I visit many churches, and know many Christians of different confessions. I don't quite fit into any of them anymore - if anything I guess I would feel most comfortable as a Mediaeval English Catholic, though that world is dead, and gone, and can only be pieced together in such places as Westminster Abbey where Common Worship is used on Sundays and feasts. I go regularly to an Anglo-Catholic church for Sunday Mass, though I can't say that I identify with either Baroque liturgy or most Anglicans. I have great sympathy with ''Western Rite Orthodoxy,'' though I am genuinely appalled at most attempts at ''Western'' liturgy by most Orthodox, and find their prejudice against everything ''Western'' more than just a bit ignorant.
Today is one of those days where you just wish that the Papacy had died out centuries ago, along with other less pernicious heresies. It is, of course, the pseudo-feast of ''Christ the King,'' and is, as Rubricarius points out, one of those more spectacular occasions where one pope contradicts another in the space of less than 15 years. If Papal authority is such a good thing, what is the use of such authority when it is scarce consistent, and one pope can undo the work of another at the stroke of a pen? If Tradition is so inextricably linked up with the will of the pope, then I marvel that the Roman Church has any tradition intact, since the popes are so wayward and have no love for it. It was hard for me, even as a ''traditionalist,'' to get enthusiastic about a feast no more than six years older than my grandmother, and fraught with so much reactionary theology. Does anybody give a crap about the ''social kingship'' of Christ as expounded in the writings of Pius XI? Lace cottas, Fatima shrines, Jesuits lurking in the shadows, name your cliché. It's all just tacky and dangerous, and it fills me with wrath.
Roman Catholics out there seem to think that my eschewing of the Papacy is something as strange and crooked in me as something else which I don't let on about. Perhaps I just can't get my head around looking thither to solve all the liturgical problems of this world, since it seems to me that the Papacy was to blame in the first place. Unless I am quite mistaken, every minute change in Liturgy and ''canon law'' was at the will and command of the pope. But no, we'll just carry on with our Joseph the Workers, and our Signum Magnums and let on, to ourselves and to the world, that what we're doing is genuinely for the good of the Church. I mean, if it's in Latin, and the altar has six candlesticks and a crucifix, it doesn't really matter whether you face the right way, or you use liturgical texts composed by some pen pusher in the Vatican, scanned over and over by a team of experts for heresy, does it? Just feel smug in your deluded sense of Tradition and look down your nose at schismatics and other non-Ultramontane types. What is Tradition compared with the will of the Dark Tower, the Holy Father, even...
Today is one of those days where you just wish that the Papacy had died out centuries ago, along with other less pernicious heresies. It is, of course, the pseudo-feast of ''Christ the King,'' and is, as Rubricarius points out, one of those more spectacular occasions where one pope contradicts another in the space of less than 15 years. If Papal authority is such a good thing, what is the use of such authority when it is scarce consistent, and one pope can undo the work of another at the stroke of a pen? If Tradition is so inextricably linked up with the will of the pope, then I marvel that the Roman Church has any tradition intact, since the popes are so wayward and have no love for it. It was hard for me, even as a ''traditionalist,'' to get enthusiastic about a feast no more than six years older than my grandmother, and fraught with so much reactionary theology. Does anybody give a crap about the ''social kingship'' of Christ as expounded in the writings of Pius XI? Lace cottas, Fatima shrines, Jesuits lurking in the shadows, name your cliché. It's all just tacky and dangerous, and it fills me with wrath.
Roman Catholics out there seem to think that my eschewing of the Papacy is something as strange and crooked in me as something else which I don't let on about. Perhaps I just can't get my head around looking thither to solve all the liturgical problems of this world, since it seems to me that the Papacy was to blame in the first place. Unless I am quite mistaken, every minute change in Liturgy and ''canon law'' was at the will and command of the pope. But no, we'll just carry on with our Joseph the Workers, and our Signum Magnums and let on, to ourselves and to the world, that what we're doing is genuinely for the good of the Church. I mean, if it's in Latin, and the altar has six candlesticks and a crucifix, it doesn't really matter whether you face the right way, or you use liturgical texts composed by some pen pusher in the Vatican, scanned over and over by a team of experts for heresy, does it? Just feel smug in your deluded sense of Tradition and look down your nose at schismatics and other non-Ultramontane types. What is Tradition compared with the will of the Dark Tower, the Holy Father, even...
For such reasons, and others, I doubt I shall ever pray with Roman Catholics again. It is their obstinacy in heresy, particularly their beliefs about the Papacy and 20th century liturgy - this is the crux of the whole argument. The Lutheran image above pretty much sums up my personal beliefs about the Papacy.
It didn't sum up Tolkien's, not at all.
ReplyDelete--
I suppose if you lived in the 14th century, you would have rejected the Pope's horrendous recent imposition of the feast of Corpus Christi on the whole Latin Church.
Happy Christ the King.
I don't see that Corpus Christi really compares with ''Christ the King.''
ReplyDeleteWhy not?
ReplyDeleteI believe it certainly was not extended to the universal Roman church until much later. Did it not begin as a feast particular to a diocese and then grow from there, eventually being almost "ratified" by the Pope as fait accompli? I could have this all wrong but there seems to be a strong ground up / top down distinction here.
ReplyDeleteUnlike Christ the King, the feast of Corpus Christi gained gradual foot in the mideaevel Latin Church, first being introduced as a diocesan feast (in present-day Belgium), as a result of a private revelation. The instrument in the hand of Divine Providence was St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon, in what is now Belgium. She died 5 April, 1258, at the House of the Cistercian nuns at Fosses, and was buried at Villiers. The Catholic Encyclopaedia writes thus:
ReplyDeleteJuliana, from her early youth, had a great veneration for the Blessed Sacrament, and always longed for a special feast in its honour. This desire is said to have been increased by a vision of the Church under the appearance of the full moon having one dark spot, which signified the absence of such a solemnity. She made known her ideas to Robert de Thorete, then Bishop of Liège, to the learned Dominican Hugh, later cardinal legate in the Netherlands, and to Jacques Pantaléon, at that time Archdeacon of Liège, afterwards Bishop of Verdun, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and finally Pope Urban IV. Bishop Robert was favourably impressed, and, since bishops as yet had the right of ordering feasts for their dioceses, he called a synod in 1246 and ordered the celebration to be held in the following year, also, that a monk named John should write the Office for the occasion. The decree is preserved in Binterim (Denkwürdigkeiten, V, 1, 276), together with parts of the Office.
Bishop Robert did not live to see the execution of his order, for he died 16 October, 1246; but the feast was celebrated for the first time by the canons of St. Martin at Liège. Jacques Pantaléon became pope 29 August, 1261. The recluse Eve, with whom Juliana had spent some time, and who was also a fervent adorer of the Holy Eucharist, now urged Henry of Guelders, Bishop of Liège, to request the pope to extend the celebration to the entire world. Urban IV, always an admirer of the feast, published the Bull "Transiturus" (8 September, 1264), in which, after having extolled the love of Our Saviour as expressed in the Holy Eucharist, he ordered the annual celebration of Corpus Christi in the Thursday next after Trinity Sunday, at the same time granting many indulgences to the faithful for the attendance at Mass and at the Office. This Office, composed at the request of the pope by the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas, is one of the most beautiful in the Roman Breviary and has been admired even by Protestants.
The death of Pope Urban IV (2 October, 1264), shortly after the publication of the decree, somewhat impeded the spread of the festival. Clement V again took the matter in hand and, at the General Council of Vienne (1311), once more ordered the adoption of the feast. He published a new decree which embodied that of Urban IV. John XXII, successor of Clement V, urged its observance.
Neither decree speaks of the theophoric procession as a feature of the celebration. This procession, already held in some places, was endowed with indulgences by Popes Martin V and Eugene IV.
The feast had been accepted in 1306 at Cologne; Worms adopted it in 1315; Strasburg in 1316. In England it was introduced from Belgium between 1320 and 1325. In the United States and some other countries the solemnity is held on the Sunday after Trinity.
In the Greek Church the feast of Corpus Christi is known in the calendars of the Syrians, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, and the Ruthenians of Galicia, Calabria, and Sicily.
“In the Greek Church the feast of Corpus Christi is known in the calendars of the Syrians, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, and the Ruthenians of Galicia, Calabria, and Sicily.”
ReplyDeleteFirstly, Syrians, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, and Ruthenians do NOT belong to the Greek Church. Secondly, those—patronisingly—referred to as “Ruthenians” by the papists may, indeed, inhabit Galicia, but I know of no significant (pod-)Carpatho-Rusyn presence in Calabria or Sicily. Thirdly, it is only those, from any of these groups, who have succumbed to the advances of the Whore of Babylon in Rome and formed their own heretical and schismatical splinter-movements that recognize “the feast of Corpus Christi”.
“In the Greek Church the feast of Corpus Christi is known in the calendars of the Syrians, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, and the Ruthenians of Galicia, Calabria, and Sicily.”
ReplyDeleteFirstly, Syrians, Armenians, Copts, Melchites, and Ruthenians do NOT belong to the Greek Church. Secondly, those—patronisingly—referred to as “Ruthenians” by the papists may, indeed, inhabit Galicia, but I know of no significant (pod-)Carpatho-Rusyn presence in Calabria or Sicily. Thirdly, it is only those, from any of these groups, who have succumbed to the advances of the Whore of Babylon in Rome and formed their own heretical and schismatical splinter-movements that recognize “the feast of Corpus Christi”.