The Sensible Bond

Work avoidance

2011-12-05T21:38:00.002Z

I'm not avoiding you lot, honest! It's just been one heck of an autumn. As countless people have now said to me wistfully, becoming a parent, getting a new job and moving house are generally considered three of the most stressful things to do, and we have done them all within the space of a couple of months. I know! What can I say, other than that it was unavoidable? Not for us the long, cold separation of husband-working-away-from-wife and wife-at-home-with-newborn-infant. The job surely came at the providential moment, and what else could we do but answer the call? We see it as a letting go - love is proven in the letting go, as C. Day Lewis wrote in another context - and, at the same time a leap into the unknown.

That said, our new town is becoming a little less unknown. My move to a Midlands university persuaded us that Birmingham was the place to go - against all stereotypes and its dreadful reputation - and we have not been disappointed. Birmingham is in point of fact a magnificent city of a thousand hues, from its green and leafy outskirts to its pug-ugly, greying 1960s architecture. I can leave the latter but I'm very grateful for the former.

Actually, there us much less of the 1960s greying architecture than I had feared. Birmimgham is still filled with the civic grandeur that the Chamberlains brought to town. Moreover, the square and lawns around the Anglican cathedral make a welcome Georgian contrast with the pedestrianised steel and glass splendour of the far more recent Bullring Shopping Centre.

And then there is the city's heart, or rather its belly: le ventre de Birmimgham, with its crowded fruit and veg market

where they sell amazing produce at £1 a bowl, and its glorious meat and fish market where you can buy everything from finest, unplucked game to dull-eyed, staring sheep heads.

This isn't the plastic-wrapped cosmopolis in its low-fat pomp; rather, it is like something lurching out of the Middle Ages, vulgar, red-raw and ponging to high heaven but deeply human to the core. I bow to this temple of food as often as I can.

But the true religion of Birmingham is its Catholicism: it is extraordinary how it seeps out of all its pores. From the magnificent St Chad's along one of the Queensways, to the Oratory on the Hagley Road.

It was no mistake a pope just had to come here to beatify the first English beatus who ever walked these streets.

So, you see, with all that, and my many parental and professional duties, I might be excused even light blogging, were it not for the temptation of the soap box. And what do I feel like ranting about at the moment? Er, perhaps I must leave that for another time. Duty calls me away ...

Thank you, America

2011-11-23T23:43:00.003Z

It's proving rather difficult to get anywhere near the blogging platform these days. But I cannot let tomorrow's Thanksgiving celebrations in the USA pass by without acknowledging them. In Europe it remains deeply fashionable to hold the US in contempt. There is an odd kind of American conservative who even does this, convinced of the inferiority of American culture as opposed to the European.

But the problem is wrongly posed. America is in some senses only an extension of Europe, a sometimes strange and a sometimes successful experiment undertaken by Europeans for reasons we all know about. Those who first celebrated Thanksgiving were Europeans on a trip which had only just lasted slightly longer than a journey on Ryan Air. They were hardly the first European settlers though; the Spanish were there some time before them. What am I saying in fact? Well, that European culture is American culture. It belongs to America inevitably.

Of course, I don't mean to downplay America's essential otherness in comparison to the European thing. Its deliberate setting aside of so much of the old continent's ways partly explains why it belongs to what is known more broadly as the New World. But where can I flee where I will not find myself? The traffic back and forth between the US and Europe has been constant for good and for ill.

Even now, America has perhaps a greater chance of preserving what made the civilisation of Europe so distinct: its Christianity. While significant parts of Europe promise in the next few decades to become as lost to the Church as the African and Middle Eastern dioceses in partibus infidelium, the US seem to offer up case after case of the invigoration of Christian life, a renewal in contemplative communities, courage in the public square. Arguably the heterogeneity of its current episcopate has allowed it to begin to escape from the sickman blues of Vatican II more quickly that a local church like England and Wales where parochialism and cronyism are still ingrained.

And then there are all the things which make me smile about the US. The ubiquitous air conditioning, the easy cuisine, the help-yourself-to-my-fridge hospitality, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Kansas City, Santa Fe and Washington DC, the muppets ...

the redundant expressions like 'How can I help you today?' (as opposed to tomorrow, I suppose?) and the sudden uppitiness of the shop keeper when Englishmen innocently ask if he has anything 'cheap' for sale.

I suppose when one spends one's formative years in a country, as I did in the US as a young man, it marks one deeply in ways that one cannot change. I'm sure that is true for me. But, still, it is en pleine connaissance de cause - as the French say - that I'm deeply, deeply thankful for the US, for the funny, irritating and delightful companions of my American sojourn, and to everything from its glorious landscapes to it crappest tin-pot beer, for being there and for being that irreducibly annoying, inexorably pleasing country strung somewhere between here and the other side of the planet, its heart free of irony and its waistline slung amicably a little lower than it ought to be.

Which reminds me of a true American anecdote with which I will finish.

Pat had been some kind of ranger in a vast American country park. For all I knew, he was friends with Yogi Bear. In any case, he was a blood-red American, and one time over coffee he asked me with pride and a rhetorical flourish why America had never been invaded.

'I don't know, Pat, so go on and tell me,' I replied.

'It's because we all have the right to bear arms' he said, beaming a smile and with just a small glimmer of stars and stripes in his eyes.

'That's interesting,' I said, 'but it does make me wonder, Pat: have you ever seen the sea?'

He looked at me totally puzzled, so I pressed him further, 'Surely you're aware that the US is bounded on either side by oceans that are thousands of miles wide.'

'Hmmmm,' he conceded, 'but we'll be ready for anyone who ever crosses them!'

Perhaps the conversation has been embellished in the remembering. No matter. What else is remembering for? But I like to think he is somewhere there still, slurping his coffee and making sure his guns are ready for when the invaders arrive! I meanwhile am free in my mind to wonder freely down all the lovely roads I remember from Virginia to New Mexico.

God bless America! And today of all days: God bless, America.

Benga Beat

2011-11-12T15:33:00.000Z

Classical guitar as you have never heard it ...

Goodbyeee

2011-11-04T00:22:00.000Z

Ttony's going. I hope it was nothing I said, yet I fear that it was. Indeed, he says it was. Oh dear. I don't follow your logic, Ttony, but I sympathise enormously.

Well, good bye, old chum. Hope you'll come back one day. And in honour of your last post, here's another in keeping with the cold and chilly season that is settling in right now

So no agreement [updated AGAIN!] ...

2011-11-01T18:58:00.009Z

This story already has a bizarre life. It was posted on Rorate Caeli yesterday afternoon, but then disappeared. I picked it up when someone sent me the link to Ignis Ardens, a traditionalist forum based in the UK, which among other things regularly publishes the newsletters of the SSPX's district superior, Fr Paul Morgan, in GB. The forum post there contained a link to the November letter published on the SSPX's GB website which I verified as valid yesterday afternoon. As of 2 November, the link from Ignis Ardens has gone dead.

According to that letter, the consensus of the SSPX's superiors was that no agreement with Rome is currently possible (see: (now a dead link). It is a report which I have not seen anywhere else:

Hence the stated consensus of those in attendance was that the Doctrinal Preamble was clearly unacceptable and that the time has certainly not come to pursue any practical agreement as long as the doctrinal issues remain outstanding. It also agreed that the Society should continue its work of insisting upon the doctrinal questions in any contacts with the Roman authorities.

I'm fascinated. It really isn't for Fr Morgan to be making such an announcement before Bishop Fellay has made it... or is something else going on here?

Watch this space ...NEWS NOW IN:

Rorate Caeli relays a press communiqué from SSPX Headquarters today:

Following the meeting of the Superiors of the Seminaries and Districts of the Society of Saint Pius X in Albano (Italy), on October 7, 2011, several comments have appeared in the press on the response Bishop Bernard Fellay [Superior General of the Society] would give to the Roman proposals of September 14, 2011. It is recalled that only the General House of the Society of Saint Pius X is entitled to make public an official communiqué or authorized commentary on this matter. Until further notice, reference should be made to the communiqué of October 7, 2011.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Is there a 'Collaborationist Catholicism' at work in England?

2011-11-01T08:39:00.008Z

After this post was written, and after several bloggers (Ttony, James Preece and John Smeaton) had taken Francis Davis to task for his appalling treatment of Fr Leon Pereira and his championing of Jon Cruddas, Davis removed all the relevant posts from his blog The Principled Society.. What he needs to do in fact is to issue a full apology to Fr Pereira on his blog. Justice and charity demand it.

*********************

Let me begin by defining my terms. By 'Collaborationist Catholicism', I do not mean the kind of Catholicism which one might have witnessed under the Vichy Regime - the government led by Marshal Pétain in France from 1940-1944. By 'Collaborationist Catholicism' what I mean is a Catholicism which behaves towards civil power like the Vichy government behaved towards the Third Reich. I mean a kind of Catholicism which thinks that 'resistance' is futile, naive and 'not very constructive'. By 'Collaborationist Catholicism' I mean a kind of Catholicism which would praise its own kind for being conciliatory - not like that nasty American Catholicism which is so divisive. By a 'Collaborationist Catholicism' I also mean a kind of Catholicism whose adherents very often give the impression that they secretly agree with some of the key values of their political overlords, no matter how hypocrtical this makes them.

I ask the question because I, like James Preece and Ttony, have been surprised at the defence given to the egregious Jon Cruddas by Francis Davis. Though Davis has taken down his CV from his blog, he is according to other sources a Fellow of Blackfriars, Oxford [UPDATE: apparently, so a source informs me, he is no longer so], and he even sits on a HEFCE Panel. What, then, does he think he is doing by indulging in this sub-critical attack on Fr Pereira?

But let me come back to my point: is this not a sound example of 'Collaborationist Catholicism'? Fr Pereira bucks the conciliatory trend which Davis would prefer Catholics to take. Davis never makes clear quite what glorious achievements the conciliatory action of Jon Cruddas has brought about. Personally, I have my doubts; just take a look at his voting record. One wonders if Cruddas has ever thought of thinking for himself at all. He appears not to have bothered thinking for the unborn in any discernibly Christian way.

And one must wonder why Davis comes to Cruddas's defence with such cringe-making enthusiasm. A perusal of Davis's blog shows he has been championing Cruddas's cause recently, but then never does he provide any evidence - it bears repeating - of what is so miraculously beneficial about the service Cruddas renders to his country. It is intriguing that Davis thinks Cruddas is an example of an MP defending justice 'in extremely trying times'. Could this be a reference to Cruddas's support for the squalid Iraq war, or perhaps for his vote against the requirement for children born through fertility treatment to have a mother and a father?

Yes - the Collaborationist Catholic says - all you résistants are naive fools. You should look to how successful and close to power Jon Cruddas is and marvel at his wonderous star. Because look what Cruddas has achieved by being so close to power: he has consistently voted with his party! And, in any case, Cruddas is a fighter for justice, as all the unborn children in this country will no doubt agree.

Truly, this is 'Collaborationist Catholicism' - craven before corrupt authorities, happy to cover its collaboration with the mantle of constructive conversations, delighted to label as hopelessly naive those who believe in firmer resistance, and entirely, utterly, callously careless of what it loses by being so conformist.

Fairtrade? Why not Pro-life too?

2011-10-28T09:21:00.000+01:00

A few years ago, during the Portsmouth Diocesan consultation over reorganisation, I made a submission in which I suggested that in addition to being 'Fairtrade' (an accolade they clamoured loudly about), the diocese should also be 'Pro-life' in the sense of promoting the plenary teaching of the Church on marriage, sexuality, contraception and the family. Along with probably 99% of proposals, that one ended up in the bin.

I note then with pleasure the rather hard-hitting letter on John Smeaton's blog from Fr Leon Pereira OP, commenting on the Las Casas Institute's invitation to Dr Jon Cruddas to speak at Blackfriars, Oxford (not that they are in Portsmouth, but they are not far away!).

Among other salient arguments, he hits the nail on the head when he says that there has been a bias towards the soft issues in the Catholic defence of justice and peace in England and Wales. Here is how he puts it:

We sign agreements to make our parishes ‘Fair Trade friendly’. That requires a conversion of sorts, although I understand that Fair Trade as it now stands could be improved and made fairer. But why do we not make a covenant with all our families (remember, they are the ‘domestic Church’ according to Vatican II!) to be ‘Humanae Vitae friendly’? Is it a good use of our energies to chain ourselves to the gates of Faslane, when hundreds of thousands of children are slaughtered in our cities every year? Probably not, but it is easier isn't it? It's easier to moan about carbon footprints than to form our consciences according to the mind of Holy Mother Church. But then the Gospel isn't about what's easier.

Fr Pereira is being both bold and brave here. Cruddas won't thank him for his intervention, and my guess is that Fr Pereira's intervention will be viewed dimly by some of his brethren. But if, as he says, Cruddas's record on abortion voting is so lamentable, and if, as he says, Cruddas is unlikely to get a roasting by the participants at Las Casas, then what else can a conscientious man do other than register his protest against the event?

God bless Fr Pereira and God save him from the whirlwind he could reap from sticking his neck out like this.

Silly season in Assisi (or what the pope SHOULD say today)

2011-10-27T07:54:00.005+01:00

Well, it's here, the grand religious jamboree which I wrote about here and here and here and here. Here is a day, if ever there was one, for looking bleary eyed at the dawn (as I have done) and burying oneself under the covers again (which I have singularly failed to do).

I must admit the Vatican has worked overtime to prevent misinterpretations of the genre that made Benedict stay away from Assisi in 1986 and which, in 2006, made him write the following to the Bishop of Assisi:

In order not to misinterpret the meaning of what John Paul II wanted to achieve in 1986 and what, to use his own words, he habitually called the 'spirit of Assisi,' it is important not to forget the attention paid on that occasion to ensuring that the interreligious Prayer Meeting did not lend itself to syncretist interpretations founded on a relativistic concept.

In the same letter, Benedict also recalled what John Paul II had said about the first Assisi meeting:

The fact that we have come here does not imply any intention of seeking a religious consensus among ourselves or of negotiating our faith convictions. Neither does it mean that religions can be reconciled at the level of a common commitment in an earthly project which would surpass them all. Nor is it a concession to relativism in religious beliefs.

But surely, the fact that JPII could say this and still find the spirit of Assisi running out of control is proof that you cannot simply offer your own interpretations of your actions while, in those actions and in other words, undermining the interpretation you want people to lay on them. I'm reminded of a scene from a Marx brothers film in which Groucho is flirting with some pretty young girl and Margaret Rutherford (was it she?) says to him: 'But what are you doing flirting with her?

Groucho: I wasn't flirting!

Rutherford: Yes, you were! I saw you!

Groucho: Well, who are you going to believe: me or your own eyes?

Let me make that simpler. If we say: Neither does it mean that religions can be reconciled at the level of a common commitment in an earthly project which would surpass them all, what does it mean if we then say that we are all in a quest for world peace? Isn't that an 'earthly project which would surpass [all religions]'? And if not, why isn't the nature of that peace - a purely civilisational or civic peace which simply ensures that we are not at each other's throats - made unmistakeably clear? I admit I haven't read all the sources and documents but this is fundamental.

And then there is this notion of pilgrimage. We're all on a pilgrimage are we? Let me quote to you what I wrote about this previously:

That every human being is a pilgrim in search of truth and goodness is a reasonably accurate description of the human intellect and will, our principal and distinguishing faculties. But then what do we [hear]? Believers too are constantly journeying towards God? The problems here are severe. There is a substantial difference in the journey of a man who already possesses the fulness of the faith and a man who does not. Of course they are both viatores but in quite distinct senses.

Let us find a comparison. Can you imagine what a woman would think of her husband if he sat in a room full of single people and, gazing around at them, said: 'We are all seeking love!' 'Well, you've got it chum!' she would say. And if you muddle the search for love by pretending that the internal journey of a married couple and of a single person are the same, you're in dead trouble.

Indeed, we are all in a convenant with God through our baptism. So what does it mean if we place ourselves in the same position of pilgrim towards the truth alongside members of all other religions? Of course, we as individuals are fallible and error-stricken at times: but do we believe our religion is Christ's revelation and our Church Christ's instrument to save the world, yes or no? And if so, what does it mean to pretend to be a pilgrim just like any Buddhist or Hindu?

What then really is the meaning of the train which today will rumble its way from Rome to Assisi? Am I the first one to wonder Quo vadis, Petre?

All that said, the actions of someone like Fr Régis de Caqueray, SSPX district superior in France, repeating everything that was said about Assisi I, and ratcheting it up a notch, are one more proof of the poor stuff that passes for argumentation from that quarter. Even the left-wing media - the Guardian and the BBC included - have got the message that Assisi is not syncretist or relativist in intention. And the SSPX's promise of a thousand Masses in reparation just looks a little too passive-aggressive to me. Some devils are only driven out by prayer and fasting, I agree, but but this just smacks of not trying to understand.

Mrs Ches asked me the other day what it would take for the pope to redeem the Assisi meeting today in my eyes. My answer is simple: all he need do is to say that while he welcomes them all as fellow humans and even as friends, he must read to them something he recently wrote to Catholics:

The “door of faith” (Acts 14:27) is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church. It is possible to cross that threshold when the word of God is proclaimed and the heart allows itself to be shaped by transforming grace. To enter through that door is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime. It begins with baptism (cf. Rom 6:4), through which we can address God as Father, and it ends with the passage through death to eternal life, fruit of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, whose will it was, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, to draw those who believe in him into his own glory (cf. Jn 17:22). To profess faith in the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is to believe in one God who is Love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8): the Father, who in the fullness of time sent his Son for our salvation; Jesus Christ, who in the mystery of his death and resurrection redeemed the world; the Holy Spirit, who leads the Church across the centuries as we await the Lord’s glorious return.

And he might finish his address by donning his silly red hat and saying something like:

'So come on in, boys, the baptismal water is lovely!'

And then he could recess to the strains of Dave Brubeck's Take Five.

Nothing, after all, could be as silly as the bonsai olive plants of 1986.

Really what would be so bad if he did all that? It is that, after all - as the author of Dominus Jesus knows better than most - that Assisi or peace or pilgrimage or dialogue should mean ultimately:

Open your hearts to salvation in Jesus Christ: there is salvation in none other.

Of food and faith

2011-10-25T08:44:00.000+01:00

There was a little event yesterday the consequences of which Houseman might have expressed as follows:

Now of my three score years and ten,
Forty will not come again.

It went mostly unnoticed. I've never really banged the drum on my birthday, not since I was a young lad. And at the moment, with so much of our energies being absorbed by parenthood, we had other fish to fry.

Oddly enough - given that we were frying other fish! - it was a weekend of food, glorious food, washed down by the occasional glass of well-aged grape juice. For Sunday lunch I made a kind of Moroccan-style tagine affair with shin of beef, while in the evening we prepared a tomato and mozzarella salad to go with our flash-fried, ruby-red rare goat steaks (yum!). Yesterday - the day itself - was a brutal day of lecturing and meetings but in the evening we managed a very easily prepared fresh fig and parma ham salad with a honey dressing (mega-yum!). Mrs Ches, the soul of constant generosity, presented me with a manually operated fruit press, not merely to up my in-take of fruit (!) but also with one eye on my slow-burning, long-term ambition to experiment with home-made cider. Watch this space.

Yesterday evening we found ourselves at Birmingham Oratory where Vespers and Benediction are celebrated in the 1962 rite. This is a form of liturgical prayer which is etched deeply on my psyche, and there was something entirely fitting about bringing the raggle-taggle memories of my life so far before a sanctuary filled with the slow chanting of the Divine Office. Sometimes God speaks in thunder and sometimes in cadences.

A dear friend believes there is some inherent connection between Catholic respect for food and the Holy Eucharist; it is as if our very material world is raised a notch higher because God has given himself substantially to us under the material appearances of bread and wine. When we are not fasting, therefore, we must feast! Our food as it were continues our hymn of thanksgiving which is integral to our reception of the Eucharist - just as the incensations of the altar at Vespers recapitulate the incensations of the Mass. And, I think I began to understand, as I sat there in the church on Sunday evening, why Chesterton places gratitude so very high in the ranks of the virtues.

But that is perhaps for another blog ...

The Inn Catholics

2011-10-25T08:07:00.000+01:00

The Inn Catholics in London have asked for a little publicity boost with the following event:

Dr Joseph Shaw, A Political Future for England - Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Common Good

Tuesday the 25th of October at 7.30 PM.

More details here.

Trouble at t' mill

2011-10-16T21:41:00.004+01:00

After a month away from the blogging coal face, it's taken me three days to actually get back in the saddle (though no time at all to mix my metaphors). It's not that I've been busy, I just don't know where the time goes these days.

But I've had to force myself to sit down in the chair (while Mrs Ches feeds the bairn) to report on the trouble unfolding within the SSPX. It's reasonably well known by now that Bishop Williamson received a letter from Bishop Fellay dated 23 September. The former shared it with friends one of whom, we must suppose, leaked the text to traditionalist blogger Maurice Pinay who - fearing this was a major step in a dirty tricks war to get Bishop Williamson expelled from the Society - promptly published it. An update to the original post states that Bishop Williamson has now certified the letter as authentic but claims not to have given his permission for it to be published on the net. In a further development, it is now being said that the letter was sent by mistake, and that a second letter exists (which Bishop Williamson has not received) which does not contain the threat of expulsion from the SSPX to be read in the letter posted on Pinay's blog. This news broke on Friday and was sent to me by an old seminary pal. On Saturday, in the wake of this unauthorised publication, Bishop Williamson's Eleison Comments took up the question of whether Pope Benedict had suppressed an ancient truth in excusing the Jews collectively of the crime of deicide in the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth. And there, as far as I know, the matter rests.

********************

So what exactly is going on in the SSPX? The Fellay letter, whether it was sent by mistake or not, contains some extraordinary revelations about the internal atmosphere of the SSPX, not the least of which is the claim that a group of Anglo-Saxon priests (the expression is a classic French one for Anglophones) is planning to break away. It is a strange letter which ranges between a rather conciliatory opening (setting out conditions for Bishop Wiliamson to attend the Albano meeting) and various accusations about Bishop Williamson's disloyalty to the SSPX. It seems to be out of step with Bishop Fellay's habitual poise.

Talk on the traditionalist forums is rife with accusations and counter-accusations in support or condemnation of Bishop Williamson and Bishop Fellay. Bishop Fellay is supposed, by many, to be preparing to 'sell out' to Pope Benedict, while others report senior SSPX clerics denying any possibility of the Society signing the Doctrinal (and still secret) Preamble. Bishop Williamson, who has been in exile for the last few years, has clearly invested this weekend's Eleison Comments with maximum provocative value. He surely knows full well that talking about the Jews is the thing that is most likely to embarras Bishop Fellay at the moment, but in this week's newsletter he has chosen to talk not about the Holocaust but about a common opinion - in his newsletter he scrupulously avoids calling it a dogma because he knows full well that it isn't! - concerning whether the guilt of the Jews in Jerusalem for Christ's death on Good Friday was shared with the rest of the Jewish race. For some people such an opinion is enough to have him thrown out of the Church, not just the SSPX. That said, I dare say it is an opinion one would find thoroughly well attested in the Fathers. It is not for all that a dogma de fide catholica, and dressing it up as an 'ancient truth' and lambasting the pope for overthrowing it looks on reflexion like a sleight of hand.

It becomes more difficult by the day to talk about these topics, as it becomes more necessary to do so. But at the same time, the brass-necked delusions of Bishop Williamson - who defends his continued publication of Eleison Comments on the ridiculous pretext that nobody can stop him as a bishop preaching the Faith - are not in fact that distant, metholodogically speaking, from the rest of the SSPX. Bishop Williamson's rebellion is beyond doubt the logical working out of a position that nobody in the SSPX has examined properly. Indeed, while not all the SSPX will chose to talk about the same controversial questions as Bishop Williamson, they pretty much all to a man follow the same modus operandi: if they decide something is against the Faith, then it is against the Faith, and this claim represents their Joker card which justifies them doing whatever they decide is for the good of the Church. By talking about this 'ancient truth' concerning the Jews this weekend, Bishop Williamson seems to be inviting Bishop Fellay to kick him out of the SSPX for reasons which would enable Bishop Williamson to charge Bishop Fellay precisely with betraying ancient truths. After all, why this subject and why now? I suspect Bishop Fellay knows Bishop Williamson has him over a barrel on this one.

But who decides in the end? We still don't know what is in the Doctrinal Preamble but I'm prepared to bet my last cigar that it is about this question of WHO is the final judge of these questions of Faith.

***************

We must pray for the speedy resolution of this situation, but all the signs are, quite frankly, very bad: this looks increasingly like a proverbial train wreck, as the inner contradictions of the SSPX collide with each other. Here we are needing serious reform in the Church, and here we have a group which could make a massive contribution to the cause. And here we are waiting for the rivers of bullshit to subside before any resolution can be found.

God alone can sort this mess out.

Ches ...

2011-10-15T11:54:00.000+01:00

... was on his way back, but somehow family life did not permit and does not permit until sometime later today. A plus tard.

Ches ...

2011-10-14T09:54:00.000+01:00

... is on his way back.

More later!

Annuncio vobis gaudium magnum!

2011-09-16T22:16:00.000+01:00

Habemus puellam!

Born at 2.33am on 16 September and weighing in at 6lb 12oz (3.06 kilos).

Mother and baby are doing very well indeed.

The 16th September was also the 50th wedding anniversary of my parents and, spookily, my daughter is their ... 16th grandchild! Please God we can be as faithful to our vocation as my parents have been to theirs.

Many thanks to those who have sent messages of support and promises of prayers.

Very grateful to you all!

Hmmm, there will be some blogging-lite for a little time, me thinks. Not too long, I hope.

Doctrinal preambles: a question of methodology

2011-09-15T09:34:00.000+01:00

The events of yesterday, covered so well elsewhere, are very heartening. We can only pray that the next few weeks or months will bring about a substantial change in the situation of the SSPX.

Of course the secrecy that now surrounds the doctrinal preamble spoken of in the Holy See's communiqué is rather frustrating but entirely proper and correct: in fact it is the only means by which negotiations can carry on in the serene atmosphere in which alone the voice of the Holy Spirit can be heard.

From another perspective, however, we already know what the DP contains and the communiqué said it out loud:

This preamble enunciates some of the doctrinal principles and criteria of interpretation of Catholic doctrine necessary for ensuring fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church and to the sentire cum Ecclesia, while leaving open to legitimate discussion the study and theological explanation of particular expressions and formulations present in the texts of the Second Vatican Council and of the Magisterium that followed it.

In other words, the doctrinal preamble is a methodology; a set of rules which legitimise conclusions. Ontologically, it is the doctrines that matter; logically, it is the method by which one arrives at them which matters. I would not believe in the Gospels if the Church did not tell me they were true, says St Augustine (or something to that effect). The quid, the what of his belief is the Gospel; the quo, the by which of his belief, is the Church's teaching. The means by which we arrive at our conclusions and the importance we accord to them, are crucial when it comes to theology and faith.

In making the DP the condition of any recognition by the Church, Rome - imposing its own conditions after meeting the conditions of the SSPX - is saying that before the SSPX is approved, it has to recognise that the Holy See is the final criterion for judging whether something is in accord with the Faith. It's the methodology! The final criterion is not theological expertise, individual memory or the positivist comparison of past and present teachings.

Oremus!

***********

Back to the hospital now. Thanks for the various messages of prayers. Mrs Ches is well and I hope there will be news later on.

That fine balance

2011-09-14T08:37:00.000+01:00

We're off to the hospital soon, we hope, but here's a final thought on today's events in Rome. As Rorate Caeli has indicated, on the one side La Porte Latine and the American website of the SSPX have posted in the last few days an excoriating denunciation of Assisi III. Now, I'm a critic of Assisi III, as I wrote here, but this text denounces it as worldly, liberal and modernist. It's pretty relentless. On the other hand, this morning on the same La Porte Latine, their Thought for the Day, drawn as usual from the sayings of Archbishop Lefebvre is the following:

Si Rome veut nous donner une véritable autonomie, celle que nous avons maintenant, mais avec la soumission, nous le voudrions. Nous l’avons toujours souhaité : être soumis au Saint Père ; pas question de mépriser l’autorité du Saint Père.

If Rome wants to give us veritable autonomy such as we have now, but with our submission, we would want it. We have always wished for it: to be submitted to the Holy Father; there is no question of despising the authority of the Holy Father

One the one hand, a clearly coordinated publication in French and English of a quite intemperate denunciation of the Holy Father, and on the other, sweet thoughts from the old Archbishop. It does make one wonder. As strong as they feel about Assisi III - and I'm with them in sentiment, though not in argumentation - is this really the time to publish such a document in the days before Bishop Fellay's meeting with Cardinal Levada? As Archbishop Lefebvre said on the day of the consecrations when the Papal Nuncio had sent a car to whisk him away to Rome, judge for yourselves the timeliness of such an intervention.

Or do we dare to suspect that a different hand is behind this publication and that its claims of approval are not true? It is very strange indeed.

Hope for the best; prepare for the worst, say I. Let us pray that wiser minds are running the show this morning.

An SSPX deal? And a prayer request

2011-09-13T23:06:00.000+01:00

Rumours are flying around the net of what might happen at the meeting between Cardinal Levada and Bishop Fellay tomorrow at the Vatican. The substance of the rumours is that Bishop Fellay "will be handed a two page document, containing the Church’s appraisal of the doctrinal discussions held in recent months between the Vatican and the Fraternity, approved by the Pope. It is an altogether brief but accurate document, which contains the answers to the problems raised in the discussions regarding the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council’s texts on religious freedom, ecumenism and ecclesiology." (see here) The SSPX could then be offered some kind of practical agreement.

I have been very sceptical about anything positive coming out of the recent talks, but of course Pope Benedict is the pope of surprises, and we know how committed he is to trying to solve this problem. That said, would the SSPX accept such a document? Unless it contained the beginnings of Rome renouncing what the SSPX denounces as errors against the Faith, then the likelihood is that they would not.

The tenor of the Le Figaro article referenced on Rorate Caeli today was that Rome would say that the SSPX's positions were compatible with the Faith. But anyone who thinks this is relevant is mistaken. What the SSPX seeks is Rome's recognition that its own teachings coming out of the Council are not compatible with the Catholic Faith.

I pray that the SSPX take any offer that is on the table. But I do not see how in their own logic they can do so. We should all pray very hard for Bishop Fellay and the SSPX over the next few days.

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And speaking of prayers, please say a prayer for my wife as she goes into hospital tomorrow. We hope to be back home by Friday with baby in tow.

Bishop Fellay on the eve of the big match Part 2

2011-09-10T20:07:00.000+01:00

So, we'll carry on here with the precis of his lengthy interview. The first part is to be found here.

Part 3: so what now for the 14th September?

Bishop Fellay (BF) recalls the last time things came to a head in Rome. There was talk of the SSPX having to submit to certain conditions. In the end, he simply wrote a letter to the Holy Father and talk of the conditions passed. Then there was the big SSPX pilgrimage to Lourdes. They were told that they could have the basilica at Lourdes but none of the SSPX's bishops could celebrate Mass. BF sent to Cardinal Hoyos some official Lourdes literature which showed the Lourdes sanctuary being used for Anglican services in which seven Anglican 'bishops' took part in the presence of Cardinal Kasper. The Bishop of Tarbes finally said that the SSPX could use the churches of Lourdes as long as they said they were not Catholic, a remark which spurred BF into making some caustic remarks in his next letter to Cardinal Hoyos. Yet again there was talk of condemning the SSPX but a month later after BF's letter to Hoyos there was no more talk of it.

The meeting itself on 14 September is to evaluate the doctrinal talks. Others are suggesting that practical offers will be on the table (Aulagnier and Williamson) but BF knows nothing about that. He begs people not to listen to the rumours. The doctrinal talks will bring no benefits in the short term and they have revealed the clash of two mentalities completely opposed, like knights jousting who pass by each other.

From here I want to give you BF's direct words and my translation:

La seule chose que je dis, c’est : “on continue”. Nous avons nos principes, et le premier d’entre eux, c'est la Foi. A quoi servirait-il de recevoir un quelconque avantage ici-bas si on doit mettre en jeu la Foi ? c'est impossible. Et sans la Foi il est impossible de plaire à Dieu, donc notre choix est fait. D'abord la Foi, et à tout prix, elle passe même avant une reconnaissance par l'Eglise.

The only thing I say is: 'we are carrying on'. We have principles and the first of them is the Faith. What good would it do to earn any earthly advantage if one must put the Faith at risk? It's impossible. And without the Faith it is impossible to please God, so our choice is made. First, the Faith, and at any cost. The Faith comes even before recognition by the Church (emphasis in the original).

He finishes off by saying that the SSPX must open its arms wide to welcome people, even if they are very imperfect from the traditionalist point of view. The SSPX must even go on the offensive and bring people in. All is down to grace and supernatural help and this is why BF thinks their Rosary Crusade is of such importance.

Ches's comments: I'm not the least surprised at the attitudes of the Bishop of Tarbes or the shoddy running of Lourdes. The story only goes to show once again that expecting the Vatican to micro-manage everything is absurd. Half the time, nobody knows what is going on. At the same time it demonstrates that episcopal appointments have to be a thousand times better if this kind of nonsense is to be avoided.

I applaud BF's caution. Someone opined on this blog last week that there would almost certainly be an agreement after 14 September. Personally, I think it is years away, at least on the tack that the SSPX is on.

But I do think it is worth reflecting on BF's remark about the Faith:

And without the Faith it is impossible to please God, so our choice is made. First, the Faith, and at any cost. The Faith comes even before recognition by the Church.

I was amazed to read that line. I was further amazed that it appeared in bold in the original interview. It provokes such massive questions that one hardly knows where to begin, but let us begin with the simple ones.

The Faith is not a private principle but a public rule which we believe comes to us through Jesus Christ. Now what BF is saying is that insofar as they are 'carrying on' doing what they have been doing, they are obeying this principle of the Faith. Does it not follow logically, therefore, that it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep the Faith without taking the steps the SSPX are taking? Objectively, is it not the case that those who do not live by this rule are not being obedient to the Faith? Objectively, then, how can anyone else please God except those who live by the SSPX's rule? By this measure, even the Ecclesia Dei groups are unfaithful to the Faith since they have refused to take such steps.

I hardly expected this principle to come from the mouth of Bishop Fellay but he has enuciated it loud and clear for all to see. If the sufficient reason for the SSPX's action is the maintenance of the Faith, then we cannot escape the implications. But then, not content with enunciating such a principle, he goes further still:

First, the Faith, and at any cost. The Faith comes even before recognition by the Church.

These remarks were made at an apologetics summer school. But the implications of such a principle for apologetics are extraordinary. We know what the Faith is because we believe in a Church which is indefectible and visible. If what that Church now says is not the Faith - and that for over forty years now - how can the Church be indefectible and visible?

Furthermore, how can any man alive in the world today know the Faith? Surely, the logic of BF's statement is that only through the SSPX can he know the Faith. Is this what Bishop Fellay means? Is this what he really believes? And just how much in line with the Tradition of the Church does he really think that principle is?

********************

I have been hammering this line of analysis for the last three years but to little avail. Surely, it is plain to see here that while the provocation which the SSPX has been subjected to is massive - and I have no time for the lunacy seen in Lourdes - the logical outcome of BF's position is that the Church no longer has any charism-given competence to guarantee the Faith. The SSPX claim their position is based on the Faith; what they forget is that nobody in the Church self-authenticates their own Faith. Who guarantees that the SSPX's analysis of the New Mass is in conformity with the Faith, for example?

It is about time the SSPX woke up to their own methodology. It is going to destroy any good they might do. It is compromising massively the Faith of those who depend on them in this grim and dark night in the Church. The problems of the Church are currently deep and grievious. But this response is a dead end.

In sundering the recognition of the Church from the principle of keeping the Faith, BF has explicitly turned a corner. Only time will tell whether he maintains this disastrous course.

Bishop Fellay on the eve of the big match Part 1

2011-09-10T13:37:00.000+01:00

His "Fiskness" Fr John Zuhlsdorf, over at WDTPRS, links to a precis of an interview which Bishop Fellay gave to Fr Alain Lorans, the SSPX's top PR honcho, during a summer school in France. The translation of the interview is lamentable and the precis leaves it sounding more garbled than ever. Moreover, some of the remarks are so questionable that one really has to go back to the original.

Now, I'm not going to offer a full translation here of the original French. Life is simply too short, even if my wife and I are being made to wait by the sluggard Ches Jr. who is currently five days behind his ETA. But, rather in the old style of indirect speech in Hansard, I will offer here a precis of Bishop Fellay's replies to Fr Lorans (promoted to Abbot Lorans by the aforementioned translation) and offer my own comments thereon. I warn you the original interview is quite long (over 7000 words) but let us be patient. We're trying to understand. I'll cover the first parts now and the rest later on. I DO have a life you know!

Part 1: is the line separating the SSPX and Rome moving?

Bishop Fellay (hereafter BF) says that lots of interesting things are happening and have happened since Cardinal Hoyos and he began talking in 2001. Things moved forward notably with the pontificate of Benedict XVI and Summorum Pontificum was a milestone, especially since BXVI said the Extraordinary Form had never been abrogated. The new generation of clerics coming through is not as viscerally attached to the Council, and seminary professors tell BF their seminarians are demanding much more conservative theology in class. The progressives are wondering whether the future will be conservative or progressive. Gherardini has made the first open attacks on the Council, which he felt in conscience he had to do before he died.

However, while the pope has condemend the hermeneutic of rupture, he spoke not of a 'hermeneutic of continuity' but of a 'hermeneutic of reform'. Mgr Pozzo of Ecclesia Dei told the FSSP priests during a talk at Wigratzbad that it is a conciliar ideology rather than the Council itself which is to blame for the post-conciliar problems. If this is true, says BF, of course Rome is responsible for letting this ideology dominate for forty years. Thus, the views of Gherardini and Bishop Schneider (who has proposed a Syllabus to clarify the Council) are positive signs that the situation is hotting up, though they do not go as far as the SSPX yet.

Ches comments: BF is being a little anachronistic here. The idea that one must attack the conciliar ideology - a meta-Council, to use the expression of de Lubac - has been around since the mid-1960s. Paul VI's Credo of the People of God was indeed one of the first major signs of Rome trying to deal with it. This is a battle which has been going on for a very long time. That said, BF is perfectly correct that Rome must share the blame for the dominance of this conciliar ideology and the damage it has wrought in the Church.

Part 2: What about the SSPX's relations with Rome now?

BF finds dealing with Rome like walking on a tightrope. He says that he is facing contradictory forces. After the lifting of the excommunications, for example, the SSPX found themselves the victims of a plot in Germany to try to get them condemned again for disobeying the local bishop's orders not to perform ordinations at their seminary at Zaitkofen. At times there has been talk of an imminent reconciliation for the SSPX, followed shortly by rumours that they would have to accept the Council. The pope tacitly seemed to accept the need for the SSPX by saying in an allocution at Castel Gandolfo on 29 August 2005 that perhaps a state of necessity existed in France and Germany. An Augustinian priest who joined the SSPX was sent a letter approved by the Congregation for Religious saying that he was excommunicated for being schismatic and losing the faith. Mgr Pozzo of Ecclesia Dei told BF that such a letter should be ripped up. At the same time, the SSPX priests who went to Rome for the talks were allowed to stay in the St Martha House where cardinals lodge during conclaves and could say their daily Mass at St Peter's. The other contradiction BF underlines is the fact that Universae Ecclesiae approves all parts of the old rite (Missal, Ritual, Breviary, Pontifical) for use by everyone but forbids its use in ordinations except for those under the umbrella of Ecclesia Dei. Mgr Pozzo told BF to tell his people that not everything coming from Rome comes from the Pope. So there is clearly a mess in Rome and it is hard to know how to deal with it.

Ches comments: On the surface of it, this seems calamitous, but on second thoughts is it really that surprising that there are forces battling it out in Rome? Things are changing in some parts of the Curia but other parts have their own agendas. The culture of the mandarin is well entrenched. On the one hand, one can understand BF's caution at not wishing the SSPX to fall victim to the vagaries of this battle. On the other hand, people who sit battles out until they are finished have generally little say about the terms of the peace.

One side of me also finds this criticism of the disorder of the pope's house a bit rich. The SSPX itself is a mass of tendencies. We all know full well that Bishop Williamson said what he liked whever he liked until 2009 when only the gravest of scandals led to his being put out to grass in Wimbledon. I also know from my many years in the SSPX milieu that one priest's position on modesty was different from another's and was applied differently to the faithful; that some colleagues could barely speak to each other; that some were close to sedevacantism while others were close to the mainstream; that some priests refused their new appointments and got away with it. Multiply this to the scale of the Vatican or the global Church, add in Pope Benedict's age, and you have to ask whether Bishop Fellay is being quite fair. He has been dealt with incompetently but surely he can understand the situation better than this.

One last remark to make here. BF portrays the terms of Universae Ecclesiae as contradictory, especially given the restriction of the use of the ordination rite. This provision, so I heard, was the fruit of pressure, but at the same time, given that use of the Extraordinary Form is often (not always) associated with a theology which questions the validity or the legitimacy of the newer rites, one could see why allowing this restriction ensures that mainstream ordinands accept the new rites fundamentally. That is not what the SSPX wants, but it is entirely consistant with Pope Benedict's agenda!

More later. Unless labour begins...!

A Belloc Blog

2011-09-06T22:54:00.000+01:00

A correspondent brings to my attention a blog devoted to the writings of Hilaire Belloc. It looks like a very worthy project and includes a number of useful links, not the least of which leads to some recordings of Hilaire Belloc available on Youtube. Never more than when he was singing did Belloc realise that saying of his great friend G. K. Chesterton that 'if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly' (just think about it).

On this recording below, he sings four songs. Tough it out if you can since the last of the four is the best sung of them all.

The End of the Affair? What next for the SSPX?

2011-09-03T18:10:00.000+01:00

Everybody and his dog now knows that Bishop Fellay will be received by Cardinal Levada on 14 September this year, and Bishop Fellay has sketched out what the meeting will be about:

The truth is that Cardinal Levada has called me to Rome and it appears that it will be around the middle of September. That’s the only thing I know. It’s about the discussions we had with Rome. After these discussions, it had been said that “the documents will be given to the higher authorities.” These are the exact words. That’s the only thing I know about the future. All the rest is made up. Please don’t run after these rumors.

Dici, the SSPX's information outlet, gives more details here about the meeting which, it says, will aim 'first to make an assessment of the theological discussions conducted by the experts of the Congregation for the Faith and of the Society of Saint Pius X over the past two academic years, and then to consider the future prospects' (emphasis in the original).

With our baby due imminently and a new job just started, I won't have time to blog about this nearer the date, so these few lines are simply to reflect on what this meeting might signify.

******************

Nobody knows yet exactly what the talks have covered, apart from the basic topics. For all we know, the papers are unlikely ever to be published. What we want to know, however, is what is going to happen now. The SSPX stipulated quite some time ago that no practical agreement with Rome was possible without there being a serious discussion of doctrine. Indeed, while this stipulation might have been couched in rather diplomatic language, the real meaning of these talks for the SSPX was that they would show Rome what the errors of the Council are, i.e. what the errors of the current incumbent of the Holy See and those under him actually are.

This is an important nuance to grasp. While he believed there were errors in the Council, Archbishop Lefebvre talked about the possibility of understanding the Council 'in the light of Tradition'. Bishop Fellay and the SSPX's theologians have believed for some time now that understanding the Council thus is not even possible since the least admixture of error with truth unavoidably harms the truth. Bishop Tissier de Mallerais has even talked before about erasing the Council from the history of the Church.

Now, - and I realise I'm going on a dangerously speculative limb here! - if we take it for granted that the SSPX's dream solution is not about to be realised by the highest authorities of the Church, and if we likewise take it for granted that the SSPX is not about to change its tack and admit that Rome has the final word on matters of doctrinal dispute, what else might happen at the end of these discussions which are by their very nature surely unique and unrepeatable? Several possible scenarios spring to mind:

1. Absolutely nothing. The SSPX are not about to change their modus operandi, their interpretation of the Council or their rejection of Vatican II with all its works and pomps. The Vatican, for its part, is known to be gifted at the long game and may choose simply to let things be until a new generation takes over the leadership of the SSPX - one not directly and personally implicated in the episcopal consecrations of 1988. The problem with this solution from Rome's point of view is that, sooner or later - probably within the next ten to fifteen years - the SSPX will again consecrate its own bishops. It is already operating with only three of its usual four, and none of them are getting any younger.

2. A CDF analysis and condemnation of the SSPX's theological position. In spite of the culture of admonishing rather than condemning, over the last few decades the CDF or the Holy Father have issued analyses and condemnations of various theological positions, notably liberation theology, the theology of Jacques Dupuis, the various ethical theories condemned in Veritatis Splendor and in other encyclicals, etc. The CDF is now in a better position than it ever has been to explain and analyse the SSPX's theology, so why not tease out exactly what has gone wrong with it? Indeed, why not use such an analysis to highlight what they have got right? The problem with this eventuality is that the traditionalist movement is a hodge-podge of views, and such a clarification might only be able to hit certain targets. I also doubt the Pope's willingness to have recourse to such a step if it were judged that most of the SSPX's followers would simply ignore the condemnation anyway. And as Pope Benedict knows, when it comes to condemning theological errors, there are many bigger fish out there to fry.

3. The transformation of the FSSP into an ordinariate. I am told that the SSPX has already said no to an ordinariate as a purely practical solution of their situation. Well, if that is so, why couldn't Rome grant to the FSSP the same status, with bishops and canonical self-sufficiency, by way of launching the traditionalist lifeboat that the SSPX has already said no to? It is not so long since Rowan Williams woke up to find the tanks of the Vatican parked on the lawns of Lambeth Palace. It would be entirely in keeping with Pope Benedict's ability to hatch dramatic coups to offer to the FSSP what the SSPX have already turned down and look like they will never accept, unless it is on their own fanciful terms. The problem with this is that it would signify a clear break with the body of estranged traditionalists in France (not to mention Germany), many of whom regard the FSSP as a gang of spineless ralliés. I'm sure the Pope is intent on trying to recuperate as many people - to rescue as many sheep - as possible from this sorry mess, not least because the SSPX's priests could be an immense force for good in a Church where error, ignorance and irregularity can be found from Poland to Brasil. Surely, there would also be opposition from within the Church to this eventuality. Solving the SSPX's situation is about solving a tangible division; boosting the FSSP's position might look like undue favoritism.

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Well, those scenarios far from exhaust the possibilities. Who knows eventually what will happen except for God? My certainties are

1. that the SSPX will not change or even mollify their position and,

2. the Vatican will not throw out the Council.

And so, we come back to the endgame which I wrote about in February. This clash of wills cannot be resolved except by a solution which allows for the Holy See to serve the Church as it is meant to: by having the final word. There is no other solution attested by history:

The final criterion is what it has always been: the final criterion is the faith of the Church of Rome articulated by the Bishop of that holy, ancient See. This is not primarily a juridico-canonical category - though it is that - so much as the corollary of a charism which the Church perpetually needs. We are not talking about a production line of infallible statements here, but just the practical acceptance that the Magisterium of the Pastors (notably of the chief pastor) has priority over the Magisterium of the Theologians (be they in the SSPX or Tubingen); it is the practical acceptance that all charismatic action in the Church (which we might kindly interpret the SSPX's action to have been) must be subject to the hierarchy. Under that umbrella there is immense freedom to criticise, debate and discuss. With that umbrella, indeed, we can have a thumping great debate about the new liturgy, religious liberty and ecumenism, as long as the rules of charity, honesty and patience are observed.

But without that umbrella there is never ANY endgame to ANY doctrinal discussion. Without that umbrella, discussion is only over when I, me, moi, your truly - or every individual from Bishop Fellay to Hans Kung and Mrs Miggens of The Tablet - say it is over.

In other words, without that criterion in the Church we are condemned to fragmentation. This is the lesson of history.

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BY WAY OF A PS

I have just read another Dinoscopus letter from Bishop Williamson talking about the Vatican Insider's view of the outcome of the doctrinal talks. Therein Bishop Williamson again repeats his view that the issue is one of Catholic Truth. According to his rather threadbare metaphor, the SSPX believes 2+2=4; the Vatican believes it equals 5. Bishop Williamson repeats this ad nauseam and never seems to show the least sign of realising that he is turning the theological differences between Rome and the SSPX into a blackbox the inside of which we cannot examine.

So let us take just one example and try to explain the complexity of the issues to the good bishop and those who agree with him:

1. There is no definitive Magisterial teaching which condemns the New Mass. Fact.

2. Everyone who finds fault with the New Mass must therefore make a theological argument based on other teachings about the Mass and apply those teachings to the New Mass.

3. Where there is a theological argument, there is room for individual error and there is the potential for theological disagreement.

4. When there is theological disagreement in the Church, and this disagreement reaches critical proportions, it is the Holy See which has the final say.

5. The final say on the Catholic character of the New Mass rests with the Holy See.

THEREFORE

It is entirely a misrepresentation of the problem to reduce it to some simple mathematical equation.

Madrid, Catholic youth and some hard questions

2011-08-30T09:32:00.000+01:00

I have seen a long procession of posts praising the events of World Youth Day this year. One of the most interesting was by Ben Akers in First Things who compared the gathering in Madrid with the riots in London. In the same way that the riots demonstrated the moral turpitude of many young people, so, Akers argues, Madrid can be taken as an emblematic event:

A very different kind of spirit was on display in Spain: the Holy Spirit of God, which offers an opposite vision of a world transformed by love, joy, and hope. Let us pray that this new generation of youth gathered in Madrid will stand up in faith against what Yeats would have called the “blood-dimmed tide” by witnessing to the liberating power of the precious blood of Jesus Christ.

Noble sentiments indeed. But what is this new generation really like?

I made the case yesterday that Liberal Catholicism does not reproduce itself, but reflecting on this issue I think it needs some nuance. As a rule of thumb, it is probably true, especially when it comes to matters such as vocations to the priesthood and religious life. That said, our ambient culture is so shot through with moral individualism and intellectual suspicion of doctrine that it would be no surprise to find beyond an inner circle of faithful Catholics a wider circle of those who mostly respect what the Church says (but not completely), and beyond them an outer circle which is either not sure what it thinks or positively rejects Church teaching.

Take in evidence of these nuances this vox pop video from World Youth Day made by Figaro International. It starts out in Spanish with French subtitles but most of the youth - who comes from various countries - speak in English.

Initially, they are asked what it is like being young and Catholic today. Generally, they answer that it is difficult because people don't understand (this is notably the case for the Spaniards; logically, because anticlericalism is stronger in Catholic countries), but it is not too bad. One even says it is very beautiful.

Then they are asked if they are excited about the visit of the pope to Madrid. Of course they are, with one exception who says she is curious!

Finally, we come to the big question: do you agree with the Church on moral issues that affect society. Here is the break down of views:

Spain:

Of course there are things I don't agree with, notably condoms. The Church doesn't allow sex outside marriage but you have to accept that things have changed. We aren't 17 or 18 all our lives.

What surprises me is that the Church forbids abortion completely. For me, it depends on the context. You can abort if there has been a rape or if the pregnancy is not wanted.

Serbia:

We do not live in the same period as our parents. No, the Church shouldn't change its principles but it could sometimes be more flexible. But it's not good to be very flexible.

Poland:

I agree with the Church on abortion and euthanasia. As for sexuality? I don't know.

Brasil:

I don't follow everything the Church says because I don't agree with everything. On the topic of condoms, for example, that's for everyone to decide for themselves. It's very important these days to use condoms. It's not about sex, it's about health.

We have to be very careful here. This is just a random sampling of views and we cannot be certain of how representative it is. That said, the picture of Catholicism coming from this sample is far from a healthy one.

One young person alone (from Serbia) sounds like she might be a 'Benedictine' Catholic, i.e. one who actually shares the same faith as the pope.

Another one (from Poland) is quite firm on some controversial issues, but isn't sure about sexuality. This is hardly surprising in the current climate, but this is not the Catholicism of Benedict XVI; it is most certainly not the sexual ethics which were central to John Paul II's teachings.

Finally our two young people from Brasil and Spain are fascinating. They profess to be Catholics and to be excited about the pope's visit. The Spaniards, however, have rather broad views about what they ought to be allowed to do. The girl doesn't want to obey the Church's teachings on sex, while her friend, logically, sounds like he would happily see her abort any unwanted pregnancy that came from her sexual activities. Good luck to them both. The two Brasilians are interesting not so much because they question the ban on condoms but because, as one of them says, one must be allowed to decide for oneself. Which makes me wonder how an individualist act of faith might go:

O my God, I believe in you and all I think I agree with. Because I have said it, and that is what counts.

************

Eh alors? Well, first, we have to pray for all young people, especially for those who have not been catechised well and those who are struggling with the many problems which our current state of ultramodernity throws at them. We have to ensure we are also setting the example. But I think above all we need a colder, more clinical, more realistic view of what these million or so young folk were doing in Madrid a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, we ought to be impressed by how Pope Benedict leads them in prayer. It's the first time some of them have ever learnt to listen in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. But is Akers right that in Madrid we have seen a 'vision of a world transformed by love, joy, and hope?' I think not.

Rather, in these few moments of vox pop, I think we are seeing something more realistic about the face of this mass Catholicism. It is very easy for people to get carried away with how wonderful Madrid WYD actually was. But how real was it in terms of Catholic belief? How real and solid is the faith that underpins it? How searching is the reform that young people feel called to? One Pole told me that the difference between a JPII WYD and a BXVI WYD (both of which she had attended) was that at the former the crowd went crazy about the pope but didn't really listen; at the latter, they went mad for the pope but they sat and actually listened to him. But is this true? Frankly, we might not be able to tell for many years yet to come.

I'm sorry to rain on this parade, but I do think some people have got carried away with it all and ought to be reminded of something. We are not Catholic by being excited about the pope or by declaring ourselves Catholic. Such a mentality is all too redolent of the views expressed in Mark Dowd's documentary which I wrote about here. We are Catholic by sharing in the faith of the Church, though the Sacraments and by submission to the successors of the apostles in union with Peter. That's the genuine article. Accept no substitutes, say I!

There has been talk of a New Evangelisation for the peoples of Europe and the West for quite some time. By this measure, they remain in desperate need of it.

It's grim in the trenches

2011-08-29T09:28:00.000+01:00

Ttony over in The Muniment Room has been left 'winded, floundering, and ready to throw in the towel' by a series of recent events, not the least of which is his PP's resolution not to use the new translations before he has to, and the news that English seminarians are being hounded to find out whether they are secret biformists. I send my fellow Mancunian mucker my sympathies, but I do not agree that 'the game is up: they will win, they are winning: perhaps they have won, here and now'.

There are at least three reasons why I find in the contrary:

1. The wise-as-serpents argument. The lesson of recent ecclesiastical history is this: the more the screws get tightened from above, the more adept people become at learning how to duck and dive. The generation of theologians that brought us the meta-Council had as their official masters Reginald Garrigou Lagrange, Louis Billot and Adolphe Tanqueray. Nobody could have worked out what they would do without seeing the books those students were cradling on their knees beneath the desk. Nowadays, seminarians who wish to celebrate the EF know that they must be extremely cautious about this prior to ordination. It isn't fair; it isn't just; but it is hard, cold reality - with which men who are giving their lives to Christ ought to become closely acquainted.

2. The demographics argument. The abusers of power are living off the fat of their upbringing. Liberal Catholicism, however, is sterile because it has no intrinsic reason to reproduce. It is not just pro-contraception in practice; it suffers from the consequences of a spiritually contraceptive mentality in which we need not communicate life (because we're all going to heaven anyway). It is no wonder, therefore, that we have a vocations crisis. If instead of saving souls we are simply providing chicken soup for the soul, what's the point of giving one's life to Christ? Vocations in most cases tend to come from good families; look where the families are and you will know where the vocations are going to come from. Consequently, even if we have to wait, the demographics will win in the end.

3. The law of the unexpected. When I first came back from my dalliance with the SSPX, I felt at times about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. There are many places where that is still the case. But who in 2004 could have predicted Summorum Pontificum? Now, make no mistake about it, Christ remains master of his Church. In the midst of the spiritual poverty which anthropocentrism always produces, one comes across extraordinary oases of sanity and sense just lurking beneath a ledge, unobtrusive, unassuming, but doing the Catholic thing - that Catholic thing which is unmistakable in its profile and abundant in its fruits. None of it is perfect, but that is only because the Faith is a pilgrimage and not a fine art.

8-2 is the real scoreline, Ttony. Bad tackles are just the intimidation of the hopeless against the rise of more talented men who possess the future.

And if that doesn't cheer you up, may I remind you that all plans - especially those dreamt up by clever dicks who think they are in control of affairs - are in the end b+*&!!*@s!

Prayer request

2011-08-27T12:11:00.000+01:00

Please say a prayer for a family I know who are being subjected to the most awful and destructive trial. No need for the details.

God and his saints alone stand between us and the malice of the world, the flesh and the devil.

Oremus!

Piety, pain and the Immaculate Heart

2011-08-24T16:24:00.000+01:00

As I write this afternoon, I have on in the background the habanera I appended to my last post. The habanera, which is actually Cuban in origin has to be one of the most romantic of slow dances. And while that might make a habanera seem an odd choice for a soundtrack to a film about Provence - the film in this case being La Gloire de Mon Père and its sequel Le Château de Ma Mère - it is something not a million miles away from the mood of these films and the books they are based on: the childhood memoirs of Marcel Pagnol.

As a pioneer of French cinema, Pagnol knew a thing or two about tugging at the heart strings. There is, however, undoubtedly something very Provençal about his memoirs and about their blend of sentimentality and tragedy. If we can forgive his sentimentalism, it is because it is founded on what feels like an almost Roman reverence for his forebears. La Gloire de Mon Père - my father's glory - marks the moment in which Pagnol discovers that his father is not actually superhuman, but finds himself thereby all the more able to celebrate his progenitor's achievements as a novice hunter. I suppose this is also the moment in which Pagnol's pietas passes from the naïveté of infancy into something more realistic, and thereby something more forgiving and tender. Pagnol was no Christian, but somehow there is an instinctive wariness of idolatry in his writings. And he is right. Reverence is not merely a question of its object but also of its tone and substance. Not all those who say 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Where I find Pagnol more difficult to walk with is in his conclusions about pain. The second of his memoirs Le Château de Ma Mère, is full of his mother's fears. This too is a kind of awakening, like his awakening to who his father really is, but it is one in which Pagnol can find no footing; it is like some kind of abyss into which he falls for fear of minimising the pain of his mother and the pain her eventual death causes to him and to his father.

Now, while there is nothing wrong with hurting, Pagnol's pain seems to go beyond pain by holding itself to be beyond final consolation. The book - and the film - memorably finishes with these lines (I give them in English):

Such is the life of men: a few joys quickly wiped away by unforgettable sorrows. But we do not have to tell the children.

But is our life such? Perhaps we should say instead: telle est la vie des hommes modernes. I used to think that defending or promoting the faith consisted in knowing how rationally to demonstate the reasonable nature of Christianity. I'm more persuaded these days that it might also be about understanding why some hearts like Pagnol's, the hearts of contemporary men, do not want to be consoled.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas, said another Frenchman (Pascal): the heart has its reasons that reason does not know.

I don't suppose one can do without either: rational defence and sensitive understanding. Come to me all you who labour and I will give you rest. But how does one give back hope without treading on that part of the sufferer which demands to be recognised? Only, I suppose, by walking with them somehow. Perhaps the sorrow of the saints is not only about joining in the reparation of Christ. Perhaps it is also a proof that their holiness does not break their solidarity with their brothers.

So where am I going with all this? Simply to this conclusion. There are some who believe devotion to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary is particularly for our times. If the pain of Pagnol typifies the pain of some modern men, then perhaps they are right.

In which Ches rants and then cheers up

2011-08-23T08:43:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the short interlude in posting. I cannot tell you how draining my summer is turning out to be, and yet I feel I ought to try. We're trying to move to another city, we have a baby due in two weeks and I'm still battling through random bits of work that ought to have been finished long since. Couple all that with subsidence repair works, the need to go flat hunting for temporary accommodation in our new city - made more difficult by estate agents who book you a viewing and fail to tell you the flat is already let - and the mountains of baby washing that have been moving glacier-like through our one-bedroom flat in the last ten days and you'll understand why I might need a holiday after this summer holiday.

But that's not the worst of it. I look out now through my gloomy lounge window onto a world of torrential rain. It's August the sodding 23rd and the sky looks like mid-November, the passers-by appear frozen in their soggy apparal and both pairs of my shoes have holes in them. To make it all the worse, my one major jolly of the holidays which was planned for last Saturday - and which involved hiking up a hill in Oxfordshire to read, chomp, sip wine and smoke cigars with the best of company - had to be called off because of ... rain. Nay, because of heavy rain. What had we pleasure seekers to do with wandering up hills in the rain and wind?

Well, I'm off on another flat hunting trip this morning. As I look out of my window, I have quivering anxieties about the intercity line being flooded and my afternoon made a mockery of. It wouldn't be the first demonic intervention of the week. Yesterday our doorbell, which normal rings the traditional "ding-dong", played the verse of Yankee Doodle Dandy out of the blue. Nobody was at the door leaning on the button. I kid you not! That was just spooky.

Ah, well. If the weather wants to rain on us, perhaps the only thing we can do is rain back on it. 'What if the pope said it was raining, but it really wasn't?' the priest instructing Max in Brideshead Revisited asks. 'Well,' the sub-pagan Max replies, 'it would be raining but sort of spiritually.' What if, he should have said, we say it is sunny when it really isn't? I mean, isn't that how Brits from time immemorial have got through that phoney of phoney seasons called the English summer?

So, ye London dwellers, look not through your windows this morning, trying to remember where you have stashed your inflatable raft. Think rather of some dusty Provençal road, lined with lavender and the occasional rank of poplars, and filled with the chirruping of cicadas from the fields. Stare into the pall of dark clouds and think of blue skies, swooping swallows and the distant call of a goatherd. Think it once and you'll not notice the rain. Think it twice and you're no longer in London. It's sunny spiritually speaking and all is right with the world.

Witnesses or counter-witnesses of the truth?

2011-08-17T09:00:00.000+01:00

Have atheists got it wrong? asks Katherine Birbalsingh on her blog in The Telegraph. It is a fascinating post, especially since Miss Birbalsingh, a gadfly of liberal educationalists in the UK, argues that perhaps they have! How many public figures even hint at coming to that conclusion these days?

First she is impressed by a couple of ex-gang members who have reformed because they have 'found God'. Next, she is moved by the profession of faith of Tariq Jahan, the Muslim father of one of the three men murdered by a hit-and-run driver in Birmingham during the riots:

He explains that his religion gives him the strength to see through the death of his dearly loved boy and accept that this was his son’s fate. I look on in admiration because I exist without that sense of certainty, and I find his certainty mesmerising.

Last she is interviewed by a Russian journalist who, because Birbalsingh believes in objective morality, asks her whether she believes in God or the State. After all, if there is an objective morality, it must come from somewhere!

Then out of the blue, she receives an email from a friend who tells her that the rioters cannot even have heard of the ten commandments and quotes from the Gospel of Saint Matthew:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:36-40

If you ask me, I think God is quitely stalking Miss Birbalsingh.

************************

I can hear some people already bristling with hostility at that idea. After all, Birbalsingh is impressed first by any faith rather than by the true faith. But I think that would be to mistake the paths by which people are led towards the truth.

Wherever we are, we can only take the step that is in front of us. What is interesting for a believer in reading Birbalsingh is to note how even contact with a kind of faith-filled certainty is mesmerising. Mesmerising: the word is very strong. By faith here, I am speaking about what appears to be faith to an outside observer, rather than faith, the supernatural virtue given by God. Birbalsingh's use of the word mesmerising underlines the fact that often, in embracing propositions which we believe are revealed by God, we take for granted the psychological processes that belief implies and which appear thematic to someone who doesn't believe in anything. Faith for us is not a state of mind, and yet for an unbeliever in our culture, that is what it can first of all appear to be.

The awful corollary of this for those with faith - and I speak now of the supernatural virtue by which we believe what God has revealed through the Church - is that we are bound all the more to reflect faithfully what our faith proposes, for fear that we will appear as counter-witnesses to the truth. This is how people will know you are my disciples; by your love for one another. Preach always, said Saint Francis, and use words if necessary.

Perhaps in these days, in the context of unbelief, we believers are preaching, whether we like it or not. Perhaps then we should pray that it is always for good and not for ill.

So why did it happen?

2011-08-12T10:28:00.000+01:00

I've been mumbling on to myself for days, as I do here on The Sensible Bond, trying to prod and poke my way to understanding the riots of the last week in England. Perhaps you're bored with it and want to read about something else. Nobody is stopping you. Go forth with my blessing. The rest of us have to try to understand, however. We have to try to understand because, make no mistake about it, if the country were a physical body, these riots would be as significant as a sudden and complete loss of bowel control.

All the usual suspects have lined up for the identity parade. What was it then that we saw rioting through the streets of London? Was it family breakdown? Absent fathers? The failure of state education? Moral relativism? Sheer criminality? Opportunism? The vacuity of the political system? The structural deprivation in our council estates?

In my view it was all of these and more. Another interesting feature of the events of this past week is that those responsible come from a whole range of backgrounds. Yes, there are the gangs, the career criminals and those 'known to the police'. But there are also the educated, the professionals and the daughters of wealthy businessmen. Whatever ills we put in the dock, somehow we have to recognise that our problem crosses all class divides.

Diseases have a way of joining forces to create a symbiotic tsunami: obesity leads to a strain on the heart which leads to blood pressure which triggers, etc., etc. So I imagine it is with the riots. One crisis simply led to another, while the latter was ready to burst like a boil and provide a catalyst for the next crisis. Okay, enough of the biological imagery. You get my message.

****************

Chesterton characterises modern life as the result of the dismantling of things which once lived in organic unity. The electric light bulb and the radiator are undoubtedly great boons to modern life, but no family ever pulled up its chairs and sang songs around a radiator; no poet could stand looking into the bulb long enough to feel inspired by the passionate glow of its filament. And, as the fire's organic unity of light and warmth were broken up into bulb and radiator - for eminently practical reasons - something was lost which had hitherto graced human life and shaped a million imaginations.

Every comparison limps of course but here is the point: there is a layer of complexity and integrity in the right order of things which cannot be reassembled simply by putting together all the component parts. Life is not a problem set by Ikea or a special kind of Lego.

Let me take just the example of education to explain what I mean. We have heard many laments about education. But the fact is that state education is always a function of the culture in which it is born. Children whose home-lives are characterised by TV dinners, late nights and general dissipation are not going to get what they need out of even the best educational syllabus. They will not be apt to take part in it. The late, great John Senior observed that the Great Books movement had failed not because of the weakness in those books but because students who had not been raised on the 1000 great fairy tales did not have the imaginative and moral capacity to extract the great ideas from the great books. The popular view of education - that it has something to do with what happens in the classroom - is naive at best and hopelessly wrong at worst. Of course, learning goes on in a classroom, but book learning is part of a wider project by which the human subject becomes capable of civilisation. Frankly, there are many paths to that point and they are not all contained in a book. Capable of civilisation: there are many walking around today with iPods, the latest fashions, degrees, doctorates, successful careers, fancy cars and holidays abroad who are in point of fact substandard in that regard.

Everything has been separated from everything else and everything has grown cold: such was Chesterton's conclusion, and he was writing a hundred years ago. These riots were not a new problem and neither can they be answered by all the panoply of the technocratic state swinging into action to express the instinct for revenge. The riots happened because we have not done our duty. We have not done our duty because our duties have long been kept in the deep freeze of pragmatism. And now we're frost bitten, we want to plunge our limbs into boiling water by a juridical backlash against the rioters. Let justice act, of course. But justice; not some substandard form of justice. I honestly doubt we're even capable of it.

So, what should we do now? I have but one answer and it involves our collective repentance and prayer. England needs to pray, it needs to turn off the TV and introduce itself to its neighbours, and it needs to remember what it has lost: principally Jesus Christ. Any priest or bishop who climbs into his pulpit this Sunday and speaks of anything except Christ as the ultimate answer to the problem has thereby declared himself to be part of the problem.

Because short of reconciling with Christ, we will simply continue sleep walking into our next embarrassing disaster, the disaster of a highly sophisticated and popular socialite who functions brilliantly until she goes home at night, makes a cup of tea and retires to her room to self harm. Eventually she'll do it in public.

Everything has been separated from everything else and everything has grown cold. And every evocation of technocratic solutions without the invocation of Christ will only compound our problems.

The nastiness of the long-distance mummer

2011-08-12T08:43:00.000+01:00

I am not surprised to read that Fr Z is coming under attack from Phyllis Zagano, a fully qualified whinger for rights she has only just invented. Anyone who spends any time blogging finds their in-box filling from time to time either with openly aggressive, deliberately autistic bile masquerading as interaction, or with the more sinister forms of intimidation which the media age allows. I have had both.

Somehow, the distance which the internet creates also allows for the festering of some pretty hostile feelings which people do not normally allow themselves to indulge in. They then rant like tale-telling idiots behind a mask which deceives only them.

Only time will tell whether Zagano will abase herself to indulge in the nastiness of the long-distance mummer against Fr Z. We must hope she refrains. She will only look stupid in the end.

In the meanwhile, we send Fr Z our best wishes, pray for his ministry, and hope for better counsel for Zagano.

Forms of imitation

2011-08-11T09:58:00.000+01:00

Many people have commented on the copycat dynamics of the violence and looting which has spread across England in the last week. When television viewers saw the looting and violence in Tottenham last Saturday, many saw the opportunity to jump on the consumerist bandwagon without troubling to cross the driver's palm with any money. And the measure of violence which was used in Hackney was soon reproduced imitatively in Peckham, Croydon, Ealing, Birmingham and my own home town of Manchester.

Humans tend to be quite adept at disguising their proclivity for imitation. And yet imitation is everywhere in culture; for a start, it is the very stuff of every representational form. But imitation is more deeply rooted in us than we are often aware. Anima quaedamodum omnia, said the Scholastics; the soul is in some way everything. Our capacity to understand depends on our ability to fit our intelligence to reality: truth is the adequation of mind to being.

But there is something more here, and it concerns the moral life. I do not agree with René Girard that all our desires are learned by imitation, but the fact is that many desires, especially in a consumerist culture, are learned. Desire and need are distinct realities. I need to wear something on my feet; for that purpose, I do not need Adidas trainers, but I might desire Adidas trainers, especially if I see others making a big deal of them. I need to be able to speak to my friends; for that purpose, I do not need BlackBerry messenger, but I might desire to have BlackBerry messenger, especially if I see others making a big deal of it.

I mentioned two days ago that one of the most striking aspects of all these riots was the lack of ideology underpinning them. It seemed that the rioters had no political motivation or targets. How, then, do we explain their behaviour? We must look to their desires, and noting their desires, we must wonder from whom they have learned them; we must wonder as a consequence whom they are imitating.

*********************

These riots have not been an unleashing of relativistic behaviour, as I have argued from day one. They are rather an unleashing of acquisitional behaviour. They are not about power in the political order, but rather about power through appropriation. This is what underpins the wave of violence, since in this week looting has been seen by the rioters as the best means of acquiring what it is that they want. Violence is contagious; violence itself is a kind of contagion. But let us ask ourselves again from whom the looters have learned their desires.

The very first answer to this is quite obvious: they learn what is desirable from those with whom they are in immediate contact. This is why mobile phones, fancy footwear, sharp clothes and jewellery have been amongst the looters' favourite swag. These are the emblems, the symbols, the badges of office, that mark the young, fashionable consumer, or that the man with an eye for the main chance knows that he can flog to the young, fashionable consumer.

But is it also not true that, in our information age, many desires, are learned in the space created by the media? This is the very logic of advertising which aims to teach us to desire what it is the manufacturers produce. But it is also the very logic behind celebrity culture which fosters a continual vicarious experience of desire without ever promising to pay those desires with anything real or substantial. Celebrity culture is to social contact as voyeurism is to sexuality. We have to wonder therefore what desires it teaches to those who immerse their minds in it.

Arguably, there is a third level of imitation which we can uncover in the desires of those who have looted and pillaged with so much abandon over the last few days. We have noted their political neutrality, but should we not also wonder to what extent their desires are a reflection of the desires modelled by those who have dominated our public life over the last few years? In the last three years, our newspapers has been full of story after story of politicians caught with their hand in the Westminster cookie jar, and of bankers who earn more in their annual bonus than a teacher could earn in thirty years of dedicated service. If these riots tell us at anything, they should tell us that when we reward wealth makers in ways that so disproportionately outstrip the way we reward virtue makers, we only have ourselves to blame if those at the bottom of the pile behave more like animals than like citizens.

These layers of imitative potential do not immediately explain the means which the first looters chose to pursue their desires. But the actions of subsequent looters seem precisely like a contagion of violence which spread like wildfire given the chance. Likewise imitation does not wholly explain the collapse of the normal restraints which prevent people looting or setting fire to shops as a normal part of their Saturday shopping routine. But it underpins the way in which all these hardbitten individualists opted out like a herd of lemmings from the unspoken accords which underpin our normal commercial relations.

I think we find here one of the fundamental reasons why the market cannot rule society. Because the market does not know what society needs. The market only knows how to respond to desire and the forces of acquisition. There is no system either political or economic which is sufficient in itself to secure order for us. Whatever system we choose to adopt, we too must be good.

And so we come back to the fundamental problem of imitation: from whom should we learn our desires? But who will be asking that today as Parliament reconvenes?

Archbishop Longley speaks

2011-08-10T12:23:00.000+01:00

At last, someone in a mitre speaks.

“I ask the Catholic community to pray, especially for all those whose livelihood or property has been damaged.

“We also pray for a strengthening of family values and guidance, and for a change of heart among those involved.”

UPDATE: apparently, Archbishop Nichols spoke the day before to express his concerns over the riots.

Who does this kind of thing?

2011-08-10T12:11:00.000+01:00

All the reasons that people are fumbling for across the media, to explain what has happened in London and now other British cities since the weekend, depend on understanding who exactly has been doing the rioting and looting. It seems to me, however, this question is rather complex in itself.

Red Ken Deadstone claimed that the unrest was the work of deprived youngsters reacting against the effects of government cuts. As many people have retorted, we wish we were deprived enough to communicate exclusively through BlackBerry Messenger. Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North, claimed it resulted from uncontrolled gang subcultures. There is probably something in that, especially when it is combined with what another commentator described as the postcode truce which has allowed rival gangs to unite in unleashing disorder across the capital.

What nobody expected was the profile of the looters which emerged from the first prosecutions yesterday. Many media outlets remarked on the fact that they included a graphic designer, a university graduate and someone who was just about the enter the army. Without knowing what the other looters listed as their professions, it is hard to decide whether theses are significant or not. What they do indicate is that no simplistic assumptions can be made about the shared alienation of looters and rioters from society. David Hughes in Wednesday's Torygraph writes:

The BBC is reporting that the first person up at Highbury Magistrates Court on looting charges was a 31-year old school teacher [a teaching assistant apparently] named Alexis Bailey. He pleaded guilty to being part of the looting of the Richer Sounds store in Croydon.

This then is a mixed public.

More signficant are the vox populi interviews which brave or foolhardy reporters have garnered from some of those involved. Last night in Manchester Nick Ravenscroft of the BBC interviewed a number of young lads who admitted that they could afford some of the things they were stealing (they're deprived, eh, Ken?) and they were not bothered about getting caught because, well, what would happen? An ASBO? Eh alors? But they explained further:

Why are you gonna miss the opportunity to get, like, free stuff that's worth loads o' money? [...] It's the government [...] Kids don't wanna go to college no more coz they don't get paid innit.

Yes, you heard that right. Pay me to go to college or I will sack the city.

I cannot have been the only person shocked by the incomparable vacuity of two female looters interviewed by Leana Hosea in Croydon on Tuesday morning who thought the chaos they had wrought was both 'mad' and 'good'. When Hosea remarked on the fact they were drinking at 9 in the morning, one answered:

It's the government's fault ... Conservatives.. It's not even a riot, it's showing the police we can do what we want [...] It's the rich people, and that's why all of this has happened, because of the rich people.'

If you suspect that of being a stream of demented drivel, then you're not far wide of the mark.

One trope to emerge from both of these interviews was the blaming of the government. Now, I am a political cynic at the best of times, but what is going on here is far more sophisticated than simple moral relativism. First, there is rather a process of moral vicarious transfer. I have done this but in fact it is somebody else's fault. Like health care, education and so many other services provided by the public purse, one's own moral responsibility can now apparently be passed upwards to the State so it can be blamed when looters loot. This looks like the fruit of the depersonalisation of authority in reaction to the disfunctioning of the family. One unintended consequence is that the nanny State itself has paradoxically become a scapegoat of the resulting disorder. These individuals labour not under the influence of wrong-headed ideology but under a kind of moral imbecility, the fruit of a cultural breakdown and the bureaucratic sticking-plaster response to it, which are now producing fruits that are sub-human.

On the other hand, these interviews are also marked by a trope of amoral individuality. The two female rioters were showing the police and the rich that they could do what they wanted to do. They were in no way beholden to an outside authority, and to prove it, they would daub their inner chaos on the streets of the capital with fire and theft.

Here, we have another paradox: a moment ago, we were witnessing the process of moral transfer as the looters blamed the government for their action, and now they assert that the chaos achieved is the result of their self expression. They deny their responsiblity and a moment later they affirm their agency.

Of course there is a huge dose of permissiveness in both of these themes since both basically facilitate whatever moral choice the individual is intent on making. But the reason I say this attitude is not relativism is that there is not a single one of these moral imbeciles who would approve of their own homes being ransacked and looted or their houses set on fire. If it happened, they would be outraged. In fact, those rioters who are members of gang subcultures operate under strict codes of conduct which reference the cohesion of the gang first and foremost.

I still haven't answered the question in the title: who are these people? I wonder if outraged Britain must face the possibility that these people, these looters and rioters, are in many ways a reflection of ourselves. We have been passing responsibilty up the chain of bureaucracy for so long now - not educating our children, not looking after our elderly, etc. - that it has made many of us become as dependent on the State as a drunk on the nearest lamppost. On the other hand, we have so approved self expression and self affirmation, we have been for so long the dupes of authenticity, that the chains of restraint on some hearts have rusted away to nothing.

But there is another problem here and it is this: we have to face up to the fact that society is suffering a compound fracture, the parts of which protrude through the flesh and openly declare their alienation. Those of us who remain within the national contract have one set of laws. Those who have broken away from it have another set of rules. And yet, they drift in and out of the contract that we others hold to, like the splinters of some broken limb searching painfully to be reset. Arguably, we are not merely talking about one kind of fracture, but many kinds of fracture, as is shown by the involvement of lower middle classses in the looting and rioting. For the underclasses, having sacked the post office one night, the chances are that they still want to turn up the next day to draw their benefits from the PO's ATM;l so thought one commentator yesterday. For the others, they return to their offices or books still tingling from the thrill of an adrenaline-pumped, violently-induced shopping bargain.

Who does this kind of thing? They are undoubtedly our brothers, our semblables, and yet they belong to a foreign and enemy country; indeed to foreign and enemy countries.

This is not relativism. We are living rather in a xenocracy - the looters feel no duty to those who rule them while the looted feel their persecutors do not even live in the same moral universe.

How, as Theoden says, did we come to this?

London in chaos

2011-08-09T10:48:00.000+01:00

I'm sure many readers share my own sense of bewilderment, disbelief and anxiety over the violence, looting and disorder which has swept across London in the last seventy-two hours. We are currently staying in Hertfordshire not far from Enfield where violence broke out again last night. Reports from where we live in East Dulwich say that rioters from Peckham, just a mile away, rolled up Lordship Lane last night, smashing windows as they went. In the light of what has happened in Ealing overnight, it looks like ED has gotten away with it very lightly. Who knows what tonight holds, however? The violence seems to be confined to shopping areas where looting and mass muggings can be carried out easily, but who knows what comes next?

Many people are pitching in to try to clear up the mess left by the rioters. The sense of grievance against the trouble makers in the communities where they come from is strong. One video from Hackney showed a black lady with a stick yelling obscenities at the looters who, she said, could have been fighting for a cause, but who prefer instead to attack Footlocker and Ladbrookes looking for shoes and money.

The old left-right divide of social commentary is drawing its lines predictably. The toothless Tory-Lib Dem government is talking about criminality and lawlessness, and promising robust policing in response. Some left-wingers are claiming that the riots are the reaction of a class of socially deprived young men without job prospects. Curiously, the Guardian blogging platform is unusually silent about the events of last night. Some right-wing commentators have seen in these riots the consequences of a weak and liberal education system that has looked on, powerless to control the violent gang culture which exists beneath the surface of many inner-city communities. Others have raised the possiblities of people fleeing the capital or of setting up their own vigilante groups if the police remain overwhelmed by the violence. Strategically, the police have been intermittently effective, but in many places they have been totally outnumbered and thus unable to deal with the crowds of looters. Fr Finigan cannot be the only person who feels that these are the desserts of a morally relativistic culture. A lot of people will be sat at home this morning, scratching their heads and wondering how this could have happened, and what can be done about it.

There are a lot of things one could say about all this, but let me just mention what I see as the most striking aspect of this unrest until now: the almost total absence of ideological justification. I know that the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham by the police was the spark for the unrest, but the events have entirely outstripped Duggan's death. The rioters are not even pretending that they are unhappy about that. They are simply dismantling civil order, robbing shops in which some, perhaps many, of them were customers last weekend, and setting fire to property, homes and cars, with reckless disregard for the life and safety of others.

What we are looking at here is not 'anarchy' in its strict sense. I'm sure it is not even moral relativism, although undoubtedly moral relativism has helped create the atmosphere in which these events have occurred. Neither is it a total breakdown of the social contract, resembling a Hobbesian landscape in which all wage war against all; after all, many people are helping to clear up this morning in what appears to be a resurgence of community feeling across the capital.

So what is going on exactly? The explanations will be necessarily complex - social, cultural and criminal; the consequences will be far reaching, and the fallout is likely to affect London for years to come. More later.

Extraordinary Form Mass at Douai in September

2011-08-08T08:55:00.000+01:00

Damian Barker of the Young Catholic Adults asks me to advertise the following events:

Sung Mass at Douai Abbey in September

On Saturday 10th September 2011 at 11am there will be a Sung Mass in the main abbey church at Douai (Berkshire) followed by a Marian Procession around the extensive grounds of the abbey (starting from the main abbey church).

The Sung Mass will include Victoria’s Quam Pulchri Sunt (1572), in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the composer's death, and the motet O Sacrum Convivium, sung by Ensemble 1685, please see here.

Please don't tell her

2011-08-07T11:57:00.003+01:00

We've not had any cool music on The Sensible Bond for a bit, so here comes a slice of it right now.

Coercion and liberty: reframing the debate

2011-08-05T09:44:00.000+01:00

A new post has been issued on Rorate Caeli on the topic of religious liberty. It presents links to a new essay by Professor Thomas Pink of King's College London on a problem which has exercised the minds of philosophers and theologians on both wings of the Church.

The controversial passage in Dignitatis Humanae, Vatican II's declaration on religious freedom, is usually taken to be the following:

1. [...] Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.

Over and above all this, the council intends to develop the doctrine of recent popes on the inviolable rights of the human person and the constitutional order of society.

2. This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.

Interpretations of what this declaration really means are varied, but three clear trends emerge from them.

Liberal interpretation - this was a revolutionary reform since by approving freedom of conscience the Church thereby corrected one of its previous mistakes.

Conservative interpretation - this was a surface reform of political policy but the deeper obligations of society to God remain the same.

Traditionalist interpretation - this was a revolutionary reform that overturned two centuries of near-certainly infallible teaching, and represents the Council's commitment to bring the 1789 Revolution into the Church.

The significance of Pink's new essay is that it reframes the problem completely. For the liberal, conservative and traditionalist interpreters, the idea that Dignitatis Humanae is the rupture point in a long line of teaching on this issue goes largely undisputed. For Pink, however, a specialist in Early Modern thought, this understanding evinces near complete ignorance of Church teaching on these issues between Trent and the nineteenth century.

Pink thereby drops several bombshells on the various sides of this debate but let me highlight here just two:

1. Dignitatis Humanae, which is thought to be a denial of the permissibility of coercion of belief, significantly omits to say anything about the Church's power to coerce its own members (i.e., those who are baptised, even schismatics and heretics). This coercive power is in fact a matter of Catholic faith as taught by the Council of Trent in its treatise on baptism.

2. The personalist argument, which traditionalists say Dignitatis Humanae used to dissolve the Church's 19th century Magisterium, is in fact a lot older than they recognise, not in explicit terms (which were not developed until the 20th century) but in its fundamental assumptions about autonomy. The idea that the subject cannot be coerced interiorly in matters of religion appears to be a keystone of theological thinking in this area in nineteenth-century Catholic writers such as Cardinal Manning or Bishop Kettler. But, as Pink shows, this idea would have been very strange to the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who understood the problem in the light of Trent.

It seems, therefore, that the great forgotten link in this chain of argument is this: the Church has only dogmatically asserted its power of coercion over the baptised, and any State which acts as the civil arm to help the Church in this matter does so by delegation of the Church and NOT by its own power.

Consequently - and this is Ches-reading-Pink now - it is logical that as we move into a period where the Church is no longer in a position to delegate in that way, the need to remind the State of its true powers is ever clearer. It does not de jure have the power to coerce conscience. The Church never taught that it did. It only ever held it as a delegated power accorded it by the Church for the sake of the baptised (see Leo XIII, Immortale Dei). It might have overstepped this boundary at times, but that is another matter.

So why the change in this problematic? I can only suggest a couple of reasons myself. Perhaps coercion is more thematic in the treatment of the issue of religious liberty by the theologians of the earlier period because they instinctively assume that most people are Catholic or baptised. When the theologians of the nineteenth century begin arguing in favour of interior freedom, it seems they are working on a new assumption that Catholicism is now a minority religion in hostile and secular conditions. Both positions depend ultimately not on a shift in doctrine but in contextual circumstances.

******************

That at least is how I understand the consequences of Pink's essay. As I say, for me this essay not only reframes the problem; it is a game-changing intervention.

In its light, no longer can the liberals pretend that coercion has been done away with by Vatican II.

In its light, no longer can the 'personalist' reading of Dignitatis Humanae be used by traditionalists as a stick to beat the Council.

I commend its reading to you all most heartily.

Tightening of the belts

2011-08-04T10:47:00.000+01:00

Well, the fallout continues from my series of posts on Quest's conference at London Colney. I have now had several visits from GNAA, a nice group of internet trolls who attack blogspots. Hello, boys!

Who knows where these attacks have originated from? Quest? Westminster? Well, somebody knows of course. Odd really. One tries to maintain at all times a reasonable, dialogical line; no system can work without self regulation. One wonders at the means deployed to answer my arguments. There is nothing permissive or liberal about them.

Ah, well, in media vitae... old chums!

Sancte Michael Archangele,
defende nos in proelio;
contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium.
Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur:
tuque, Princeps militiae Caelestis,
satanam aliosque spiritus malignos,
qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo,
divina virtute in infernum detrude.
Amen

50 years wed

2011-08-04T08:53:00.000+01:00

Just when The Sensible Bond is up and running again, I have to disappear for a week on various errands. Typical!

I rather like that word 'errand'. It is the sort of language my grandmother used to use if we asked where my mother had disappeared to: 'She's gone an errand', she would say, as if that explained anything. Well, dear readers, I had to go an errand! Well, several in fact.

But most importantly, to the celebration of my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was a momentous and joyous occasion. The in-laws and the outlaws rolled in from far and wide, and the party, which was scheduled to last from 1-5pm, rolled on well into the summer evening. Fifty years of marriage are quite an achievement, and my father celebrated the fact in his short thank-you speech by acclaiming his family stock and referring (quite meretriciously!) to their part in the Norman Conquest and Agincourt! For the duration of the the party - and, I have it on good authority, ever since - my mother out-grinned the Cheshire Cat, and one was left with admiration and wonder for the deep peace a life of commitment, wounds not withstanding, can deliver. An impromtu concert broke out in the mid-afternoon and its strains floated over the Berkshire countryside until we could barely see each other for the gathering gloam (or do I mean, since the end was near, the looming gloom? No matter).

My wife and I were left wondering if we would ever see our fiftieth anniversary - not that she has had enough of me yet, although nobody could blame her if she had! My father and mother were early starters by today's standards, having married at the practically toddler ages of 25 and 23 respectively. It was a different moment, a different time. Britain was gearing up for the massively regressive sexual revolution which has left its suppurating open wounds all over the national psyche. Fast-forward fifty years and we met a woman this week who is buying a house with larger rooms so that her girls can 'bring boys home with them'. She could not have shocked me more if she had explained the size of her oven by reason of the need to roast small children whole. 'Do you like children?' is the socially acceptable question. 'Yes, but I couldn't eat one on my own,' is the reply I like to give. But why are people more shocked at that than at the prospect of their teenagers bringing home sundry objects of either sex - I use the word 'objects' advisedly - for the purposes of mutual abuse?

Yes, fifty years is a long time in the saddle to see the world change so much. And yet there it is like a fact, a rock, a mountain range of experience and solidity against the erosion of our better instincts, the corrosion of our mores, and promising the eclosion of all that is good in human society. 'Come under the shadow of this red rock', as Eliot says - not that anyone knows exactly what his 'red rock' is, but why should it not be life-long, nuptial, fruitful faithfulness?

There are many scales on which our lives are weighed out, but why should they not be weighed out on this scale? Happy anniversary, Mum and Dad. Humble and enduring faithfulness makes mightier worlds than all our tin-pot, gone-tomorrow lusts can muster.

Catholic literature and secularisation

2011-07-28T19:06:00.000+01:00

Readers may be interested in a new book just published:

Catholic literature and secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011)

This book is the first comparative study of its kind to explore at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J.K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton, and Lionel Johnson. Revising critical approaches which tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, this book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity.

Orders through me will cost £30.

For more details of the book, follow the link here.

Oxford pro-life witness

2011-07-27T16:04:00.000+01:00

Amanda Lewin asks me to advertise this event.

Saturday, 30th July - Oxford Pro-life witness

3pm- 4pm

Please join us to pray for all unborn babies and their families who have been affected by the evil of abortion.

We stand at the entrance to the John Radcliffe Hospital, just in front of the Church of St Anthony of Padua, Headley Way, Oxford.

Refreshments available afterwards.

Please keep the unborn in your prayers and please pass this on to anyone you know who may like to join us. Thank you!

Topsy-Turvy Talking

2011-07-27T08:46:00.000+01:00

Fr Davide Pagliarini, the SSPX district superior of Italy, has given an interview, reported by Rorate Caeli, in which he says the following:

"I can only repeat that which has been clearly and always explained by my superiors: the canonical situation in which the Fraternity is currently places is a consequence of its resistance to the errors that infest the Church; consequently, the possibility for the Fraternity to reach a regular canonical situation does not depend on us, but on the acceptance by the hierarchy of the contribution that Tradition can give for the restoration of the Church.

I like Fr Pagliarini; we rubbed elbows in the kitchen sinks of Econe lo those many years ago. But at best this is topsy-turvy talk. I've upset everyone else this week from Westminster Archdiocese to the advocates of queering the Church, so I might as well offer an opinion on the SSPX too.

1. The current canonical situation of the SSPX is not simply the result of their resistance to the errors in the Church; it is the result of the way in which they think those errors must be fought. Fr Pagliarini's argument is a bit like saying that a man who gets a ticket for speeding has been punished for driving fast (whereas he has been punished for driving TOO fast).

2. 'The acceptance by the hierarchy of the contribution that Tradition can make to the restoration of the Church' - this is code for 'we'll be good if our theses are accepted'.

Really, it makes one wonder who exactly is going to bring the Church to the point of being ready to SSPXify itself. How exactly is the Church ever going to improve her internal life if good people hold themselves to one side under the illusion that self preservation can be assured in no other way? The SSPX holds to this logic with all the unshakeable confidence of the man on the roof in a flood who has prayed for divine assistance and refuses all human help that comes along.

In addition to the mark of unity, which is one of the signs of the Church's divine origins, there is also a habit of unity. The habit of unity is what makes it possible for us to know how to live under the same roof with others who are effectively our estranged brothers. It is a risky business, let nobody deny it. My blog posts of last week are a response precisely to one of the risks that it entails. But if one believes in the power of the Holy Ghost in the Church, and in our conformity to Christ through a VISIBLE institution - and that's what I mean by the Church; the Church is not a theory or a treatise of theology - , then there is no plausible alternative.

In other words, there is no other providentially assigned way for the Church to operate than through its divine constitution. That is why the Church has known periods of Borgias and periods of saints. It has never known a period in which the Holy See is rightly treated for all practical purposes as a defected bishopric.

It's hot in the kitchen, Davide, but it's where you have to be!

Now that is a surprise

2011-07-25T22:40:00.000+01:00

Today I have had at least ten visits from www.hackthissite.org, a nasty little site for nasty little people who like to hack into the websites of others. Now, just who do you think would want to hack my blogsite at the moment? Obviously someone who abstracts from decency in the blogosphere; probably, someone who is miffed at what I have been blogging about; clearly, not one of my friends.

Curious how the bonds of reason break, isn't it? If you don't like what I have written and are prepared to argue dispassionately, you will find me a very reasonable interlocutor.

Blogger is on the case by the way.

A Quest too far: theological omerta in Westminster

2011-07-23T18:25:00.000+01:00

I blogged this morning about the conference of Quest and about Quest's agenda. I likewise lamented the betrayal committed against those who suffer same-sex attraction by the Archdiocese of Westminster acting in such a way as to make Quest a dialogue partner in this field of pastoral care. By Friday evening the wait for a reponse from Westminster to my two questions on this issue came to an end. Neither question was answered. The message simply told me that Archbishop Nichols knew about Quest's conference at London Colney and that he has engaged members of Quest in dialogue. So what should we make of that?

**************

Imagine for a moment you arrive at your friend's house and two of his teenage sons are sitting in the back garden smoking canabis with their friends and praising the virtues of free love and legalised drugs. Horrified, you go back inside and you say to your friend:

'Do you approve of your kids smoking pot in the back garden and praising free love and legalised drugs ?' And he answers:

'I know they're smoking pot in the back garden and praising free love and legalised drugs.'

Bewildered, you march into the kitchen where you find your friend's wife cooking up a storm and laying out bottles of beer and wine on the dining room table. 'Excuse me a minute,' she says, 'I'm just getting a special supper ready for the kids.'

'Your kids are out there smoking pot, praising free love and legalised drugs.'

'Yes,' she says, 'but we do talk to them about it.'

******************

It seems to me that the answer from the Archbishop's private secretary - which is of course the mind of the Archbishop who appeared to have dictated the email - is a calculated albeit flimsy evasion. After all, if the diocese approves, what is the problem in admitting it? The problem arises only if the diocese approves something it should not in fact approve. Does Westminster know it should not approve this conference? The email's allusion to dialogue provides some semblance of distance between the diocese and Quest; after all, the vocabulary of 'dialogue' belongs to the language of external relations. The subtext is that 'we don't approve'.

But, the fact that the conference is happening on diocesan property is already a certain seal of approval de facto. The fact that there will be Sunday Mass at 2.30pm at the end of the conference - I have had this from two sources within Quest - is another indication that the diocese is effectively (not officially) sanctioning rather than merely tolerating this conference.

Let me make clear I am making no conclusions yet about the Archbishop's theology on these points. Some people are raising questions - there is a whole wesbite dedicated to his more suspect public comments - but I believe it is too early to tell. Rather, I return to my argument of this morning. Diocesan involvement in the Quest conference - and the diocese is involved, as sure as a parent who allows his children to smoke pot in the family back garden - is an affront to all Catholics who feel same-sex attraction and who want to live out the full Catholic teaching on human sexuality, cost what it may. The very fact that the Archbishop knew about the conference and did not prevent or stop it, or warn against it, or in any way voice his reservations concerning it, is ... well ... as irresponsible as a man who lets his kids smoke pot in the back garden because, well, "We know what they do and we have talked to them about it." The fact he might have other children going cold turkey up in their bedrooms isn't even mentioned.

Unless ...

*****************

... Unless, the argument that Trisagion made this week holds good: that the diocese is obliged under the Sexual Orientations Regulations not to turn down a booking at London Colney from this group. But in that case, what is the harm in admitting this? What is the harm in saying: 'Legally we were obliged and we did not think this was a battle we could win'? It might appear spineless but at least it would not appear to be an act of complicity with a group whose purpose - I repeat once again - is avowedly to deconstruct the Catholic teaching about homosexuality.

*****************

But why would the Archbishop not admit to that pressure from the law? For the same reason that he says he knows about Quest's conference but does not say whether he approves of Quest conference. I feel that in posing this question we begin to move into the modus operandi of the current Westminster diocesan administration. We cannot see inside their heads but we can look at what they do. And do they not show all the signs of being afraid of giving hostages to media fortune? Clearly, one should not give needless hostages to fortune, but don't we sometimes have to speak the truth, whatever the inconvenience? Arguably, this apparent policy, a kind of theological omerta if you will, is a sign that the Westminster curia, in particular the office of the Archbishop, does not want the media firestorm that a select but influential clique of the chattering classes could rain down on its head if Westminster provided them with the headline: 'Archbishop opposes gay conference'.

From the perspective of such a modus operandi, the fact that the Archbishop would probably be applauded by many people for a gentle but inexorable defence of Catholic moral teaching appears to be inconceivable. Yet if the pope's example of speaking the truth to power in Britain last year has not convinced the current hierarchy that they CAN raise their heads above the parapets, be villified and then a week later be feted like film stars, then when will they ever learn?

But there is another problem here too, and it is this: the Catholic Church in this country has long had a policy of saying nothing about the trickier areas of human sexuality. The same pragmatic silence which covers the area of homosexuality is deployed on the topic of contraception, IVF, cohabitation, etc. Most Catholics nowadays use contraception and would hardly know why the Church forbids it. Most Catholics have sexual partners long before they are married these days and would not know why the Church does not approve. The problem isn't sin; we will always sin. The problem is NEEDLESS IGNORANCE! As we know, this silence is so utterly poisonous and destructive - is anybody in a mitre listening, for crying out loud? - that it has left several generations of Catholics with few moral or intellectual resources to resist the ambient culture. Is it any wonder such groups as Quest exist? I would say that the desperation with which some Catholics welcome the Theology of the Body is a sign of the great thirst which exists for a plenary and authentic teaching on these issues.

******************

I have received at least two communications in the course of these posts from individuals who have met the same theological omerta in Westminster. My experience has been rather limited in comparison to theirs. I have few other conclusions to offer you, other than to invite you all to pray for Archbishop Nichols, for Westminster, for Quest and its members and for all those suffering with same-sex attraction.

Somewhere, somehow, the Church in this country has to find a voice which is not afraid to be the voice of prophetic witness.

Somehow, it has to find a modus operandi which is not bogged down in the complicity which arises from its own purblind pragmatism and which does not look to flimsy evasion and theological omerta for its defence. Somehow ...

Oremus.

A Quest too far: Reflections on another Westminster Waltz

2011-07-23T09:39:00.000+01:00

We have come an interesting journey over the last few days on The Sensible Bond. For those of you who are not up to speed, by all means go and read the posts from Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.

Finally, yesterday, I did indeed receive a reply from the private secretary of Archbishop Nichols. More of that further on. So, it is about time we gather our thoughts together and reflect a little on Quest and on the conduct of the Archdiocese of Westminster in relation to Quest's conference. I am not going to concern myself with the justification of the Catholic understanding of human sexuality. For anybody in doubt on this point, I refer you to Paragraph 2357 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I am simply going to deal, first, with the problem that Quest's agenda poses, and then (in a second post later this afternoon) with the actions of the Archdiocese of Westminster in that light.

****************

In one respect, Quest's very existence must be attributed to the failure of other Catholics to have the respect, compassion and sensitivity which the Catechism states we should show towards people with a same-sex attraction. Seriously, with some people, particularly of a conservative bent, the very mention of homosexuality induces furrowed brows and curled lips. If they thought about it for a minute, however, they would realise that that is exactly the way to drive those with same-sex attractions into each others' arms (no pun intended).

On another level, however, Quest is based on an entirely incoherent ambition of reconciling the full expression of the Catholic faith with the full expression of homosexual natures. I paraphrase Quest's first purpose. To savour the absurdity of this proposition, compare it for a minute with the possibility of a Catholic Polyamorous Society devoted to reconciling the full expression of the Catholic faith with the taking of multiple partners (because, after all, nobody is attracted only to one person). Or let us imagine the foundation of the Catholic Kleptomaniac Society, devoted to reconciling the full expression of the Catholic faith with the taking of other people's property (since the very notion of property is itself an imperialistic and outdated value). Quest's ambitions frankly are about as serious as that. We have just lost the sense of absurdity that such propositions ought to provoke.

In criticising the Archdiocese of Westminster for allowing Quest to hold their conference at London Colney, I am fully aware of the respect, compassion and sensitivity which must be shown to people with same-sex attractions. My contention, however, is that in allowing this conference to be hosted on diocesan property, the diocese has effectively acknowledged Quest as a serious partner in this important Catholic project. But Quest's purpose is so decidedly irreconcilable with the Catholic cause, that the actions of the Archdiocese cannot but harm pastoral ministry to people with same-sex attractions. THis is the right race but absolutely NOT the right horse.

I think of those Catholics who realise that their same-sex attraction can never be reconciled with the full expression of the Catholic faith. What an insult and offence to their painful, moral struggle the actions of the Archdiocese of Westminster have been in this matter. Why after all should they bother struggling? Why not simply embrace the squared circle and sleep with people of the same sex, especially if the diocese is prepared to extend its hospitality to them (excepting the Sexual Orientation Regulations question to which I will return)?

****************

This is why I have pursued my little campaign in the last few days to get some answers from the Archdiocese of Westminster; specifically, I wanted to know whether the diocese approved the use of London Colney for the Quest conference, and whether the Archbishop backed the conference. Finally, after three unanswered e-mails and a further e-mail to the press and public affairs office, I received late yesterday afternoon an e-mail from the private secretary of Archbishop Nichols. Courtesy prevents me reproducing the entire text, but in the interests of fairness let me give you the substance of the reply:

1. The Archbishop was aware that Quest is holding their conference at All Saints, London Colney.

2. He has met with members of this organisation in order to engage them in dialogue.

I replied accordingly:

Dear Fr O'Leary,

Please assure his Grace of my sincere prayers and good will. He will no doubt appreciate, however, that your message does not begin remotely to answer either of my questions.

Very best wishes, etc.

Well, I asked my questions, and I eventually got the only answer that the Archbishop of Westminster was inclined to give me.

I'll tell you what I think of that later.

An answer from Westminster ...

2011-07-22T19:45:00.001+01:00

... details coming soon.

Still no answers ...

2011-07-22T08:11:00.000+01:00

At least according to the publicity, London Colney All Saints Pastoral Centre 22-24 July will be the venue for the Quest conference this weekend. In brief, Quest states that its first purpose is to 'associate lay men and women who are seeking ways of reconciling the full practice of their Catholic faith with the full expression of their homosexual natures in loving Christian relationships.' I wrote about this matter on Sunday and Wednesday. Someone in the comments below suggested that whatever happens, they will not stop the conference. But that was never my target. Targets have to be credibly achievable! My target has simply been to get information from the diocese about whether this event is approved. More precisely, I wanted to know, indeed I still want to know, if the Archdiocese of Westminster is happy for this event to take place in a pastoral centre which it owns, and whether Archbishop Nichols gives his backing to the conference.

As I stated on Wednesday, I wrote twice very courteously to the administrator of London Colney, Alan Johnstone, and the Archbishop's office, seeking this information. I didn't ask them to cancel it, I didn't state my own opinion, other than to call myself a concerned Catholic. I simply asked them - am I sounding repetitive? It's my Jeremy Paxman impersonation - if this event was diocese approved and whether it had the backing of Archbishop Nichols. I wrote for a third time on Thursday, this time copying in the CDF (a blank email address, for all I know, but why not widen the loop a bit?):

Dear sirs,

This is now the third time I have emailed you (previous emails copied below) to inquire about the Quest conference to be held this weekend 22-24 July at London Colney Pastoral Centre.

http://www.questgaycatholic.org.uk/conferences/conf2011.asp

I will be very happy if you will just confirm two things for me:

1) Does the diocese approve of Quest being allowed to hold their conference in a centre which it owns?

2) Does Archbishop Nichols lend his support to this conference?

If you do not reply, then I will conclude that the answer to these questions is in the affirmative.

Yours faithfully, etc.

And answer came there none. A simple yes or no would have sufficed, but neither was given. Need I explain to this readership: qui tacit videtur consentire? He who is silent is seen to give consent.

So, I'm now making the diocesan press office aware of my campaign to get some answers. Let us hope in the course of the day that they manage to provide them.

A soothing interlude

2011-07-21T21:40:00.000+01:00

I notice the OCD clickers are back, desperate to click on something to signify their disgust at the furrow which we plough on this blog. So, as a soothing interlude before tomorrow's business, I post John Taverner's setting of the Magnificat. Goodness, I first heard this in 1989 sung by the chamber choir of Chetham's School of Music. And it still sends tingles down my spine.

Please also pray for the wife of a friend and reader of this blog who is currently in hospital.

A curious silence in Westminster

2011-07-20T22:15:00.000+01:00

On Sunday night I blogged about the fact that Quest are due to hold their annual conference at London Colney All Saints Pastoral Centre which is owned by the Westminster diocese. I said then the following:

But I'm curious whether Archbishop Nichols knows about this meeting. I'm curious whether he is happy that the pastoral centre of his diocese is hosting a conference for an organisation whose aims are to defy and undermine a Catholic moral teaching repeated again and again in recent years.

There is no doubt in my mind that Quest openly opposes the Magisterium on the issue of the compatibility of the full expression of homosexuality with the full expression of the Catholic faith. Indeed, they say these things are quite compatible.

**************

So, rather than sitting here doing nothing, I wrote to the Westminster Diocesan Office for Pastoral Affairs on Monday morning. Undoubtedly, it must be a busy office but I was sent a prompt reply stating that it had no responsibility for London Colney.

Next, I sent an email to London Colney and to the office of Archbishop Nichols directly which read as follows:

Dear sirs,

I understand that Quest are to hold a conference at London Colney Pastoral Centre on 22-24 July. As a concerned Catholic, I would like to ask whether the diocese approves of Quest being allowed to hold their conference in a centre which it owns, and also whether Archbishop Nichols lends his support to this conference.

Yours faithfully, etc.

I did not expect an immediate answer, but perhaps at least a holding response acknowledging my email. Unlike the Pastoral Office, however, neither London Colney nor the office of Archbishop Nichols replied.

By Tuesday evening when there was still no reply, I thought that perhaps they needed a little reminder of my correspondence. While this might seem a bit hurried, the conference is due to start this coming Friday and I thought it best to clear these matters up. So, I wrote for a second time:

Dear sirs,

Given the proximity of the Quest conference, I would appreciate it very much if you could answer my two questions which I submitted to you yesterday. I will be quite content with yes or no answers:

1) Does the diocese approve of Quest being allowed to hold their conference in a centre which it owns?

2) Does Archbishop Nichols lend his support to this conference?

Yours faithfully, etc.

Today there has been once again no reply from either party: not from Alan Johnstone, the administrator of London Colney, and not from the office of the Archbishop.

*****************

Now, call me old fashioned, but I am not drawing any conclusions from the current radio silence (or whatever the email equivalent is). I'm sure these offices are very busy and have a mountain of work to get through. But surely enquiries about current events could receive punctual replies, even of the briefest kind. Indeed, I have attempted to make their job easier for them by simply asking for 'yes' or 'no' answers. They could satisfactorily have answered my emails something like this:

Dear thingy,

1. Yes (or no, as the case may be)

2. Yes (or no, as the case may be)

Yours, etc.

So, there we have it. I thought I would let readers know that I have been trying to get some clarity from Westminster Diocese on this question. It does OWN London Colney after all. And Quest is clearly a group which both professes to be Catholic and at the same time defies the Magisterium (which includes the teaching authority of the bishops in communion with the Holy See) on a key area of human sexuality. I suppose what I'm getting at is that this is quite a grave question really. I don't want to overstate the matter but there it is.

So, does the diocese approve of Quest holding this conference at London Colney, and does Archbishop Nichols lend his support to Quest's conference?

I will of course write again tomorrow morning.

A tale of two conferences: PEEP and Quest

2011-07-17T23:55:00.000+01:00

I think there is a fairly widespread consensus that when the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice (PEEP) conference was cancelled last month, the organisation had effectively shot itself in the foot, not once but twice. First, having secured Cardinal Burke's agreement to speak, they then advertised the conference in such an openly contentious way with regard to the English and Welsh Bishops that His Eminence could only withdraw from the event. Second, PEEP then cast around for emergency substitute speakers and found two, er, let us call them mavericks, Fr Paul Kramer and Robert Sungenis, who were so controversial that Westminster Methodist Central Hall pulled the plug on the event. If only they had taken a leaf out of Quest's book...

Quest, unless you are unaware, is ... well, let me say it in their own words on their homepage:

Quest is a group for lesbian, gay and bisexual Catholics. Its purpose is to proclaim the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ so as to sustain and increase Christian belief among homosexual men and women. Membership is open to all who share Quest’s aims, regardless of sexual orientation or religious affiliation. Transgendered persons should feel themselves especially welcome.

And what is the purpose of Quest? Well, let me quote what they state is their first aim:

The purpose of Quest is to proclaim the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ so as to sustain and increase Christian belief among homosexual men and women by:

1. associating lay men and women who are seeking ways of reconciling the full practice of their Catholic faith with the full expression of their homosexual natures in loving Christian relationships, and providing opportunities for them to meet together for worship, discussion and study.

Now, by all means have a look around Quest's website. John Smeaton, to whom we must be grateful for drawing our attention to this matter, quotes from several articles published on Quest's website which seem, on a cursory inspection, to be in keeping with Quest's general ethos. But I'm sure you might already know as much as you want to know about Quest after reading their primary aim, as quoted above: 'reconciling the full practice of their Catholic faith with the full expression of their homosexual natures.' It was certainly enough for Cardinal Hume who, according to somebody I spoke to yesterday, had Quest removed from the diocesan directory.

So, given the character and aims of Quest, why on earth am I saying that PEEP ought to have taken a leaf out of Quest's book? Well, because Quest will next weekend hold their annual conference at London Colney All Saints Pastoral Centre which is owned by the Archdiocese of Westminster. Indeed, their website says that they are 'Part of the Diocese of Westminster'. Somewhere, somehow, PEEP missed a trick.

********************

I say PEEP could have taken a leaf out of Quest's book. After all, if you had some kind of Catholic group and you were holding your meeting at a diocesan pastoral centre, people would surely assume that your group met with the approval of the said diocese. And it seems that PEEP could do with a bit of diocesan kudos.

On the other hand, said someone to me yesterday, London Colney will rent out their conference facilities to anyone, builders, plumbers, etc., anyone... Yes, I answered, but the Catholic religion has no objection to plumbing and building, or at least none that I am aware of (please feel free to correct me in the comments). I am myself due to go to a wedding reception in a few weeks time at London Colney Pastoral Centre and now find myself scratching my head at the contradiction before us. On one weekend London Colney, the pastoral centre of the Westminster diocese, will host a conference for a group whose main aim is entirely contrary to Catholic teaching on human sexuality. A few weeks later, London Colney, the pastoral centre of the Westminster diocese, will host a reception for a Catholic wedding which will be, I'm sure, entirely in keeping with Catholic teaching on human sexuality. Is it just me? Or is the only thing that Quest and our wedding reception have in common the colour of their money?

*****************

I'm not one of those people who thinks that everything that happens in a diocese happens with the full knowledge and consent of the local bishop. But neither am I one of those people who thinks that everything the local bishop sees fit to approve is in fact fine and we should all learn to just hold our tongues. Did I just say 'learn to hold our tongues'? I cannot think where that expression came from.

But I'm curious whether Archbishop Nichols knows about this meeting. I'm curious whether he is happy that the pastoral centre of his diocese is hosting a conference for an organisation whose aims are to defy and undermine a Catholic moral teaching repeated again and again in recent years. And, frankly, I'm curious whether London Colney would open its doors to any other organisation which defies and undermines Catholic teaching, for example, Planned Parenthood or even the BNP? Okay, so perhaps those organisations don't qualify as spiritual groups. What if there were a Catholic Polyamorous Society (the CPS!)? There isn't one - the very idea is repugnant - but just supposing there was one, dedicated to the full expression of polyamory, just as others might be dedicated to to the full expression of their homosexual natures. "Yes," their webpage might say, "we want to help the Church achieve a more progressive understanding of exclusivity in marriage; after all, exclusivity contradicts the strong and frequent attractions that many people have towards multiple partners and leaves them with a terrible dilemma of conscience. Don't we have to think exclusivity through?"

So, do you think polyamorous Catholics would be able to book their conference at London Colney? Me neither. And why would organisations who sin against the exclusive character of the nuptial relationship be more disadvantaged than one which intends to deconstruct the intersexual nature of the nuptial relationship? Come to think of it, would PEEP be able to hold their conference at London Colney? Something tells me they would not.

**************

I've spoken to a priest of the Westminster Diocese and he is going to write to somebody in the know to inquire into this event.

Reasonable and charitable comments only, please. Ranters, ravers and self-appointed lynch mobs will be deleted.

Memories

2011-07-14T10:12:00.000+01:00

I stood for a little while in Westminster Hall last night as a dear friend reflected on the building. Just imagine, he observed, that when St Thomas More, St Edmund Campion and the proto-martrys of the Henrician revolution stood condemned in this very building, they probably looked up and saw the same immense angels carved in wood and the same expansive medieval ceiling. Breathing the same air, their eyes raised to the same glorious architecture, they were then led away to their deaths.

As he was speaking a gaggle of parliamentary guests came streaming across the hall and bustled passed us, so many...

I had not thought death had undone so many ...

Well, that's a little bit harsh perhaps! But their obliviousness was suddenly fixed in my mind as a symbol of the obliviousness of us all as we totter around on a daily basis, treading on the graves of deep, Christian history and saintly fact.

A couple of years ago I was asked to organise a little trip around Wessex for some visiting American students. I did so happily and we have just done it again barely two weeks ago. What struck me the first time, and once more on this occasion, was again the depth and richness of our past and the extent to which it goes mostly ignored. Who in the Thames Valley enthusiastically celebrates it as the scene of the mission of Saint Birinus, sent by Pope Honorius, or the location of Alfred the Great's many battles against the Danish pagans? Not many, that's for sure, although such events are rather more crucial to its deepest identity than the presence of Microsoft or Huntley and Palmer's biscuits.

One of the main arguments in a recent paper I gave on the Ballad of the White Horse was that the ballad reflects very powerfully on the problem of remembering and forgetting, not as pure cognitive processes or failures, but as essential signs of our moral life. What we remember and what we forget are indicative of who we are and of the direction in which our moral compass points. Generally speaking, remembering is associated with continuity, gratitude, stability or perseverance; forgetting with an inward-turning fracture in our identity. The only two kinds of forgetfulness which are in fact allowed are humility (forgetfulness of self) and acceptance of forgiveness (forgetfulness of our offences).

But remembering and forgetting are no simple processes. As I write France is gearing up for a day of celebrations to mark the liberation of the Bastille Prison during the French Revolution. This seems to be an example of what one historian has called 'invented tradition' in which a community commemorates some past event and attributes to it some meaning which it did not possess. The Bastille Prison after all contained few prisoners.

If one sin against memory is the sin of forgetting, another sin against memory is the sin of false recal. On the social level, we can call this invented tradition; on the individual level, I suppose it can be associated with nostalgia. But nostalgia is not so much invented as blurred; nostalgia, in other words, involves a heavy dose of analgesia. I need hardly say that this is one of the great dangers of the conservative moment which is pressing itself upon the Church currently. We are passing successfully out of the period of great forgetfulness (and, yes, frank denial) which marks the years since Vatican II. We must not now counter its profound ills by turning instead to an equally false recall of the past.

There is a third category of sin against memory for which I fail to find a name. It is the kind of memory which asserts itself over authority in the supernatural order. Because I remember it THIS way, that is the way it was and is. In other words, individual memory can be privately canonised, just as much as individual judgment can, and, I would argue, with similarly disastrous consequences. In the natural order, this is a much more vexed question. We have already commented on false recall on the public level, and individual memory might well assert itself against official invented traditions. On the other hand, individuals themselves are quite capable of false recall or indeed of inventing the past in their own interests; this is often the case with war criminals who try to deconstruct the past actions of which they stand accused. In all cases, memory stands in need of purification, just as much as our judgments do.

**********

My theme is memory, as Charles Ryder says. Last night I went out onto the terrace of the Houses of Parliament and recognised a lady whom my friend and I had known many years ago and whose daughter is now an MP. We approached her and greeted her enthusiastically, asking her how she was.

'Do I know you, young man?' she said to me somewhat coldly.

'You do,' I replied, as I gave her my name.

'Ahhhh,' she cried, dropping her walking stick and flinging her arms around me in a genuine, rib-cracking Scouser bear hug (for she is from Liverpool).

And that is another thing memory can do for you.

Petition concerning the Cardinal Vaughan School

2011-07-11T21:08:00.000+01:00

Hot foot it right now over to Go Petition and sign the petition of the Vaughan Parents' Action Group.
Go on. You know it's the right thing to do. Here in brief are the petition's points:

Now that the government is about to consult on a change to the law, we, the undersigned, respectfully ask Archbishop Vincent Nichols two things:

• that you now nominate two current parents as Foundation Governors of the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School and

• that you advise your other nominees on the Governing Body to conduct the selection process of a new Head so as to bring about an appointment that will command the support not just of your nominees but also of other sections across the unhappily divided Governing Body and that will ensure that the School’s parents no longer feel ignored.

Come on then. Spread the word.

Hat tip to Linen on the Hedgerow

Blessed J H Newman

2011-07-10T11:08:00.000+01:00

Blessed John Henry Newman has been sitting quietly on the periphery of my vision for quite some time now. It hasn't been easy to attract my attention. I remember trying to read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua nearly twenty years ago and feeling defeated - I was then a callow youth of barely twenty - by the concept of a long, written self defence and by Newman's aversion to the full stop. God forgive me but Newman struck me at the time as one of those whinging, sallow Victorians who probably wrote poetry about the death of roses and who clearly ought to have got out in the fresh air more. Michael Davies, I knew, had compiled a volume of Newman's sermons against the liberals, but that imposing tome sat on my father's bookshelf undisturbed. And then just a few weeks ago in St Paul's Bookshop at Westminster I chanced upon an anthology of Newman's writings, or more strictly, an abridgment of an anthology of Newman's writings, made by Fr Erich Przywara SJ many decades ago. I confess now to being hooked.

It's not just Newman's aversion to the full stop which I have now managed to see through, nor does my new enthusiasm derive from the fact that I'm readier now to understand a man's pain (and the journey that has brought him to where he is) than I was as a twenty-something. I think what has struck me most in beginning to read through these excerpts is that Newman feels both like a contemporary and like a master. He feels like a contemporary because his psychological terrain is vast and complex; he seems to understand motives in all their ambiguity and confusion, much better than some spiritual analysts. He also seems to grasp like a true master the range of phenomena that stir us into action. For a Victorian the underpinnings of moral worthiness in his writings - the ethical sledge hammer against the will - are less emphatic than they are in many writings dating from that hugely moralistic age.

All this points to the conclusion that Newman had an instinctive feeling for the importance assumed by individual interiority in the modern period - the way in which emotion, sentient life and experience colour our judgments and resolutions, as much as will power. The Catholicism of his age rightly denounced individualism in various guises without realising how very individualistic its own spirituality had become, partly in order to deal with the challenge of individualism. O unhappy irony!

At the same time, however, the few Newman writings I have so far read communicate also a deep appreciation of the immensity of God, both in His love and in His majesty. Far from Newman's intensified interiority leading to a sterile, humanistic dead end, it seems to make him even more aware of God in His greatness and in His intimacy.

I've already every reason to feel grateful to Blessed JHN to whose intercession I attribute my new job. But I now have the whimsical but reassuring sense that I'll be learning from him more than I thought I had bargained for.

Perhaps the problem all those year ago was not the length of his sentences so much as the shortness of my attention span.

Victoria Mildew

2011-07-09T14:27:00.000+01:00

Long-time readers of the blog will remember Victoria Mildew who used to comment here quite regularly and for whom I requested prayers earlier this year. The news is not good for Victoria, I'm afraid. Here is what she writes:

I am due to have a hysterectomy with removal of tumour (or as much as they can) on 19th July 2011.

Prognosis - perhaps 12-18months of life or longer if the operation is successful.

My health has not been brilliant and my confidence is rock bottom.

I'm sure Sensible Bond readers will respond with their usual vigour. Please keep Victoria and her husband in your prayers.

Chesterton on a Saturday

2011-07-08T09:48:00.000+01:00

The Seton Hall Chesterton gathering last Friday at St Benet's, Oxford was followed on Saturday at the Catholic Chaplaincy of Oxford University by the conference of the Chesterton Society in the UK. This was a more populist gathering, at least on this occasion; the papers of the last conference on the holiness of GKC were published in book form. This time around, two of the speakers, Lynette Burrows and Dale Alquist, addressed the theme of Chesterton as Prophet, while the third, Fr Ian Ker, looked at Chesterton's treatment of the person of Jesus Christ.

I suppose the main concern one must have after such a meeting is how the diffusion and influence of Chesterton's thought will continue in the future. William Oddie and Ian Ker have both published biographies of Chesterton in the last two years. Ker's is soon going into its second edition with Oxford University Press. Dale Alquist has done a fine job in the USA of making Chesterton available again for the general public. I suppose one can only hope that Ker and Oddie's work is indicative of a deeper, wider and more rounded respect for Chesterton than we suspect.

Which reminds me of a Chesterton anecdote. During the First World War one woman berated Chesterton for the fact that he was not away fighting in France.

'Young man,' she said, 'why aren't you out at the Front?' To which he replied, 'If you will come around to my side, Madam, you will see that I am.'

Chesterton is jolly. In our dark world, there's a lot to be said for that just in and of itself. But of course there is a lot more to be said for Chesterton, unless, that is, you are an Oxford don ...

Chestertonian points of view

2011-07-07T18:08:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning all week to write something about the Chesterton conferences in Oxford last weekend. The best laid plans, eh?

But it was a very interesting weekend all told. The fun began on Friday evening with a gathering at St Benet's Hall where Seton Hall University were holding their summer school and had organised a conference to celebrate the centenary of The Ballad of the White Horse. A small but select crowd gathered, therefore, to listen to papers from John Coates on Redemption and Recovery in the Ballad of the White Horse, Sheridan Gilley on whether the Ballad of the White Horse is the English epic, Julia Stapleton on the genesis of the Ballad, and then some dishevelled, rambling academic whose name escapes me talked for what seemed like an eternity about history, memory and forgetting in the Ballad of the White Horse. One Catholic Oxford don of St Benet's has recently written that the failure of GKC readers to spot GKC's essentially heretical mindset says a lot about the state of Catholic education in the 20th Century. So, of course, one is free to regard the conference as the work of ignoramuses and poltroons.

Those that bothered to attend - and our Oxford don naturally did not - might be forgiven for thinking that GKC emerged rather well from the evening's deliberations. In the hands of the four speakers the Ballad appeared in all its polysemic brilliance, its vigour matching that of Chesterton's Lepanto, its religious and political scope matching that of Chesterton's Orthodoxy. My own paper considered how Chesterton plays with time in the poem, casting the events of King Alfred's struggle against the Danes in the context of the end of the world, and against the timeframe of 'the night'. It also considered how the processes of remembering and forgetting shape the moral destinies of Alfred and his foes.

For me, Chesterton's preoccupations in the poem cannot be treated reductively. The poem dances between political, religious, cultural and social concerns, evokes grand moral decisions and stirs up the blood with the kind of thunderous versification which make me want to march around my living room looking for a sofa or a bureau to conquer. Here's a taster from Alfred's address to his soldiers on the brink of the battle of Ethandun:

"Up on the old white road, brothers,
Up on the Roman walls!
For this is the night of the drawing of swords,
And the tainted tower of the heathen hordes
Leans to our hammers, fires and cords,
Leans a little and falls.

"Follow the star that lives and leaps,
Follow the sword that sings,
For we go gathering heathen men,
A terrible harvest, ten by ten,
As the wrath of the last red autumn--then
When Christ reaps down the kings.

"Follow a light that leaps and spins,
Follow the fire unfurled!
For riseth up against realm and rod,
A thing forgotten, a thing downtrod,
The last lost giant, even God,
Is risen against the world."

Roaring they went o'er the Roman wall,
And roaring up the lane,
Their torches tossed a ladder of fire,
Higher their hymn was heard and higher,
More sweet for hate and for heart's desire,
And up in the northern scrub and brier,
They fell upon the Dane.

The rhythms seem to grow ever more martial as the verse rushes towards the conclusion - they fell upon the Dane. You wouldn't want to be Danish at that point.

And then there was the conference of Saturday ... More later.

Coming up ...

2011-07-05T16:28:00.000+01:00

... a report on the G. K. Chesterton conferences last weekend, but first, a bit of Elliott Smith (poor lad, RIP).

How to defend the Church in the Public Square

2011-06-30T15:18:00.000+01:00

This is quite a remarkable performance. Never mind the strategy; witness the fervour and the conviction.

Can't we make this priest Bishop of Portsmouth of something? I think they will be in need of a bishop pretty soon.

A Chesterton Conference, Friday 1 July in Oxford

2011-06-30T10:18:00.000+01:00

The G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture, US has the pleasure of announcing a conference celebrating the centenary of G. K. Chesterton’s epic poem ― The Ballad of the White Horse. The conference will be held

on Friday, July 1, 2011

from 5 – 8 pm

at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford (38 St. Giles, Oxford).

Speakers include: Fr. Ian Boyd, C.S.B., John Coates, Dr. Sheridan Gilley, Dr. Julia Stapleton and Dr. Brian Sudlow. This event is open to the public and free of charge.

For more information please contact: chestertoninstitute@shu.edu

The Ballad of the White Horse is a poem by G. K. Chesterton about the idealized exploits of the Saxon King Alfred the Great, published in 1911. Written in ballad form, the poem narrates how, with the help of God and the intercession of the Virgin Mary, King Alfred defeated the invading Danes at the Battle of Ethandun. In addition to being a story of Alfred's military and political accomplishments, it is also considered a Christian allegory in which Chesterton examines the threats of neo-paganism in modern times. Chesterton incorporates a significant amount of philosophy into the basic structure of the story.

Loving priests

2011-06-28T14:09:00.000+01:00

The older I get, the less I am prepared to go in thundering against those I consider to be evil doers. I hope this is humility rather than complacency. One rarely if ever knows all the facts, even of the most public cases. The problem is all the worst in the case of priests who sometimes know things they cannot reveal. I wonder if our passion for total disclosure comes from our living in the information age. Least said, soonest mended, is a counsel honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

Neverthless, I have been scratching my head with increasing frustration in the last few days over the conduct of some of the clergy. I was dumbfounded at the nerve-shrivelling melodrama of Fr John Corapi's public self-exile. I'm not underestimating how difficult it is to sit accused of wickedness and be subject to a system in which one appears guilty until proven innocent. I'm just amazed at his lack of judgment, his appalling self promotion, and, let us say it, at his cloth-eared sense of what makes a good, heroic moniker. The Black Sheep Dog sounds a bit like 'The Black Vegetable', if you know what I mean. He is seriously in danger of looking thoroughly absurd. We can only pray he rediscovers not only his sense of obligation to the Church but his sense of proportion.

At a much more serious level, I have between tea breaks and lunch today watched the BBC's latest documentary on priest abusers: Abused: Breaking the Silence. Not for the faint hearted, this documentary lays out accusations, many of them admitted by those accused, of sexual abuse by four Rosminian priests in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of them, Fr Kit Cunningham, later became a minor celebrity, served in Saint Elthelreda's in London, and earned an MBE which he returned last year to the Palace without any explanation. He died in late 2010.

Peter Stanford is wringing his hands in palpable confusion over this news. He wonders whether he can ever trust a priest again; if he was so wrong about Fr Cunningham, how can he ever trust his judgment in the future? I sympathise with Stanford but do not agree. The preparation for celibacy which seminarians go through these days is considerably more sophisticated than it was in the 1950s. The less formal nature of social mores also, arguably, creates a more supportive context in which priests and religious can live out their celibate vocation. The standards of child care and safeguards against abuse in the Catholic Church in this country easily compare to anything available in civil society.

But why is the fall of Frs Corapi and Cunningham so devastating for so many people? Undoubtedly some suffer directly through their actions: in Corapi's case, those who have been inspired by him; in Cunningham's case, those who have been abused by him. Yet in some way, we all are touched by their actions. The Church suffers because their sins stain the icon of Christ which they are supposed to embody. The world suffers because even though it had its doubts about such an icon, to find that they have fallen means there is a little less hope in the world at large.

It all underlines the importance of support for our priests, of the need not to be too hasty in judgment, of the need not to isolate them out of a false sense of hierarchy. If you want to make people good, the first thing you have to do is to love them, i.e. to see them as God sees them.

I pray that Fr Corapi comes to his senses. I pray that the Rosminians do the right thing by the victims of their members. Other than that what can one do except wonder at the God who gave such power to men?

Flat for sale!

2011-06-27T17:11:00.000+01:00

We interrupt our normal inactivity to advertise a one-bedroom flat for sale in East Dulwich, SE22.

The flat is on the first floor. All details available here.

On the road again

2011-06-26T09:32:00.000+01:00

We spent most of last week on the road, travelling between relatives and visiting Birmingham. There is something incomparably liberating about escaping from London. The skies seem bigger, the air is definitely easier to breathe, and the spirit seems to calm down and revive a little far from the frenzy of the capital. He who is tired of London is tired of life, said Samuel Johnson. But the London he knew was something different from the London of Boris Johnson.

We spent one night at Studley Castle, as can anyone actually. These days it is a hotel. And, moreover, it never really was a castle; more a glorified stately home. Still, getting beyond the idea of Studley as an early Victorian fashion accessory, we found it to be a very comfortable inn for the weary travellers that we were.

The glorious Warwickshire countryside stretched away into the distance:

And in the evening the castle sat back in splendour and told us its tales during our after dinner walk:

One more could one ask a 'castle' to do?

The following day we found ourselves in Birmingham on the feast of Corpus Christi (except in England and Wales, worst luck), which proved as good an excuse as any to toddle along to the Birmingham Oratory before dinner and assist at a Solemn High Mass (Extraordinary Form).

The pictures I had seen of the church did it no justice at all. I was expecting something like the wearisome albeit devotional monstrosity in South Kensington. What I found was something smaller but infinitely more tasteful. It seems that Blessed John Henry Newman, who founded the Oratory in Birmingham, died before the church was even begun. They have a very pretty little chapel dedicated to him and in which we said our prayers before heading off for a well-earned dinner.

Did I just mention dinner again? Well, we always eat well when we go away (and, I hasten to add, it's not too bad at home either).

So, now, it's back to London for the time being. I don't think I'm tired of London life. I'm not even tired of Boris Johnson. But rather as Bilbo Baggins found, having once left the Shire, you never really settle again when you return.

Brumington bound

2011-06-23T23:17:00.000+01:00

Little blogging time this week as we are up in Brumington, inspecting the city and doing a lot of thinking. I managed tonight to go for the first time to the Birmingham Oratory. What a gem! For Corpus Christi there was a Solemn High Mass and a procession of the Blessed Sacrament. The choir was top draw.

We also paid a visit to the shrine of Blessed John Henry Newman to whose intercession we ascribe my recent appointment. The chapel is simple but very pretty. All of the altars throughout the church and chapels were ad orientem. How refreshing!

Back to the big smoke tomorrow. It's amazing to get out of London once in a while and find out how friendly the rest of the country is. We had two spontaneous offers of help from people today and others were simply obliging in the extreme. I could get used to that!

Pictures this weekend.

It's one of those afternoons ...

2011-06-19T16:08:00.000+01:00

... when only a little English choral music can soothe the nerves all frayed by the English summer.

My song is love unknown,
My Savior's love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take frail flesh and die?

He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend, my Friend indeed,
Who at my need His life did spend.

Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then Crucify! is all their breath,
And for His death they thirst and cry.

They rise and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they saved,
The Prince of life they slay,
Yet cheerful He to suffering goes,
That He His foes from thence might free.

Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend, in Whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.

A new book to take note of

2011-06-18T13:58:00.000+01:00

I'm happy to report to readers the publication of Anselm Gribbin O.Praem, Pope Benedict XVI and the Liturgy (£12.99) published by Gracewing. The blurb goes something like this:

A prominent and inescapable feature of Pope Benedict XVI's pontificate is the importance which has been given to the sacred liturgy, in its actual celebration, as well as in the pope's Magisterium and theological writings. Not only have we witnessed the reappearance of many elements used in older, but recently-abandoned papal liturgies, but also what amounts to be the virtual liberation of the 'Old Latin Mass'. This has come as a great surprise to many people in the Church, some of whom almost regard it, and the pope's liturgical theology, as a betrayal of recent liturgical reforms. On the other hand, others have viewed these liturgical changes, and the emphasis which Pope Benedict places upon the liturgy in the life of the Church, as positive developments, leading to a more correct understanding of the Second Vatican Council within 'the hermeneutic of continuity' and reform, and the notion of 'organic development'. But, in the midst of conflicting interpretations, how are we to understand these developments and Pope Benedict XVI's re-affirmation of what we now call the usus antiquior? In this book Dr Anselm J. Gribbin explores these and other related questions by examining the liturgical theology of Pope Benedict XVI in his magisterial teachings and writings, particularly in the post-synodal exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, and The Spirit of the Liturgy. Gribbin, in an extensive, and detailed analysis, indicates that the liturgical theology of Pope Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger points the way forward for the Church in the field of liturgy. He also addresses the fundamentally important question of the relationship between the liturgical writings of Pope Benedict XVI as a theologian, and his Magisterium as the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church, and that the latter is best understood with recourse to the former.

Frater Anselm, a Scotsman and a Norbertine of the Abbey of Tongerlo, is a medievalist by training, and I have no doubt that this book will be worth the read. I'm asking Gracewing for a review copy and hope to report back on the book in due course on the blog.

The 'why' of the TOB

2011-06-17T13:06:00.000+01:00

It has been interesting watching the reaction buttons on my last post. Eight readers happen to think it was funny. I'm not sure exactly what was funny. Larson wasn't funny for a start.

I fear greatly that what was meant was that it was 'laughable', i.e., it's laughable to be talking about the body, especially in relation to theology. Larson himself seemed to take if not this point of view, then at least a dismissive point of view, considering the expression theology of the body as 'inappropriate pomposity'. Now, we can wonder what Larson thinks 'appropriate pomposity' would be, but that is tangential for now. I suppose I can only confront those amused by the notion of TOB by answering the question I left hanging at the end of an earlier post on this topic: what's the point of theology of the body?

Again, I come at this very much as a novice, simply asking the questions and trying to work out the terrain which has necessitated such study and provoked such debate. But I have to say that anything within Catholicism which reminds us of our embodied condition is worth considering. The nature of the human being is after all composite.

To consider this reality purely from the point of view of theological tradition is interesting. Doubts about the bodiliness of our condition can be found in some early Christological heresies. Doubts about the embodied character of our means of salvation are later found in doubts over the necessity of the sacraments. The incarnation too was one of those themes that became ever more prominent in late nineteenth-century theology, as historical criticism began to break down Protestant and then Catholic belief in the divinity of Christ. Speaking now as someone interested in France, I find divine poetry in the fact that Ernest Psichari, the grandson of Ernest Renan whose notorious Vie de Jésus was responsible for popularising a proto-modernist understanding of the Christ of History, would turn back to the Church at the same time as his good friend Charles Péguy who placed the incarnation at the heart of so much of his late work.

We can look back at other traditions within Catholicism which are equally proccupied with the body in ways that have the potential to surprise us. I remember coming across Saint Dominic's 'nine ways of prayer'. Instead of the complex psychological treatise which my formation in counter-reformation spirituality led me to expect - how to train the imagination, use the mind in prayer, elicit desires, move emotions - I found a list of bodily postures. Who would have thought that one of the masters of Catholic life in the Middle Ages would have left us such 'ways of prayer'. If we are surprised, it is indicative of how our thinking about spirituality and prayer has shifted locus, since the Cartesian revolution, from outward to inward. Of course, traces of this earlier dispensation remain within Catholicism until the present. Traditionalists often prefer to kneel when they are praying. Some other Catholics prefer to adopt the orans position with hands stretched out and palms facing upwards. To my mind, anything that casts our bodies in an attitude of prayer - rather than pretending that our souls are the ghosts in the machine - comes from a good instinct.

All this, it seems to me, can be linked to a theology of the body, i.e. how our bodies, as well as our souls, are intimately linked to the ecology of salvation.

***********

The need for a theology of the body, which John Paul began to work out well before he came to Rome to be pope, seems to arise from several accidents of history. The first of these is the development in the social sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably anthropology and semiotics. Anthropology, as I understand it, is the study of the species of homo sapiens, but it can also concern basic human production and those things that dominate the symbolic domain which each individual or community lives in. While this has no apparent theological significance, the fact that God became man - homo - and that the religion he founded is worked out in material conditions suggests that anthropology can serve theology in how theology thinks about man's return to God. After all, Saint Thomas used not only philosophy but also biology and astronomy in various questions of the Summa Theologica. All truth is of the Holy Ghost, as Saint Ambrose observes.

The other science to develop in the twentieth century and which is of importance here is semiotics, i.e. the study of how signs or symbols work. Our cultures are full of signs and symbols denoting directly, and connoting indirectly, meaning. The very work of our intellects is to make sense of the world around us. In other words, our minds' search for meaning is closely associated with the world's capacity to express meaning and purpose. The heavens proclaim the glory of God and our minds can embrace this meaning.

The second accident of history crucial to the development of the theology of the body - I say accident because everything in history depends on our free choices - was the collapse of sexual morality in the West. We can spend a long time going over this ground, but essentially what we have since the 1960s is a massive departure not only from the practice of a truly human sexuality (seen in various ways in previous centuries) but also from the understanding of human sexuality which is reduced for many to the level of a purely pleasurable pursuit, entirely unrelated to procreation and only incidentally related to personal relations.

Now, it is in these contexts - the development of the social sciences and the sexual revolution - that a thinking man like JPII begins working out ways in which the men of his time could be shown again the path towards a sexuality which is worthy of humanity and - at the same time and because God is the author of nature and grace - which is compatible with our call to salvation. In TOB, JPII appears to have set out to win the battle over the meaning of sexuality. If 'sex' has become the dominant theme of this theology, at least as it is popularly received, it is certainly in part because sex has become pathological in the liberal culture of death. But it is also because the division of genders and their orientation towards one another in creation are at the heart of all our bodiliness as designed by God; a bodiliness which is bound to the rational soul in a substance known as the human person. This is at least what a Christian anthropology, derived from revelation, would posit.

Another way of saying this is actually that the family, not the individual, is at the heart of Christian anthropology. Another way of saying this is that the Christian teachings on sexuality can only be supported and nourished by a better understanding of why God wants it this way.

In other words - and this, you'll be glad to know, is my last word on the matter since I am only learning about it myself - here is the importance of understanding what theology of the body terms the 'nuptial meaning' of the body. Nuptial must be understood not only in a univocal and concrete sense but also analogically. We are all, men and women, single and married, somehow shaped by this nuptial dynamic that belongs to us as embodied human persons. We must in some way give ourselves. Christianity completes that insight by telling us that we give ourselves to our sacramentally bonded spouse and children, or to others through our celibate service (singletons, priests or religious).

And that is, as I understand it, the why of the theology of the body. Laugh at it if you will.

James Larson's objections to TOB

2011-06-10T12:32:00.000+01:00

One commenter below asks me what I think of James Larson's latest offering in Christian Order about the Theology of the Body. Having just read it, I wonder if he wrote it at the last minute or something. It seems to be a piece that works mostly by insinuation.

For example, Larson quotes at length a passage of St Thomas in which the saint observes that:

Since a lawful occupation about lower things distracts the mind so that it is not fit for actual union with God; and this is especially the case in carnal intercourse wherein the mind is withheld by the intensity of pleasure.

(ST, Suppl., Q.41, A.3).

Commenting on this, Larson states:

St. Thomas’ words clearly leave no room for exaltation of the married act to the status of any kind of profound spiritual experience. [...] To attempt to identify or confuse the two is a manifest perversion. Nor is it permitted to identify the marriage act itself with the fullness of that ontological reality by which the marriage of man and wife image Christ’s relationship to the Church. This “image” is not to be found in the sexual act itself, but in the virtue of fidelity between man and wife, and in their bringing forth and rearing of children.

But there are a number of problems here. First, Larson gives us no idea which bit of Theology of the Body he is talking about. We cannot check his insinuations (for example, that the TOB does indeed confuse the marriage act with a spiritual experience) because he isn't engaging with TOB. He appears rather to be engaging with a secondary account of TOB which has come from who knows where. Larson certainly doesn't tell us.

A second problem here is Larson's reading of St Thomas. In this passage St Thomas distinguishes which acts actually unite us to God in contemplation and specifically rules out the marriage act for this purpose (since it is concerned with lower goods and its intensity impedes the action of the mind). But Larson talks about 'any kind of spiritual experience', a category which, it seems to me, is not quite the same as the exercise of the gifts and virtues which lead us into contemplation. If TOB enthusiasts talk about sex as a 'spiritual experience', it seems to me such a claim is probably a way of describing the union of persons (not just bodies) which the act can bring about, especially in persons who realise that their union through the sacrament of marriage has been conformed to Christ and become a source of grace for them.

Actually, now I think about it, if we wanted to connect sex to one of the gifts, it surely can be seen in relation to the gift of knowledge which allows us to understand created things in relation to their supernatural end. Still, if you want to hang TOB on this Thomistic scaffold, you have to establish that TOB indeed claims copulation as an act of the theological virtues or the gifts. Larson is nowhere near establishing this because, again, he does not cite TOB in any place in his argument.

The third problem here is with Larson's last claim:

Nor is it permitted to identify the marriage act itself with the fullness of that ontological reality by which the marriage of man and wife image Christ’s relationship to the Church. This “image” is not to be found in the sexual act itself, but in the virtue of fidelity between man and wife, and in their bringing forth and rearing of children.

On the one hand, I want to know who has said this identification is not permitted, apart from James Larson. Indeed, while the marriage act is not everything, its power and importance as a sign of Christ's love and fecudation of his Church is given full and blazing expression in the Song of Songs. On the other hand, I would like to know also why he thinks he is making such a big distinction by introducing the notion of fidelity. In TOB, all copulation is already considered as posterior to the marriage vows. The marriage act then gives expression precisely to those vows. Nowhere have I heard TOB enthusiasts say that any copulatory act carries nuptial meaning. Indeed, they try to help the struggle that many today have with the sin of fornication by showing how sex outside marriage is is a lie (because the body then says what it cannot mean). In the marriage act, our bodies are expressing something which can only be expressed by those who have mutually given themselves to each other in matrimony. Incidentally, when I pointed out to Professor Michael Waldstein, the translator of the TOB discourses, that this knowledge (of impurity as a lie) cannot replace the virtue of purity, he completely agreed. It is not a case of either one or the other. Purity helps us understand the law while a greater understanding of the law helps us to be pure.

It seems Larson labours under a major assumption that Theology of the Body is all about sex. For which he reason, he observes:

'But to designate a separate “theology” specifically assigned to human sexuality amounts to an exaltation of this sphere of human activity which implicitly masks a serious disorder.'

But this is not the case, as far as I understand it. On the contrary, Theology of the Body seems to be an attempt to work out how the structure and ecology of grace in our moral and ecclesial lives have been made by God not arbitrarily but so that they heal and elevate our embodied condition. Now, our embodied condition is connected to our gender and our psychosexual condition regardless of what state of life we live in. In fact, 12 of the 132 papal discourses in TOB concern continence for the Kingdom of God.

As far as I understand it, the heart of TOB is the idea that the nuptial relationship helps us make sense of this area of morality regardless of whether we are sexually active or not. We are all called to make a gift of our person in someway. In calling some to celibacy, God is not only providing for the Kingdom by a restraint of their sexuality; He is providing a new and elevated goal through which all the dynamics of the individual's gender and psychosexual energy can be raised up by grace and made to serve God in a new way. That is why in my experience the celibates that are happiest are those who see themselves as married to the Christ and the Church in a union through which they continually bring souls to the life of grace and sustain them in it. After all, we call some celibates 'father' and 'mother'! In other words, the obediential potency of human nature to be raised by grace is not a voluntaristic reality, but one whose shape and character (what is it actually that is raised by grace?) have already been taken account of by God's plans.

Let me say as a last remark that Larson perhaps reveals the true origin of his criticism by his claim that TOB leads to emasculation which is endemic throughout the Church, especially in most performances of the new liturgy. Emasculation is what he is concerned about, and I mostly agree with his concern. Emasculation certainly is abroad in the Church, and it is certainly articulated by liturgical praxis in many places.

To push TOB into the dock, however, without even quoting a word of it seems like a rather emasculated way - because not grounded in reason and evidence - of going about facing the problem.

TOB objections

2011-06-08T07:31:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the short, euphoric interlude, but if you know me, you'll realise why I just had to stop and find a small glass of sherry to toast the recent news. Now back to business...

Let us make all the reservations first. I was standing in the lunch queue on Sunday next to another conference delegate who, like me, had had some reservations about what was an otherwise great conference. My view, I told him, was that it was very bizarre to hear a treatise of theology expounded almost as the panacea of twenty-first century Catholic illnesses without hearing a word breathed about the liturgy. Of course the Church, like Christ, has a role as servant, and so is concerned with ethics, but first her role is that of priest, because she is the Mystical Body of the High Priest himself who worships the Trinity ceaselessly. My theory, which I think is borne out by history, is that an ethically-preoccupied Christianity is on the slide towards secularisation, because sooner or later it is in danger of placing human agency above the agency of God. So, I found it problematic to be hearing all about Theology of the Body with no account of our bodies in relation to worship. I think one speaker during the weekend said that a Christian who fails to serve is on his way towards Phariseeism; he failed to mention the correlation that a Christian who serves but fails to worship is on his way to Zealotism.

My lunch companion had had another concern, which was that we had talked about 'the body' all weekend but not about the Mystical Body. Quite! And this was strange since one of the central themes of theology in the last half of the twentieth century was the attempt to marry all the treatises of theology to the treatise of ecclesiology.

Let me mention a last problem I had this weekend which not many people seemed to get. Everyone kept banging on about the body as a sign carrying a nuptial meaning. But it is clear that very few of the speakers had problematised this expression. I contend, however, that if you are going to borrow scientific language - and 'sign ' and 'meaning' qualify as terms belonging to the fields of linguistics and semiotics - you have to know what you are doing. You cannot, moreover, ignore the consequences. If, for example, I say the conjugal act has a specific 'meaning', and thus borrow a linguistic concept, I have to be able to defend the untranslate-ability (if you'll allow me the neologism) of that meaning. Normally, all signs that denote meaning can be translated into other signs. I can tell you I love you, or I can kiss you. I can tell you I hate you or punch you on the nose. If there is a meaning of the conjugal act, why cannot it be translated into other signs - not a man and a woman but a man and a man, for example?

Hang on, I'm not saying it can be translated! But I am saying that the language of 'signs' and 'meanings' appears not to have been thought through. Actually, the answer is not that difficult, but it forces us to connect the personalism which suffuses TOB with a bit of old fashioned cosmology. Blessed John Paul II knew this in fact, but sometimes, in listening to some of the enthusiasts of TOB, I get the impression that they are just a little unaware of it. On Saturday one speaker got carried away with a stream of melifluous consciousness on the theme of conjugal love, but when she was faced with a member of the audience who had been conceived by sperm donor (not her fault, right!) and who stammered her pain at the thought of her conception being so removed from the culmination of conjugal love, the speaker, not knowing what to say, blurted out, 'I'm sorry was there a question in that?' Everyone in the room hung their heads in embarrassment.

Well, anyone can screw up on the podium, and that is not a TOB problem. But my point is that some exponents (not all!) of TOB appear to go around with a halo of melifluousness which has not been grounded in classic, Thomist psychology - the psychology which JPII himself knew so well.

Right, you lot, you've made me miss my train! So I shall leave it there and come back to this later or tomorrow. I have stated the reservations that sprung to mind over the weekend and in doing so raised the question: so what? What indeed is the point of TOB?

I'm too excited ...

2011-06-06T22:23:00.000+01:00

... to write about TOB. I just learned I have got a new and permanent job! I cannot tell you what a relief this is!

Many thanks to all who prayed for me last week. Blessed John Henry Newman be thanked for his intercession!

It has been a long and difficult path these last few years.

On the suggestion of the Rev Trisagion, let Te Deum and Non nobis be sung!

This weekend, one of the speakers at the TOB conference quoted a Mexican proverb which says: Every baby comes with a piece of bread under his arm. In our case this certainly seems true since we are expecting our first baby on 5 September a few days after the new job begins!!!

TOB

2011-06-06T08:10:00.000+01:00

After a fraught week, I spent the weekend with my wife at the International Symposium on the Theology of the Body (TOB), this year held at St Mary's College near Twickenham. It probably wasn't the best remedy to the stress of the last fortnight, but that said, it was a remarkably stimulating conference in any number of ways.

Knowing the constituency that most readers belong too, I know this might sound a bit odd. Ches is really going off his rocker this time! I'm no enthusiast of Blessed John Paul, as I think I have well established, and I'm quite aware of the arrant nonsense talked by some proponents of TOB. That said, the symposium had much to offer. Major stars like Professor John Crosby and the feisty Dr Janet Smith were on the programme. In the event, some of the 'lesser' speakers were among the most powerful, notably Dr William Newton and Edmund Adamus (he who described London as the 'geopolitical centre of the culture of death'). Robert Colquhoun of Love Undefiled, one of the chief organisers, worked relentlessly throughout the weekend; clearly nobody had told him that ushering conference delegates is like shepherding cats. He stuck to his task, neverethless!

So I came home exhausted but full of ideas - both positive and negative, but ideas all the same! Now, however, I must dash for a train, so more of this later.

Theology of the Body

2011-06-04T07:45:00.000+01:00

Thanks to those of you who said prayers for me in the last week. At this point, it appears that God has said, 'No!' - a result I'm still trying to get my head and heart around. I promise you I wasn't praying for a second car or a yacht in the Med. It was more like; please don't let us go smashing into that brick wall. Well, that won't happen just yet! God remains in charge.

Meanwhile, I'm at the Theology of the Body conference this weekend in London. Reports tomorrow.

Ascension Day

2011-06-01T23:14:00.000+01:00

Happy Feast to the rest of the Church Universal. Here in England, it's just another ordinary Thursday for most people. But not for me!

No, it's a big day chez Ches today, so if you have a spare prayer around 12pm BST, I'll be most glad of it. If God wills, then I will ascend in glory, possibly to the sound of tubae, who knows!

Meanwhile, I'm listening to some cool music to loosen me up a bit. I've posted this before, but, heck, another time won't hurt.

Novena 25 May-2 June

2011-05-25T22:29:00.000+01:00

For more information, see here.

Please pray -

One Our Father, One Hail Mary and the following prayer:

O God, who bestowed on the Priest Blessed John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fulness of your truth, and likewise grant [Ches's special intention].

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Blessed John Henry, pray for us.

Chesterton Conference in Oxford

2011-05-25T22:27:00.000+01:00

The Ballad of the White Horse—a centenary celebration

The G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture, US has the pleasure of announcing a conference celebrating the centenary of G. K. Chesterton’s epic poem

The Ballad of the White Horse.

The conference will be held on Friday, July 1, 2011 from 5 – 8 pm at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford (38 St. Giles, Oxford).

Speakers include: Fr. Ian Boyd, C.S.B., John Coates, Dr. Sheridan Gilley, Dr. Julia Stapleton and Dr. Brian Sudlow.

This event is open to the public and free of charge.

An apology and a novena

2011-05-25T21:47:00.000+01:00

Sorry, dear readers, not to have updated the blog for a week. I'm snowed under with work at the moment. It is unlikely in fact that I will be able to write again before the end of next week (though I will try).

Meanwhile, I am beginning today a novena to Blessed John Henry Newman for a very special intention; indeed, a life-changing intention. So, shamelessly, I am going to beg anyone who has the time to join me in the novena. The last day will be next Thursday.

Please pray -

One Our Father, One Hail Mary and the following prayer:

O God, who bestowed on the Priest Blessed John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fulness of your truth, and likewise grant [Ches's special intention].

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Blessed John Henry, pray for us.

I will let you know the outcome of course.

Various prayer requests

2011-05-19T11:20:00.000+01:00

Prayers, prayers, prayers this morning, folks. Please say one for

1. Some friends who have just lost their baby two weeks before the due date.

2. The brother-in-law of Paul, a regular reader, who is suffering with leukemia.

3. A special intention of mine.

Much obliged.

Community

2011-05-18T08:56:00.000+01:00

There is a good argument to class the word community within the jargon of the media. The journalist John Humphreys divides much media jargon into 'boo words' (e.g. traditional, conservative, elite, etc.) and 'cheer words' (or something like that: e.g. liberal, progressive, egalitarian, etc.). Now, community is definitely a media cheer word. It is then, to paraphrase a certain American general, the sort of word that makes me want to reach for my gun.

The interesting thing about the word community in our age is that it has tended to be mobilised as a leftist word, on the basis that solidarity and cohesion are thought to be socialist concepts. This is a gross anachronism. Community is a fine natural concept, not to say a fine Christian concept. My closest friends who used to groan when they heard me say Gemeinschaft (German for community) were, I think, horrified to hear it used every five minutes in the film Into Great Silence.

But it is true that community is often used as a evocation of authenticity which is rarely attested in the fractured archipelago of modern life. Just watch any news report about one of these awful gun massacres and at some point, someone - journalist or interviewee - will say: 'Well, Nether Wallop is in fact a close-knit community, so we never expected this.' And that, in spite of the fact that most of the inhabitants of Nether Wallop spend most of their time hiding behind their front doors playing on their Wii gadgets and hoping never to meet the neighbours.

I suppose what I want to drive at this morning, in my tangential manner, is that community is one of those things that just is. You cannot really invent it. It only grows and matures in its own time and it cannot be fabricated. Indeed, when community is self-conscious it is always in danger of becoming its opposite, Gesellschaft, which is a chosen association. Of course there are other dimensions to be taken into account here, but I'm merely stating what I think is the most important thing.

You cannnot build a community; a community can only grow. You cannot assert priorities within a community; they are inscribed in its organic tendencies. All mobilisation of community is in danger of looking like a party, or a clique. And the thought that we can steer community self-consciously is exactly the kind of error which modernity induces in us.

I say all this because there is some loose talk around and about these days about the Traditional Latin Mass community. I'm all for it of course. But I'm also slightly suspicious of the underlying search for an authenticity which only the fumbling passage of time and the accumulation of organic connections can really create.

And that's another thing. There is a time element here which we simply cannot get around. Some things take a lot of time to mature. Community is one of those things that takes the most time. We have to await the second or third generation to see the system cleansed of any arbitrariness / narrowness that was inherent in the original options that formed the community.

In Catholicism, when counsels begin to assume the character of precepts, they must either declare themselves as vows, or simply wind their necks in. It is not for anybody to interfere with the freedom which God confers on his children. And labelling a self-elective group as a community seems like an attempt to apply the leverage of authenticity and precept to what is a laudable but non-obligatory counsel.

I hope that's clear.

Now, I'm off to the chiro!

A little bit of music

2011-05-17T22:39:00.000+01:00

This goes out to the 'Reading Massiv' for last weekend's hospitality.

Prayers for Rita's husband and for Rita

2011-05-16T22:06:00.000+01:00

Rita of Tigerish Waters has announced on her blog the death of her husband Paul. Please pray for the repose of his soul and for Rita too.

On building the Universae Ecclesiae

2011-05-15T23:53:00.000+01:00

I know that should be 'universam ecclesiam', but put up with me, you Latin specialists. Archbishop Nichols's reaction to Universae Ecclesiae sounds remarkably ungracious. Of course we do not know everything he said yet. Still, it did confirm for me that the traditionalist cause is often perceived as a battle being waged on the Universal Church, rather than an enrichment of the Universal Church.

Why is this so? In part because it is true. There is some irony in the welcome being offered to Universe Ecclesiae by people who are not at all convinced of Paragraph 19 which states, in part, that:

The faithful who ask for the celebration of the forma extraordinaria must not in any way support or belong to groups which show themselves to be against the validity or legitimacy of the Holy Mass or the Sacraments celebrated in the forma ordinaria .

Come on, you know this is an issue. Frankly, if Archbishop Nichols sounds defensive, it is because he knows very well that those who will quote chapter and verse in favour of this document's application often reject the forma ordinaria's legitimacy in the concrete.

On the other hand, his remarks are also revelatory of a certain mentality at large in the Church, a mentality which can hardly be said to be quite in keeping with the mind and spirit of Summorum Pontificum. Indeed, it appears to be a mentality which is persecutory and hostile, rather than conciliatory and peaceable. Why don't we ever hear anything on His Grace's lips about the sacredness and greatness of the forma extraordinaria? Why have his comments alighted on the restrictive devices in Univesae Ecclesiae and not on the document's most positive message? No need to answer. Only he can tell us for sure.

Still, in one sense, none of this matters. In my view the only things which will carry the forma extraordinaria forward are the fruits it bears in people's lives, and the way in which it acts as a magnet or conductor for grace, thereby giving the unmistakeable Pneumatic proof of its immense power. Few minds will be won by the arguments. Some may be won by the example. Whether Universae Ecclesiae will ever be as universal as its name proclaims will depend very much on what happens on the ground.

As to that, do we still truly have the patience needed for the building of Christian civilisation (of which liturgical restoration forms a part)? Or do we just imagine Church reform like some holy version of political reform in the controlled state of passive war which characterises the modern state? Not consciously of course, but unconsciously, how easily we sticky-plaster over our modern instincts the holier objectives of a less technocratic age. We cannot, however, reach out and grab hold of Catholicity; we cannot instrumentalise it, as if it were as tangible as a public-relations profile.

These things are not defined; they are only lived, as the fruit of the Holy Ghost in our ecclesial lives. And to my mind, nothing about the liturgy can be restored while it remains prey to an unconscious modus belli of one group against another.

As for Universae Ecclesiae and Archbishop Nichols, only time will tell (and time, so I'm told, takes an awful long time to speak).

Blogger problems

2011-05-13T22:55:00.000+01:00

Like all other Blogger-based bloggers, I have been cornered over the last 36 hours and unable to post anything.

I'm off to bed now but I note with joy the Bishops of England and Wales' statement on Friday penance.

More tomorrow.

On systems and charity

2011-05-11T10:02:00.000+01:00

Well, it seems I'm driving readers away in their droves. That's what comes of living in a consumer society: fail to make yourself available for consumption and you get the push. Nice work.

For those faithful compagnons de route who remain, salve. Apologies for the hiatus earlier this week. Recent events have left me feeling at times like I have fallen down the rabbit hole par excellence. Happily, reality conspires to keep one sane. La réalité maîtresse, as I believe Péguy calls it somewhere. I'm still laughing about the tin-pot exercise in realism that a certain bile merchant recently tried to serve me on the internet. But passive-aggressive patronization is only another type of myth.

Speaking of Péguy, I just purchased his entire works for a project which will unfold over the next couple of years (I hope). This is a new venture for me, but also, I hope, a timely one. Péguy is the grand analyst of how systems and abstractions get in the way of freedom and realities. By freedom I do not mean licence but virtuous franchise.

I suppose one of the ironies for we Catholics is that we must sometimes suffer our 'system' because it is not just our bureaucratic system but our life system also. I remember a couple of years ago when bureaucrats in the Portsmouth Diocese tried to insist on the FSSP distributing Holy Communion on the hand during the avian flu crisis (you remember, the one that killed hundreds of thousands of Brits ...). The Pompey bureaucrats failed to take account of two things, however: on the one hand, the FSSP priests are forbidden from doing this by their statutes, and on the other hand, no traditionalist would receive Holy Communion on the hand. God knows why the Pompey men insisted on this measure, and God, not we, will be their judge.

The crucial thing here is what the FSSP should have done about it. In my view, they did the right thing. They obeyed the stricture and did not distribute Holy Communion over quite a long period (I forget how long). The damage was minimal. People could cross the diocesan border and not be subjected to the same rules.

We can make any number of hypotheses about this situation, which is now a fading memory, but my point is this: it would not have been good enough simply to defy the diocesan system. Some systems are arbitrary, but some systems are more than purely systematic. The truth is that when a system is God-given - and the attachment of individual Churches to bishops is God-given - it undoubtedly involves crosses that we are MEANT to carry. If we take ourselves out of the system, then we protect our sense of agency, but we miss out on potentially on what God wants to teach us. Some systems are not ideals, they are simply the reality in which we live, like fish in water or pigs in mud (I apply the last simile strictly to specimens like myself).

But my final point is this: we make a mistake when we act towards the Church as we might do towards bureaucracy (that is, rule by an office). The rule of Christ is that we do NOT come down from the cross. It is not that we come down from the cross and bash our enemies - or those we consider the enemies of Christ. Success is not our criterion; Christ is our criterion. Charity is not a hypothesis or a postulate. It is the life of God himself.

If I repeat these things, dear readers who remain, I repeat them above all so that I might not forget them.

Nothing, nothing, nothing

2011-05-09T21:58:00.000+01:00

No, not a single thing to say.

Because I'm in this kind of a mood ...

2011-05-04T23:00:00.001+01:00

By Tyburn Tree

2011-05-04T22:59:00.000+01:00

I sang tonight at Tyburn Convent for a Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form in honour of the Martyrs of England. It is their feast day after all today in the Diocese of Westminster. It was a rather subdued congregation, and I'm betting most of them are not that familiar with the Old Mass. Fr Armand de Mallerais FSSP celebrated Mass and preached. One of his themes was how the martyrs of England might view us nowadays: we who have so much freedom to worship but who are so lukewarm in our devotions. He had a point.

After Mass, my wife and I went by Tyburn Tree (now a traffic island) and said a little prayer before rushing home for the second half of the Champions League semi-final, Man Utd vs Shalke (of course). And this evening, upon returning home, I remembered that poem of Francis Thompson which is so little known these days but which is worth a read...

RAIN, rain on Tyburn tree,
Red rain a-falling;
Dew, dew on Tyburn tree,
Red dew on Tyburn tree,
And the swart bird a-calling.
Thence it roots so fast and free,
Yet it is a gaunt tree,
Black as be
The swart birds alone that seek,
With red-bedabbled breast and beak,
Its lank black shadow falling.

___The shadow lies on England now
Of the deathly-fruited bough,
Cold and black with malison
Lies between the land and sun;
Putting out the sun, the bough
Shades England now!

___The troubled heavens do wan with care,
And burthened with the earth’s despair
Shiver a-cold ; the starved heaven
Has want with wanting man bereaven.
Blest fruit of the unblest bough!
Aid the land that smote you, now!
Which feels the sentence and the curse
Ye died if so ye might reverse.
When God was stolen from out man’s mouth,
Stolen was the bread; then hunger and drouth
Went to and fro ; began the wail,
Struck root the poor-house and the jail.
Ere cut the dykes, let through that flood,
Ye writ the protest with your blood ;
Against this night wherein our breath
Withers, the toiled heart perisheth,
Entered the caveat of your death.
Christ, in the form of His true Bride,
Again hung pierced and crucified,
And groaned, “I thirst!” Not still ye stood,—
Ye had your hearts, ye had your blood ;
And pouring out the eager cup,
“The wine is weak, yet, Lord Christ, sup !
“Ah, blest ! who bathed the parched Vine
With richer than His Cana-wine,
And heard, your most sharp supper past,
“Ye kept the best wine to the last !”

___Ah, happy who
That sequestered secret knew,
How sweeter than bee-haunted dells
The blosmy blood of martyrs smells!
Who did upon the scaffold’s bed,
The ceremonial steel between you, wed
With God’s grave proxy, high and reverend Death ;
Or felt about your neck, sweetly,
(While the dull horde
Saw but the unrelenting cord)
The Bridegroom’s arm, and that long kiss
That kissed away your breath, and claimed you His.
You did, with thrift of holy gain,
Unvenoming the sting of pain,
Hive its sharp heather-honey. Ye
Had sentience of the mystery
To make Abaddon’s hooked wings
Buoy you up to starry things ;
Pain of heart, and pain of sense,
Pain the scourge, ye taught to cleanse ;
Pain the loss became possessing ;
Pain the curse was pain the blessing.
Chains, rack, hunger, solitude these,
Which did your soul from earth release,
Left it free to rush upon
And merge in its compulsive sun.
Desolated, bruised, forsaken,
Nothing taking, all things taken,
Lacerated and tormented,
The stifled soul, in naught contented,
On all hands straitened, cribbed, denied,
Can but fetch breath o’ the Godward side.
Oh to me, give but to me
That flower of felicity,
Which on your topmost spirit ware
The difficult and snowy air
Of high refusal ! and the heat
Of central love which fed with, sweet
And holy fire i’ the frozen sod
Roots that had ta’en hold on God.

___Unwithering youth in you renewed
Those rosy waters of your blood,—
The true Fons Juventutis—ye
Pass with conquest that Red Sea,
And stretch out your victorious hand
Over the Fair and Holy Land;
Compasses about
With a ninefold-battled shout,
Trumpet, and wind and clang of wings,
And a thousand fiery things,
And Heaven’s triumphing spears: while far
Beneath go down the Egyptian war—
A loosed hillside—with brazen jar
Underneath your dreadful blood,
Into steep night. Celestial feud
Not long forbears the Tudor’s brood,
Rule, unsoldered from his line,
See unto the Scot decline ;
And the kin Scots’ weird shall be
Axe, exile and infamy ;
Till the German fill the room
Of him who gave the bloody doom.
Oh by the Church’s pondering art
Late set and named upon the chart
Of her divine astronomy,
Though your influence from on high
Long ye shed unnoted! Bright
New cluster in our Northern night!
Cleanse from its pain and undelight
An impotent and tarnished hymn,
Whose marish exhalations dim
Splendours they would transfuse! And thou
Kindle the words which blot thee now,
Over whose sacred corse unhearsed
Europe veiled her face, and cursed
The regal mantle grained in gore
Of Genius, Freedom, Faith and More!

___Ah, happy Fool of Christ ! unawed
By familiar sanctities,
You served your Lord at holy ease.
Dear Jester in the Courts of God !
In whose spirit, enchanting yet,
Wisdom and love, together met,
Laughed on each other for content !
That an inward merriment,
An inviolate soul of pleasure
To your motions taught a measure
All your days ; which tyrant king,
Nor bonds, nor any bitter thing
Could embitter or perturb ;
No daughter’s tears, nor more acerb,
A daughter’s frail declension from
Thy serene example, come
Between thee and thy much content.
Nor could the last sharp argument
Turn thee from thy sweetest folly ;
To the keen accolade and holy
Thou didst bend low a sprightly knee,
And jest Death out of gravity
As a too sad-visaged friend ;
So, jocund, passing to the end
Of thy laughing martyrdom,
And now from travel art gone home
Where, since gain of thee was given,
Surely there is more mirth in heaven !

___Thus, in Fisher and in thee,
Arose the purple dynasty,
The anointed Kings of Tyburn tree ;
High in act and word each one.
He that spake and to the sun
Pointed—”I shall shortly be
Above yon fellow.” He too, he
No less high of speech and brave,
Whose word was : “Though I shall have
Sharp dinner, yet I trust in Christ
To have a most sweet supper.” Priced
Much by men that utterance was
Of the doomed Leonidas,
Not more exalt than these, which note
Men who thought as Shakespeare wrote.

___But more lofty eloquence
Than is writ by poets’ pens
Lives in your great deaths : O these
Have more fire than poesies !
And more ardent than all ode
The pomps and raptures of your blood !
By that blood ye hold in fee
This earth of England ; Kings are ye,
And ye have armies Want, and Cold,
And heavy judgements manifold
Hung in the unhappy air, and Sins
That the sick gorge to heave begins,
Agonies, and Martyrdoms,
Love, Hope, Desire, and all that comes
From the unwatered soul of man
Gaping on God. These are the van
Of conquest, these obey you ; these,
And all the strengths of weaknesses,
That brazen walls disbed. Your hand,
Princes, put forth to the command,
And levy upon the guilty land
Your saving wars ; on it go down,
Black beneath God’s and heaven’s frown ;
Your prevalent approaches make
With unsustainable Grace, and take
Captive the land that captived you ;
To Christ enslave ye and subdue
Her so bragged freedom : for the crime
She wrought on you in antique time,
Parcel the land among you : reign,
Viceroys to your sweet Suzerain
Till she shall know
This lesson in her overthrow :
Hardest servitude has he
That’s gaoled in arrogant liberty ;
And freedom, spacious and unflawed,
Who is walled about with God.

Dead and buried: more thoughts on the beatification

2011-05-02T15:04:00.000+01:00

First, an anecdote. I was intrigued to hear that the Divine Mercy devotion, which underpins Divine Mercy Sunday, had a rather uneven path towards recognition. The bishop of Vilnius originally approved the devotion in the 1930s, but when the diaries of Sister Faustina were sent to Rome in the 1950s, so badly were they translated that their contents apppeared unorthodox and they ended up on the Index of Forbidden Books. Only a subsequent reappraisal in the 1970s, backed by Karol Wojtiya, then Archbishop of Krakow, led to the devotion's new approval and its subsequent rise to such prominence. Thereafter, Blessed John Paul II appointed the Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday.

The idea that this devotion was once dead and buried, only to be resurrected, has this morning brought me some consolation after the beatification yesterday. For yesterday, as the ceremony unfolded and Pope Benedict delivered his sermon, something became clear which various voices had been denying for the last few weeks: that the beatification would inevitably stand as a stamp of approval on Vatican II as implemented by John Paul II. Honest defenders of John Paul had been pleading the case that this beatification was only a statement about his heroic virtue and sanctity. This argument was always weak, notably because he spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as Bishop of Rome.

But yesterday Pope Benedict set out for us in his sermon the way in which the Council's implementation and John Paul's legacy are intertwined:

This was his message: man is the way of the Church, and Christ is the way of man. With this message, which is the great legacy of the Second Vatican Council and of its “helmsman”, the Servant of God Pope Paul VI, John Paul II led the People of God across the threshold of the Third Millennium, which thanks to Christ he was able to call “the threshold of hope”.

And with these words, I'm afraid I heard the creaking lock of history turn in the door behind which stand those who demand a reappraisal of the Council's legacy. For how can one now interrogate the legacy of the Council, as interpreted by John Paul, without mounting an assault on his status as beatus? The beatification yesterday plucked an extraordinary and undoubtedly holy man out of his historical cursus and invested his memory with an eschatological dimension.

Not only did the lock turn in the door of history, the spirit of John Paul now stands before it. Question the implementation of the Council under John Paul and you must more or less question the one now beatified as God's providentially appointed guide who led the Church from the second into the third millenium. Question the implementation of the Council under John Paul and you must attack the rhetorical insufficiencies and doctrinal gaps of a Council which he held to be an unimpeachable treasure for the Church. Bruno Gheradini, Romano Amerio, Athanasius Schneider? There was, for me, something about yesterday's ceremony which took the analytic charts such individuals have recently attempted to draw and ripped them into the confetti which floated across Saint Peter's Square.

And what of the SSPX whose talks with Rome are sinking into the sand? Bishop Fellay remains upbeat in his most recent interview with Una Voce. At the same time the SSPX has just published a new book by Abbé Patrick de la Roque which casts many doubts on the beatification of John Paul II. Now, as usual there is no sign of the SSPX analysis providing a comprehensive review of the questions addressed. But, their questions are pertinent! Here are just a few:

The beatification of John Paul II, the pope of Assisi, is deeply perplexing and raises serious questions. Henceforth, must it be considered virtuous to receive, after John Paul II's example, the sacred ashes of Shiva? To go and pray, according to the Jewish custom, at the Wailing Wall? To recognise, by the ritual gesture of a kiss, that the Qu'ran is the word of God, or again to implore Saint John the Baptist to protect Islam? Or to go and practise animist ceremonies in the forests of Togo?

Now, let us not take these questions at face value. We really need an ethnographer's analysis of these actions before we accept the theologian's judgment thereon. Judgments made from outside a culture can sometimes be rather ill informed. A Protestant watching a Catholic priest genuflect three times to the wood of the cross on Good Friday (in the Old Rite) could easily think we Catholics, who genuflect only once to the Blessed Sacrament, really do worship idols. Still, since such actions by JPII were not isolated but programmatic features of his conduct as pope, we cannot simply explain them away as peripheral details of an otherwise holy life. Indeed, such actions are often described as examples of his daring and courage by his advocates.

Of course, the great weakness of the SSPX's position is that their focus on these questions unsights them with respect to the rest of John Paul II's legacy. I have yet to read de la Roque's book, but unless it breaks with the usual traditionalist approach, it will have little to say about Blessed John Paul's writings and example concerning the priesthood, personal prayer, the Blessed Sacrament, the rosary, the Divine Mercy, the fall of communism, the theological refutation of contraception, etc. Archbishop Lefebvre even labelled John Paul a communist-loving politician in his prologue to The Spiritual Itinerary, a frankly stupid thing to say for a man comfortable in his purblind, self-righteous Petanism while Karol Wojtila went toe-to-toe with Moscow's vicious commissars.

In any case, as I say, yesterday's ceremony signified the turning of the lock. The canonization - for canonization there will almost certainly be - will be the bolts and chains upon the door. Pope Benedict, a man normally open to dialogue, has unwittingly sealed up this corridor. People can footle around the door with talk of improved translations, more reverence and oodles of incense if they like. Good luck to them. But the radical interrogation of the Council which might have reshaped ecumenical relations and corrected the all too frequent syncretism of inter-religious dialogue? Forget it.

At least for now. For just as Sister Faustina's legacy spent years in disgrace, perhaps it will be necessary for another generation to pass away before a reappraisal can be considered. Perhaps John Paul's cause will stall at this stage. Perhaps his further elevation might, in a generation or two, not signify the stamp of approval on his interpretation of the Council which it now undoubtedly does.

And there again, at last, is another sign of the folly of a hasty beatification. How could this rushed beatification not appear as a stamp of approval on JPII's papacy, especially since so many who played a role in that papacy have been the agents of the beatification process, or its front-row witnesses?

I received an email from an old friend yesterday that bespoke the profound pain of traditionalists on this day. The only words I can find for him are these:

'Brother, believe in the Church. Believe in the power of the resurrection, in spite of all the appearances of death. Believe in the God of surprises. And believe above all that our religion is not a fine art but a pilgrimage and a crucifixion. What else did we expect when we were baptised in the death of Christ? And pray to the new beatus who possessed more honesty, frankness, intelligence and devotion to Christ than all ranks of the neo-cons.

Wedding thoughts

2011-04-30T12:36:00.000+01:00

I noticed a strand of rather negative criticism emerging in the days leading up to the royal wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Various people remarked that it was going to be a travesty. This young couple who have apparently been living together, now taking promises to live according to God's holy law, and being accorded all the honours which Westinster Abbey and the Anglican liturgical tradition can confer on them: quel scandale! And then there was the little matter of the cost of the day: several squillions (which the nation doesn't have) disappearing down the drain in what was an odd exception to the ambient austerity of Cameron's Britain.

The argument which Archbishop John Setamu of York put up yesterday in defence of the couple was one of the oddest I have ever heard. Setamu, an evangelical Protestant, took the lenient line that now the couple were married, then it was all alright. The argument isn't quite what we expect, even from Anglican leaders, but what he meant was that the couple's cohabitation was now history. As my students would say, 'So, get over it'.

But then Sentamu went on to say that many people nowadays like to 'test the milk before they buy the cow'. Now that I did find strange! His first argument was basically 'let bygones be bygones'; his second argument was more like 'boys will be boys', or in this case, 'princes will be princes'.

I'm not sure who in his metaphor is the cow and who is testing the milk. The exploitative insinuations of the image are unfortunate given the history of Prince William's mother. I suppose what is most alarming about it is the idea that the Establishment can do what it will and all will be well, as long as the Established Church can wave a graceful hand of benediction in its direction. Personally, I find such confidence to be rather ill placed.

*********************

But all that said, I'm a great fan of the kind of event that happened yesterday, not because of the supposed coherence of the Established Church blessing any old muck the Establishment brings before it, but because our royal tradition in this country is one of the best protections against our final demise as a nation. The royal family preserve the space in which the nation's irrationalism can unfold. This is no bad thing. In fact, in politics it is almost certainly necessary to preserve this kind of irrational space. God forbid we begin to take our political processes so seriously that we become a republic.

I'm not glorying in incoherence here. I'm simply making a case for the politics of the imaginative, or perhaps what we should call supra-rational rather than irrational politics. Royal events help keep our sense of proportion about our nation; they remind us that our nation is as much a given which we receive, as it is a project in which we are involved. Royalty reminds us that our sense of agency is not everything; it reminds us - in the midst of all our hubris - that we alone cannot shape our own destinies.

All that said, who knows how this royal marriage will turn out. At the beginning of the ceremony yesterday, when the Archbishop of Canterbury was admonishing the young couple, I thought the Duchess of Cambridge looked quite bored. It brought to mind the fact that the current generation coming through have had little experience of formality, and are only still capable of appreciating its disruption because of the boredom it most often induces in them. Still, as Shakespeare says somewhere, bring us all to a proper account and who would escape whipping and hanging? Or something like that. We must pray for the happy couple for their own sake.

But actually we should pray for them for ours as well. We cannot simply attribute the interest the couple excite to our celebrity culture. Our nation is beset by the vices of stardom, but underneath it all, the capacity to command imitation can be a force for immense good. I have no doubt that the number of marriages will increase this year because of this royal event. And who knows, maybe the value of marriage will be boosted by such a public celebration of family stability. Even if the Queen's children are a shower, she herself remains a remarkable personality and institution.

So, God bless and save the happy couple, ye, even from themselves.

And what taste to have chosen Walton's Crown Imperial, as my wife and I did on the day of our wedding last November!

Blog updates

2011-04-30T11:49:00.000+01:00

Mrs Ches asked me a couple of days ago why so few people comment on anything I write apart from the SSPX/traditionalist stuff. I dare say this is for the same reason nobody links to my blog except for those reasons (and the occasional cool video from Youtube). It could also be that I'm a huge bore, and she just hasn't realised yet.

Still, we're a modest blog here at The Sensible Bond and open minded to everyone except hecklers. So, in the interests of being dialogical - and shamelessly copying Mulier Fortis - I have posted a poll over on the right to ask readers why they don't bother commenting. I have also included reaction buttons below posts.

I could make a joke here about participatio actuosa, but that would be out of place ;-)

Thoughts on the beatification: roll on Monday ...

2011-04-28T07:16:00.000+01:00

... say I. Not because I am simply looking forward to the Bank Holiday (which I am, of course); not because I particularly like Mondays (which indeed I don't). Quite simply, the piece of grit clogging up my soul between now and Monday is the beatification of John Paul II on Sunday.

THOC has written a piece nailing his colours to the mast on this topic. I confess I have no colours and no mast to nail them to in any case. One surfs around the internet and what does one find? His sincerest defenders cannot truly account for his appalling neglect of the liturgy and for a generation of episcopal appointees who make the blood run cold. His most robust critics have barely begun to understand his remarkable faith or his outstanding contributions to moral theology.

Usually debate is hardly so elevated. Either we have John-Paul tub thumping of one kind or another or we have desperate denunciations of the beatification from the liberals or the hard traditionalists; the former because John Paul was too Catholic, and the latter because he wasn't Catholic enough.

Of course the vast majority of pew-bound Catholics will be oblivious to either camp. John Paul will be beatified, and most western Catholics will still use contraception. John Paul will be beatified and most western Catholics will still show little reverence for the Blessed Sacrament; in my local church at Holy Thursday last week, a group of old ladies rose en masse and began talking loudly as soon as the priest had retired from the altar of repose, an action undoubtedly repeated in many places. Mind you, they are not the only ones not listening to John Paul. The traditionalists will continue to claim he believed in universal salvation, in spite of his having established the Divine Mercy devotion as an integral part of the Church's calendar. The liberals will still insist he was an authoritarian bully, even though his record on excommunications was pretty tame in comparison to some popes.

Nobody is listening. As I said, I have no mast and no colours to nail to them. I know that John Paul was a lot nicer and far more reasonable than many of his loudest cheerleaders. I'm also sure he was a lot more pious than many of his severest critics. I can see no justification for his reckless inter-religious programme, nor can I see how he squared that with his laments over the apostasy of Europe now mired in religious indifferentism brought on by the kind of doctrine-lite thinking which inter-religious activity very often promotes.

I have found this whole rush to beatification dangerous. It simply unsights us. We have no perspective. All the more reason, one would assume, to trust the Church; to trust that - in spite of the contradictions one can see on all sides, in spite of the fan-club mentality on the one side and the angry incomprehension on the other side - God is still guiding his Church.

One last thought, however. I fear greatly that this beatification and the Assisi meeting of October will seal permanently the rift with the SSPX. Things were difficult enough as it was. Their unawareness of their own theological methodology was as good an obstacle as any I can think of. But how will they ever get over this beatification, let alone a potential canonization?

So, roll on Monday. Truly, I am lost in incomprehension.

Yound Catholic Adults retreat

2011-04-26T08:14:00.000+01:00

Juventutem ask me to post the following

Photo Copyright David Aron

During the weekend of the 9-11 September 2011. Young Catholic Adults will be running a retreat at Douai Abbey, it will be led by Juventutem Ecclesiastical Assistant Fr de Malleray . The weekend will be full-board.

* YCA will have half of the retreat centre to itself

* There will be a Marian Procession, Rosaries, Sung Mass, Low Mass, Confession and socials

* Fr. de Malleray FSSP head of Juventutem will preach the retreat, Masses will be in the Extraordinary form

Prices range from £5 to £51 per person per night . There are 3 options

THE MAIN GUEST HOUSE

Friday , registration from 4pm, to Sunday 11th September (full board)* or

Arrive Saturday morning till Sunday or day only

51 pounds full-board PER PERSON PER NIGHT

25 pounds for students/low waged/unwaged (or whatever you can afford) PER PERSON PER NIGHT

THE COTTAGES

£35 PER PERSON PER NIGHT (full board). Self catering £25 per person per night (reductions for students:- or whatever you can afford) .

SELF CATERING CAMPING

£5 PER PERSON PER NIGHT (or whatever you can afford - please bring your own tent and food ).

If you would like lunch on Sunday 11th then it will be an extra £7 each.

How to book - limited places so please reserve your place early

To reserve your place FOR THE WEEKEND (no deposit needed if you are coming for the day on Saturday), please contact the Guestmaster direct and send a 20 pound deposit (NON RETURNABLE) to Brother Christopher Greener OSB, Douai Abbey, Upper Woolhampton, Reading, Berks. RG7 5TQ (please make any cheques payable to Douai Abbey). Please mention how long you wish to stay and any special diet.

For general enquiries about the weekend:- or any queries about the accommodation/location/lifts required please ring Damian Barker on 07908105787 or 01452 539503.

Easter feast

2011-04-24T19:18:00.000+01:00

A happy Easter to one and all! After three days of sacred ceremonies, I'm exhausted! So, I shall take the easy route out and post some pictures of our Easter dinner. Mrs Ches says 'hello' by the way.

The wine you can see is one of a batch of Australian merlot that we had blessed on the feast of Saint John. Er, I think we'll look at something else next year (sorry Australia).

For lunch we had duck aux myrtilles (that's blueberries), spuds and carrots roasted in the duck fat and buttery spinach.

Yum!

Oh, yes, and now I'm off to face the aftermath...

My kind of serious

2011-04-21T14:41:00.000+01:00

I missed this the other day on WDTPRS.

Priceless...

Story: One day I was to be deacon for a Mass in St. Peter’s. Having vested at the altar under the Pietà, I – at the direction of the MC – took the thurible into the small vesting room nearby to have John Paul put in the incense. With his good-natured grandfatherly charm he kidded around. “You again! What is your seminary?” He knew full well, of course, and he knew I already worked in an office around the place as well. “The John Paul the Second Seminary, Santità“, quoth I. “Terrible! Terrible!”, quoth Peter’s Successor. Then, leaning in nearly nose to nose, the Vicar of Christ stabbed me hard in the chest several times with his finger and said, “Tu… devi essere serio… You… have to be serious.”

Homo liturgicus

2011-04-19T09:00:00.000+01:00

I've been rereading Joris Karl Huysmans's En Route and I have to say I'm hooked again. Huysmans was a well-known novelist in late nineteenth-century France who wrote perhaps the most emblematic of decadent texts A Rebours. At that point Huysmans is representative of one of the disintegrating strands of modernity. Having lost its grip on God, the human subject gradually loses its own integration: reason becomes separate from emotion, truth understood is confused with desire, and, in the case of decadent aestheticism, the only things left are the entrancement of the senses and the strained aristocracy of hedonism.

Huysmans next composed a notorious novel about Satanism entitled Là-Bas (literally, down under). Much of the material was gleaned from a strange cleric called Abbé Boullan whose ideas about the exactitude of vicarious suffering - in which we make reparation for the sins of others - had taken over his understanding of Catholicism. Huysmans would always exhibit this influence, even after Boullan died. Thankfully, he never acquired - or never knew about? - Boullan's taste for esotericism, or his theory that sin could be purged by fornication (how about that for a self-serving argument!).

Fortunately, there were many heathier winds swirling around late nineteenth century Catholicism, the most positive of which was a growing liturgical sensibility. And here was the point at which Huysmans felt he was coming home. Nothing spoke more to this aristocrat of the senses than the grandeur and beauty of Gothic art and the well-executed liturgy. Most critics find in this simply an extension of Huysmans's own taste for fine art.

Yet his writings show an ever-depeening awareness of the grand vistas behind the art, the stonework, the liturgical gestures and all the rest. The art becomes not end but means. Sensible of the ignobility of much human motivation and conduct, he was gripped by the power of the ministerial function of the priesthood in which it was possible for any ill-educated, black-hearted oaf to be effaced by acting in persona Christi:

Never in any religion has a more charitable part, a more august mission been assigned to man. Lifted by his consecration, wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office, the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss.

At this early stage Huysmans was still writing his own emotions onto the liturgy. He is not the only one to do so! The novel's main character is called Durtal who is in fact a thinly disguised Huysmans. But again and again the themacity of his own perceptions must grapple with what he beholds:

Touched by the timidity of this silent mystery, Durtal listened to the mass chanted by a scanty choir, but one patiently taught. The choir of Saint Severin intoned the Credo, that marvel of plainchant [...] It bore it, as it were, to the top of the choir, and let it spread with its great wings open, almost without motion, above the prostrate flock, when the verse 'Et homo factus est' took its slow and reverent flight in the low voices of the singer. It was at once monumental and fluid, indestructible like the articles of the Creed itself, inspired like the text, which the Holy Spirit dictated, in their last meeting, to the united apostles of Christ. [...]
At such a moment, Durtal was roused and exclaimed, 'It is impossible that the alluvial deposits of Faith which have created this musical certainty are false.' [...]
He ended by being moved to the very marrow, choked by nervous tears, and all the bitterness of his life came up before him.

This knowlegde of the self could end badly for Durtal, as it could for any of us. Instead it leads him slowly towards an ever-growing awareness of the mastery of God over his life and an increasing willingness to cooperate with it. To his priestly confident who is leading him towards conversion, he remarks:

'All these suppliants [at the shrines of our Lady] are not especially extraordinary souls, for indeed the most part of them are like me, they come in their own interests, for themselves and not for her.'

And he remembered the answer of Abbé Gévresin [...] ''You must be singularly far advanced on the road to perfection if you go there for her only.'

... which of course implies to some degree the need for the refinement of Durtal's own aesthetic sense which is so much about him, his nerves, his feelings and his perceptions, and not quite enough about God.

I remember some devout liturgistas years ago quoting to me the story that Saint François de Sales used to pray the rosary if he assisted at Mass in choir. They referred to the habit as an example of how not to be involved in the liturgy. More recently, a friend of mine has used the same example not to denouce such liturgical individualism, but to show how free and varied our involvement in the liturgy can be. We are in the presence of words and ceremonies - lex orandi - but by those very prayers - ex opere operato - we are more essentially in the grace-effected presence of the mysteries of our salvation.

Grace means forgetting yourself, Georges Bernanos will later say. It is a grace I pray for us all this Holy Week.

British Catholic bloggers, I salute you!

2011-04-17T09:31:00.000+01:00

Last Sunday I blogged about what was beginning to happen among Catholic blogs with respect to the Vatican-sponsored Blogathon in Rome in early May. I observed then that Hilary White of Orwell's Picnic was organising a counter blognic on 3 May, and I wondered whether this was a sign of a fear of the safe boredom of the mainstream (let's call it 'the karaoke theory'), or of the potential for such Vatican-sponsored events to take over and control blogging activity ('the bodysnatcher theory').

Things developed the following day when A Reluctant Sinner proposed the idea of a Catholic Bloggers Guild in the UK and found support among various bloggers including Mulier Fortis, THOC and William Oddie. Laurence England jokingly portrayed the Guild along the lines of the bodysnatcher theory, but it seems he supports it. James Preece, on the other hand, thinks its motives are admirable but fully believes in the bodysnatcher theory. Regular readers of this blog - good morning, all three of you, incidentally - will know my wariness about clubs and tribes, which is why I for one won't be a signed-up member of the GCBs, if it ever gets going. But I shall keep an interested eye on it, and wish it well of course.

Now, the story moves on ever so slightly this weekend with an extrordinary attack by Hilary White on the proposed Guild of Catholic Bloggers and, more generally, on British Catholic bloggers. Here's the key reflection:

I've noticed for a long time that it is the British Catholic bloggers who are quickest to kowtow to the Powers, the biggest nervous nellies when it comes to political incorrectness and, perhaps ironically, the most vicious pack of pirhanas in the commboxes.

Very interesting indeed. I remember when The Tablet launched its attack on bloggers, I did a post - now unfortunately awaiting recovery from the drive of my defunct Dell laptop - in which I scolded The Tablet for its sorry criticism, and surveyed some of the British blogs that most merit attention. At that time, Hilary White came clamouring in my combox for acknowledgement, insisting that she too ran a British Catholic blog (though her address of Anglocatholic had made me assume that she wasn't a Roman Catholic at all). I accorded it willingly, of course, since I was an admirer of her writing...

And now this! Hilary White sitting in judgment on British Bloggers. How times have changed!

Closer inspection of the evidence, however, reveals a few cracks. Argument 1 in her evidence against Catholic bloggers is that they kowtow to the Powers that be; there is, however, no Exhibit A to support her. Argument 2 is that the British Catholic bloggers are nervous nellies about political incorrectness; sadly, there is no Exhibit B to support this claim either. Argument 3 is that the British Catholic bloggers are vicious pirhanas in the comboxes, in support of which argument - finally - she produces Exhibit C (which is really Exhibit A): a thread of comments on William Oddie's blog. Read the thread by all means, but you will find few recognisable names listed there proving White's argument, other than Paul Priest whose own blogging, clever and incisive as it is, is rather secondary to his role of blog commenter elsewhere. Oh yeah, and one or two bloggers who post in Scotland might be on there too. Mind you, I have read White's post assuming it to be coherent. Perhaps one shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the gap between the argument and the evidence.

And then there is White's wild reference to 'English desperation to be ruled by bureaucracy'. I admit that this made me sit up. It strikes me that someone who spent such a long time in Canada would naturally think that British cooperation with bureaucracy is about a desire to be ruled. Like many English instincts, however, it is actually about a desire to be obliging. Our relationship to liberty is neither that of Hobbesian contractualism or of Lockean libertarianism, but of the classic British muddling tolerance.

Of course there is an instinct among many Catholics in England to be 'ruled'. But that is something quite different, and probably related to the injection of Irish immigrants into the English Catholic Church during its revival in this country. The Irish, having lost their own aristocracy to British pikes or British bribes, were the unconscious feeders of this grand clericalist monster. It is illustrative that one of the most libertarian of bishops in England - a man who can have Paul Inwood for his liturgy grandee while approving the erection of an FSSP house in Reading - is not from this Irish line at all. All that said, communitarian instincts are thoroughly compatible with the Catholic spirit which rejects the assumption of individual alienation inscribed in libertarian trends. Maybe there is a nasty plot to gag bloggers, but does that mean there cannot be a legitimate desire on the part of British Catholic bloggers to meet in guild?

Still, if the funniest thing about this is La Pirhana herself calling other bloggers 'pirhanas', the oddest thing is her blanket condemnation of British Catholic bloggers on such, well, gratuitous grounds. And all the while desperately calling for everyone to attend her own blognic on 3 May. Had she spent more time in England, White might realise that those who rain on other people's parades while organising their own are often thought to have ulterior motives.

There is the narrowness of officialdom and then there is the narrowness of the counter-officialdom club. I'm not sure which one I would rather avoid.

British Catholic Bloggers, a free man salutes you!

The Assisi Obex

2011-04-11T10:28:00.000+01:00

[UPDATED] This wasn't written in answer to William Oddie's post today, but it seems we were thinking about the same topic, only in quite contrary ways.

******

I'm dismayed this morning, cher lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère. I know what is going to happen in the next few weeks. Quite apart from the liturgical season, it is going to be full of excitement about the approaching beatification of John Paul II. As I remarked yesterday, the buzz on the blogs is all about the alternative bloggers' meeting in Rome. The weather here in the UK is hot. We've forgotten the worst of the recent past, and the year is full of Spring promise.

So nobody wants to read or hear about reservations with the good ship Vatican at the moment. Tribalism is alive and well. If we object to the current mood, then we must either belong to the lunatic fringe of the Great-Dotty Traditionalist variety, or we must just be sour pessimists. I cannot say I agreed with half of the content of the recent petition that was got up to protest at the beatification of John Paul II, but I certainly share their fear that the beatification will not simply stand for beatification of the person of John Paul II - a man of immense piety, sacrifice, devotion to duty and chronic suffering - but a stamp of approval on his papacy, good and bad.

The biggest mistake in this beatification is that we have no historical perspective. Comparisons with popular acclamations of holiness by the faithful in the past are lame. We live in an age of fadism and fancy where yesterday's fringe indie is today's modishness, and where last week's scapegoat is next week's pop idol. John Paul II's holiness would not change one bit if the Church left it ten or twenty years before going any further in this beatification process. But another ten years would give us calmer minds and spirits, greater objectivity, and more willingness to sift and discern.

For me, the greatest sign of the refusal to discern further is this meeting planned for October in Assisi. Don't get me wrong. I believe the traditionalist position which states that such meetings contravene the First Commandment is not well founded. I also applaud the changes in format in this meeting which are meant to be another barrier against such intepretations.

No, the Assisi Obex is the way that it embodies a certain philosophy of religion which is unbalanced. You can read all about it in Cardinal Ratzinger's book Truth and Tolerance in which he describes the change in how theologians view other religions. Nowadays the procedure is to regard all religions from the perspective of the religion of the Three Kings. Their religious understanding led them to follow the star and to honour the King at Bethlehem. So too, we must regard other religions as ground in which seeds of the Word are already present and need only to be brought to fruition. Indeed, it is possible that some religions are still pre-Christological, not historically speaking, but in terms of having hardly encountered Christ... like the Three Kings.

This position is in contrast with a time in which theologians, indeed the Church herself, was far more preoccupied with the errors of other religions. Such an approach tended to see the glass as half empty rather than half full. It also sometimes left doctrinal precision at the mercy of humanity's proclivity for hurly burly. This was the spirit of the Counter-Reformation. And it was one which Vatican II was renouncing in its statements on ecumenism and inter-religious relations.

Let us be practical. In the fragile and violent world in which we live, with conflict never far away, the Church needed to tack differently against the winds of religious difference. Indeed, one can convert nobody unless one learns how to walk with them in some sense. The problem with this reformed philosophy of religion, however, is that it air-brushes out of existence the notion that other religions are as capable of posing an obstacle - an OBEX - to conversion as they are of providing a stepping stone thereto. Of course it is marvellous that we 'share' the Sacred Scriptures with our Protestant brethren, but we cannot thereby air-brush out of existence the fact that Sola Scriptura is the context in which vast swathes of Protestants receive those writings. In other words, at the very point we can acknowledge what we have in common, we have to acknowledge the gulf in how we conceptualise the passing on of Revelation.

But that would be considered unecumenical. In practice - I'm not speaking of the theory - ecumenism seems to be an ecclesiological form of the English vice of saying the very opposite of what we mean. 'Oh, yes I'm quite comfortable'; 'oh, yes, I've had enough to eat'; 'oh, I don't mind at all.' In point of fact, we aren't comfortable, we're starving, and too right we bloody mind! But we had better not say it for fear of making a scene.

What I'm saying here is that Assisi III, even if it avoids the symbolic manifestation of indifferentism, will necessarily articulate an entirely benign - and, therefore, unbalanced - view of such religious distinctions. This indeed is why the announcement of Assisi III spoke of all believers 'constantly journeying towards God'. To my mind, this is as wrong as saying that all sexual relationships are praiseworthy insofar as they articulate love between individuals: men and men, women and women, humans and animals. Surely, an optimist would argue, all we need do is encourage the love and they will somehow come to a fully mature view of love and renounce their own. But is that likely if we simply tell them about the good in their relationships? Is that likely if we air-brush from view those things that are an obex to their recovery? Friendliness can lower barriers, but no genuine friend ever placed cushions beneath the elbows of sinners, as Jeremiah puts it. On a personal level, of course, prudence dictates that far more preaching must go on through action than words. But institutionally? Please tell me what ecumenism has done, other than encourage the idea that we all belong to the same slightly odd club of 'religious people'?

But Christ isn't religious. He is religion. How did we forget?

So, what is my conclusion? Simply that we cannot deal with other religions solely as seedbeds of the Word. THIS is the Assisi Obex. Nor indeed should we go back to treating them as if they are simply the work of the partisans of error. But Christ spoke sometimes with compassion and sometimes with anger: mustn't the Church do the same? How very sad that this failure to distinguish - this failure that, for me, will always mar JPII's memory - is going to be reinforced by Pope Benedict whose own motto declares his commitment to cooperating in the truth.

Blogging sociology

2011-04-10T23:34:00.000+01:00

Something terrible interesting is happening in Catholic blogging circles. Last week the Vatican announced a meeting for bloggers (often known as a blognic) in Rome on 2nd May. It is being held by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, and according to THOC's unofficial translation:

In the two planned sessions, various speakers will present some key points to open a discussion open to all the participants. In the first, five bloggers, representing the different language areas, will address specific issues of general importance. In the second, there will be accounts from people involved in the communication strategies of the Church, who will present their experiences of working with new media, as well as initiatives for an effective meeting between the Church and the world of bloggers.

All very worthy, I'm sure ...

But today I learn news of the Other Catholic Blognic on Hilary White's blog Orwell's Picnic. The programme for this blognic is as follows:

"Shaping the Narrative: how Catholic 'new media' is re-defining the global Catholic debate"

and talk about what *YOU* want to talk about...

Unlike the Vatican's, ours will be FUN!

AND ours will have beer...

AND pizza...

AND we'll let you come in your pyjamas if you want.

Tell your bloggy friends and enemies.

Skipping over to the Facebook page about this event, I note there are a number of worthies promising to be in attendance, including the great Fr Z, Dorothy of Seraphic Singles and Michael Voris. Others, including James Preece, are 'maybe attending'.

Very interesting that. And it has got me wondering whether this counter-blognic has something to do with English native contempt for ground-roots activities when some European bureaucrat tries to muscle in on the action, or whether there is something in the blogging community that would rather stand shy of officialdom. Is this a case of a fear of boredom or a fear of bodysnatching?

The stakes are high of course. The former could lead down the road trodden, I suppose, by the American Papist [nice chap though], and the latter could lead down the road taken by Austen Ivereigh [shudder]. Does this counter-blognic simply mean a refusal to accept blogging as a form of ecclesiastical karaoke, or does it mean that official sponsorship would make bloggers as proverbially dodgy as Pravda (or Ivereigh)?

I note the event is for Taliban Catholic bloggers, which is a shame. That rather rules me out since I have sworn to hold both revolutionary and the counterrevolutionary clubolatry in contempt!

Assisi III: a plan in peaces (updated)

2011-04-09T13:18:00.000+01:00

In January I and many readers, not to mention a lot of people, were disappointed to learn that Pope Benedict plans this year to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Paul II's peace pow-wow held in Assisi in 1986. Here is what I wrote in reaction to the news:

The problem is that such a ceremony, under such patronage, seems to occlude, to hide, to veil from view the salvific peace which Christ came to bring the world. What does Christ mean by peace in the gospels? Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. The Church is not a wing of the police, and still less a wing of the diplomatic service. If we are against violence, our opposition is only relative; after all, only the violent bear away the kingdom of heaven. Is there not something in Assisi which lowers the temperature of the Church's zeal for her mission to spread not civilisational order but salvific peace? Is there not something in Assisi which seems to beg us to be contented with a peace which is purely civilisational? And is there not the danger that this civilisational peace is then confounded with a salvific peace, in a tangle of ideas which the SSPX and other traditionalists feel they must denounce as syncretism? Those are the questions. My fear is that this confusion over peace is deeply problematic. I would like an answer. I'm more likely to get one from Pope Benedict than from anyone else. Let us be patient.

So, now the Vatican has released its description of the event, where does that leave us?

Here is how the Vatican describes the theme of the event:

The Day will take as its theme: Pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace. Every human being is ultimately a pilgrim in search of truth and goodness. Believers too are constantly journeying towards God: hence the possibility, indeed the necessity, of speaking and entering into dialogue with everyone, believers and unbelievers alike, without sacrificing one’s own identity or indulging in forms of syncretism. To the extent that the pilgrimage of truth is authentically lived, it opens the path to dialogue with the other, it excludes no one and it commits everyone to be a builder of fraternity and peace. These are the elements that the Holy Father wishes to place at the centre of reflection.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There are so many generalisations here, not to say dangerous insinuations. Whoever wrote this text has a serious problem with differentiation for a start.

That every human being is a pilgrim in search of truth and goodness is a reasonably accurate description of the human intellect and will, our principal and distinguishing faculties. But then what do we have? Believers too are constantly journeying towards God. The problems here are severe. There is a substantial difference in the journey of a man who already possesses the fulness of the faith and a man who does not. Of course they are both viatores but in quite distinct senses.

Let us find a comparison. Can you imagine what a woman would think of her husband if he sat in a room full of single people and, gazing around at them, said: 'We are all seeking love!' 'Well, you've got it chum!' she would say. And if you muddle the search for love by pretending that the internal journey of a married couple and of a single person are the same, you're in dead trouble. Actually, it is those very differences between believers (the possession of full or partial truth) that demand we should be in dialogue with others and not the fact we are on the same journey. But unless the distinctions are observed - AND HERE THEY ARE NOT! - warning about syncretism is merely shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

I applaud the fact that the meeting will be significantly different from the 1986 jamboree. But, really, what does peace mean when it is beset by so many confusing and misleading symbolic acts? The best we can hope for is that many people will put the best gloss on it and assume that Pope Benedict is not saying all religions are equal - an interpretation laid on Pope John Paul's Assisi meetings by some.

The worst, however, seems to be expressed in the Vatican's very own bulletin on the event. So all believers are continually journeying towards God, are they? And how different is that really from saying our religions all do pretty much the same thing?

**************************

This topic has been at the back of my mind all day (which we spent with dear friends). So I have to come back to it with just another thought or two.

It is possible that the change in the programme of this event might make the meeting in itself less susceptible of misinterpretation. I think the case could be argued either way.

But what is more disturbing is the language of the Vatican announcement which is as loose and as embarrassing as an old man's pyjama bottoms. Peace, peace, peace? St Augustine said peace is the tranquillity of order. If you want peace before order, however, you can find it in a gentlemen's club.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that a Catholic discourse which seeks to airbrush out the obstacles is as potentially damaging as a Catholic discourse which insists on beating one's interlocutor over the head with the obstacles. If we believe in the faith of the Church, we cannot describe our quest for truth - our attempts to understand better the faith, become finer realists, know ourselves but firstly know God - as if that were substantially the same as the quest of someone who is not even sure there is a God. Yes, we are all viatores, but the language of the Vatican about Assisi III makes it sound as if nobody has the map.

If Vatican officials they think they haven't got the map, I think they ought to tell us and resign! And if they have, well, why the bloody hell are they talking as if they don't?

I'm fulminating now, so I shall go to bed!

Happy Passiontide!

*******

More thoughts on Assisi here.

The Wednesday pause

2011-04-06T09:51:00.000+01:00

It's such a beautiful morning here in London. We need something mellow, however, to ease us into the second half of the week.

So here goes. The trombone and trumpet solos are priceless.

Violence and myth on the Costa del Sol

2011-04-05T07:43:00.000+01:00

I laughed this morning when I read that the White House has condemned the burning of a Koran by Pastor Terry Jones in Florida as 'un-American'. 'Un-American', or 'un-British' for that matter, is one of those egocentric measurements which smack more of myopia than insight, unless one is being purely ironic. Don't get me wrong, I love America. It is one of the few questions on which I and my wife differ greatly! But 'un American'? Perhaps in this case it was justified; since there are few causes on the American right which can disassociate themselves from the cause of the flag, those that are unacceptable must be disassociated by some higher power. Still, I don't see why 'American' be the fifth transcendental property of being after one, true, good and beautiful.

This is only one of a number of recent cases which have brought me back to the theme I began to address a week or so ago concerning Georges Bernanos and the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, cases are not lacking. Confusing a callous act of murder with a blow for freedom, a dissident Irish Republican group last weekend killed a twenty-five year old police constable in Omagh in Northern Ireland by putting a bomb in his car. The actions of the Koran-burning pastor of old Floridy were ideal fuel for trouble causers in Kandahar where more than half a dozen UN staff met their deaths, two by beheading. As the cameras rolled, we watched the head of the Russian delegation in the city crawling out of a ditch after having saved himself from being beaten to death by reciting verses from the Koran to his attackers. I call that presence of mind.

All of these incidents underline Bernanos's prescience concerning how humanity too often divides along party lines, sometimes with devastating results. His critique of the Spanish nationalists who undertook a political cleansing of the island of Majorca was itself seen as a great betrayal; if Bernanos was not one of us, he must be one of them. Ironically, such a polarisation was one of his prime concerns at the beginning of his pamphlet Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune. To lampoon this polarisation he quotes from one of Alphonse Daudet's Tartarin stories 'Rice and Prunes'. Therein, the unhappy guests at an Alpine hotel divide into those who are constipated and those who have the runs. Ater a few days of unease, however, they finally find the remedy: those with the runs eat rice and those who are constipated eat prunes, with all the desired results.

One can well imagine that in the wings some rice or prune merchant suggests to these unhappy people a mystique appropriate to their intenstinal conditions Bernanos concludes

... like un-British or un-American, I suppose.

Those who believe in dogma assume everyone else does too. Ideas are always implicit in any course of actions; ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver told us. But the surer key to action is to ask cui bono? or to what end? Indeed, could it not be the case that the more dogma is associated with this kind of threshing of mankind into acceptable and unacceptable categories, the more one can suspect that something other than openly professed dogma is driving the action forward?

By posing such a question about warring factions, Bernanos does not want us to be cynical about humanity; merely that we be attentive to how humans produce myths to disguise their violence towards others. It is easy to see myth-making in our enemies. It is very difficult to see it in ourselves.

In the case of the Spanish Civil War, there is arguably a level of complexity that Bernanos does not sufficiently acknowledge, and which concerns how myths are sometimes hijacked from a just context and made to serve injustice. Last week at a conference I quizzed a specialist on French communism about whether the French Communist Party of the late 1930s, which was so eloquent in denouncing el terror blanco was equally eloquent in denouncing el terror rojo. The simple answer is that it was not! And so, we have the ridiculous spectacle of French communists, supposedly good materialists, wringing their hands over the niceties of abstract communist theory while their Spanish brothers quietly (or not so quietly) murder thousands more clergy and religious than died during the Terror of the French Revolution. My point? That the defence of humanity or liberty by the Republicans - and which could probably with justice be invoked in the case of Majorca - sufficed, and still suffices for many, to draw a mythic veil over the awful crimes committed against the Spanish Church. Myth, therefore, is not always fiction. Sometimes it is fact-ion. It is always faction.

I don't know how the White House would have responded to such actions, other than to label them un-Spanish perhaps. Bernanos's rage in Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune is largely directed against his coreligionists because, let it be noted, political cleansing through a process of summary execution is not Catholic!

But it is also directed against the threshing out of men into the camps of the damned and the saved, an action which belongs to God alone. We who cling to dogma as our compass would do well to make sure we do not use it as our gun.

************

The population of Majorca has always been noted for its absolute indifference to politics. In the days of the Carlistes and the Cristinos, George Sand tells us how they welcomed with equal unconcern the refugees of either side. According to the head of the Phalange, you could not have found a hundred Communists in the whole island. 'There was killing in Spain,' you say. 'A hundred and thirty-five political assassinations between March and July 1936.' But in Majorca there were no crimes to avenge, so it could only have been a preventative action, the systematic extermination of suspects. The majority of legal sentences - I shall refer later to the executions without trial, of which there were many more - were merely for desafeccion al movimento salvador: Disloyalty to the movement for national safety, expressed in words or gestures alone.
Georges Bernanos, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune

Exclusive - those chatty twins revealed

2011-04-03T22:51:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the suspension of blogging in the last week or so. Since the 18th March, I have had conferences in various places, observations in a school and a cheeky spring virus to contend with. The bug left me mostly bed ridden last week and reduced me to a state in which I could easily have been mistaken for an escapee from the Peckham Home for the Mentally Bewildered. Better health has prevailed today.

Speaking of Peckham, my wife informs me that there was panic on the East Dulwich Forum on Friday when one wag informed readers about the local council's decision to abandon the locality's name of East Dulwich (a trendy and rather cool place to live) and to rebrand it West Peckham (er, quite the opposite). Property prices rocked at the very mention of the possiblity! April Fool's Day strikes again.

Personally, I was most impressed with Google's effort this year. They sent Gmail users an email explaining the 'new' service Gmail Motion. This purported to be a programme which would respond to body language picked up through the user's webcam!!! Those who followed the link found a message saying: Sorry Gmail motion doesn't exist, at least not yet ... I hasten to add that I read that in the newspapers!

Meanwhile, much has been made of the video-gone-viral of two chatty twin boys.

Far from being an amusing exchange between to classic NVCs (that's non-verbal communicators), this conversation - The Sensible Bond can exclusively reveal!!!! - is in fact a film of the last plenary session of the French Diocesan Liturgical Conference. You doubt my word? The substance of their exchange has been implemented in one recent liturgy and Fr Z has posted the video here.

The Sensible Bond. Normal service, with a smile, will now be resumed.

Aid to the Church in Need Pilgrimage

2011-04-01T13:41:00.000+01:00

ACN has asked me to advertise the following.

Aid to the Church in Need UK – Annual Walsingham Pilgrimage of Hope – Saturday, 30th April 2010

Please join us as Aid to the Church in Need remembers suffering Christians around the world with our 2011 Pilgrimage to the Roman Catholic National Shrine in Walsingham.

ACN is organising coaches from London Victoria, Bressenden Place, departing at 08:00. Should parishioners wish to join us at Walsingham, travelling independently or, perhaps, organising coaches from their locality they are very welcome to do so.

For those who would like to join us on this Pilgrimage and would like more information a brochure and booking form is downloadable from the ACN website at the following link www.acnuk.org/walsingham. You could also contact us on 020 8642 8668

Mike

Michael Cowie
Area Secretaries Coordinator
Aid to the Church in Need
12-14 Benhill Avenue
Sutton
Surrey
SM1 4DA
Tel. (direct) 020-8661-5154

Visit our website at www.acnuk.org