particular ecumenical phase which is now also over. If the Stancliffes are irritated that it is over, let them ask themselves who killed it.
Concludes soon.
22 August 2010
Gardening Leave and the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Many of the very best bishops go from time to time on Gardening Leave. Not that Bishop Williamson of SSPX, who is on Gardening Leave, is one of the Best Bishops. His Blog ... always readable (I liked his coinage 'televideots') ... is usually dotty. But it now reports a rumour that SSPX is being offered the option of subscribing to the Catechism rather than to the corpus of Vatican II.
Now where have I heard of that mechanism before?
I wonder why he did visit America recently? Possibly to check out how the Anglican Use parishes operate?
Is it true that he is to be Chairman of the new Gardening Bishops' Club?
Now where have I heard of that mechanism before?
I wonder why he did visit America recently? Possibly to check out how the Anglican Use parishes operate?
Is it true that he is to be Chairman of the new Gardening Bishops' Club?
KYRIA KAI DESPOZOUSA
... the Virgin is Lady according to her worthiness, as being Mistress of all, since it was in virginity that she conceives and divinely gives birth to the One who by nature is Master of All. And of course she is still Lady as not only free from slavery, and possessed of divine lordship, but also as fount and root of the freedom of the race, and especially after the ineffable and joyful childbearing; for the woman who is yoked to a man is lorded rather than lady, and especially after after her sorrowful and painful childbearing according to the curse made against Eve ... the Virginmother, freeing the human race from this curse, receives joy and blessing from the angel; for he comes in and says: 'Hail Graced One, the Lord is with you, you are blessed among women'. The archangel is not proclaiming the future in saying 'The Lord is with you', but announcing what unseeing he sees at this very moment fulfilled. And knowing her to be the place of divine and human charisms, and adorned with all the charisms of the divine Spirit, truly he proclaims her Graced.
Another snatch for you from the great and untranslatable hesychast father S Gregory Palamas. Sometimes I fantasise about the day when Rome feels able to add him to her calendar and to proclaim him a Doctor of the Church.
By the way, today, Octave Day of the Assumption, is regarded by Dom Gueranger as quintessentially the day when we think of the Mother of God as Queen; among other quotations from the great masters of Christian spirituality, he gives us the passage from S Bernardine of Sienna which so enrages Marian minimalists: that even God obeys Mary. The Bugnini placing of the Maria Regina on this day makes more obvious sense than the (Pius XII) Feast of her Immaculate Heart.
Today one of England's greatest bishops, John Grandisson of Exeter, chose to be enthroned and to order our Lady's Octave to be kept henceforth for ever as a feast of the highest rank. And, even though it was not the day of his death, he disposed that tomorrow be kept as his obit. I am sure that all right-thinking clerics will wish to remember him at Mass tomorrow. If I may return to the subject of a recent post, the status of intermediate primacies: Grandisson was a Sound Bloke. Friend and protege of John XXII, he reacted to the threat of a Metropolitan Visitation by having the Archbishop of Canterbury repelled by armed force. A veritable Patrimony Man.
Another snatch for you from the great and untranslatable hesychast father S Gregory Palamas. Sometimes I fantasise about the day when Rome feels able to add him to her calendar and to proclaim him a Doctor of the Church.
By the way, today, Octave Day of the Assumption, is regarded by Dom Gueranger as quintessentially the day when we think of the Mother of God as Queen; among other quotations from the great masters of Christian spirituality, he gives us the passage from S Bernardine of Sienna which so enrages Marian minimalists: that even God obeys Mary. The Bugnini placing of the Maria Regina on this day makes more obvious sense than the (Pius XII) Feast of her Immaculate Heart.
Today one of England's greatest bishops, John Grandisson of Exeter, chose to be enthroned and to order our Lady's Octave to be kept henceforth for ever as a feast of the highest rank. And, even though it was not the day of his death, he disposed that tomorrow be kept as his obit. I am sure that all right-thinking clerics will wish to remember him at Mass tomorrow. If I may return to the subject of a recent post, the status of intermediate primacies: Grandisson was a Sound Bloke. Friend and protege of John XXII, he reacted to the threat of a Metropolitan Visitation by having the Archbishop of Canterbury repelled by armed force. A veritable Patrimony Man.
21 August 2010
My opinion on Apostolicae curae
I welcome the bull for various reasons. It represented a crucial stage in the acceptance by the Roman Magisterium that the Imposition of Hands is the sole Matter of the Sacrament of Order. It was a reaffirmation of the principle that Schism does not, on its own, invalidate orders. It reaffirmed that heresy in itself did not eliminate an adequate intention (it saw the problem as lying in the fact that heresy had led to the substitution of an inadequate Form). Incidentally, judging from a recent post, Fr Zed is unaware of this basic principle of Western sacramental theology: although he thinks that things have not yet become that bad, it is in his view possible that defective episcopal orthodoxy might invalidate orders. And Apostolicae curae, by its very silence, implied the reformability of a pontifical document as solemn as the Decree of Eugene IV for the Armenians ... and thereby logically implied its own reformability. It was a useful slapdown for our Anglican arrogance. And, by that word disciplinae, it limited its own doctrinal scope.
In the last resort, however, I contextualise its celebrated conclusion theologically and historically thus:
(1) It is an echo of the old gut feeling that the people-I-don't-like-have-invalid-Orders. Its juridical foundation was a decision of the Holy Office, which in the seventeenth century had declared null the Orders of a Scottish bishop (whose consecration is now thought not to have been by the Church of England's Ordinal). And the Holy Office, like British courts, is bound by its own precedents. The participation of Dutch Tutchers I regard as adequate to settle any doubts there may be; the hoards of Roman theologians who thought that Accipe Spiritum Sanctum is an adequate Form of Consecration satisfy me. The action of the Church of England in getting the Tutch I regard as a solemn, significant and meaningful ecclesial act, and in this context I regard the reality of the diffusion of the Tutch as morally certain.
(2) It is an ultra-rigorist application of the principle that, in the matter of valid orders, it is important to be certain beyond any possibility of cavil. This principle is indeed far superior to Anglican habit of being lackadaisical ... and then going all Hurt and Wounded when other people don't feel so sure that what you've done is right. But ultra-rigorism can be taken too far. There are plausible stories about scrupulous RC bishops in the old days who reordained all their neopresbyteri in the sacristy immediately after the ordination as a matter of course, just to be absolutely sure that there could be no possibility of a fatal slip having occurred (I wonder if it ever occurred to them that if perchance their own ordination had been technically vitiated, this would not be much use). I don't really believe that God is quite the sort of God which this scrupulosity implies. And Rome itself is less categorical now about invalidity than it used to be; what would Leo XIII's generation have said if asked to judge upon the adequacy of a Eucharistic Prayer (Addai and Mari) which lacked an Institution Narrative? And this is in effect a return to a slightly less regimented Roman praxis: in the 1860s, the Holy Office declared that Abyssinian priests were to be regarded as validly ordained, notwithstanding the fact that the Abyssinian rite of priestly ordination, as found in their books, "in praxi paene abolitum est, neque alio modo presbyteros ordinari quam per impositionem manuum cum his verbis dumtaxat, Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, quae in libris non inveniuntur ...". One recalls Newman's discovery, when he arrived in Rome in 1846, "various persons there in the belief that [Anglican Orders] were valid, and none, I think, clear that they were not".
I am not insensitive to the rhetoric about how the Anglican rites were stripped of sacrificial language in the sixteenth century (nevertheless, Catholic praxis accepts the validity of Baptism by ecclesial bodies which have stripped the liturgy of Baptism of any mention of Regeneration). And I am more amused than I probably should be to find that some integralists, especially among sedevacantists, use precisely Dr Messenger's and Leo XIII's argument to argue for the invalidity of the Orders of the post-conciliar Church (even within SSPX, the argument is heard that some postconciliar Orders may because of dodgy intention be invalid; that each case should be considered individually). Plausibly; for the Sarum formulae mentioning sacrifice, which Dr Messenger and others so pedantically listed as having been eliminated by Cranmer, are pretty well the elements eliminated also by Bugnini. Who, while he kept the Porrection of the Instruments, provided it with a new formula which most certainly would not have been regarded as an adequate Form by those earlier writers who thought of this rite as the essential part of the Ordination. Perhaps Anglicans, in order to feel totally confident of their Orders, should ask to be reordained according to the Tridentine Pontifical and by a bishop who was consecrated with that Pontifical.
No; only joking. But it would be a nice experience. Is Mgr Rifan due to be in England soon?
One more.
In the last resort, however, I contextualise its celebrated conclusion theologically and historically thus:
(1) It is an echo of the old gut feeling that the people-I-don't-like-have-invalid-Orders. Its juridical foundation was a decision of the Holy Office, which in the seventeenth century had declared null the Orders of a Scottish bishop (whose consecration is now thought not to have been by the Church of England's Ordinal). And the Holy Office, like British courts, is bound by its own precedents. The participation of Dutch Tutchers I regard as adequate to settle any doubts there may be; the hoards of Roman theologians who thought that Accipe Spiritum Sanctum is an adequate Form of Consecration satisfy me. The action of the Church of England in getting the Tutch I regard as a solemn, significant and meaningful ecclesial act, and in this context I regard the reality of the diffusion of the Tutch as morally certain.
(2) It is an ultra-rigorist application of the principle that, in the matter of valid orders, it is important to be certain beyond any possibility of cavil. This principle is indeed far superior to Anglican habit of being lackadaisical ... and then going all Hurt and Wounded when other people don't feel so sure that what you've done is right. But ultra-rigorism can be taken too far. There are plausible stories about scrupulous RC bishops in the old days who reordained all their neopresbyteri in the sacristy immediately after the ordination as a matter of course, just to be absolutely sure that there could be no possibility of a fatal slip having occurred (I wonder if it ever occurred to them that if perchance their own ordination had been technically vitiated, this would not be much use). I don't really believe that God is quite the sort of God which this scrupulosity implies. And Rome itself is less categorical now about invalidity than it used to be; what would Leo XIII's generation have said if asked to judge upon the adequacy of a Eucharistic Prayer (Addai and Mari) which lacked an Institution Narrative? And this is in effect a return to a slightly less regimented Roman praxis: in the 1860s, the Holy Office declared that Abyssinian priests were to be regarded as validly ordained, notwithstanding the fact that the Abyssinian rite of priestly ordination, as found in their books, "in praxi paene abolitum est, neque alio modo presbyteros ordinari quam per impositionem manuum cum his verbis dumtaxat, Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, quae in libris non inveniuntur ...". One recalls Newman's discovery, when he arrived in Rome in 1846, "various persons there in the belief that [Anglican Orders] were valid, and none, I think, clear that they were not".
I am not insensitive to the rhetoric about how the Anglican rites were stripped of sacrificial language in the sixteenth century (nevertheless, Catholic praxis accepts the validity of Baptism by ecclesial bodies which have stripped the liturgy of Baptism of any mention of Regeneration). And I am more amused than I probably should be to find that some integralists, especially among sedevacantists, use precisely Dr Messenger's and Leo XIII's argument to argue for the invalidity of the Orders of the post-conciliar Church (even within SSPX, the argument is heard that some postconciliar Orders may because of dodgy intention be invalid; that each case should be considered individually). Plausibly; for the Sarum formulae mentioning sacrifice, which Dr Messenger and others so pedantically listed as having been eliminated by Cranmer, are pretty well the elements eliminated also by Bugnini. Who, while he kept the Porrection of the Instruments, provided it with a new formula which most certainly would not have been regarded as an adequate Form by those earlier writers who thought of this rite as the essential part of the Ordination. Perhaps Anglicans, in order to feel totally confident of their Orders, should ask to be reordained according to the Tridentine Pontifical and by a bishop who was consecrated with that Pontifical.
No; only joking. But it would be a nice experience. Is Mgr Rifan due to be in England soon?
One more.
20 August 2010
Query
Some time ago, the C Prefect of CDW said that he had asked the HF to authorise a Feast of OLJC Priest for the Thursday in the Pentecost Octave.
Has anybody heard any more about this?
Has anybody heard any more about this?
Vatican II Reforms: Calendar
Recently I reread Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC), with the hope of seeing how many of the innovations in the Divine Office are, indeed, the result of the Conciliar Mandate. I was mindful of the front page of LH (Liturgia Horarum): "officium divinum ex decreto sacrosancti oecumenici concilii vaticani II instauratum". I accordingly begin an occasional series; in what follows, I may have missed some conciliar implications, and would be grateful to have these pointed out to me.
CALENDAR
SC undoubtedly mandates a revision of the rubrics concerning the dominance of the Sunday Office, and of the Christian Seasons, over the Sanctorale. It also encourages a reconsideration of the saints who are to be commended to the Universal Church, and of those deemed to have historical problems associated with them. I do not, however, discern a mandate for the wholesale disruption of the days upon which saints are observed, except in as far as the Council could be said to give support for diminishing the numbers observed during Lent and Advent. As I work through the year, I am surprised - sometimes day after day - by the large numbers who have been shifted a day or two this way or a day or two that way. One notices this particularly when, in the same church, both the older and newer calendars are in use.
I have not discovered any mandate whatsoever in the Conciliar documents for the major changes subsequently made in the Christian Year. The abolition of the Gesimas; the revolutionary transformation of Eastertide, summarised in the change in the titles of its Sundays, so that the intense spirituality of the Easter Octave is now expected to persist for fifty days; the abolition of the Octave of Pentecost: for all these I cannot see even a whisker of a hint in SC. That there is none is suggested by the Commentary published with the revised Calendar in 1969; for example, dealing with the abolition of the Pentecost Octave, the explanation concludes " ... ita ut a multis optaretur suppressio octavae Pentecostes:quod factum est." [My italics.] If there were a conciliar basis for this suppression, a footnote, in the customary curial style, would give it. The impression one is left with is that, as soon as a particular academic tendency ("multi") had got its hands on the process of revision, they considered that they had carte blanche for the introduction of what many of them had argued in the pages of learned periodicals. A fair number of Council Fathers, had they known what their vote in favour of SC would be deemed to have enabled, might have been horrified.
Do not forget that Archbishop Lefebvre voted without demur for SC. He, presumably, assumed that what he was voting for was the text to which he subscribed his signature. One wonders how many of the Fathers made the same assumption. Indeed, one is tempted to wonder what Papa Montini would have said in 1963, had he known the full extent of what, after the regular attrition wrought by his interviews with Hannibal, he would end up having been deemed to have authorised.
Cardinal Ratzinger notoriously observed that "After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council". In as far as the erudite writer intended to describe what actually occurred after the Council, it has to be said that his analysis is far from accurate. What Paul VI did to the Calendar was, in its more dramatic manifestations, not by the mandate of the Council. It was the effect of a coterie of academics abusing the goodwill of the Pontiff.
As one peruses the evidence from the intervening episodes of the 'reform', one discovers intriguing indications of the pace at which it moved. The Commentary on the new calendar, 1969, having explained why the Gesimas were being abolished, reassured any for whom the antiquity and spirituality of these Sundays commended them, that "Textus proprii harum trium Dominicarum alibi ponentur in Missali romano". (Similarly, the Embers and Rogations.) I have yet to find them; by the time the Missal was published in 1970 such vestigial relics of respect for Tradition had been swept away.
CALENDAR
SC undoubtedly mandates a revision of the rubrics concerning the dominance of the Sunday Office, and of the Christian Seasons, over the Sanctorale. It also encourages a reconsideration of the saints who are to be commended to the Universal Church, and of those deemed to have historical problems associated with them. I do not, however, discern a mandate for the wholesale disruption of the days upon which saints are observed, except in as far as the Council could be said to give support for diminishing the numbers observed during Lent and Advent. As I work through the year, I am surprised - sometimes day after day - by the large numbers who have been shifted a day or two this way or a day or two that way. One notices this particularly when, in the same church, both the older and newer calendars are in use.
I have not discovered any mandate whatsoever in the Conciliar documents for the major changes subsequently made in the Christian Year. The abolition of the Gesimas; the revolutionary transformation of Eastertide, summarised in the change in the titles of its Sundays, so that the intense spirituality of the Easter Octave is now expected to persist for fifty days; the abolition of the Octave of Pentecost: for all these I cannot see even a whisker of a hint in SC. That there is none is suggested by the Commentary published with the revised Calendar in 1969; for example, dealing with the abolition of the Pentecost Octave, the explanation concludes " ... ita ut a multis optaretur suppressio octavae Pentecostes:quod factum est." [My italics.] If there were a conciliar basis for this suppression, a footnote, in the customary curial style, would give it. The impression one is left with is that, as soon as a particular academic tendency ("multi") had got its hands on the process of revision, they considered that they had carte blanche for the introduction of what many of them had argued in the pages of learned periodicals. A fair number of Council Fathers, had they known what their vote in favour of SC would be deemed to have enabled, might have been horrified.
Do not forget that Archbishop Lefebvre voted without demur for SC. He, presumably, assumed that what he was voting for was the text to which he subscribed his signature. One wonders how many of the Fathers made the same assumption. Indeed, one is tempted to wonder what Papa Montini would have said in 1963, had he known the full extent of what, after the regular attrition wrought by his interviews with Hannibal, he would end up having been deemed to have authorised.
Cardinal Ratzinger notoriously observed that "After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate of an ecumenical council". In as far as the erudite writer intended to describe what actually occurred after the Council, it has to be said that his analysis is far from accurate. What Paul VI did to the Calendar was, in its more dramatic manifestations, not by the mandate of the Council. It was the effect of a coterie of academics abusing the goodwill of the Pontiff.
As one peruses the evidence from the intervening episodes of the 'reform', one discovers intriguing indications of the pace at which it moved. The Commentary on the new calendar, 1969, having explained why the Gesimas were being abolished, reassured any for whom the antiquity and spirituality of these Sundays commended them, that "Textus proprii harum trium Dominicarum alibi ponentur in Missali romano". (Similarly, the Embers and Rogations.) I have yet to find them; by the time the Missal was published in 1970 such vestigial relics of respect for Tradition had been swept away.
19 August 2010
Old Missals
When I was at an EF Mass at Milton Manor, a Recusant house not far from here, somebody told me that they use Bishop Challoner's Missal. Splendid!! And ... that therefore, when they say a requiem, they use the Common Preface (you will recall that the Preface for the Dead is a recent addition to the Missal).
Not long ago, I was speaking to a FSSP priest about the naming of S Joseph in the Canon. He said that when celebrating with a book that contained it, he named the Saint; when the volume on the Altar lacked S Joseph, he omitted him. [As for the related question of whether S Joseph is canonically in the 1962 Editio Typica, see comments of Fr Michael Brown and of Rubricarius attached to my post of 13 November 2009. This is not what I am discussing today.]
Is this an accepted praxis - to use the book in front of one even if it has been superseded by more recent legislation? Or is it the celebrant's duty to check in advance and to gum/write things in so as to be up-to-date?
(When Urban VIII changed the Breviary Hymns, his decree explicitly accepted the former possibility; he even allowed booksellers to continue to move stock which they had already printed, and purchasers to use the old texts therein. On the other hand, when Pius X changed the Psalter, he insisted on immediate compliance. Is this relevant?)
The question affects me. The more recent of the two Altar Missals I use was printed just after the publication of the new Assumption propers in 1951. It contains them ...on August 15. But, presumably by a printer's oversight, throughout the Octave Famulorum is given for the commemoration.
(Yes, I know Bugnini, cuius animae propitietur Deus, abolished our Lady's Octave in 1955. Don't remind me of that but address the question I pose! It's an important one! It could vastly enhance the market value of old Missals!)
Not long ago, I was speaking to a FSSP priest about the naming of S Joseph in the Canon. He said that when celebrating with a book that contained it, he named the Saint; when the volume on the Altar lacked S Joseph, he omitted him. [As for the related question of whether S Joseph is canonically in the 1962 Editio Typica, see comments of Fr Michael Brown and of Rubricarius attached to my post of 13 November 2009. This is not what I am discussing today.]
Is this an accepted praxis - to use the book in front of one even if it has been superseded by more recent legislation? Or is it the celebrant's duty to check in advance and to gum/write things in so as to be up-to-date?
(When Urban VIII changed the Breviary Hymns, his decree explicitly accepted the former possibility; he even allowed booksellers to continue to move stock which they had already printed, and purchasers to use the old texts therein. On the other hand, when Pius X changed the Psalter, he insisted on immediate compliance. Is this relevant?)
The question affects me. The more recent of the two Altar Missals I use was printed just after the publication of the new Assumption propers in 1951. It contains them ...on August 15. But, presumably by a printer's oversight, throughout the Octave Famulorum is given for the commemoration.
(Yes, I know Bugnini, cuius animae propitietur Deus, abolished our Lady's Octave in 1955. Don't remind me of that but address the question I pose! It's an important one! It could vastly enhance the market value of old Missals!)
18 August 2010
Can Fr Zed be right?
Fr Zed refers to an occasion when S Augustine "left the pulpit". Well, Fr Zed's doctoral subject was S Augustine, so I ought not to tangle with him. But ... er ... um ... did S Augustine preach from a pulpit???
Exactly
With regard to my post about how the Bishop of Rome is not a Patriarch ... it has been pointed out to me that as long ago as 1961 one Ratzinger demonstrated that
The principle of Patriarchy is post-Constantinian; it has an administrative sense ... the Roman claim understands itself from the original theological motive of the sedes apostolica ...To the same extent that the "New Rome" made unclear the old idea of sedes apostolica in favour of the notion of patriarchy, the "Old Rome"strengthened the reference to the totally different origin and character of its own authority. This authority is in fact totally different from a primacy of honour among patriarchs, because it is situated on a different level, which is completely independent from such administrative concepts.
This is an interesting demonstration of the continuity of Ratzinger's basic theology, contra those who see him as a one-time 'liberal' who Lost The Faith and Sold Out To Conservatism.
As an Anglican, what particularly strikes me is the similarity between all this and the conclusions, as long ago as the 1930s, of Dom Gregory Dix.
Some time ago now, before JP2 became really sick, Cardinal Ratzinger had promised to write, in his then apparently imminent retirement, a preface to an edition I then hoped to produce of Dix's writings on the papacy ...
The principle of Patriarchy is post-Constantinian; it has an administrative sense ... the Roman claim understands itself from the original theological motive of the sedes apostolica ...To the same extent that the "New Rome" made unclear the old idea of sedes apostolica in favour of the notion of patriarchy, the "Old Rome"strengthened the reference to the totally different origin and character of its own authority. This authority is in fact totally different from a primacy of honour among patriarchs, because it is situated on a different level, which is completely independent from such administrative concepts.
This is an interesting demonstration of the continuity of Ratzinger's basic theology, contra those who see him as a one-time 'liberal' who Lost The Faith and Sold Out To Conservatism.
As an Anglican, what particularly strikes me is the similarity between all this and the conclusions, as long ago as the 1930s, of Dom Gregory Dix.
Some time ago now, before JP2 became really sick, Cardinal Ratzinger had promised to write, in his then apparently imminent retirement, a preface to an edition I then hoped to produce of Dix's writings on the papacy ...
17 August 2010
Ebbsfleet.
Fr Tim Fin(n)e/igan has taken a train from Ebbsfleet to Avignon.
There must be, in this, either a sermon or a joke or both.
There must be, in this, either a sermon or a joke or both.
Ecumenism
I have just been directed to an Orthodox blog which is refreshingly free from old-fashioned "Orthodox" Romophobia [Romaphobia?]. Try PadreTex.
Sol in Virgo [sic]
Medieval calendars quite often inform us that the Sun is in the constellation Virgo on August 15. I wonder if it has ever been suggested that this astronomical fact has anything to do with the selection of that day to celebrate our Lady's Assumption.
May I comment on one or two observations attached to Sunday's post? I do this randomly ...
I feel - I hope this isn't offensive - that the American Anglican collect for August 15 is a rather sad example of modern Anglican collect writing: a couple of banalities shoved together, and all the time a sense that the writer is looking over his shoulder in the hope of not seeming too "extreme". I prefer Pius XII's collect ... in fact, the main reason why I'm not more enthusiastic about the pian composition is simply that the collect it replaced is, in my view, quite exquisite. And I don't feel, as one writer did, that Pius XII's is a 'slap in the face' because I do of course subscribe to its dogma. In fact, I don't see how anybody whose affections are excited by the old collect Veneranda, and by the teaching of S John Damascene, and the explicitness of the Byzantine Liturgy about the glorification of Mary's wholeness, can dislike the Pius XII collect for doctrinal reasons. My own hesitations about features the 1950 definition relate not to what it said, to which I very cheerfully subscribe ex animo, but (1) to what, by not saying, it appeared to imply could be forgotten - such as the edifying legends which informed piety and art in East and West for centuries and about which John Henry Newman spoke sympathetically; and (2) to the fact of our Lady's mediation of all graces. This was clearer in the older traditions of East and West, but in the West has more recently been overshadowed by preoccupation with the idea, true in itself, that the Assumption is the logical consequence of her preservation from all sin. Mary, in History, mediated all graces to humankind by giving birth to the Redeemer; her Assumption means that what she was in History she is ontologically and for all eternity. In her, function and ontology are made one. I would feel more cheerful about the 1951 liturgical texts if they could be supplemented by a definition of our Lady as Mediatrix of All Graces. It could be phrased in the elegant Greek of S Gregory Palamas! And May 31 could be given to the Universal Church to celebrate this truth.
Judith ... my instinct is that Judith has commonly been a type of Mary. Considering the enthusiasm which typology has for spreading its cloak over everything it can reach, it would be mighty strange if she hadn't. I rather thing S Thomas Aquinas said something about it, and that in some Byzantine iconographical schemnes Judith, together with Esther and other obvious candidates, is associated with Mary.
I am grateful for all the contributions to that post.
May I comment on one or two observations attached to Sunday's post? I do this randomly ...
I feel - I hope this isn't offensive - that the American Anglican collect for August 15 is a rather sad example of modern Anglican collect writing: a couple of banalities shoved together, and all the time a sense that the writer is looking over his shoulder in the hope of not seeming too "extreme". I prefer Pius XII's collect ... in fact, the main reason why I'm not more enthusiastic about the pian composition is simply that the collect it replaced is, in my view, quite exquisite. And I don't feel, as one writer did, that Pius XII's is a 'slap in the face' because I do of course subscribe to its dogma. In fact, I don't see how anybody whose affections are excited by the old collect Veneranda, and by the teaching of S John Damascene, and the explicitness of the Byzantine Liturgy about the glorification of Mary's wholeness, can dislike the Pius XII collect for doctrinal reasons. My own hesitations about features the 1950 definition relate not to what it said, to which I very cheerfully subscribe ex animo, but (1) to what, by not saying, it appeared to imply could be forgotten - such as the edifying legends which informed piety and art in East and West for centuries and about which John Henry Newman spoke sympathetically; and (2) to the fact of our Lady's mediation of all graces. This was clearer in the older traditions of East and West, but in the West has more recently been overshadowed by preoccupation with the idea, true in itself, that the Assumption is the logical consequence of her preservation from all sin. Mary, in History, mediated all graces to humankind by giving birth to the Redeemer; her Assumption means that what she was in History she is ontologically and for all eternity. In her, function and ontology are made one. I would feel more cheerful about the 1951 liturgical texts if they could be supplemented by a definition of our Lady as Mediatrix of All Graces. It could be phrased in the elegant Greek of S Gregory Palamas! And May 31 could be given to the Universal Church to celebrate this truth.
Judith ... my instinct is that Judith has commonly been a type of Mary. Considering the enthusiasm which typology has for spreading its cloak over everything it can reach, it would be mighty strange if she hadn't. I rather thing S Thomas Aquinas said something about it, and that in some Byzantine iconographical schemnes Judith, together with Esther and other obvious candidates, is associated with Mary.
I am grateful for all the contributions to that post.
16 August 2010
Patrimonial Papacy
Recently, a fashionable Orthodox hierarch, commenting on the dialogue between Rome and the Orthodox Churches, expressed the view that, while Orthodoxy may have things to learn from Rome about a Universal Primacy, Rome had things to learn from Orthodoxy about Intermediate Primacies. How very reasonable. Everybody learns from everybody else's insights and we end up with Wholeness. The essence of Ecumenism.
Except that it's rubbish. The New Testament - well, I mean the Pauline Letters - knows two usages of the term ekklesia. There is the local Church - the Church, let us say, in Corinth. That is how S Paul uses the term in his earlier correspondence. But, without abandoning that usage, in Colossians and Ephesians (yes, he did write them both; Anthony Kenny proved that, even though the NT establishment ignored his scrupulous scholarship) he writes also of the Church as a universal body. In later ecclesiology, that gives us the Local, 'Particular', Church; which means, not the Church in some country or region, but a Christian community with Bishop, Presbyterium, Diaconate, and Laos. Then there is the Universal Church; and the late, great, Dom Gregory 'Patrimony' Dix showed that the role played in the Local Church by the Bishop is closely paralleled by the role played in the Universal Church by the Church of Rome (among other evidence, he illustrated this by examining the language used in the epistles of S Ignatius of Antioch about the bishop in relation to the Local Church, in comparison with that used about the Roman Church in relation to the Universal Church).
The Local and the Universal Church exist as entities jure divino. Indeed, they are in a sense the same entity, because in the Local Church the Universal Church subsists in its entirety (this was explained by Ratzinger in the two CDF documents Communionis notio and Dominus Jesus; this ecclesiology of communion is one of the points of contacts between Ratzinger and the justly celebrated Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas). Intermediate Primacies - such as Patriarchates - do not exist by divine right. They may be given a theological rationale in terms of Incarnational Theology: that is to say, an association of local churches may laudably express forms of spirituality adapted to the instincts of particular cultural groupings (one thinks of the Eastern Churches of particular rites). And Patriarchates and Major Archbishoprics may make organisational good sense. I do not deny that and I do not refuse respect to the Patriarchates of Byzantine and Oriental Christianity. But an Archbishopric or a Patriarchate does not exist in the primary ecclesiological sense in which Universal Church and Local Church exist.
Dom Gregory Dix then went on to show that the belief in the Primacy of the Roman Church existed at a very early date and, when described, was seen in terms of the Petrine status of the Roman Church. He pointed out that there is no evidence in the early centuries of the notion that the Roman Church aquired its status from its location in the Imperial City. This would have been improbable; as Dix says, no other cult (not even that of Dea Roma) assigned primacy to its group in the city of Rome; and early Christianity, far from respecting the city of Rome, loathed it as the Whore of Babylon which slaughtered the Saints. The idea that the Roman Church owes its status to its Imperial position first arose in the Constantinian period, when the New Rome had to find some rationale for claiming first place after Rome. Although (Dix's rather unforgiving term) it 'forged' the pedigree of its bishops from S Andrew the Protoclete, it knew that it needed more than that cheerful implausibility to justify its new claims to take precedence over the venerable and apostolic sees of Antioch and Alexandria.
The Roman Primacy is not the institution of Patriarch written larger. It is something sui generis or it is nothing. Now: you may not agree that Rome does have a universal Primacy. You may prove this negative to your own entire satisfaction. But you will not thereby have proved that 'Intermediate Primacies' - Patriarchates and the like - do have status jure divino. You'll have to come up with another set of arguments to establish that.
I for one applauded the move of John Paul II to explain that Episcopal Conferences, unlike the Universal Roman Primacy and unlike the Local Primacy of the Bishop in his own Church, do not have any existence by divine right. And I very much doubt if the papal title 'Patriarch of the West' is any older than the Byzantinising of Pope Gregory I. And so when Benedict XVI, as one of his first moves, divested himself in the Annuario Pontificio of the title 'Patriarch of the West', "Goodie", I cried, "at last we have pope who knows what he isn't".
We Anglican Catholics know what Intermediate Primacies can lead to if left without a check or a balance. They can lead to the mess that the Anglican Communion finds itself in. They lead to the concept of the Infallible Synod whose heretical decisions are irreformable. They can lead to self-righteous schism. Ignorant people sometimes fancy that the Papacy is some sort of tyrannical monolith successfully micromanaging the Universal Church, with an efficient and inexorable finger in every pie. Neither in theory nor in actuality is anything remotely like this true. Reality in the papal communion is often really quite ramshackle. But Papacy does make possible an institution which might be capable of protecting the weak from bullies nearer home. We shall see whether the Ordinariate enterprise provides an example of this.
Except that it's rubbish. The New Testament - well, I mean the Pauline Letters - knows two usages of the term ekklesia. There is the local Church - the Church, let us say, in Corinth. That is how S Paul uses the term in his earlier correspondence. But, without abandoning that usage, in Colossians and Ephesians (yes, he did write them both; Anthony Kenny proved that, even though the NT establishment ignored his scrupulous scholarship) he writes also of the Church as a universal body. In later ecclesiology, that gives us the Local, 'Particular', Church; which means, not the Church in some country or region, but a Christian community with Bishop, Presbyterium, Diaconate, and Laos. Then there is the Universal Church; and the late, great, Dom Gregory 'Patrimony' Dix showed that the role played in the Local Church by the Bishop is closely paralleled by the role played in the Universal Church by the Church of Rome (among other evidence, he illustrated this by examining the language used in the epistles of S Ignatius of Antioch about the bishop in relation to the Local Church, in comparison with that used about the Roman Church in relation to the Universal Church).
The Local and the Universal Church exist as entities jure divino. Indeed, they are in a sense the same entity, because in the Local Church the Universal Church subsists in its entirety (this was explained by Ratzinger in the two CDF documents Communionis notio and Dominus Jesus; this ecclesiology of communion is one of the points of contacts between Ratzinger and the justly celebrated Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas). Intermediate Primacies - such as Patriarchates - do not exist by divine right. They may be given a theological rationale in terms of Incarnational Theology: that is to say, an association of local churches may laudably express forms of spirituality adapted to the instincts of particular cultural groupings (one thinks of the Eastern Churches of particular rites). And Patriarchates and Major Archbishoprics may make organisational good sense. I do not deny that and I do not refuse respect to the Patriarchates of Byzantine and Oriental Christianity. But an Archbishopric or a Patriarchate does not exist in the primary ecclesiological sense in which Universal Church and Local Church exist.
Dom Gregory Dix then went on to show that the belief in the Primacy of the Roman Church existed at a very early date and, when described, was seen in terms of the Petrine status of the Roman Church. He pointed out that there is no evidence in the early centuries of the notion that the Roman Church aquired its status from its location in the Imperial City. This would have been improbable; as Dix says, no other cult (not even that of Dea Roma) assigned primacy to its group in the city of Rome; and early Christianity, far from respecting the city of Rome, loathed it as the Whore of Babylon which slaughtered the Saints. The idea that the Roman Church owes its status to its Imperial position first arose in the Constantinian period, when the New Rome had to find some rationale for claiming first place after Rome. Although (Dix's rather unforgiving term) it 'forged' the pedigree of its bishops from S Andrew the Protoclete, it knew that it needed more than that cheerful implausibility to justify its new claims to take precedence over the venerable and apostolic sees of Antioch and Alexandria.
The Roman Primacy is not the institution of Patriarch written larger. It is something sui generis or it is nothing. Now: you may not agree that Rome does have a universal Primacy. You may prove this negative to your own entire satisfaction. But you will not thereby have proved that 'Intermediate Primacies' - Patriarchates and the like - do have status jure divino. You'll have to come up with another set of arguments to establish that.
I for one applauded the move of John Paul II to explain that Episcopal Conferences, unlike the Universal Roman Primacy and unlike the Local Primacy of the Bishop in his own Church, do not have any existence by divine right. And I very much doubt if the papal title 'Patriarch of the West' is any older than the Byzantinising of Pope Gregory I. And so when Benedict XVI, as one of his first moves, divested himself in the Annuario Pontificio of the title 'Patriarch of the West', "Goodie", I cried, "at last we have pope who knows what he isn't".
We Anglican Catholics know what Intermediate Primacies can lead to if left without a check or a balance. They can lead to the mess that the Anglican Communion finds itself in. They lead to the concept of the Infallible Synod whose heretical decisions are irreformable. They can lead to self-righteous schism. Ignorant people sometimes fancy that the Papacy is some sort of tyrannical monolith successfully micromanaging the Universal Church, with an efficient and inexorable finger in every pie. Neither in theory nor in actuality is anything remotely like this true. Reality in the papal communion is often really quite ramshackle. But Papacy does make possible an institution which might be capable of protecting the weak from bullies nearer home. We shall see whether the Ordinariate enterprise provides an example of this.
15 August 2010
Why was she assumed? A Patrimonial answer
Christians have sometimes based a belief in our Lady's Assumption upon her perpetual virginity; or her freedom from actual sin; or her freedom from original sin; or the inseparable physical bond between her and the Son who shared her flesh and blood, her DNA; or the unbreakable bond of love that must exist between Mother and Son. All this I agree with. But as I observed yesterday, the reason most consonant with the liturgical traditions of East and West is that she was assumed so that she could be our Intercessor. Sometimes it is assumed - oops, considered - that the concept of our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces is somehow "extreme" and is a horribly divisive extravagance that any sensible ecumenist (oxymoron?) dreads being defined ex cathedra by some maximalising pope. I disagree. I will make the point by giving a translation of a Secret which was often used in many parts of Europe during this season - including England.
O Lord, may the prayer of the Mother of God commend our offerings before thy merciful kindness; for thou didst translate her from this present Age for this purpose, that (idcirco ... ut) she might confidently (fiducialiter) intercede before thee for our sins.
Our Lady was assumed that she might be the treasury of God's grace, the Mediatrix of All Graces, the mother whose hands stretch out to bestow. In Newman's majestic words, written while he was still an Anglican: There was a wonder in heaven; a throne was seen, far above all created powers, mediatorial, intercessory; a title archetypical; a crown bright as the morning star; a glory issuing from the Eternal Throne; robes as pure as the heavens; and a sceptre over all ... The vision is found in the Apocalypse, a Woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
A well-known Roman Catholic (traditionalist) scholar once said to me that he felt Newman wrote better when he was an Anglican than when he was a Roman Catholic. This passage could stand as evidence. When Newman is beatified in five weeks time, the author of his Anglican writings will be beatified too. Nobody is more Patrimonial than Newman.
O Lord, may the prayer of the Mother of God commend our offerings before thy merciful kindness; for thou didst translate her from this present Age for this purpose, that (idcirco ... ut) she might confidently (fiducialiter) intercede before thee for our sins.
Our Lady was assumed that she might be the treasury of God's grace, the Mediatrix of All Graces, the mother whose hands stretch out to bestow. In Newman's majestic words, written while he was still an Anglican: There was a wonder in heaven; a throne was seen, far above all created powers, mediatorial, intercessory; a title archetypical; a crown bright as the morning star; a glory issuing from the Eternal Throne; robes as pure as the heavens; and a sceptre over all ... The vision is found in the Apocalypse, a Woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
A well-known Roman Catholic (traditionalist) scholar once said to me that he felt Newman wrote better when he was an Anglican than when he was a Roman Catholic. This passage could stand as evidence. When Newman is beatified in five weeks time, the author of his Anglican writings will be beatified too. Nobody is more Patrimonial than Newman.
14 August 2010
Evening Prayer today
August 14 is a day to say Vespers from some form, any form, of the Roman Rite which precedes the Bugnini 'reforms'. So as to have the magical experience of that great shout of triumph and joy suddenly going forth: Assumpta est Maria in caelum gaudent Angeli laudantes benedicunt Dominum. Compare that with the pedantic Marian minimalism of the Liturgy of the Hours. You can just imagine those grim committee-men sitting round their table ... "We really had better begin the Assumption by setting it in the theological context of the Ascension of Christ". Let us hope that they are now suffering some sort of Theological Context in some sort of painful place. By the way: try looking through the actual prescriptions of Vatican II and see if you can find anything that could conceivably be seen as a mandate for such tinkerings.
Even if you use the Pius XII forms, you will still get Ave Maris Stella at II Vespers, despite Fr Genovesi's dominance of the rest of the Hymnody. In Pius XII's time they at least kept Ave Maris Stella for II Vespers on most Marian Festivals. Bug knew better and he knew wrong.
The real loss in 1951 was of the Collect for the Assmption. We beseech thee O Lord forgive the offences of thy servants: that we who are not able to please thee by our own deserts; may by the intercession of the Mother of thy Son our Lord be saved. It was replaced by a modern composition which I would describe as a dollop of dogma followed by a platitude. The older collect emphasises the ancient conviction of East and West that the purpose of the Assumption is that our Lady might intercede for us; it reminds us that only through the Mediatrix of All Graces, reigning body and soul in heavenly glory, can we attain Salvation; it always reminds me of the homilies of the Greek Fathers, culminating in S Gregory Palamas, about the Mediation of our Lady. And of the plea one hears in the Byzantine Rite Most Holy Mother of God, save us.
Even if you use the Pius XII forms, you will still get Ave Maris Stella at II Vespers, despite Fr Genovesi's dominance of the rest of the Hymnody. In Pius XII's time they at least kept Ave Maris Stella for II Vespers on most Marian Festivals. Bug knew better and he knew wrong.
The real loss in 1951 was of the Collect for the Assmption. We beseech thee O Lord forgive the offences of thy servants: that we who are not able to please thee by our own deserts; may by the intercession of the Mother of thy Son our Lord be saved. It was replaced by a modern composition which I would describe as a dollop of dogma followed by a platitude. The older collect emphasises the ancient conviction of East and West that the purpose of the Assumption is that our Lady might intercede for us; it reminds us that only through the Mediatrix of All Graces, reigning body and soul in heavenly glory, can we attain Salvation; it always reminds me of the homilies of the Greek Fathers, culminating in S Gregory Palamas, about the Mediation of our Lady. And of the plea one hears in the Byzantine Rite Most Holy Mother of God, save us.
13 August 2010
Nostra antonomaica Domina
When the Lufwaffe bombed Exeter Cathedral (tit-for-tat: the RAF had bombed a nice little medieval city in Germany ... and the Rhodes Scholars in the German government wouldn't allow Oxford to get the retaliation ... such are the legends) a discovery was made amidst the rubble: of wax ex voto offerings which had been hidden behind a stone above the tomb of Exeter's great and holy Bishop Edmund Lacey (it was rather a shrine: his progress towards canonisation was of course halted by the Reformation). Presumably they were hidden away when the Protestant Dean Simon Heynes vandalised the tomb. (He was not a popular dean and his new-fangled religion was as unpopular in the Close as it was in the City.)
Lacey was an intellectual who was not above putting his head into intellectual hornets' nests. On August 15 1441 he preached to the English Chapter of the of the Domicans in the Exeter Blackfriars at a time when the Preachers were still far from enthusiastic about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; his action in having his sermon transcribed into his register has no parallel that I know of in Medieval episcopal registers ... would anyone like to comment on that? Lacey pulled no punches: So those who, with their rash and reprobate opinion struggle to besmirch her Conception, let them shut their mouths; and those who struggle to put blemishes on her way of life, let them put a sock in it; and those who are unwilling to exalt the outcome of her Assumption, let them get lost and stay lost (perpetuo delitescant).
But let me tell you his argument for the Assumption. The Philosopher of the Ethics proves that it is necessary for there to be some end to human affairs, namely immortality and eternity. To which our antonomaic Lady is deservedly assumed by the Apostle, Romans 2, 'Glory , honour and peace to the one who does good'.
So you bung Aristotle and S Paul together and invoke the principle of antonomasia, which I trust is still taught in the Fundamental Theology courses in our seminaries, and Bob's your Uncle.
Antonomaica Domina in caelum gloriose Assumpta, ora pro nobis.
Lacey was an intellectual who was not above putting his head into intellectual hornets' nests. On August 15 1441 he preached to the English Chapter of the of the Domicans in the Exeter Blackfriars at a time when the Preachers were still far from enthusiastic about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; his action in having his sermon transcribed into his register has no parallel that I know of in Medieval episcopal registers ... would anyone like to comment on that? Lacey pulled no punches: So those who, with their rash and reprobate opinion struggle to besmirch her Conception, let them shut their mouths; and those who struggle to put blemishes on her way of life, let them put a sock in it; and those who are unwilling to exalt the outcome of her Assumption, let them get lost and stay lost (perpetuo delitescant).
But let me tell you his argument for the Assumption. The Philosopher of the Ethics proves that it is necessary for there to be some end to human affairs, namely immortality and eternity. To which our antonomaic Lady is deservedly assumed by the Apostle, Romans 2, 'Glory , honour and peace to the one who does good'.
So you bung Aristotle and S Paul together and invoke the principle of antonomasia, which I trust is still taught in the Fundamental Theology courses in our seminaries, and Bob's your Uncle.
Antonomaica Domina in caelum gloriose Assumpta, ora pro nobis.
12 August 2010
Other blogs
In response to enquiries: the blogs which I recommended, for those really interested in the evolution of the Roman Rite, were the "St Lawrence's Press blog", which gives you the Roman Rite as it was just before Pius XII's protegee Bugnini began his wrecking career. Then there is "The Tridentine Rite", which gives you what the Missal of S Pius V provides. As you look at the latter blog, you will have to remember that - if the dates appear a trifle strange - this is because they relate to the Julian Calendar. That will explain to you how it could be that last Sunday's First Vespers had to be reconciled with the Second Vespers of S James.
Go for it. The writer has at the finger tips of his mind a body of expertise which is possessed, I suspect, by nobody else in the world. And so many of the misunderstandings of the present age arise from an oversimplified understanding of the evolution of the Roman Rite since the sixteenth century.
I agree with the author of these blogs on most things, and where I don't, it's probably my own ignorance that's in the way. Just one thing ... it's a matter where I get the impression that I have not been able to persuade him of a conviction of my own ... the first modern' and objectionable intrusion into Tradition, long before Pius X corrupted the disposition of the Psalter, was the corruption of the texts of the hymns by Urban VIII in the 1620s. This was symptomatic of the root problem: if a liturgical tinkerer has the weapon of printing at his disposal, it enables him, be he Papa Barberini or Thomas Cranmer or Hannibal himself, to impose his own fads on a whole ecclesial community almost overnight. It is subversive of the whole principle of organic development.
Go for it. The writer has at the finger tips of his mind a body of expertise which is possessed, I suspect, by nobody else in the world. And so many of the misunderstandings of the present age arise from an oversimplified understanding of the evolution of the Roman Rite since the sixteenth century.
I agree with the author of these blogs on most things, and where I don't, it's probably my own ignorance that's in the way. Just one thing ... it's a matter where I get the impression that I have not been able to persuade him of a conviction of my own ... the first modern' and objectionable intrusion into Tradition, long before Pius X corrupted the disposition of the Psalter, was the corruption of the texts of the hymns by Urban VIII in the 1620s. This was symptomatic of the root problem: if a liturgical tinkerer has the weapon of printing at his disposal, it enables him, be he Papa Barberini or Thomas Cranmer or Hannibal himself, to impose his own fads on a whole ecclesial community almost overnight. It is subversive of the whole principle of organic development.
11 August 2010
Ash Wednesday is being moved to Tuesday
You don't believe me? Well, pick up your copies of the Editio Tertia Missalis Romani and turn to the tables on page 117 giving the dates for major days over the next few decades. And check the dates of Ash Wednesday in 2012, 2016 ...etc.. You will discover that in the mad, bad world of Novus Ordo liturgical periti, in Leap Years Ash Wednesday occurs on Tuesday. I thought of saving this up on my blog for next April 1 ... but, well, it's not funny, is it?
This piece of daftness first impinged on me when I was compiling my ORDO for 2008, but I thought the mistake there was a one-off misprint. (We are all fallible. The first thing that happens when I open a nice newly printed copy of my own ORDO is that I spot three misprints.) It was only recently, as I did my first Year's Plan for the 2012 ORDO, that it dawned on me that there was a structural error in the tables in Missale Romanum, probably relating to somebody's incapacity to handle the mathematical subtleties of bissextilitas. Silly me. I should have realised that the illatinate incompetents who staff CDW would be innumerate as well ... after all, such people seem to have trouble counting forty days from Easter so as find Ascension Day. (Have I uncovered the real reason why Papa Ratzinger, crafty fellow, put the Ecclesia Dei Commission under CDF rather than CDW? What a mercy it is that Ordinariates also will come under CDF - thanks to the wisdom of the Holy Father.)
This sort of thing is not peculiar to the RCC. When the Anglican Liturgical Commission, under the influence of the self-confident Bubbles Stancliffe*, tried to do some fancy innovatory footwork with the "Epiphany Season", making it like the Easter Season by calling the Sundays of rather than after Epiphany, nobody realised that when January 6 was itself a Sunday, their whole silly game would collapse into lectionary chaos. To be philosophical about all this, it's the result in practical terms of a liturgical culture of discontinuity. When years just roll comfortably on, changing liturgically, if at all, only slowly and organically, problems only rarely crop up and when they do there are seasoned experts in charge with eagle eyes who spot them and make early and accurate provision. When a lot of not-very-clever people with an exaggerated idea of their own capacity for brilliant innovation get their hands on a tiller after redrawing all the maps, the next thing that is going to happen is that they will start trying to navigate their beautifully designed boat across the broad and deep waters of the Sahara.
There was an early example of this in 1955, when the first Bugnini Commission put together a decree 'simplifying' the rubrics. They made such an appalling hash of their job that when those humble, despised, practicioners and workers in the Lord's vineyard, the Compilers of ORDOs worldwide, started trying to give effect to what the Great Men had decided, Rome was inundated with hundreds of puzzled enquiries (dubia). One lot of answers in AAS (47, 1955, 418-419) failed to hold back the avalanche, and they tried then to save face by hiding their next load of corrections away in the pages of Ephemerides Liturgicae instead (70, 1956, 44-49). The entire episode was a foretaste of horrors to come.
As I've explained to you so often before, printing+committees=liturgical disaster.
___________________________________________________________________
*Bubbles Stancliffe is soi-disant Bishop of Salisbury. I put it like that because I am, as far as the See of Salisbury is concerned, a sedevacantist. He was originally one of us; got a mitre after deserting us; then turned nasty against us. In the last General Synod, when the archbishops were making their flawed but well-meaning attempt to create a Canterbury Ordinariate by stealing the Holy Father's idea of shared jurisdiction, Bubbles' contribution was to propose that bishops serving traditionalist parishes should be restricted to solely liturgical functions (he failed ignominiously). He's incredibly High Church in the very worst sense of those words.
This piece of daftness first impinged on me when I was compiling my ORDO for 2008, but I thought the mistake there was a one-off misprint. (We are all fallible. The first thing that happens when I open a nice newly printed copy of my own ORDO is that I spot three misprints.) It was only recently, as I did my first Year's Plan for the 2012 ORDO, that it dawned on me that there was a structural error in the tables in Missale Romanum, probably relating to somebody's incapacity to handle the mathematical subtleties of bissextilitas. Silly me. I should have realised that the illatinate incompetents who staff CDW would be innumerate as well ... after all, such people seem to have trouble counting forty days from Easter so as find Ascension Day. (Have I uncovered the real reason why Papa Ratzinger, crafty fellow, put the Ecclesia Dei Commission under CDF rather than CDW? What a mercy it is that Ordinariates also will come under CDF - thanks to the wisdom of the Holy Father.)
This sort of thing is not peculiar to the RCC. When the Anglican Liturgical Commission, under the influence of the self-confident Bubbles Stancliffe*, tried to do some fancy innovatory footwork with the "Epiphany Season", making it like the Easter Season by calling the Sundays of rather than after Epiphany, nobody realised that when January 6 was itself a Sunday, their whole silly game would collapse into lectionary chaos. To be philosophical about all this, it's the result in practical terms of a liturgical culture of discontinuity. When years just roll comfortably on, changing liturgically, if at all, only slowly and organically, problems only rarely crop up and when they do there are seasoned experts in charge with eagle eyes who spot them and make early and accurate provision. When a lot of not-very-clever people with an exaggerated idea of their own capacity for brilliant innovation get their hands on a tiller after redrawing all the maps, the next thing that is going to happen is that they will start trying to navigate their beautifully designed boat across the broad and deep waters of the Sahara.
There was an early example of this in 1955, when the first Bugnini Commission put together a decree 'simplifying' the rubrics. They made such an appalling hash of their job that when those humble, despised, practicioners and workers in the Lord's vineyard, the Compilers of ORDOs worldwide, started trying to give effect to what the Great Men had decided, Rome was inundated with hundreds of puzzled enquiries (dubia). One lot of answers in AAS (47, 1955, 418-419) failed to hold back the avalanche, and they tried then to save face by hiding their next load of corrections away in the pages of Ephemerides Liturgicae instead (70, 1956, 44-49). The entire episode was a foretaste of horrors to come.
As I've explained to you so often before, printing+committees=liturgical disaster.
___________________________________________________________________
*Bubbles Stancliffe is soi-disant Bishop of Salisbury. I put it like that because I am, as far as the See of Salisbury is concerned, a sedevacantist. He was originally one of us; got a mitre after deserting us; then turned nasty against us. In the last General Synod, when the archbishops were making their flawed but well-meaning attempt to create a Canterbury Ordinariate by stealing the Holy Father's idea of shared jurisdiction, Bubbles' contribution was to propose that bishops serving traditionalist parishes should be restricted to solely liturgical functions (he failed ignominiously). He's incredibly High Church in the very worst sense of those words.
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