Reigning from on high...

One of the ironies of this merging and mingling of Anglican patrimony into the Romish stew is the adoption of the Roman kalendar of saints days by the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Today in the Ordinariate kalendar is Pius V. Whether or not you believe Pius V to have lived a godly life is irrelevant, but his inclusion in the kalendar of the Ordinariate presents, at least to me, a number of historical and liturgical problems. On the one hand, you have the problem of reconciling the 1559 Prayer Book with the Roman liturgical tradition, inextricably linked up with the authority wielded by two historical figures. On the other, deciding what place (if any) Queen Elizabeth I has in the Anglican Catholick tradition comparable with Pius V. Pius V, you see, had blasted Queen Elizabeth for "ordering that books of manifestly heretical content be propounded to the whole realm and that impious rites and institutions after the rule of Calvin" replace the Sacrifice of the Mass. However, Anglicanorum Coetibus says that the liturgical books proper to the Anglican tradition are "treasures worthy to be shared." Some starry-eyed Anglican Papalists might have jumped for joy to read that but in the light of the Revised Standard Version and a few trite Cranmerian phrases in the Ordinariate liturgy, all this seems very spurious to me. Hence my view that the Ordinariate is a dried up old onion. I am not an Anglican and indeed despise the Church of England but there are certain traditions and heroes of that fallen communion which be dear to me, and among them is Queen Elizabeth of happy memory.

If we are to understand "Anglican Patrimony in the Catholick Church" as the blessing of an Anglican pilgrimage towards Rome (assuming, for the sake of argument, that Rome is that Church spoken of in the Nicene Creed) then what place would Queen Elizabeth have? Pius was her enemy, declared her removed from the community of Christ's Church and sowed the seeds of sedition in her realm. For her part, Queen Elizabeth steered the English Church in the time of its growing identity; the time of Archbishop Parker who sought to align the Elizabethan Church with the faith and tradition of the Saxons ere the Normans brought Romanism to our shores; the time of Tallis, Merbecke and Byrd who shaped Anglican liturgical musick; and the time of other wise clerkes of the faith, Richard Hooker, for example, and Lancelot Andrewes whose scholarship was surpassed by none in that age. Queen Elizabeth presided over this English Renaissance. Are the members of the Ordinariate expected to anathematise her, as Pius V had done, her considerable contribution to Anglican patrimony notwithstanding? Would it not be fair to say that Elizabeth was ostensibly rather an instrument of God in the cultivation of many of the dearest of our traditions and not an usurper and persecutor of a faith driven underground and thrice worthy of damnation?

O Lord, save The Queen!

Maybe I'm talking about an Anglican who doesn't exist...or perhaps the battle going on in my head everyday? I certainly don't hold with the sanctity of Pius V. I hardly think that encouraging sedition is a catholick ideal and, assuming for the moment that he was "universal pastor," he ostensibly failed in his ministry by leaving the Elizabethan recusants to the spy master at the English court by publishing Regnans in Excelsis. C.S Lewis, in characteristic patrimonial wisdom, seems to propose an answer. In a Latin epistle to Don Giovanni Calabria he mentioned having an untold reverence for both Thomas More and William Tyndale. He says:

Ex vestris Tetzel, ex nostris Henricus VIII, perditi homines erant: adde, si vis, ex vestris Papam Leonem, ex nostris Lutheram (quamquam egomet de ambobus mitiorem sententiam darem) sed quid sentiam de vestro Thoma Moro, de nostro Gulielmo Tyndale? Tota opera et huius et illius nuper perlegi. Ambo mihi videntur esse viri sanctissimi et toto corde amare Dominum: neque huius nec illius caligas solvere dignus sum. Attamen dissentiunt et (id quod me torquet et attonitum habet) illa dissensio mihi videtur non ex vitiis nec ex ignorantia eorum, immo ex virtutibus et fidei eorum penetralibus oriri - ita ut quo optimi sunt eo maxime dissentiunt. Credo Dei iudicium de hac dissensione altius absconditum esse quam tibi videtur: etenim iudicia eius abyssus.

God grant that pious Elizabeth finds a place in the hearts of those Anglicans who have dared to swim the abominable Tiber. Remember that not all piety, goodness and tradition comes from Rome. I believe St Gregory the Great said something like that to St Augustine when he brought the Roman Rite to our shores.

Ephesus...

We are often told that the Council of Ephesus (A.D 431) "defined" St Mary as Theotokos. In fact, it did no such thing. The Council issued no dogmatic decrees or definitions at all. The fathers condemned Nestorius as an heretic but the issue at stake was thoroughly Christological. The heresy of Nestorius lie in his position that Christ was a mere man and his teaching that St Mary was, therefore, Anthropotokos (Mother of the Man) was treated as evidence of this. But most of the evidence given against Nestorius came from his sermons that said absolutely nothing about St Mary. As Professor Price notes in his essay Theotokos: Significance in Doctrine and Devotion, the closest the Council came to defining St Mary as Theotokos was in an epistle sent by St Cyril of Alexandria to John of Antioch in A.D 433, two years after the synod, even so:

"On the matter of how we think and speak concerning the Virgin the Theotokos and the manner in which the only-begotten Son of God became man, we must state briefly (not by way of addition, but in the form of giving an assurance) what we have held from the first...We acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, perfect God and perfect Man made up of a rational soul and body, begotten from the Father before the ages in respect of the Godhead and the same on the last day for us and for our salvation from the Virgin Mary in respect of his manhood...By virtue of this understanding of the union which involves no merging, we acknowledge the holy Virgin to be Theotokos, because God the Word was enfleshed and became man and from the very conception united to himself the temple taken from her."

I take comfort in the fact that these early debates were fundamentally about Christ, not His Mother.

Two new saints...

What happened to the age-old prohibitions against praying with heretics, schismatics and infidels?

Do I get the impression that by these infamous canonisations people think that pope Francis has cast down a lamp and declared a new dark age to have begun? The canonisation of two 20th century popes can hardly be any different to the canonisation of Pius X, surely? The pope-emeritus has already declared Pius XII to have been "venerable." If wonders can be attributed to that man at all then they must have their uttermost origins in the Devil, whom he undoubtedly adored. Of course, it makes no difference to me. The popes can declare whomever they like to be saints; that doesn't make them so since the antient bishoprick of Rome is fallen and in any case I find the modern canonisation process quite ridiculous. It seems, to me, that the Traddies are hesitant about John XXIII and John Paul II because they are popes of the wicked Council. Quid plura dicam?

Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! For so did their fathers to the false prophets. Luke 6:26.

Many popes of Rome lived godly lives. Leo the Great is a good example. Why is he a saint? Well, perhaps because he saved the City of Rome from Attila's hordes; perhaps because he wrote the most eloquent Latin sermons I have ever read; yea more, because he tirelessly defended Orthodoxy and lived a Christ-like life so that we may rejoice humbly to cry blessed Leo, pray for us! On the other hand, if changing the Good Friday prayer for the faithless Jews or being anointed by a Hindu priestess are pathways to sainthood then never mind about what the Scriptures say! If the pope, as "supreme legislator," can change the strictest criteria of salvation then we're all just fine, aren't we! Nevertheless, as a friend of mine noted recently, John Paul II excommunicated Marcel Lefebvre so he must have had a streak of decency in him somewhere, pushed down and buried deep beneath the trappings of popery and all the shewing off for which he was renowned. John XXIII always struck me as a kindly old man largely ill-used by his subordinates.

As I have said, it makes no difference to me. I am under no delusion that God welcomed either Roncalli or Wojtyla into the Kingdom with the words Euge, serve bone et fidelis! I merely point out that the Roman church, under this popular new pope, has sunk to a new low. During the visit of pope Benedict to Britain, I saw a priest get up from his chair and kneel to receive a blessing he saw the pope give from a television screen. The fact that mine eyes were wide with disbelief is irrelevant; I just wonder if this man would do the same if pope Bogroll came onto the television and began Sit nomen Domini benedictum? It's a perfectly reasonable question. It just seems that traditionalists have a rose-tinted vision of the Papacy and its occupant which was justified during the pontificate of Benedict XVI, the time of their ascendancy, but dispelled entirely with the coming of this South American peasant. The reaction on Rorate Caeli to the election of pope Francis was surely telling. Why? Because Benedict and Francis are two very different people, and their respective pontificates are a clear reflection of this difference whether you're prepared to admit that a pope's private theological opinions or liturgical preferences can push the official church doctrinal or liturgical pendulum in the undesirable way or not. It is the essential problem of the Papacy.

By canonising these two conciliar popes, Francis is sanctifying a period in church history in which the traditionalists were largely sidelined and their bastardised rites treated (rightly) with suspicion. No wonder the Traddies can't stand it! But on a human level it's also a question of embarrassment. John Paul II was a patsy in some respects but even he had an air of intelligence and dignity. John XXIII was a fat provincial man (although to be fair in Italy that is by no means as derogatory as it would be in England). The traditionalists are embarrassed by a man who seems to have verbal diarrhoea and by consistently shooting off at the mouth is bringing official doctrine into question...not that that ever counted for much! I mean, when did you ever hear a priest preach against women wearing trousers? But heaven forbid that you didn't shew up to an abortion clinic to wave a placard! I expect only such as Richard Williamson would have the gumption to do that, having cast off all credibility anyway.

I wonder if the Traddies have begun substituting the collect Pro Papa for Ecclesiae yet? I know at least one traditionalist who doesn't recognise Francis as the "true pope," and by extension all his canonisations, decrees, etc. He is an old man but with hope the scales might fall from his eyes and he might start crawling to the doors of an Orthodox church seeking the Sacraments there. The Papacy is redundant. It is time for all to admit that the West has failed, failed utterly and to turn Eastwards in prayer, saying God, for thy great Mercy, give Grace! Have Mercy on me, a Sinner!

Dried up...

I have said before that there is an element of vulgarity about blogging, understood as a form of journalism; as an human being, and indeed an idle one, I cannot be expected to churn out post after post of thoughtful, even the occasionally original, posts day after day. What can I say? Three months ago I began the composition of a post about elevations in the Roman Rite. This, you understand, was bethought of that page in the Canon Romanus of a 1576 Belgian missal, about which I made such a fuss. The post was going well; I was even quoting the patrimonial wisdom of Fr Hooker about the rationale of ceremonies, but in the end I gave up and retired to my bed. Like the renewal of my passport, which I have put off for four years now, I aim to accomplish my design one of these days. Similarly, the other day I was discussing with a friend of mine the rudiments of a post about the treblefold significance of the rooster in relation to Tolkien and Christianity. Blending the account of St Peter's denial, bits of antient Church hymnody and the psalter, and the breach of the brazen doors of Minas Tirith; that the cock, recking nothing of wizardry and war, heralding only the Sun of Righteousness and the hope of Men which comes with the Dawn, is the most sublime emblem of Christ. As Eliza Doolittle said, "O, wouldn't it be loverly!" Only, it wouldn't now as I have given the plot away.

I started this job in retail banking just over a month ago. I never was so convinced of my incompetence. It's one thing to be utterly incapable of passing for a "normal" person, it's quite another to be taken for an intelligent person by a well-meaning display of articulateness and then to appear utterly foolish by the inability to perform even the simplest tasks. I don't understand the concept of money. I cordially dislike new surroundings. Nobody can understand that I have no ambition and the reasons for that. Nobody understood my profound disgust with a man forty-two years my senior threatening to leave the bank for the sake of a "better rate" which amounted to a few points of a point of interest (incidentally, another concept wholly over my head). Woe is me that I am in the midst of a fierce, modern world of Mammon in which I want no part. On Wednesday morning I felt so depressed I was giving very serious thought to throwing myself under the next fast-moving train.

My mother came to the rescue. We went to see La boheme at the Orchard Theatre in Dartford. My contempt for Puccini notwithstanding, the evening was enjoyable on a number of levels. The average age of the audience seemed to be 75. I found this funny because I had heard an advert on the wireless earlier that day in which it was said that a large portion of old people have had no contact with friends, neighbours or enemies for over a month. I was not alone in finding this funny. My father, who turned 57 on Easter Day, laughed and said "good for them!" Perhaps I am just used to the comparatively high standard of Covent Garden but everything about the Orchard was tacky. For example, I don't think that you can really hold it against a provincial theatre for having piss-poor stage art; but the irony of Act II, in which the Bohemians were mocking Musetta for taking up with an elderly gentleman (played by a man of 30) and then her defection to Marcello (played by a man of about 55) was too much. The only gin at the bar was Gordon's rinse water (I thought better of paying £40 for a bottle of champagne), not to mention the standard of the performance. The libretto was cheap, predictable, rather shallow and given to lasciviousness and the musick was abysmal. Volunteers from the Salvation Army contributed their skills to Act II. The evening was a success on account of the sheer lack of dignity and I went home with a smile on my face and takeaway Chinese food and the thought that while I may have become insensitive to all else, my sense of taste is still in tact.

Nothing much else to report, really. My brother has bought whichever hobbit film is out on DVD at the moment and has twice asked me to watch it. I simply will not do that. I feel as strongly about Peter Jackson as I do about Pius XII; both men eviscerated great works of art, to their irredeemable shame, and I will not countenance their works. Anyway, another day past means another day closer to the grave. If death is oblivion, a sleep of everlasting forgetfulness, then God is indeed a merciful God!

Art: I think that's John Bunyan's Pilgrim; I forget. It's been in my pictures for some time. No need to name the artist.

Two Ronnies...

I thought something light-hearted for Bright Monday would hit the spot. This is, without the shadow of a doubt, the funniest Two Ronnies sketch I have ever seen. I laugh out loud every time I watch it. Enjoy!

Alleluia!

From the Hours of Alice de Reydon of Wherstead in Suffolk, circa 1324.

In the spirit of Spenser's poem, may I wish you all the temporal and spiritual blessings in the Risen Lord on this most sacred solemnity of Pascha. Happy Eoster everyone!

Of the first fruits...

Most glorious Lord of lyfe, that on this day,

Didst make thy triumph over death and sin:

And having harrowd hell, didst bring away

Captivity thence captive us to win:

This joyous day, deare Lord, with joy begin,

And grant that we, for whom thou diddest dye,

Being with thy deare blood clene washt from sin,

May live for ever in felicity.

And that thy love we weighing worthily,

May likewise love thee for the same againe:

And for thy sake that all lyke deare didst buy,

With love may one another entertayne.

So let us love, deare love, lyke as we ought,

Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

Edmund Spenser 1552-1599, Eoster.

My talent...

I have several talents. As a boy, it was Irish dancing and when I was 10 years old I won the World Championship for the Under 11's. Having mastered Irish dancing, I had wanted to take up ballet but my father decided that I was already too much of a "pansy" for it to be safe for me to go down that road. When I was asked to leave the Irish dancing academy (you see, I was a pariah even then) I devoted myself wholly to Tolkien, at which I have always considered myself, next to Christopher, the world's leading authority. But there has always been another talent, slightly less gratifying, namely my talent for attracting publick ridicule. This has been with me since my earliest days; from my first trip to the post box at the end of the road with an A4 brown envelope (I spent approximately ten minutes trying to fit the thing in the hole, eventually going home with it and asking my mother what to do; she took it, folded it, and then told me that she despaired of my woeful lack of "common sense") to walking into a pub in Farningham with my mother some years ago and a table of young men erupting with laughter at my appearance. To-day an otherwise very patient woman sighed and had to stamp a set of documents I was carrying for me because I couldn't work out how to do so or where to stamp, then pointed out that it was "perfectly simple" to fill out an envelope, that I had put cellotape over the wrong side of the envelope (to be fair, I was by this point sweating with stress and there was a slight tear at the top right-hand side which I mistook for a fold), then when I went back down to the other office to retrieve the cellotape I managed to cellotape over the address, which I had in any case written on the wrong side. It was a good day.

Then I came home and read this! Perhaps I ought to have said that when I read the works of Joseph Pearce, while I found his style banal, I agreed with the general thrust of his arguments because I was still then a Roman Catholick. Some time ago I began to re-read many of the old books in my library in order to reappraise their value in the light of my views now. I never bothered with Pearce for the reason I have just given, but that's clearly funny!

What happened?

You know, these days there are only three liturgical services in the Roman Rite to which I would go gladly. They are the ceremonies of Palm Sunday, the ceremonies of the Paschal Vigil on the morning of Holy Saturday, and Pontifical Mattins and Lauds of the Resurrection (the latter simply because it no longer exists and not out of especial preference). I find the rest of the Roman Rite rather grotesque, to be frank, and so irretrievably riddled with popery as to be not worth one's trouble. Still, I suppose it is fitting to compare the "achievements" of Pius XII to the lands about Mordor:

"Before them dark in the dawn the great mountains reached up to roofs of smoke and cloud. Out from their feet were flung huge buttresses and broken hills that were now at the nearest scarce a dozen miles away. Frodo looked round in horror. Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring would come; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light.

"They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing - unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. 'I feel sick,' said Sam. Frodo did not speak." (The Lord of the Rings, Book IV, Chapter II).

C.S Lewis, upon reading this passage, remarked that no one could have conceived of this landscape had he not seen the battlefields of the Western Front. When first I made this comparison, however, I still loved and revered the Roman Rite. Now I would say that Pius XII changed the situation, not the landscape. If we're conditioned to believe that the Tridentine innovations in Holy Week (brought in, I suppose, to drag the antient ceremonies of this solemn and serious time down to the level of the rest of the Roman Rite), for example, are essentially beautiful and necessary when in fact they are ruthless grotesqueries forced upon us by the tyranny of bad theology, then really we were already in the graceless wilderness to begin with. A rose by any other name, but in reverse, if you like. On Spy Wednesday of 1956 Tolkien bemoaned the senseless violence wrought against Palm Sunday (I have deduced that since nobody had yet experienced Good Friday (in my opinion the worst of the lot)), and I share his frustration. I really do. But I think now that defence of the Roman Rite, in whatever form, is tantamount to defence of the Papacy since the two are so inextricably linked over centuries of misery. I suppose what I am trying to say is that there is a fundamental cognitive dissonance between accepting the Filioque and all subsequent liturgical and doctrinal developments in the West and objecting to Urban VIII's hymns or the Pius X breviary or Palm Sunday in red, whatever you like.

Besides, by going to church you risk having a conversation with someone.

Art: Ted Nasmith. I couldn't find anything else. Ithilien is too pretty and would not illustrate the point.

Spy Wednesday...

"When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death; and when they had bound him, they led him away and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor. Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, what is that to us? See thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself." Matthew 27:1-6.

Valiant for Truth...

Who would true Valour see

Let him come hither;

One here will Constant be,

Come Wind, come Weather.

There's no Discouragement,

Shall make him once Relent,

His first avow'd Intent,

To be a Pilgrim.

Who so beset him round,

With dismal Storys,

Do but themselves Confound;

His Strength the more is.

No Lyon can him fright,

He'l with a Gyant Fight,

But he will have a right,

To be a Pilgrim.

Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend,

Can daunt his Spirit:

He knows, he at the end,

Shall Life Inherit.

Then Fancies fly away,

He'l fear not what men say,

He'l labour Night and Day,

To be a Pilgrim.

The original rendering by Bunyan is much nicer than that of the 1906 English Hymnal. It's one of my favourite hymns.

Solitude...

Turning back the clock on this world by deleting social networking accounts, avoiding television and not renewing one's mobile phone contract is a good way of culling unwanted people from your life. It also eliminates conversation. When people ask, "are you on Facebook?" You say, "no..." They then ask if you saw the latest on...whatever is latest in the news, and you say, "I don't watch television." Then they ask what your plans are for the weekend, and you say, "nothing." You can't really proceed from there and your annoying questioner has no choice but to walk away. This is because most people have an active Facebook account; if you have no part in that then that closes off one avenue of useless talk. Everybody spends their evenings by letting the television wash all over them; if you don't watch television, you have nothing to talk about. Finally, if you're perfectly frank about keeping your activities to the absolute minimum this too will eliminate any possibility of forming a connexion with your ungodly questioner. People will then see you as a terrible bore and want nothing whatever to do with you. Then the work is done! Solitude is the elixir of life.

Towards the end of the First Age the remnant of the Sindar and the Gnomes were constrained to fly to the Isle of Balar to seek refuge from the soldiery of Morgoth. Would that there were an island to which I could fly! We are a small island already but I sometimes wish that God would shew forth his power and destroy it for an example to the eyes of posterity.