The Undercroft

Letter from Fr. Demitrios Tanaka in Japan

2011-03-16T22:13:00.001Z

Via Mother Martha of the Sisterhood of St Elizabeth at Rocks Farm in Sussex:

Beloved-in-Christ Mother Martha and Kateryna

This terrible earthquake hit the whole East Japan diocese and the tsunami devastated the whole city of Sendai and almost all the regional orthodox communities which exist along the Pacific coast.

By order of His Eminence Daniel, the Metropolitan Council has been trying to get information from the beginning of the incident but does not have enough exact information about the East Japan diocese, because the telephone and internet lines are not working properly. They are mostly destroyed and other lines are restricted by the national authorities for the emergency priority.

However, by now we confirmed that at least the clergy of Sendai orthodox church including Bishop Seraphim and Fr Clement is safe. According to Bishop Seraphim, most of the church buildings in Tohoku parish along the Pacific coast are severely damaged.

There are 24 churches in Tohoku parish. These churches are ministered by 5 priests. Out of these 5, one priest is missing. We have no exact information about the safety of the parishioners.

Fortunately, my churches and parishioners are totally saved by God’s grace.
We are praying fervently Christ our Savior have mercy upon Japanese orthodox faithful and Japanese nation, because the nuclear power plant in Tohoku parish is found in critical situation.

Please remember us Japanese orthodox christians in your fervent prayers.

With love in Christ

Fr Demitrios Tanaka
Holy Trinity Church of Odawara
Director of External Church Relations
Metropolitan Council
Holy Autonomous Orthodox Church in Japan

Saint Nicholas of Japan

Pray for your flock.

Not Fasting

2011-03-15T22:52:00.008Z

It wasn't my intention to discuss the "F" word so early in these reflections, but with it being that time of year when the apprehensive voyager East scans the liturgical calender with mounting dismay, bordering on horror and revulsion, it seems prudent to offer a floatation aid and a wholesome ships' biscuit (spit out the weevils - no animal products) before we pass the harbour bar.

There are any number of excellent articles on fasting out there, by respected Orthodox pastors and theologians. I am neither of those, and the subject of this post is Not Fasting - Not Fasting for the Not-Yet-Orthodox.

So what is fasting not, and how do we approach the business of Not Doing It?

The first thing that has to be stated clearly is that it is not "penance" and it is not "meritorious". Orthodoxy knows neither "merit" nor magic. It insists, rather, on synergia (St Paul's term) - "co-operation"; but more on that subsequently. In any case, the Church is not a boot-camp nor a penal colony and neither is it a perfectionist cult. It's a hospital.

The second thing fasting isn't is compulsory. Nothing in Orthodoxy is compulsory. You are (very scary, this) completely free and completely responsible. Here is medicine. Take it or don't take it - your choice.

Third - it isn't easy. It has to be learned, with patience and humility, and "success" often fails where failure succeeds. If you're proud of having eaten nothing but bread, beans and cabbage for six weeks, you'd have been far better never to have done it. Failure, on the other hand, humbles us. "You will not take pleasure in whole burnt offerings; a sacrifice to God is a broken spirit. A broken and a humbled heart, God will not despise". So whereas refusal to fast may be sinful if it's evidence of pride, failure to fast can be salutary if it teaches us humility. It's a means, not an end. There's only One End.

Now: imagine you're a Greek, from 40 generations of Orthodox Greeks. He comes home from work having lunched on a little good bread and fragrant bean soup and sits down with his Orthodox family for dinner, prepared by his Orthodox wife, who has artfully deployed 40 generations' Orthodox experience in manipulating the modest range of fresh, seasonal ingredients to produce a variety of gustatory delights, familiar from earliest childhood. Your own situation is somewhat different. You get home before your (RC) wife, and scan the cupboard for anything that isn't another tin of baked bloody beans or jar of peanut bloody butter. Halfway through the search, she arrives, loaded with fractious children and Tesco's bags.

"Don't worry, love!" she sighs - "I've got us a pizza - you can't eat meat, right?".

So - do you roll your eyes, pound your forehead, throw your arms out and shout "I can't eat bloody cheese, either!!!" - or do you kiss the mother of your children and put the oven on?

If your colleague brings you a massive wedge of chocolate cake because it's her birthday do you modestly decline "because I'm fasting", or kiss her on both cheeks and attack it with relish?

Do you spend an extra half-hour in the supermarket scrutinising lists of ingredients for concealed animal proteins, or do you make a number of reasonably informed choices and chuck them in the bloody basket?

In case it isn't obvious, the latter option is the correct one in each case. Don't be a hero (you'll fall flat on your face), don't be a Pharisee (you don't need me to tell you why not) and don't be a pain in the neck to those around you. Do what you can, don't make a fuss and don't worry.

Clearing the Decks

2011-03-13T19:03:00.020Z

To know oneself is a miracle greater than raising the dead.
- St Isaac the Syrian

Only Christ is the End; everything else is a means. If we approach Orthodoxy looking for anything but Christ - well, we might find it; more likely we won't, but it won't satisfy in any case. If, on the other hand, it's Christ we're seeking, we'll certainly find Him, and we'll certainly suffer. So, first of all, we have to be honest about what it is we're really looking for, and then we have to be prepared to pay the price.

If anyone is seeking simply to exchange one system of ideas for another, possibly more coherent, less problematic system, he needn't waste any more time following these reflections. Christianity is a Life, essentially - a life that must be lived if we're to know it for ourselves - and we have to know it for ourselves for it to save us. Repeating second-hand formulations, acquiring a "correct" apparatus, won't suffice. Ortho-doxy, "right-glory" is "a human being fully alive" in Christ (St. Irenaeus). It is nothing other than recovery of the "image and likeness of God" by participation in the death, resurrection and glorification of Jesus. It's quite possible that this doesn't interest us at all, and that we'd really rather have "religion" instead...

Four years ago, a kind Anonymous commented here as follows:

If you can live a proper Christian life within Rome, why leave? And if you can't live a proper Christian life within Rome, might the solution be found not in Byzantium, but rather by examining yourself? I have lately stood often at that quayside, and looked out at the sea. But to sail away is merely to turn my back on the problems I have here, and now; and my greatest fear is that I'll find them on the other side.

This is absolutely right, I think. This is the question that must be confronted as the basic pre-condition of boarding. Attempting to get anywhere by grappling with "big ticket" issues in theology and ecclesiology, in the absence of a ruthlessly honest engagement with this question, is insane. But how on earth are we to get at the truth, through the thicket of vanity, delusion, passion, misapprehension and self-deception?

The answer, I believe, is to do as follows. It is distilled from a riveting lecture by Fr Thomas Hopko (the link to which I shall post in due course, when we've got several other issues out of the way). I think that anyone who makes a serious attempt to follow this "Twelve Step Programme" will find the answers he needs - or, at least, the equipment he needs realistically to address the questions. In fact, this is nothing other than the permanent, perennial pre-condition of an authentic spirituality, which all of us are required to renew, daily and hourly, to our last breath on Earth. This "never stops":

We must really desire the Truth, and we must be willing to do whatever is necessary.
We must be hungry and thirsting - we must pray, in other words, for illumination, begging for God as He really is, and not some metaphysical construct or pious fantasy.
We must be reading the New Testament, constantly; "not the Philokalia, not the Typikon, not the Canons, not The Rudder - the New Testament Scriptures." What we don't understand, we leave for the time being. What we do understand, we put into practice.
We must go to Church. We must not, at this time, chant or serve or concern ourselves with anything other than standing there and being immersed in the Divine Liturgy. "If you feel like you're gonna throw up if you hear one more "Lord, have mercy!", throw up! - but stand there and let it lacerate you!"
We must not tell any lies. We must not harm anyone. On the contrary, we must be kind to, and forgive, absolutely everyone, starting with those under our own roof. We must try regularly to do something good for others, without anyone knowing. If we have a little extra money, we should give it away.
Unless we are married we must engage in absolutely no sexual activity - "not with yourself, not with the computer - not with anything". If we fall, we get up again immediately, say "Lord, have mercy on me" and begin again.
We must not get drunk and we must abstain from bad food altogether and rich foods on a regular basis (Wednesdays and Fridays, usually) - we must begin to fast, in other words.
We must practice silence for at least 15 minutes a day - not theologising or fantasising or "thinking" at all - when thoughts intrude, simply pushing them away; if they involve persons, commend them to God; and in general we must try, as far as possible without annoying others, to be quiet - not to talk much, and certainly not to chatter. We absolutely must not pretend at this time to teach, argue about, or formulate theological views.
We must do our work, whatever it is, conscientiously and to the best of our ability, living in the present moment and not worrying about the past or the future. We must aspire to be rooted, not moving impulsively or precipitately.
We must find somebody we can trust and discuss our lives frankly with them, dealing honestly with our parents, our childhood, our relationships, our religion, our culture. We must not, however, discuss in detail sexual matters, or other people.
We must be honest in confronting addictions and compulsions - alcohol, drugs, pornography, rage, "religion" (on which more subsequently) - in order to be delivered from them.
We must be ready seek help without shame or hesitation.

So there it is. Broaching the Philokalia, or forming views on hesychasm or the filioque, or theologising in any way whatsoever, if we haven't at least embarked determinedly on this essential work of purification, is delusional and a waste of time, if not worse. This is what we need to do before anything else - and if we do it, and keep doing it until the end, perhaps we won't have any more questions.

Crossing the Water

2011-03-08T22:27:00.004Z

My friend TTony, in a very kind "welcome back" post, describes me having "blogged all the way through [my] conversion to Orthodoxy". This is true, but it isn't what I thought I was doing at the time - and in fact I wrote very little about it explicitly, even after I understood that "conversion to Orthodoxy" was what was, in fact, going on. I had no inkling when I started to blog, or through the greater number of posts, that I would ever leave Roman Catholicism for Orthodoxy. Most of the posts on here are by a Catholic Traditionalist - a very "Ortho-friendly" one, certainly (one could say the same of Fr Ray Blake) but with no intention of relinquishing his hard-won position "nor thought of the levelling wind". The wind came nevertheless, the seas rose, and in due course every deck fitting and every bit of luggage was swept overboard.

Anyway, it occurred to me following a recent conversation with a friend on the brink of Orthodoxy, himself suffering the seasickness and loss of bearings that must always attend the voyage, that there's something useful I could do here during Great Lent: offer a few modest observations from my own experience that might be helpful to the lonely traveller East - lonely, because in this country at least there is no "convert culture" (such as one sees in the US, for example) to help the sufferer understand what's happening to him. Only after he's made port, it seems, does he run into all sorts of experienced mariners!

These reflections will NOT involve apologetics or polemics. I have no intention of attempting to argue you out of your Catholicism/Anglicanism/Atheism/Buddhism. I'm addressing especially those who have already reached some kind of point of departure, whether they've burned their bridges or are keeping the return ticket safe, just in case. Perhaps at some juncture someone will be able to say, "Aha - I see. That guy warned me about this..." , and I'll have done what I set out to do.

To clear the ground I mean to start this weekend with Fr. Thomas Hopkos's "Twelve Step Programme", which I earnestly recommend to absolutely everyone, Orthodox, Ortho-friendly, Ortho-phobic, or Ortho-couldn't-care-less. Pack the Avomine.

Crisistianity

2011-03-06T17:33:00.007Z

During the three years since I last sat down in this abandoned cellar, I've been troubled from time to time over what to do with it - whether to wall up The Undercroft, leaving its odd assortment of slight essays and occasional jokes to the spider, the woodlouse and the occasional Googler for a half-remembered poem or random image - or to refurbish and re-occupy it.

Insofar as there is a shape and a history to the place, it's a story with a middle, an end and a beginning - the record of a middle-aged Catholic's determined bid, before his children got any older, to shake out a stone from his shoe - one which had chaffed and distracted him for most of his adult life. As a consequence of the shaking-out - a far more painful and protracted business than the metaphor will support without gratuitous extension - the unhappy Catholic is now happily Orthodox, and a stranger to the lugubrious lair in which he once spent so many hours strutting, fretting and cudgelling his brains.

And that's the problem: contrary to appearances, perhaps, I do not write without enormous effort. Fluency and facility desert me the instant I sit down before a blank screen. Blood, sweat and tears therefore mark every part of the fabric of this place, and in the absence of very much else to show for half a century's occupation of space on the planet, I'm loathe to bury these few etiolated fruits, however insubstantial or unappetising incompetence or the passage of time may have rendered them. More - my own contribution was frequently the least interesting part of the conversations that developed here, for which I must thank very sincerely all those who read and contributed to The Undercroft. If the record of your thoughts here should ever disappear, it won't be my doing.

Of course, many of the themes and ideas I struggled so hard to articulate have since become commonplace, to the extent that I would probably not nowadays have felt compelled to blog them myself. Nevertheless, with all their inadequacies, mistakes and misapprehensions, these little pieces are part of the history of a movement (or a minority strand of it, at any rate) during one of its most significant, defining periods - the earlier part of the present pontificate, up to and in the immediate wake of Summorum Pontificum; at a more intimate level, they're also a record of individual pain and confusion, exaltation and dismay.

I felt, and still feel, that simply continuing here in Orthodoxy, assumed "like new store clothes", would be frivolous and impertinent. Far better to keep decently quiet for an interval, suckling as an infant the "rational milk without guile" - practising silence in order eventually, perhaps, to have something to say. As it turns out the silence has been imperfect at best, as many of you with comboxes are aware. Whether or not I have punctured it with anything worth saying (as opposed to sterile polemic) is less certain. What prompts me in any event is articulated in the following passage, gleaned from beloved Father Stephen Freeman's blog (begun around the same time as The Undercroft - I grew up under his gentle tutelage):

"Orthodoxy is summoned to witness. Now more than ever the Christian West stands before divergent prospects, a living question addressed also to the Orthodox world… The ‘old polemical theology’ has long ago lost its inner connection with any reality. Such theology was an academic discipline, and was always elaborated according to the same western ‘textbooks.’ A historiosophical exegesis of the western religious tragedy must become the new ‘polemical theology.’ But this tragedy must be reendured and relived, precisely as one’s own, and its potential catharsis must be demonstrated in the fullness of the experience of the Church and patristic tradition. In this newly sought Orthodox synthesis, the centuries-old experience of the Catholic West must be studied and diagnosed by Orthodox theology with greater care and sympathy than has been the case up to now… The Orthodox (...) must also offer his own testimony to this world — a testimony arising from the inner memory of the Church — and resolve the question with his historical findings.”
- Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology II, pp. 302-304

It is obvious that one does not walk away from one's friends, simply because the difficulties and questions that continue to beset them have been resolved in one's own mind, heart and experience. One does not refuse to bear their burdens because those burdens no longer bear heavily on oneself. Today, at the entry to Great Lent, where I stood three years ago on the threshold of Orthodoxy, on the Sunday of Forgiveness, I ask forgiveness of friend and foe. May we pass through the gates of repentance together to a happy and holy Pascha.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.
- TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Loss & Gain

2008-07-09T22:19:00.008+01:00

Whithersoever thou shalt go, I will go: and where thou shalt dwell, I also will dwell. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. May the Lord cause this to happen to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee. Then Naomi, seeing that Ruth was steadfastly determined to go with her, she ended her conversation with her: So they went together and came to Bethlehem...
Ruth 1:16-19

The icon is of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, courtesy of Fr Stephen -
The Consequence of a Full Faith

Ars celebrandi

2008-06-23T21:58:00.010+01:00

Father Blake has a post today about liturgical silence, from which I've borrowed the image above. He writes:

I think there is a real problem many people have with integration of personal and liturgical prayer. It is perhaps easier with the use of the Missal of John XXIII and its silent Canon or the Byzantine rites when the Canon is in silence, the Royal doors closed and the veil drawn, and prayerful hush descends on the congregation.

I smiled, thinking of something that occurred in my delightful Greek parish a few weeks ago. In the course of twenty-five years of attending Orthodox services, in England and in Greece, what has always fascinated and beguiled me is that almost miraculous conjunction of high solemnity with an easiness and geniality that somehow never descends to irreverence. Well - I say "never"...

One Sunday towards the end of Great Lent, our priest appeared as usual in front of the Royal Doors as the deacon was opening them. "Excuse me!" he scowled, "Does that curtain have a notice on it saying "Now you may talk"?". A certain amount of congregational shrugging ensued. I suspect the phenomenon is peculiarly Greek, judging by the uniformly austere demeanour of the Slavs in our congregation; in any case, the level of chatter (mostly, you understand, from the north side of the nave) following the closing of the doors had on this occasion risen to a pitch sufficient to have launched the present reflection, as well as the paternal tirade...

My friend Arturo Vasquez has somewhere identified as a quality of "true liturgy" that it always "tells the story". I was thinking about Pascha and Pentecost (although it was still Lent) and the crowds milling in the street below that upper room, where "the doors being closed" the Glorious One appeared in the midst of his Apostles, or the tongues of fire descended upon them. Soon the doors of that hidden room would open, and emerging, they'd reveal to the street "He whom the world could not contain".

It's said that one knows an institution is in decline when its occupants have to be competent; conversely it's another quality of "true liturgy" that it works - it "tells the story" - even when it ought not to work.

Harrowed

2008-05-18T21:47:00.026+01:00

In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger…

I’m at the end now. Dust and ashes everywhere I turn; life reduced to mere movement persisted in for its own sake, because without it there is nothing distinguishable from death. It’s time to be gone from here. Why can’t I go? Why isn’t it enough?

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain…

- You’ve thought very long and hard about it…

Well, yes – you’ve seen it all.

And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again…

- I’ve seen a lot of strutting and fretting. I’ve seen a distracted, inattentive father and a difficult husband; a negligent worker, an introverted and inconstant friend…

Yes. I’m sorry.

- Others have paid for your high-minded conclusions.

I know. And the conclusions – they’re still not enough.

- Quite so.

Empty shuttles weave the wind

I’m sorry for the cost.

- I see that you are; but as for these “conclusions” themselves - they concern ideas and attitudes you once made your own. Do your conclusions touch your heart, or only your head? To take a man out of TradWorld is easy, but useless if TradWorld remains in the man…

I see. Metanoia.

- Yes. You know the word. You know lots of words.

Ouch.

It’s still not enough, is it Father?

- No.

Because I do not hope to turn

What more must I do?

- You must die. Go down to the place of blind, unarticulating silence. Lie there in the hands you cannot see or feel, of one whose voice you can no longer hear.

I am already dead.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

- Yes – and for some time now. Enough. Nunc hiems transiit.

Arise!

Christ has risen from the dead,
By death He has trampled on death
And to those in the graves
Given life.

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter…

Quotations: TS Eliot - Gerontion, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Marina

Pitiful

2007-11-10T11:27:00.000Z

Ideology warps the mind and suffocates the conscience.

People who have become accustomed to viewing everything through ideological lenses are often genuinely incapable of recognising or telling the truth. Up is down for them and black, white. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. Collapse is Renewal.

Such people seek affirmation in one another's company as a matter of necessity, and are at the same time overwhelmingly anxious to exclude or suppress whatever has the potential to expose or undermine their immaculate falsifications. If they think of themselves as liberals they remain untroubled by the fundamental illiberalism of this mentality, because it is taken for granted that their outlook is co-extensive with rational discourse itself.

It is this more than anything which accounts for the grotesque, topsy-turvy, parallel-universe quality of TabletWorld (whose Rome correspondent recently sneered that the Pope was not, after all, "a trained liturgist"). What looks like comical, mind-bending hypocrisy and intellectual perversity is merely an indication of people struggling desperately to make reality fit their theories and foundational myths: it's cognitive dissonance on public display. They need our prayers, but they will also benefit enormously in the long run from unrelenting ridicule.

Speravit anima mea in Dominum

2007-11-01T20:27:00.000Z

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

Philip Larkin - The Explosion

Hw-ay Gai

2007-10-27T15:33:00.000+01:00

Someone once told me that learning Chinese had changed the whole shape of his brain. I think I can understand what he meant, just as I think I understand, as a functional innumerate, what people mean who speak of the beauty of mathematics. There's nothing obscure about the beauty of what follows, though. Thanks to my friend Theophilus.

The above shows the Chinese for repentance, as used in most Bibles (for example “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” - Matt 4:17). 悔改

The first character, 悔 (pron. “hui” or “hw-ay”), means to feel sorry; the second, 改 (”gai” as in the English word guy), means to change or correct. Although this is the same as English, in Chinese the meaning of the word is explicit: change and correction through remorse. Perfect.

And there is more. The character hui, 悔, has on the left the character used for the heart (心) emphasising that the remorse felt is something of the heart, just as Biblical writers understood that this is the seat of emotion and intellect. To the right, is the character meaning “every”, or “each”, (e.g. 每天, means “every[每] day[天]”). The remorse we have must be for everything we have done.

Following on from the remorse and regret, crucially, is change (改). Here again are two parts, left and right. To the left we have 已, ji, which means “oneself” or “one’s own”. The right part literally means to “whip” or “tap”, but ultimately has the meaning of change. Our own change, the correction of ourselves.

“Hw-ay Gai” - Remorse leading to correction.

What's the difference between repentance and remorse? It's the difference between Peter and Judas.

Waiting for the Barbarians

2007-09-29T23:08:00.000+01:00

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

C.P. Cavafy translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

MeMe

2007-09-29T21:12:00.000+01:00

Oh, very well - I'm doing nothing else presently, so here's another broken resolution. I wasn't even tagged, explicitly, which makes it all the more reprehensible. If you're not interested in Me Me Me, you may return immediately to your menial pursuits. Run along, now...

1. Do you attend the Traditional Latin Mass or the Novus Ordo?
The former, exclusively, for most of the past 20 years. The tadpoles are unaquainted with anything else.

2. If you attend the TLM, how far do you drive to get there?
50 mile round trip, at present. One should seek some kind of attainder on the Montini estate for the fuel and the carbon footprint. Driving, on the other hand, is something of a passion with me, though some have ventured to suggest it might not be one's forte. Fools.

3. If you had to apply a Catholic label to yourself, what would it be?
Apart from sophisticated, green and unfeasibly handsome? Missal-and-Breviary.

4. Are you a comment junkie?
I beg your pardon? A common what? How dare you...

5. Do you go back to read the comments on the blogs you’ve commented on?
Ah - I see. Usually. Sometimes I forget where I've been.

6. Have you ever left an anonymous comment on another blog?
Once. Not saying.

7. Which blogroll would you most like to be on?
Burke's Peerage (Amphibian Supplement).

8. Which blog is the first one you check?
Varies according to the state of one's digestion. Rorate Caeli, probably, until quite recently. Pass the Andrews, there's a good chap.

9. Have you met any other bloggers in person?
Fr Ray Blake and Pastor in Valle have had that privilege, as have the admirable Shawn Tribe (of New Liturgical Movement) and M. l'abbé Laguérie, at whose Mass I assisted when he was still SSPX, and afterwards when he wasn't. He won't remember me though. The place, on both occasions, was heaving with Frogs.

10. What are you reading?
Matins for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
HV Morton's In Search of Scotland
Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard (for about the 20th time)

Bonus Question!
Has your site been banned by Spirit of Vatican II?
I haven't the faintest idea. We don't get many of that sort down here, in the dark underbelly of the world...

Nyet! - The Old Gang Not Getting It.

2007-09-19T16:29:00.000+01:00

ONE OF THE MORE diverting phenomena of recent years is the consistent inability of the Church's liberal establishment, the '60's avant garde, to read the signs of the times. Wrapped up in their hermetic understanding of the past, the present and the future, which for them defines the limits of rational discourse, more and more they seem to inhabit a vanished world: a bureaucratic, technocratic, relentlessly ideological looking-glass world, its cold, hard edges quaintly draped for our benefit (or is it theirs?) in anodyne, Kennedy-era platitudes from Gaudium et Spes.

Father Z has been "fisking" episcopal reactions to Summorum Pontificum and has identified the emergence of a coherent, hostile Party Line which goes something like this:

1) It's a "step backwards" for the purpose of placating a tiny minority of hard liners (the Pope, on the other hand, insists that the older form retains its permanent value as a bearer of the Living Tradition - that it is therefore an indispensible treasure of the Church for all times and places).

2) It doesn't therefore apply in this diocese, where we don't have any of "these people" to placate.

3) We have in any case already made generous provision for Tridentine Masses (i.e. every fourth Saturday afternoon).

4) The situation viz-a-viz the Old Rites remains essentially proscriptive - i.e. exceptional permission is still required (the diametric opposite of the truth).

5) There must be a "stable group" minimum number X (false), which..

6) ...must have been consistently attached to the Old Rite over a number of years (a completely unwarranted assertion).

7) Adoption of "New Rite" practices, though (concelebration, communion in the hand etc) must not be refused where requested.

...and so on and so forth. What it all boils down to, though, is the strident irreconcileable assertion of No. 4, in spite of its bare-faced, manifest falsehood.

Here is Cardinal Castrillon, as reported by CWN:

Rome, Sep. 14, 2007 (CWNews.com)
With the formal implementation of Summorum Pontificum, the Pope's motu proprio providing wider access to the 1962 Roman Missal, diocesan priests do not need permission to celebrate the Latin Mass, a top Vatican official has stated. Cardinal Dario Castrillon-Hoyos - the president of the Ecclesia Dei commission, which supervises Vatican outreach to traditionalist Catholics - says that "from this point, priests can decide to celebrate the Mass using the old rite, without permission from the Holy See or the bishop."
In an interview with Vatican Radio on September 13, broadcast just before the motu proprio officially took effect, Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos explained that Pope Benedict's motu proprio affirms the right of any priest to use the "extraordinary form" of the Latin liturgy. "It is, therefore, unnecessary to ask for any other permission," he said.

Contrast with the following:

Some questions and answers on Benedict XVI's recent Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum
1. Why has the Pope seemingly taken a step backwards in allowing the former Tridentine rite of Mass alongside the one we have now?
Benedict XVI's main concern seems to be to make a gesture of reconciliation to those who have never been able to accept the rite of Mass we have now. He wants to try to integrate them more closely into the Church as a whole, so he is to a small extent relaxing the rules regarding when celebrations of the Tridentine rite can take place. In England and Wales we have already had an indult from Rome, obtained in 1971 by Cardinal Heenan, allowing celebrations of the Tridentine Mass with the permission of the local bishop. The latest document merely eases slightly the legislation that had already been relaxed for the universal Church in 1984 by Pope John Paul II...

You can read the whole of this egregious piece here. It gets better and better. It purports to issue from the Diocese of Portsmouth, in the person of its Director of Liturgy - presumably one of the lay commissariat who nowadays pretend to decide on behalf of the sheep just how much of the truth we're entitled to (under the old clericalism such were at least clerics in fact, but that's People-of-God "democracy" for you). Whether or not the piece is correctly attributed, it's nevertheless a convenient distillation, in tone and content, of Fr Z's "party line", as pioneered in these Isles by the Archbishop of Glasgow . This one contrives to evolve a couple of ingenious and imaginative refinements all of the author's own, such as the nonexistence (in the Novus Ordo - here is someone who simply doesn't, or is determined not to "get it": we're not talking about the Novus Ordo!) of the Subdiaconate and consequent inadmissibility of the Tunicle at High Mass. Give that man a coconut for superlative, nit-picking, pharisaical ingenuity.

What is hoped to be accomplished by these posturings? Have their authors still not cottoned-on to the fact that the Internet provides instant access to the authentic documentation and to authentic interpretations of it, unspiked by conniving editors, days and weeks in advance of retrospective efforts to "spin" them? - that the same medium will also expose instantaneously such mean and mendacious manoeuverings, for all the world to see? Do they think we're complete idiots, or is this simply a barefaced attempt at intimidation? Either way, the gloves are off. The Ecclesia Dei Commission will have its work cut out.

Ad sanitatem revertens

2007-09-04T08:57:00.000+01:00

Fr Ray Blake poses the following questions in a piece about celebration versus populo:

So, why do we do it?
Does anyone know why it became almost universal?

Easy! Most of us are by now aware of the ideological history and discredited rationale behind this aberrant fad, but its present ubiquity boils down to a single factor: we do it because the Pope does it.

In the Latin Church of the modern era, it’s what the Pope does today, rather than what the Church did yesterday, that establishes in practice the operative norm. "I am Tradition!". A single, televised Papal Mass can therefore consign to oblivion an Apostolic tradition, or a mountain of dead-in-the-water paper exhortations.

Summorum Pontificum does two things with startling economy: it rescues the Liturgy (facta non verba), and it restates the permanent force of objective Tradition. That’s why it’s the most important document in 150 years. The most significant act will be that first public, Papal celebration ad orientem.

The Deluge

2007-08-20T18:21:00.001+01:00

"Oh Lord, we ken fine we hae sinn'd
But a joke can be cairried ower faur!"

THE LORD tuik a staw at mankind,
A richteous an naitural scunner;
They were neither tae haud nor tae bind,
They were frichtet nae mair wi his thunner.

They hid braken ilk edic an law,
They had pitten his saints tae the sword,
They hid worshipped fause idols o stane;
"I will thole it nae mair", saith the Lord.

"I am weary wi flytin at fowk;
I will dicht them clean oot o ma sicht;
But Noah, douce man, I will spare,
For he ettles, pair chiel, tae dae richt."

Sae he cryet untae Noah ae day,
Whan naebody else wis aboot,
Sayin: "Harken, ma servant, tae Me,
An these, ma commands, cairry oot:

"A greit, muckle boat ye maun bigg,
An ark that can float heich an dry,
Wi room in't for aa yer ain fowk
An a hantle o cattle forbye.

"Then tak ye the fowlis o the air,
E'en untae greit bubbleyjocks;
An tak ye the baists o the fields:
Whittrocks, and foumarts, an brocks.

"Wale ye twa guid anes o each,
See that nae cratur rebels;
But dinna ye fash aboot fish:
They kin tak tent o theirsels.

"Herd them aa safely aboard,
An ance the Blue Peter's unfurled,
I'll sen doon a forty-day flood
An deil tak the rest o the warld!"

Sae Noah wrocht hard at the job,
An searched tae the earth's farthest borders,
An gethered the baists an the birds
An tellt them tae staun by for orders.

An his sons, Ham an Japhet an Shem,
Were thrang aa this time at the wark;
They hid fellt a wheen trees in the wid
An biggit a greit muckle ark.

Noo this wisnae juist din on the quaet,
An neebours wid whiles gether roon;
Then Noah wad drap them a hint
Like: "The wather is gaun tae brak doon."

But the neebours wi evil were blin
An little jaloused whit wis wrang,
Sayin: "Oh that will be guid fur the neeps,"
Or: "The wather's been drouthy ower lang."

Then Noah wi aa his ain fowk,
An the baists an the birds gat aboard;
An they steekit the door o the ark,
An they lippened theirsels tae the Lord.

Then doon cam a lashin o rain,
Like the wattest wat day in Lochaber;
The hailstanes like plunkers cam stot,
An the fields turned tae glaur, an syne glabber.

An the burns aa cam doon in a spate,
An the rivers ran clean ower the haughs,
An the brigs were aa soopit awa,
An whit hid been dubs becam lochs.

Then the fowk were sair pitten aboot,
An they cried as the wather goat waur:
"Oh Lord, we ken fine we hae sinn'd
But a joke can be cairried ower faur!"

Then they chapped at the ark's muckle door,
Tae speir gin douce Noah hid room;
But Noah ne'er heedit their cries,
He said: "This'll larn ye tae soom!"

An the river raired loodly an deep;
An the miller wis droont in the mill;
An the watter spread aa ower the land,
An the shepherd wis droont oan the hill.

But Noah an aa his ain fowk,
Kep safe frae the fate o ill men,
Till the ark, when the flood had gien ower,
Cam dunt oan the tap o a ben.

An the watters rowed back tae the seas,
An the seas settled doon an were calm,
An Noah replenished the earth -
But they're sayin he tuik a guid dram!

W D Cocker - The Deluge

First Blood

2007-07-26T20:22:00.000+01:00

This is Dennis. Dennis is a training bus. On Wednesday, I wrapped him round an iron bollard. Two nearside panels and a wheelarch, but I'm still in the job, Deo gratias. Today I passed the first part of my test (the theory part) and returned a 40 footer more-or-less intact.

Sincere thanks to visitors and old friends for good wishes - practical test in three weeks so please spare me a Pater and an Ave as you depart.

Thus, it begins...

2007-07-13T21:51:00.000+01:00

Ttony has been the recipient of some ugly rumours at the Muniment Room. I'm sure it'sthe tip of the iceberg, and that dastardly doings are being prepared in certain quarters.

Get your retaliation in first. Sign up to the Summorum Pontificum database now!

What did you do in the war, Daddy?

2007-07-10T21:31:00.001+01:00

I DON’T DO MEMES as a rule, so please don’t take this as an invitation to tag me. I’m making an exception for my friend Ttony, because this one seemed for a variety of reasons to be asking the right questions at just the right time. I trust there are no blood-curdling penalties for breaking the chain.

1. How did you start blogging?
I don’t think blogging is what I do here, strictly speaking: hardly any of the posts are timely and only the most obvious ones relate to current events. I certainly don’t log my quotidien doings or thoughts, or respond to whatever rouses my interest from day to day. I prefer in addition to keep myself at a certain distance, because (a) I’m not a naturally gregarious man and (b) I don’t do interesting or unusual things (I start a new job on Monday, so that might very well change). Hermeneutic of Continuity or The Lion & the Cardinal are very different examples of real blogs, by busy men, engaged in exacting and challenging work. Anyway, I started because I found I could: I registered a blogger identity in order to comment on other blogs (I’d been commenting before I even realised that “blogs” is what they were). I used to hang out on a couple of forums, but got bored with the name-calling, cheerleading and party-lining.

2. What do you hope to achieve or accomplish with your blog? Have you been successful?
I wanted to do a “brain dump” on some of the things I’d been mentally refining and revising over the years, to the point at which I thought they might make a useful contribution. Debates on forums had to some extent helped me to develop them, without providing a suitable medium for bringing them together. In other words, I had a load of stuff lying around on my hard drive which, I flattered myself, might make interesting reading as stand-alone pieces. At least, I wanted to see if they’d stand up to a reading by people far better qualified to write on these matters than myself. I used the term “peer review” somewhere, but that’s pretentious and inaccurate. It wasn’t the assessment of my peers I was looking for, but of my betters – and of priests in particular. Was I successful? Well, I did the brain dump, most of it during November and December of last year, and the response was very gratifying from several points of view.

3. Has the focus of your blog changed since you started blogging? How?
Yes, and it will probably change again, after 7.7.7. The war is over, and I’m not interested in arguing about the liturgy any more (other than at a purely practical or local level). Most of the “brain dump” stuff has, to my intense joy, become obsolete overnight. There’s no point in looking for different ways of saying the same things now. The unnatural posture of the lay Traditionalist liturgical autodidact can be relaxed now, though I suspect a limp and a number of reflexive spasms will persist, after a quarter century in the trenches. I’d love The Undercroft to be more like Glory to God for All Things – but then, I wish its author was more like Fr. Stephen Freeman. The Letters to a Fundamentalist Friend begun in March are probably an indication of where I’d like to take it, avoiding the trap of apologetics, which I have grown to loathe.

4. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started?
That my hard drive and motherboard would die last week, taking down quite a lot of stored-up, unedited stuff. Oh, well…

5. Does your immediate or extended family know about your blog? If so, do they read it? If not, why?
They know about it. Do they read it? No. Sometimes I drag my wife bodily to the screen and she finds something nice to say (usually about the pictures).

6. What advice would give to a new blogger?
Well, I’m still a fairly new blogger myself, but I suppose I’d say:

- make a bit of an effort with the composition. You don’t have to be Joseph Conrad, but if people are going to do you the honour of spending five minutes looking at your stuff, the least you can do is offer them something decently constructed, properly proofread, and easy on the eye. Arturo's a good example - even when he's lobbing a brick through your window, he does it with style. Don’t post for the sake of it, and don’t pad. If you’re blogging on religious matters consider your responsibilities before God and your downright unworthiness and incompetence to be holding forth about holy things. Be kind, constructive and don’t get personal or snide. Maintain your independence. Don’t tag me for memes.

Our Feast of Orthodoxy: Thank You, Holy Father

2007-07-09T14:14:00.000+01:00

"What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place."
Benedict XVI - Letter to the Bishops on Summorum Pontificum

THE CATHOLIC WORLD has a different landscape after 7.7.7; or rather, the contours of an ancient landscape are becoming once again discernible as decades of thick, disorientating smog and toxic fallout begin to disperse in the freshening breeze. In several pieces on this blog (the obsolescence of which becomes more gratifyingly evident to me by the minute), I have referred to the Second Council of Nicea (from which came the definitive resolution of the first Iconoclast crisis) - in particular, the famous fourth anathema on "anyone (who) rejects any written or unwritten tradition of the Church". This anathema, I have contended, has been quietly overturned in recent decades, and especially since the Council, in favour of a kind of magisterial positivism, without most Catholics noticing or caring.

We breathe the sterile air of iconoclasm today, I have argued, and have grown lightheaded on it. We have been tempted to rationalise and intellectualise the Faith, falsifying our own nature and contradicting the Incarnation - a very much graver matter than any mere questions of taste, ethics, modernity or culture. We have dared to consider the most holy and Christ-bearing things as mere legal prescriptions.

As far as the ancient Liturgy of the Roman Rite is concerned, this argument is now over. Its rights and privileges are permanently recognised and restored, whether or not it becomes more widely adopted in the near future. My expectations of the motu proprio were not high, but I find instead that they've been exceeded on practically every point, beyond the hopes of twenty-five years as a convinced and committed participant in the Traditionalist movement. Last November, I wrote as follows:

If the liberation of the Mass is the essential condition of rebalancing the Church - the sine qua non - at another level it seems to me that some kind of major teaching document on Tradition and Magisterium is urgently required, on the basis that the only means of moving those who now appear to think that the Catholic Faith is whatever the present Pope/latest Council says it is (and who, in a sense, can blame them?) - is a Pope himself telling them otherwise.

The truly momentous aspect of Summorum Pontificum and its accompanying letter is the one most commentators will miss: it is the Holy Father's implicit re-statement of Nicea II - that the whole tradition of the Church retains its permanent value; that whatever has been held sacred in the past remains sacred today and can never be be abrogated, despised or abandoned without contradicting the nature of the Church herself, and of her Faith.

For my own part, all the energy and time devoted to defending and studying the Ancient Liturgy can at last be turned with great joy and serenity to living and praying it "in the Church and with the Church".

From a full heart, thank you, Holy Father.

"Anyone who believes that the liturgy of the Incarnation and sacred images are intimately and essentially linked to faith in Christ - and actually come forth from Him - anyone who finds it easier to imagine the total collapse of religion than its continuance in the absence of liturgy, can be quietly confident about the outcome of the present catastrophe. As the example of Byzantine iconoclasm shows us, a hundred years is a relatively short time to overcome this kind of sickness...

On the first Sunday of Lent the Orthodox Church celebrates the end of iconoclasm with the great Feast of the Reestablishment of Orthodoxy". So it is my dream that one day, when this altar and so many other high altars are reerected, we shall be able to give thanks as we celebrate the reestablishment of Latin Orthodoxy."
Martin Mosebach - The Heresy of Formlessness, p.92

Te Deum laudamus!

2007-07-07T11:23:00.000+01:00

GRATIAS AGO SANCTE PATER!

Et cum fratribus nostris absentibus

2007-07-06T22:53:00.000+01:00

IT IS SAID that following the the conclusion of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Empress Eugenie entered the Bonaparte chapel at Farnborough Abbey and read its terms aloud over the coffin of her husband, ruined after the defeat of Sedan. Tomorrow as glasses are raised and toasts drunk all over the Catholic world, I will go off to a quiet corner and remember those wonderful people I was privileged to know, who never lived to see restored what they had loved so much; who suffered, and bore their suffering with courage and cheerfulness, faith, hope and charity even when the hope of restoration seemed most dim.

David Read
Lillian Hayes
Joe Johnson
Anthony Allen
Tony Smith
Madeleine Primavesi
Michael Davies
Alice Thomas Ellis
Barbara Guest
Eric Dyson
Ted Marchant
Alban Russell
Julia Brophy

May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen

Sharper than the serpent's tooth

2007-07-05T21:55:00.000+01:00

Conversation in the car, on the way back from Mass (me driving).

Five-year-old: You're going to hell Daddy, for being cross with me.
Three-year-old: Yes! You're going to hell, Daddy!
Elderly guest, in passenger seat: You can tell they're Traditional Catholics, your daughters.

Usquequo Domine?

2007-07-05T10:37:00.000+01:00

Please, dear Lord, let not your servant depart, after all these years, without seeing Saturday 7th July.

A word of reassurance...

2007-06-26T22:39:00.000+01:00

...to old comrades-in-arms, after that last post: I'm not planning to re-order the Undercroft. It will continue for the foreseeable future to smell funny down here. It's me, not you.

Those leaded windows? They don't open.

The TradWorld Archipelago

2007-06-26T10:25:00.000+01:00

From every point by many a turning road,
Maimed, crippled, changed in body or in mind,
It was a sight to see the cripples come
Out on the fields. The land looked all awry,
The roads ran crooked and the light fell wrong.
Our fields were like a pack of cheating cards
Dealt out at random - all we had to play
In the bad game for the good stake, our life.

Edwin Muir - from The Good Town

A LITTLE while ago an aquaintance - a former Protestant, someone of far deeper theological learning than me (not my Fundamentalist Friend, to whom I'll return subsequently) - began expressing a serious interest in the traditional Liturgy of the Roman Rite (as I guessed he would, sooner or later). His questions were characteristically thoughtful and Christocentric; but living in a country with a tiny Catholic population, he had no present opportunity to assist at the traditional Liturgy and few sympathetic souls with whom to discuss it. He had provided himself with a Missal and a Breviary, for the purpose of investigating the differences between Old and New and, having done so, had drawn the same conclusions as so many of us - not from the romance of Latin nor the ravishing heaven-hungry beauty of the chant, nor the "silence", nor any vision of glamorous externals; no brocaded fiddlebacks nor incense-hazed high altars haunted his imagination (yet). The texts and the rubrics did it all on their own. A man after my own heart.

"Will the Old come back? Should I pray for its return?" - these were his immediate concerns, together with how best to assimilate the traditional liturgy into his devotional life, where no opportunity to live it fully and properly (in the Church and with the Church) existed. I told him right away - pray the Office anyway. Pray the Missal. Adopt both as the primary source and inspiration of your devotional life - but for the good of your soul, keep clear of TradWorld!

The spontaneity of this last advice surprised me as much as its vehemence. "Where did that come from?" I had a vision of myself as a hooded spectre, indicating with horrid warning the unseen pit, from which groans, muted screams and abandoned ullulations were suddenly audible. I am of course, a denizen of the pit, acclimatised to its acrid, sulphurous bowels, having spent most of my adult life there. I'm a Trad: one of those whom the abnormality of the times has compelled into a variety of absurd and unnatural postures; one of the mad, driven in my leisure hours to the digestion of turgid encyclicals in order to defend what ought to be self-evident; to contrive some kind of "systematic statement of the obvious" in the face of universal denial and purblind stupidity. Has it done me any good? Well has it?

"Perhaps the greatest damage done by Pope Paul VI's reform of the Mass (and by the ongoing process that has outstripped it), the greatest spiritual deficit, is this: we are now positively obliged to talk about the liturgy. Even those who want to preserve the liturgy or pray in the spirit of the liturgy, and even those who make great sacrifices to remain faithful to it - all have lost something priceless, namely, the innocence that accepts it as something God-given, something that comes down to man as gift from heaven.

Those of us who are defenders of the great and sacred liturgy, the classical Roman liturgy, have all become - whether in a small way or a big way - liturgical experts. In order to counter the arguments of the reform, which was padded with technical, archaeological, and historical scholarship, we had to delve into questions of worship and liturgy-something that is utterly foreign to the religious man. We have let ourselves be led into a kind of scholastic and juridical way of considering the liturgy. What is absolutely indispensable for genuine liturgy? When are the celebrant's whims tolerable, and when do they become unacceptable? We have got used to accepting liturgy on the basis of the minimum requirements, whereas the criteria ought to be maximal. And finally, we have started to evaluate liturgy - a monstrous act! We sit in the pews and ask ourselves, was that Holy Mass, or wasn't it? I go to church to see God and come away like a theatre critic. And if, now and again, we have the privilege of celebrating a Holy Mass that allows us to forget, for a while, the huge historical and religious catastrophe that has profoundly damaged the bridge between man and God, we cannot forget all the efforts that had to be made so that this Mass could take place, how many letters had to be written, how many sacrifices made this Holy Sacrifice possible, so that (among other things) we could pray for a bishop who does not want our prayers at all and would prefer not to have his name mentioned in the Canon.

What have we lost? The opportunity to lead a hidden religious life, days begun with a quiet Mass in a modest little neighbourhood church; a life in which we learn, over decades, discreetly guided by priests, to mingle our own sacrifice with Christ's sacrifice; a Holy Mass in which we ponder our own sins and the graces given to us - and nothing else: rarely is this possible any more for a Catholic aware of liturgical tradition, once the liturgy's unquestioned status has been destroyed."
Martin Mosebach - from The Heresy of Formlessness

...We have seen
Good men made evil wrangling with the evil,
Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.
Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace.
Look at it well. This was the good town once.’

These thoughts we have, walking among our ruins.
Edwin Muir - from The Good Town

Will Pope Benedict break in upon the captives to harrow the Limbus Tradorum, the unfurled banner of the Motu Proprio streaming in his excommunication-banishing wake? Who knows? I shall in any case continue to sustain myself here on sweet messages from the pre-lapsarian, "separated" but unsullied East, among whose gentle ministers Father Stephen always seems so uncannily apropos.

Lurve

2007-06-25T10:58:00.000+01:00

As an ochlophobic Scot, two of the things I detest most in this world are weddings, and parting with money.

My five-year-old emerged into the school-yard on Friday, brandishing a piece of artwork. Festooned with love hearts, it indicated two stick-people with ear-splitting grins being bound in chains of matrimony.

"That's lovely, darling - did you do that?"

"No. Evan did it. That's me (the yellow-haired stick-person) and that's Evan."

Evan's BMW-driving mum just happened to be standing behind me. I engaged her winningly through her designer shades.

"More expense, huh?"

"Not my problem - you're the father of the bride. I'm very old fashioned about such things."

I'm very cynical about the kinds of things BMW drivers choose to get "very old-fashioned" about, but it doesn't do to be chippy.

If your daughters won't (in spite of everything) follow their patrons into Carmel, then start praying earnestly for their elopement; preferably in mum-in-law's BMW.

Symphony in white major

2007-06-23T19:04:00.002+01:00

A VISITOR to the Undercroft has touched its Eeyoreish denizen on the raw, as a consequence of which I've promised to make a bit of an effort to post something uplifting, life-enhancing and beautiful beyond the normal run of sublunary experiences. Those who come here in the expectation of something other than that - for whom, perhaps, the prospect of one's lugubrious self cutting a caper is repellant and unsettling, like one of Arturo's lipsticked, cavorting skeletons, look away now:

LUNCH

An Orwellian Moment

2007-06-21T11:11:00.001+01:00

All right, yes – it’s a cliché. Clue to the True Nature of Catholicism’s Present Crisis, or Troubling Aspect of the Neo-Catholic Mentality Painfully Exposed don’t have the same snap, so I’m running with it nevertheless. Father Z has re-posted his guide to appropriate and edifying behaviour subsequent to the motu proprio's immanent arrival. I am not angling for one of Father’s Sour Grapes Awards, nor do I wish to gainsay any one of his prescriptions; I’m going to remain within the letter of the law by getting my retaliation in before, all at once, the quarrel sinks.

“My theory is good”, insists, smoothly, the sinister brain surgeon in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes – “it’s the facts that are misleading”. Catholic commentators, pundits, bloggers of “conservative” stripe and a number of eminent clerics are today lining up to inform us solemnly that the Church’s traditional liturgy “was never abolished”. Well, I never; and more - some of these people are the very same people who, just a blinking of an eye since, were lining up to inform us solemnly that abolished it was, and that furthermore We Had Better Get Used To It. It’s a funny old world, as an eminent “conservative” famously observed. History is being prepared in its official version. That last forty years during which your family apostasised and you were pushed out of your parish? They never happened.

Catholicism, one might be forgiven for observing, only actually exists today on paper. What Bishop Fellay calls "normal Catholic life" is not possible anywhere - not in a "conservative" parish, and not in the SSPX, either. Whatever one's position, one requires an additional layer of theory (“hermeneutic of continuity” or “state of emergency”, according to inclination) to qualify it - to paper over the theological or ecclesiological gaps and fissures one has to live with in practice.

What to do about it it? I don't know. Telling the truth, though, has to be the indispensible condition of an integrated Christian life. A religious posture which requires to be shored up with ideological constructions and historical contingencies in order to preserve the appearance of coherence - of realisability - cannot be maintainted indefinitely. As Chesterton says somewhere, if you can't make a coloured picture of a thing, it's of no earthly use.

This is the basis of my impatience, on the one hand, with the "hermeneutic of continuity", that celebrated mot du jour. On a combox at the NLM recently, a Benedictine father invoked it in relation to the good effect of the Old Rite on the celebration of the New. This is fine as it relates to externals – but what about the texts, and that ominous shift in the lex orandi that it doesn’t require a Dr Lauren Pristas to detect? Asserted continuity is meaningless here. It springs from the same desperation that leads conservatives to insist, whenever an official statement includes something obviously at odds with reality, "Oh well, of course he has to say that..." - as though Our Lord could ever require us, like Soviet Communists, to falsify reality in order to preserve the credibility of some a priori ideological position or "foundational myth" - the Conciliar Renewal or the Glories of the Revolution.

On the other hand, although I am grateful to the SSPX on whom I have depended, on and off (and never exclusively) for twenty-five years, they remain committed, apparently, to a mere restoration of the status quo ante. I understand the reasons for their dogged immobility, and admire how they've managed to sustain it post-Lefebvre and in spite of the confident prognostications of their enemies of an inevitable slide into schism and heresy - but are they the future? I must confess my heart does not leap at the prospect. I think of them as being a bit like a seed, which gets through the winter - the frosts, the floods, the passage through the guts of animals - by being small, hard and not very attractive; but a seed must subsequently break out of its protective shell or it will die in the ground.

Why has Western Christianity shattered into pieces at least twice in the past 1000 years? Why does it seem so predominantly arid and legalistic? Is a restoration of all the appurtenances of the central-bureaucratic Papacy, and an officially asserted “continuity” the answer? My own attitude to the Papacy - notwithstanding a sincere admiration and affection for its present occupant - is, I confess, that of Cordelia to her father Lear - "I love thee according to my bond, neither more nor less". There’s the immoveable object of Tu es petrus. Beyond that…

It has been suggested by friends (who ought to know me better) that my "heart-thinking encounter" with Orthodoxy has to do with liturgical/aesthetical dreaming - a fascination with the glamorous externals of Byzantine worship. Not so. I am a Roman Catholic. My liturgical home is every bit as inspired, authentic, radical, Apostolic and Christ-bearing as any in the East. The challenge posed by the "pristine witness" of Orthodoxy is at another level altogether.

Here

2007-06-13T20:12:00.000+01:00

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?

I have no where to go
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow,

It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.

R.S. Thomas

"...of no concern to the vast majority of Catholics..."

2007-06-04T14:25:00.000+01:00

ABOUT SUFFERING they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

WH Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts

Apophatic

2007-05-25T23:05:00.000+01:00

There is a book on my shelves, its spine somewhat light-faded, bought many years ago at a time when its title excited me; packed up, unread, before a move; unpacked and re-shelved afterwards, the gold lettering still able to raise a frisson of promise and excitement – an undiscovered country awaiting the leisure to explore it. Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. I kid you not.

Middle-age presents temptations and sins unanticipated or imagined in youth and frequently, nowadays, I find myself bringing “boredom” - by which I suppose I mean accidie - to the Second Plank after Shipwreck. It is a crime to be bored, a sin against all three of the theological virtues – far more pernicious than the unsubtle misdemeanours of vigorous early manhood. The thought of Art and Scholasticism brings it on in topmast-high, unconquerable waves.

It is dispersed somewhat, for a while, in the hortus conclusus of the Divine Office (Deo gratias) but also by kindred spirits, among whom I number Philip Larkin. This sometimes surprises friends, who imagine I’d find the black thread of godless despair running through all of his work repellant and indigestible. Not a bit of it. He’s indispensible to me. My wife knows why.

“Happiness writes white” he is alleged to have answered, confronted with the accusation of wallowing in gratuitous, whinging miserablism. The accusation is of course, false. Only eupeptic souls who lack, in Alan Bennett’s phrase (Bennett being himself the perfect reader of Larkin) that “fully developed capacity never quite to enjoy oneself” of which all three of us became conscious very early in life, could ever be so obtuse and fundamentally humourless as to bring it. I relish the music of his lugubrious misanthropy (“mug-faced wives, glaring at jellies”), the exquisitely placed provincial middle-class locutions (those who produce the word “ironic” here are the same people who call Gregorian Chant “relaxing”), the cold-eyed refusal to admit that there’s much else for it in an empty universe but to “flay thy neighbour, as thyself”. Larkin’s godlessness is precisely that, having very little to do with “atheism”; today’s shrill proponents of which would, it’s absolutely certain, have bored him rigid. In this he’s a far better representative of his age than a Richard Dawkins or a Christpher Hitchens. Who, after all, but a preposterous bore would waste his time propagandising for the banal and self-evident?

And yet, as with Wilfred Owen, “the poetry is in the pity”. Pity is everywhere, and it's perfectly genuine:

The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petaled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines -
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous, inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

Dementia, of all the manifestations of human suffering, presents perhaps the greatest challenge to Christians. I mean this in a double sense: most obviously that my (mostly) non-practicing wife, having spent her nights lavishing inexhaustable patience and compassion on people whose illnesses frighten and repel the majority of us, will have a great deal more to show on the Last Day than me, with my finely-honed theological principles; but more: where is the immortal soul, with its irreducible personhood in all of it? What answer can one make to epiphenomenalism when it’s so obvious that integral personality disappears in precise proportion to the disintegration of the tissues of the brain, turning (in the words of a friend) a beloved and vivacious grandparent into an unrecognisable old sinner?

Art, like real theology, exists for the truth. My faith tells me that the soul of a demented man remains intact and inviolable, its operations no longer mediated, but impeded and suppressed for a while within the purgatory of a failing organism; but Larkin’s poetry is true, too. It’s a true representation, unmarred by any puerile polemic, of a godless universe. I need, periodically, good, strong doses of it.

Liturgical Movement

2007-05-24T11:59:00.000+01:00

... My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you that put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me

from Donal Og, anonymous 8th Century Irish, trans. Lady Gregory.

Please, please, if you haven't already done so, read these two posts of Fr. Stephen:
How much is too little? How much is enough?
Another Gospel...
If your parish has moved, or effectively dropped, the Feast of the Ascension, read them twice.

Lex orandi, lex credendi

2007-05-20T08:40:00.000+01:00

For Hilary

2007-04-11T12:07:00.000+01:00

GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self‑realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left— sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous, rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste‑paper baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he...

GK Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday

Animula

2007-03-25T21:54:00.001+01:00

'Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul'
To a flat world of changing lights and noise,
To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,
Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;
Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor
And running stags around a silver tray;
Confounds the actual and the fanciful,
Content with playing-cards and kings and queens,
What the fairies do and what the servants say.
The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul
Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Unable to fare forward or retreat,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in the silence after the viaticum.

Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,
For Boudin, blown to pieces,
For this one who made a great fortune,
And that one who went his own way.
Pray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees,
Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

TS Eliot

Breathing Together

2007-03-17T08:52:00.000Z

COMING TO CONSCIOUSNESS in the wake of some catastrophe, a man gropes his way amidst the rubble and the fallout. His memory has been disrupted and his senses impaired by a recent, unrecollected trauma; he recognises, hears, sees little with any clarity. Guided, though, by some profound instinct, and sustained by unreasonable hope, as he stumbles he becomes aware by degrees of the presence of fellow human beings. Each stops and listens; each hears the breathing of the others. Are there two – or three? Hands are extended in the darkness, and the slow, painful journey continues. None asks, nor does it occur to him to ask, where the others are bound; each has recognised the same instinct, the same hope in his fellows.

As their journey advances and their solidarity develops the man admires and grows to rely upon this one’s sharper eyes, that one’s clearer head; one’s strong arm, or strong sense of structure to discern which masonry, seemingly substantial, will shelter their passage or crumble at the touch; another’s kindness and calm. After a seeming eternity of struggle during which the instinct has appeared to fail, the hope to flicker and the solidarity to dissipate amidst inevitable quarrels, desertions and defeats, the little company (no longer so little now) finds itself on open, rising ground. The air has cleared and suddenly there below them, in sharp relief, is their city - their patria – her hills, her river; the broken towers and shattered ramparts; the great, half-ruined dome.

Reconstructing Roman Catholicism
It has been my contention for some time now that what is going on in the Roman Catholic Church is not reform but destruction...

Such criticisms against this are not new, and they are formulated by a small minority in the Church known as traditionalists. Often, however, this so-called traditionalist rhetoric is embedded in its own positivist and authoritarian narratives of what the past was like and how the present should be. It is not enough to preserve in some sense the forms used in the past. One must go deeper, into the very foundations of these practices that were dismissed as medieval, baroque, and decadent. Traditionalism, as it has appeared as a movement since the 1960's, is not radical enough, in the sense that "radix" in Latin means the root of living things. Traditionalism tends to ossify liturgy, theology, and the Catholic ethos into an agenda that did not exist prior to the changes.
- Arturo Vasquez

To "breathe together" - conspirare - is the meaning of "conspiracy". It's what like-thinking, like-loving human beings do as a matter of course. It implies necessarily no organisation nor formal statement of intent; no plan of action nor party line. It’s no more than the normal and natural way of things. It’s what we all do. The wildest and most radical of all conspiracies is of those who seek to breathe together with the Man-God in His Mystical Body.

This ignorant and infirm straggler offers thanks to all friends and co-conspirators, and begs for their prayers.

Latin Passions

2007-03-16T08:59:00.000Z

Among the wealth of rare and splendid things at The Sarabite, this jewel glitters especially brightly:

You

You are the sonnet
That the morning utters:

Silent, singing,
The incessant rustling
Of birds in the branches.

You are the song
That lifts up my feet,
Period of longing,
Period of sighs-
Sweet blade that
Plunges into memory
And cuts away all
That bends in sorrow.

You are the hue of
The sky in spring-
The light that glides off
The streams that
Gallop over stones.

You are the muse,
The recitation,
The singer,
And the tear-

All of this you consume
In your gentle eye-

And I fade away,
Lost and lifted up
In morning's prize.

Arturo Vásquez

Meanwhile, at The Muniment Room, TTony reflects on his missed Spanish wedding.

The parish church of St Eloi, Andernos, on the Arcachon Bassin, where Mademoiselle became Mrs Moretben according to the traditional rites of the Roman Church. In the foreground are the ruins of an earlier Gallo-Roman basilica.

Ignatian Retreat

2007-03-14T09:18:00.000Z

"I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy"
- Josef Cardinal Ratzinger

"If we consider the bimillenary history of God's Church, guided by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, we can gratefully admire the orderly development of the ritual forms in which we commemorate the event of our salvation (...) The Eleventh Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, held from 2-23 October 2005 in the Vatican, gratefully acknowledged the guidance of the Holy Spirit in this rich history. In a particular way, the Synod Fathers acknowledged and reaffirmed the beneficial influence on the Church's life of the liturgical renewal which began with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. The Synod of Bishops was able to evaluate the reception of the renewal in the years following the Council. There were many expressions of appreciation. The difficulties and even the occasional abuses which were noted, it was affirmed, cannot overshadow the benefits and the validity of the liturgical renewal, whose riches are yet to be fully explored..."
- Pope Benedict XVI

“What seems to me to be white, I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it.”
- St Ignatius Loyola

Monet, Monet, Monet...

2007-03-12T21:03:00.001Z

MONET - ROUEN CATHEDRAL

My modest collection of recordings includes almost none of the Romantics. I mention this gratuitously, to reassure those who detected a whiff of something incongruous and unsavoury about the Evil Denizen of the Undercroft weeping like a milkmaid under great waves of Richard Strauss as matter of routine. I make an exception for the Four Last Songs as a kind of sublime summing-up of something that ought to be kept mostly in quarantine, for all of the reasons ably presented by the visitors to my combox on the posting below. There. I'm glad I was able to clear that up. A pint of milk, please barman - in a dirty glass.

I mentioned similarly ambiguous feelings about Duruflé, organist and choirmaster of the great Cathedral of Rouen in the period just before the Council, whose characteristic ouevre, exemplified in his Requiem, is liturgical plainsong tastefully re-clothed in exquisitely respectful orchestration and subtle polyphonic variations. Duruflé himself provided two scores for the Requiem - one for choir and orchestra, another for choir and organ. It is therefore eminently useable liturgically, as its composer, a genuine lover of the liturgy, had intended.

So far so good. Like the high altar and canopied cathedra of Rouen Cathedral itself, reconstructed after war-damage in fine, minimal late-Liturgical Movement style (infinitely preferrable to the baroque monstrosity squatting in the chaste sanctuary of Chartres), but now a mere repository for the dust stirred by rarer visitors to that abandoned cul-de-sac east of the cuboid People's Altar under the crossing, it represents a kind of culmination, abandoned almost in the instant of its appearance; a sad, evocative glimpse of a discarded vision.

I loved - still love - the Duruflé Requiem; but along with related manifestations of the pre-Conciliar Liturgical Movement I have begun to regard it with a certain resentment. The feelings of longing and wistfulness it conjures are not, I fear, related to that holy fire kindled in the soul by the Gregorian originals; more a kind of fuzzy, naturalistic, emotional mirage or impression. And now, whenever I hear those Gregorian melodies in their proper liturgical context, my mind involuntarily fills them out with Duruflé. I can't quite get rid of him, and I'm not pleased. He's interfering with my prayers for the departed, and wafting me off somewhere quite remote, I suspect, from the Rex tremendae majestatis.

TTony wonders whether Duruflé has enhanced or merely adulterated the plainsong setting of the Requiem Mass, superimposing a dubious romantic sensibility on its gothic austerity. I don't think that's quite right. I think he's Monet-fied or Debussy-ficated it, which might be something even worse.

The Third Last Song

2007-03-10T17:01:00.000Z

...requiring no superfluous comment from me.

Letters to a Fundamentalist Friend - II

2007-03-05T21:52:00.000Z

PART TWO - THE HEART

FATHER STEPHEN FREEMAN, whose blog I recommended to you last time, describes himself somewhere as an “ignorant person”. I must warn you that I am not only ignorant but retarded, partially as a consequence of having mistaken apologetics and arguments (of the type in which the internet abounds) for real theology - which is, as he reminds us, only ever about a Person. If you and I are shipmates, though, that's a privileged relationship: we've come aboard at quite different ports - on different continents, with utterly different cultures, I daresay. Meanwhile, our destination remains a possibility merely, a place of the imagination, until the moment when straining eyes glimpse through early morning haze the sunlight on that dome, these ramparts. Meanwhile with nothing between here and there but wide-open sea, we can be frank in a new way. So let me tell you what I think I see already:

Here is something that has tantalised and fascinated me for years: “orthodoxy” is not, in the first instance, “right belief” at all – but “right glory”. That’s what the Greek words mean. Of course a modern Greek will also understand “orthodoxy” in the sense more familiar to us; but when the choir chants Doxa Soi Kyrie, doxa Soi, he certainly doesn’t hear Doctrine to Thee, O Lord, doctrine to Thee.

Does this perhaps go to the heart of what has gone wrong with “modern” Christianity? This submerged sense of the word “orthodoxy” seems baffling to the western mind, habituated more and more, from the late Middle Ages on, to thinking almost exclusively in terms of “correct doctrine” as first in the order of precedence – to the point at which almost everything else is up for grabs. What has troubled me most of my adult life is a nagging sense of deepening divergence between the Catholicism of the Catechism and Catholicism as it actually presents itself to the believer today – as though, provided the “theory” continues to be asserted and officially upheld, it doesn’t much matter about anything else. If true, it's madness, as the most basic analogy will tell us:

How do we go about understanding our mother? Having first drawn life from her, do we begin to place the greatest emphasis subsequently on having a firm, correct theoretical understanding of the notion of maternity, childhood and the governing principles that ought to determine the interaction between them? Is the quality of our relationship with her a direct function of our having acquired a theoretically “correct” apparatus? Having done all that, do we then advance to “loving“ her – as defined essentially by approaching her in the way that seems most “correct” to ourselves (punctiliously formal or offhand and matey, according to taste), while crooning sentimental ditties at her? Would that make us good children?

Children give “right glory” to their mothers because they first of all suckled them and lived with them and loved them before it ever occurred to them to think of the relationship in terms of what was correct and what wasn’t; when a child runs to his mother in love, or joy or distress; or tries to please her with some little gift; weeps when she weeps, laughs when she laughs; or, years later, carries her to the lavatory, cleans up her vomit, closes her eyes, lays her in the earth and weeps out his heart in gratitude to and for her – does he do this because he got it all out of a book? And having done it, could some other person who’d studied the book more assiduously claim to understand the whole mysterious business better, nevertheless?

How does this apply to the way we live our lives with the God we claim to love? Do we really live with Him - or are we content merely to study Him and scrupulously measure the quality of our continuing interaction with Him according to approved theoretical models?

Prosper of Aquitaine, a pupil of St Augustine, in the fifth century provided the West with a famous axiom - one it has all but forgotten- condensed in the phrase lex orandi, lex credendi : “the law of prayer establishes the law of belief”; or to put it more directly, “as you pray, so shall you believe”; or “if you habitually approach God in a way that really isn't consistent with what you believe in theory, your beliefs will gradually conform themselves to your behaviour”. It’s obvious really - we are not angels, but men.

Correct doctrine is fundamentally important – but the manner in which we aquire and maintain it is more important still. Just as we know and love our mother as a consequence of living intimacy with her, so our sensus fidei, our instinctive “feeling for the faith” develops as we meet and live with Our Lord in His Church, and especially as together we follow Him, fasting and feasting, from cradle to Cross and beyond, in the Liturgy. “The Church is Jesus extended in time and space in the souls of those united to him.” It is the Mystical Body visibly incarnated. Christianity is not, and never can be a “home alone” affair; neither can you do it “by the book” (Fr Freeman); nor is the Church, in contradiction to the Incarnation, a purely invisible entity without a tangible body or a distinctive, audible voice. Does it speak to us of “truths” that contradict Scripture? Impossible. Truth is Truth. On the contrary, in the Divine Liturgy, all Scripture finds its true and proper context as the very voice of the praying Christ.

The central, defining, foundational act of the faithful soul is prayer. "Correct doctrine" merely, will not "transform us in Christ". Worship which, whatever we assert about it, is in reality no more than "a dance around the Golden Calf that is ourselves" (Cardinal Ratzinger) will in any case degrade it. Instead of growing into fuller personalities, by participating in the life of the True Personality, we will become the brittle, neurotic, inhibited, fearful, spiritual hypochondriacs and hygiene fetishists you described. To paraphrase Father Freeman again: pray, go to Church, receive the Sacraments, forgive and ask forgiveness, give stuff away. Stop pretending we can ever know all the answers. Then we’ll begin to know Him. Everything else will follow.

Letters to a Fundamentalist Friend

2007-03-04T21:01:00.000Z

PART ONE - THE HEAD

Dear T.,

You will notice from my address* that I am presently at sea. The voyage is arduous and uncomfortable and there are no guarantees it will ever make port. I am, nevertheless, queasily embarked; twenty-five years of haunting the quayside are at an end.

The sea is a kind of desert, so the opportunity is presented to make a better Lent than usual. If the condition of orthodoxy in one's faith is "to think with the Church", the Christian must in addition learn to "think with the heart". Christianity is incorporation into the life of a Person – it isn’t an argument or an ideology. I am for the time being persuaded that the preoccupation with proofs and demonstrations of proofs, of controversies and their logical resolution, is radically prejudicial to “thinking with the heart”, in addition to being practically futile. "Internet religion" is, moreover, a very poor substitute for the real thing, and it's highly doubtful that the hours most of us spend strutting and fretting on this cold little stage are in any way pleasing to God, or helpful to our salvation. We could – therefore should, probably - have been praying, or just playing with our children instead. So, in addition to bodily fasting, a few weeks' retreat from cyberspace is probably all to the good. Kyrie eleison!

Another advantage of the desert, of course, is a certain enlargement of perspective one gains from being temporarily apart from the fray...

…

I WILL BRING OUT those passages of scripture which speak to me with perfect clarity of Our Lord’s promises to His Church, and you will decline to accept that these passages ought to be understood as the Church has always understood them. So which perspective is, on a balance of probabilities, the authentic one? No-one ever came to Scripture without some sort of hermeneutical “key” – it’s impossible. The only question is, then – which “key”? The Fathers, to whose witness I defer, acclaimed by the Church within their own lifetimes for clarity of teaching, purity of doctrine, and – most importantly of all – manifest holiness of life, reveal an unbroken, continuing tradition of interpretation from the very birth of the Church. I will therefore always strive to understand Scripture in the same sense as them. This is vitally important for me. God does not change; no jot or tittle will pass away. There is no value or point whatsoever in Scripture admonishing us to hear something called “the Church” as the “house of God and ground and pillar of Truth” if this “Church” cannot be identified with any certainty. Where, then, is this Church? There is no point in appealing, circular fashion, to Scripture, because it’s precisely the interpretation of Scripture on which we disagree. Secondary sources then - witnesses to how the first Christians themselves understood the Church and the Gospel:

The true knowledge is the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according to the succession of bishops, by which succession the bishops have handed down the Church which is found everywhere.
St Irenaeus

One quote, plucked from among innumerable others, by different authors, all in the same vein. Note that Irenaeus, writing in the second century, already speaks of the "ancient organisation of the Church".

This Church, then, was, and must remain, visibly constituted: go to any second century town, as the Fathers again bear witness, and ask “where is the Catholic Church?” You will - now, as then - be directed to a people gathered together with presbyters and deacons under a bishop in the Apostolic succession; who teaches, governs and sanctifies each local or particular church in communion with the Universal, “holding-all” Church whose unchanging, integral faith, order and sacramental life all of its members, united to its Head, maintain. The oft-asserted notion among the “reformed” communities, of the myriad modern “denominations” being equivalent to particular churches, the sum total of which constitute the “catholic church” despite the absence of any meaningful unity of faith, sacrament or constitution is, I’m sorry to say, a fanciful and anachronistic absurdity which can’t survive a moment’s honest encounter with the first few centuries, during which the Church asserted her catholicity precisely as the note distinguishing her from schismatic and heretical sects. Nothing has changed.

Where, then, is the record of holy souls in the first centuries, raising their voices and shedding their blood for the sufficiency and pre-eminence of scripture against the rise of usurping “Catholicism”? Where are their writings? Where are their witnesses? Where, for that matter, is any indication that Our Lord intended New Testament Scripture (which He never mentions) rather than, and apart from, the “teaching Church” (of which He speaks in the most exalted terms) to provide the sole, sufficient, infallible rule of faith? From my point of view this complete absence of any “parallel tradition” is itself sufficient to render incredible the Protestant account of Christianity, before even beginning to address the hopeless internal contradictions inherent in sola scriptura itself.

On the other hand, if catholic Christianity which alone can lay claim to a historically verifiable, continuing tradition from the Apostles to the present day is a human fabrication, then everything is rendered definitively uncertain – especially Scripture, the contents of which were discerned according to the tradition and by the authority of the Church. If what Christians took for fifteen hundred years to be the “House of God and ground and pillar of truth” was never anything of the sort, then Scripture has proved an unreliable guide throughout most of the Church’s history. What use is a scripture that insists I “hear the Church”, and then leaves me uncertain about what and where the Church is? How reliable is a scripture in which God promises to lead us “into all truth” and to be with us always, prior to abandoning us almost immediately to all sorts of ruinous, fundamental errors?

Perspective, again - mine versus yours - on the subject of false “triumphalism” and the gates of hell not prevailing: from the very beginning the Church has to struggle to distinguish herself from those errant and self appointed “pastors” - the wolves in sheeps’ clothing who “gather apart”; then the terrible Arian crisis when it really did seem for while tht all was lost; the constant threat of subjection to secular authority; the schism between East and West; the Great Western Schism; the administrative and juridical chaos of the late Middle Ages; the Protestant revolt; Jansenist rigorism versus Jesuit casuistry; the Deists and rationalists; religious nationalism; Revolution, ultramontanist reaction and the disorder and degradation following Vatican II’s ill-conceived and incredible attempt to synthesise them; the long martyrdom of the East under Islam and then atheistic Communism – well yes, I agree: it would seem as though “crisis” were indeed the “fifth mark” of the Church, and that Hell has come perilously close to prevailing throughout two millennia. There she still is, nevertheless – with the same unchanging faith, the same sacraments the same constitution, the same essential unity, miraculously preserved – unless the whole of what we call Revelation is a deep and disastrous delusion.

* i.e. "Sailing to Byzantium" - the beginnings of a serious and "heart-thinking" encounter with Orthodoxy.

PART TWO - THE HEART

Sent to Coventry

2007-01-21T16:51:00.000Z

DEAR Friends and Visitors

I'm presently working away from home (and PC) on a short-term contract until the end of February. Exchanging family life in rural Sussex for a Bed & Breakfast in the industrial West Midlands four nights a week is not without its compensations, though: material is accumulating for a return to active blogging in March. Meanwhile, my sincere thanks to wellwishers, friends and visitors, and apologies for the enforced vacation.

Suspended amidst a riot of discontinuities, living and working in one of the most radically disrupted areas in Europe, I suppose, I find the theme recurring in my B&B reading: Francois Mauriac, Ian McEwan and Joseph Conrad so far - all informed or preoccupied by rupture at one level or another, or so it seems. Perhaps it's a symptom of projecting, monomaniacally, one's own preoccupations onto the world at large; or perhaps discontinuity, like paradox, is intrinsic to the music of life, and deafness to it is more or less equivalent to being mad.

The picture? Coventry Cathedral, as re-ordered by the Luftwaffe.

With prayers and best wishes to all; see you after the motu proprio - or perhaps sooner...

Ben Donald

2006-12-24T21:54:00.001Z

Rorate caeli desuper !
Heavens distil your balmy shouris,
For now is risen the bricht day ster,
Fro the rose Mary, flour of flouris;
The clear Son, whom no cloud devouris;
Surmounting Phoebus in the east,
Is comen of his heavenly touris;
Et nobis Puer natus est.

Archangellis, angellis, and dompnationis;
Tronis, potestatis, and martyris seir,
And all ye heavenly operationis,
Star, planet, firmament, and sphere,
Fire, erd, air, and water clear,
To him give loving, most and least,
That come in-to so meek manner;
Et nobis Puer natus est.

Sinneris be glaid, and penance do,
And thank your Maker hairtfully;
For he that ye micht nocht come to,
To you is comen full humyly,
Your saulis with his blude to buy,
And loose you of the Fiendis arrest,
And only of his awn mercy;
Pro nobis Puer natus est.

All clergy do to him incline,
And bow unto that bairn bening,
And do your observance divine
To him that is of kingis King;
Ensence his altar, read, and sing
In haly kirk, with mind degest,
Him honouring attour all thing,
Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Celestial fowlis in the air,
Sing with your notis upon hicht;
In firthis and in forestis fair
Be mirthful now, at all your micht,
For passit is your dully nicht;
Aurora has the cloudis pierc'd,
The sun is risen with glaidsome licht,
Et nobis Puer natus est.

Now spring up flouris fra the root,
Revert you upward naturally,
In honour of the blissit fruit
That raise up fro the rose Mary;
Lay out your leaves lustily,
Fro deid tak life now at the lest
In worship of that Prince worthy,
Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Sing heaven imperial, most of hicht,
Regions of air mak harmony;
All fish in flood and fowl of flicht,
Be mirthful and mak melody:
All GLORIA IN EXCELSIS Cry,
Heaven, erd, sea, man, bird, and beast,
He that is crownit abune the sky
Pro nobis Puer natus est.

William Dunbar OFM (1460-1530)

Wishing a very happy and holy Christmas to all visitors and friends of the Undercroft. Apologies for the light posting schedule of late; I expect things to pick up in the New Year.

In Christo Domino

Ben Donald

Here's tae us!

2006-12-14T16:08:00.000Z

HOME, CIRCA 1960

"WHO, THAT HAS a feeling for warfare, would fight with a Scotchman? Such a one, I hope, does not breathe; the plain fact being that if a Scot beats you, he beats you; whereas if you begin to beat a Scot he will assuredly bawl, in the King's name, for the law. “Hech, sirs, rin for the polis. A'hm gettin' whupped!” Let us therefore continue our discourse amicably.

Your proper child of Caledonia believes in his rickety bones that he is the salt of the earth. Prompted by a glozing pride, not to say by a black and consuming avarice, he has proclaimed his saltiness from the house-tops in and out of season, unblushingly, assiduously, and with results which have no doubt been most satisfactory from his own point of view. There is nothing creditable to the race of men, from filial piety to a pretty taste in claret, which he has not sedulously advertised as a virtue peculiar to himself. This arrogation has served him passing well. It has brought him into unrivalled esteem. He is the one species of human animal that is taken by all the world to be fifty per cent cleverer and pluckier and honester than the facts warrant. He is the daw with a peacock's tail of his own painting. He is the ass who has been at pains to cultivate the convincing roar of a lion. He is the fine gentleman whose father toils with a muck-fork. And, to have done with parable, he is the bandy-legged lout from Tullietudlescleugh, who, after a childhood of intimacy with the cesspool and the crablouse, and twelve months at “the college” on moneys wrung from the diet of his family, drops his threadbare kilt and comes south in a slop suit to instruct the English in the arts of civilization and in the English language. And because he is Scotch and the Scotch superstition is heavy on our Southern lands, England will forthwith give him a chance, for an English chance is his birthright. Soon, forby, shall he be living in “chambers” and writing idiot books. Or he shall swell and hector and fume in the sub-editor's room of a halfpenny paper. Or a pompous and gravel-blind city house shall grapple him to its soul in the capacity of con-fidential clerk. Or he shall be cashier in a jam factory, or “boo and boo” behind a mercer's counter, or “wait on” in a coffee tavern, or, for that matter, soak away his chapped spirit in the four-ale bars off Fleet Street."

TWH Crosland – from The Unspeakable Scot (1902)

More Hermeneutico-whatsit

2006-12-11T10:59:00.000Z

A SLIGHT and rather querulous post of mine last week provided the thin compost from which a truly illuminating crop of comments sprang up. I am deeply grateful to all who contributed – particularly to Daniel Mitsui for articulating so effectively his “Hermeneutic of Recovery” (to coin a phrase) to which I also subscribe, and which makes it possible for me to remain a Roman Catholic while conceding almost all of the points addressed with such devastating effectiveness by Orthodox brethren. I’m provoked to return to it today by the speculations of my friend Tony at The Muniment Room, on the reception the fabled motu proprio is likely to receive at the hands of the English (and not just the English) hierarchy – of which more subsequently.

This whole “Hermeneutic of XYZ” business originates, of course, with that famous address the Holy Father gave to the Roman Curia almost exactly a year ago (I say “famous” in the sense that every Catholic blogger of traditionalist and conservative stripe has been over it with a toothcomb in the intervening year; beyond this and its immediate audience, I suspect it might as well have been played on a dog-whistle). It has been adopted as a kind of “mission statement” by conservative Catholics, something that provides both a key to the upheavals of the recent past, and a modus operandi for the future.

But does it? Almost every post on this blog that deals directly with the crisis in the Church is an exercise in elaborating a single idea – that Catholic belief and Catholic practice have become dangerously bifurcated as a consequence of an unbalanced ecclesiology, the origins of which are to be sought far further back than the Second Vatican Council. The hermeneutic of Continuity sets out to draw things back together by insisting that they were never legitimately loosened, far less separated, in the first place: that the discontinuities actually experienced by real live Catholics – those who approved, those who disapproved and the majority who remain absolutely indifferent because they "follow the Pope" – are the consequence of misunderstandings, misinterpretations, misapplications. In other words, another theoretical apparatus is proposed, to cover practical discontinuities that remain self-evident nevertheless to very nearly every adult in every diocese of the Catholic world.

To return to the burden of Tony’s post, then: this “Hermeneutic of Continuity” - can you touch it? Can you smell it? Can you sing or pray it? Can you make an icon of it? Will it lodge in the imagination of a five-year-old? Will it enable her to grow up understanding why we have to drive past four Catholic churches to attend a Mass thirty miles away?

So long as the answer to any of these questions is “no”, I’m afraid it’s of absolutely no earthly use.

Yper tou agiou Oikou

2006-12-09T19:51:00.000Z

THANKS TO JOHN for this beautiful image of the Great Church, accompanying his poignant commentary on an article by Rod Dreher:

"Benedict has a clearer eye about Islam than his predecessor... [and] he is not prepared to pretend that it is of no matter that in Europe Muslims are free to worship as they please and to build mosques at will, while in Turkey and the Muslim world, Christians are generally not permitted to build churches and face state-sanctioned discrimination. It is better, says Benedict, to speak frankly about the world as it is, rather than about the world Western elites wish we lived in."

Log on to the Aghia Sophia site, to demand restitution and an end to Turkey's century-long ethnic cleansing of Christian minorities, as a precondition of EU membership talks.

In paradisum deducat te Angeli

2006-12-08T21:36:00.000Z

OF YOUR CHARITY

"Please pray for the soul of Fr. Michael Charles Crowdy who passed-away mid-afternoon to-day in the care of the Bevan Family in Dover.

Fr. Crowdy was born on the 21st. November 1914, a solicitor by profession; an Anglo-Catholic convert he was Oratory-trained for the priesthood in Italy.

In latter years, to all intents and purposes, he became an itinerant priest and as late as August of this year travelled on his motorcycle...some 60 miles or more to take The Mass to outlying locations. He returned the next day, fully caped, having ridden through inclement weather.

Attempts to restrain him were to no avail, both cancer and Parkinson's notwithstanding, he said his last public Mass in Taunton on All Saints Day. On one occasion he was persuaded not to travel to a Mass Centre, but it was later discovered he had taken Communion to a sick parishioner even further distant."

May his soul and souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.

(Thanks to Sixupman for this notification)

Respectable

2006-12-07T22:45:00.000Z

MGR RONALD KNOX, somewhere, illustrates a salient difference between Protestantism and Catholicism by means of an “umbrella test”: if a man leaves an umbrella behind in a Catholic or a Methodist chapel, in which of these can he be confident of finding it, just where he left it, on the following week? We know the answer – or at least we used to: if you leave an item of property behind in a Methodist chapel, it will remain untouched until you retrieve it, except insofar as some kind soul may have set it aside for safekeeping until your return. Anything left in a Catholic Church will be nicked - full stop.

Knox’s point is also mine, and that of Arturo Vasquez; far from wringing his hands over “what this says” about the degenerate condition - as compared with their respectable counterparts in the Protestant sects - of those nurtured with the rational milk of Holy Mother Church, Knox rejoices in this certain indication of the presence of sinners within her bosom as yet further proof of the authenticity of her claims.

In Great Britain we were used to this dichotomy. Here, the Established Churches (Anglican in England, Presbyterian in Scotland), except for their more remote rural parishes, have always in modern times been identified with the middle-classes at prayer. The “Non-conformist” Protestant sects (Baptists, Methodists, Wee Frees etc) were a button down on the cuff perhaps, but still solidly bourgeois for all that. Catholics were the rabble – inbred recusant backwoodsmen, dubious bohemians and wayward aristocrats, together with the lowest of the immigrant urban poor, ten-to-a-bed in the tenements of Glasgow and Liverpool. This was one of our chief glories and, as Knox suggests, an apologetic all on its own.

Not any longer: a pincer movement of what passes for “prosperity” and the surrounding post-Protestant culture, avidly assimilated as part of the aggiornamentist project and apotheosised in smug, inverted, bourgeois liturgy, has sliced deep into the Catholic soul. Leave your umbrella in a suburban Catholic Church today (an ugly-on-purpose cinder-block affair, self-consciously tricked out in that tell-tale conjunction of low kitsch and middle-brow minimalism) and somebody in nice knitwear, wearing a strange facial expression known in Protestant circles as a SWEG (Sickly Weak Evangelical Grin) will make a point of handing it back to you. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Are “Traditionalists” immune? Not a bit of it. The dominant influence in English-speaking Traditionalism, as in English-speaking-everything-else, is American. In an astonishingly prescient piece posted at the Lion and the Cardinal, HL Menken anatomises the baneful influence of American Protestantism (a stupider, louder, more saccharine-puritanical mutation of the Anglo-German original) on US Catholic clergy two generations before Roncalli’s Folly made assimilation of it obligatory. To this, modern US Traditionalists have added their own dreary distillation of Maynooth Jansenism, so that wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of the ancient faith, the conversation is less likely to tend to the recovery of liturgical spirituality than whether or not we ought to read Dante (who condemned several Popes) or Chaucer (who wrote about toilet matters and immoral liaisons); whether or not every picture since Fra Angelico (with the exception of low charismatic kitsch) is cunningly concealed filth, the work of some unspeakable heathen degenerate; whether or not an honest wife and mother doing a bit of gardening in her jeans runs the risk of falling into trans-sexual lesbian breadwinning...

Puritanism is not Catholic. It is not even human. Prudery is not purity. Respectability is not holiness, but if anything, an actual impediment to holiness. The Church of Christ is home to saints and sinners; the merely respectable are quite welcome to shift for themselves.

Rover's Return

2006-12-06T09:29:00.000Z

Pseudo-Iamblichus, the Thinking Man's Maverick, is back on the block following a sojourn among the Saxon; but if you think he's going to cease lobbing bricks through all the right windows, you're in for a shock.

This decision will not affect how I write nor my criticisms of Catholicism, of the Pope, or of Catholic history in general. So do not hold me accountable for being inconsistent with the ethos that dominates the Roman Catholic Church or the traditionalist movement within it. I am going back to being a plain old Roman Catholic (with heavy unorthodox Lefebvrist sympathies), and not joining the Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club nor the Church of Pope Pius XII Re-Enactment Society.

Link bar amended, Arturo.

Cantate Domino

2006-12-05T12:50:00.001Z

PSALMODY GIVES tranquillity to souls, brings peace by mastering surging thoughts. It calms anger and represses concupiscence. Psalmody strengthens friendship, unites those who are estranged, reconciles those who are angry, for who would consider as an enemy one who united his voice with his in praise of God? Psalmody also gives the greatest of goods, charity: it unites all into one choir. It puts the devils to flight and ensures the help of angels. It is a protection against the fears of night-time, a rest in the labours of the day. It strengthens children, adorns the young, consoles the aged and beautifies women. It peoples solitude, it stills agitated assemblies. It is the voice of the Church. It gives splendour to festivals. It gives rise to the sadness which comes from God; from a heart of stone it can draw tears.

Psalmody is the occupation of the angels, it is the life of heaven, it is the spiritual sacrifice. It contains true theology: the prophesies of the Incarnation, the threats of judgement, the hope of the resurrection, the fear of punishment, the promise of glory, the revelation of mysteries – all these are gathered up in the Book of Psalms, a great treasure-house, open to all the world.

St Basil the Great - Homily on Psalm 1

Exsules filii Hevæ

2006-12-04T19:17:00.000Z

NOW THE ICE lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.
The water at the mill
Sounds more hoarse and dull.
The miller's daughter walking by
With frozen fingers soldered to her basket
Seems to be knocking
Upon a hundred leagues of floor
With her light heels, and mocking
Percy and Douglas dead,
And Bruce on his burial bed,
Where he lies white as may
With wars and leprosy,
And all the kings before
This land was kingless,
And all the singers before
This land was songless,
This land that with its dead and living waits the Judgement Day.
But they, the powerless dead,
Listening can hear no more
Than a hard tapping on the floor
A little overhead
Of common heels that do not know
Whence they come or where they go
And are content
With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.

Edwin Muir - Scotland's Winter

Unam Sanctam

2006-12-02T10:58:00.000Z

A FRIEND draws my attention to the following article by an Orthodox priest:

...the Orthodox would be delighted for His Holiness of Rome, repudiating what we regard as the errors attendant on his recent understanding of his ministry, to take once again his rightful place as the ranking spiritual leader of the Orthodox Church (a position that the patriarch of Constantinople has held since the separation of Rome from Orthodoxy in the 11th century).

To Orthodox Christians, such a "solution" to the problem would seem very attractive. In fact, however, one fears that it would be no solution at all. Such a weakening of the papacy would be an utter disaster for the Roman Catholic Church as it is currently constituted. To many of us outside that institution, it appears that the single entity holding the Roman Catholic Church together right now is probably the strong and centralized office of the pope.

This sobering and, in my opinion, deadly accurate view really should send icy fingers up our collective Roman spine. At the end of a thousand years of the "Roman Adventure" the unity of the Catholic Church is reduced to a legal fiction, sleeping between the covers of the Catechism and a million parish registers; it is almost nowhere effectively operative at the level of faith and worship. Without the central-beaureaucratic Papacy it would crumble at the touch. This is not the "Oneness" of the Creed, nor of any ecclesiology worthy of the name. Historically too, it's absolutely true that once a dictatorship has been erected and citizenship defined solely in terms of obedience to it, any subsequent weakening at the centre will set in motion, ineluctably, the disintegration of the state.

Having choked off Sacred Tradition, the "living Magisterium" is itself now in retreat - leaving some, like Protestants, with scripture alone and most of the remainder prey to a kind of "magisterial fundamentalism" that reduces the content and practice of the faith to following the Pope (forgetting that a Rock ought not to be "going" anywhere).

Turkish entry into Europe

2006-11-30T14:54:00.000Z

" IT WAS EARLY MORNING, with the waning moon high in the sky. The walls were strewn with the dead and dying; but of living defenders there was scarcely a trace. The surviving Greeks had hurried home to their families, hoping to save them from the rape and pillage that had already begun; the Venetians were making for the harbour, the Genoese for the comparative security of Galata. They found the Horn surprisingly quiet: most of the Turkish sailors had already gone ashore, lest the army beat them to the women and the plunder. The Venetian commander encountered no resistance when he set his sailors to break down the boom; his little fleet, accompanied by seven Genoese vessels and half a dozen Byzantine galleys, all packed to the gunwales with refugees, swung out into the Marmara and down the Hellespont to the open sea.

By noon the streets were running with blood. Houses were ransacked, women and children raped or impaled, churches razed, icons wrenched from their frames, books ripped from their bindings. The Imperial Palace at Blachernae was left an empty shell, the Empire's holiest icon, the Virgin Hodegetria, hacked into four pieces and destroyed. The most hideous scenes of all, however, were enacted in St Sophia. Matins were already in progress when the berserk conquerors were heard approaching. Immediately the great bronze doors were closed; but the Turks soon smashed their way in. The poorer and less attractive of the congregation were massacred on the spot; the remainder were led off to the Turkish camps to await their fate. The priests continued with the Mass until they were killed at the altar; but there are among the faithful those who still believe that one or two of them gathered up the patens and chalices and mysteriously disappeared into the southern wall of the sanctuary. There they will remain until Constantinople becomes once again a Christian city, when they will resume the service at the point at which it was interrupted.

Sultan Mehmet had promised his men the three traditional days of looting; but there were no protests when he brought it to a dose the same evening. By then there was little left to plunder, and his soldiers were fully occupied sharing out the loot and enjoying their captives. In the late afternoon, accompanied by his chief ministers, his imams and his bodyguard of janissaries, he rode slowly to St Sophia. Dismounting outside the central doors, he picked up a handful of earth which, in a gesture of humility, he sprinkled over his turban; then he entered the Great Church. As he walked towards the altar, he stopped one of his soldiers whom he saw hacking at the marble pavement looting, he told him, did not include the destruction of public buildings. At his command the senior imam mounted the pulpit and proclaimed the name of Allah, the All-Merciful and Compassionate: there was no God but God and Mohammed was his Prophet. The Sultan touched his turbaned head to the ground in prayer and thanksgiving St Sophia was now a mosque."

John Julius Norwich - A Short History of Byzantium pp. 380-1

The Muniment Room

2006-11-28T21:17:00.000Z

A new blogger sets himself an interesting brief - how would the mainstream Catholic Media in England & Wales look if it were to rediscover its vocation? What is "critical solidarity", what would it require, and what would it feel like? This blogger aims to challenge the English Catholic media (and, by implication, the English Hierarchy) to begin engaging honestly with the Traditionalist position, as a refreshing and radical alternative to another thirty years of soul-sapping party-line platitudes. He hopes to explore ideas of how such a thing might be set in motion, akin to coaxing hardened hydrophobics back into the stream.

Good luck with that!

Domine dilexi decorum domus tuae

2006-11-24T22:12:00.000Z

"THE CHURCH OF ST THOMAS AQUINAS was a massive building; its walls were plastered by deposits of soot and grease, so that their original grey was black. It stood on a kind of pimple of higher ground, and this fact occasioned little flights of stone steps and cobbled ramps, slippery and mossy under-foot; clustering at the base of the tower, they looked like household terriers running at the feet of some dangerous, dirty tramp.

The Church was in fact less than a hundred years old; it had been built when the Irish came to Fetherhoughton to work in the three cotton mills. But someone had briefed its architect to make it look as if it had always stood there. In those poor, troubled days it was an understandable wish, and the architect had a sense of history; it was a Shakespearian sense of history, with a grand contempt of the pitfalls of anachronism. Last Wednesday and the Battle of Bosworth are all one; the past is the past, and Mrs O'Toole, buried last Wednesday, is neck and neck with King Richard in the hurtle to eternity. This was - it must have been - the architect's view. From the Romans to the Hanoverians, it was all the same to him; they wore, no doubt, leather jerkins and iron crowns; they burned witches; their buildings were stone and quaint and cold, their windows were not as our windows; they slapped their thighs and said prithee. Only such a vision could have commanded into being the music-hall medievalism of St Thomas Aquinas.

The architect had begun in a vaguely Gothic way and ended with something Saxon and brutal. There was a tower at the west end, without spire or pinnacles, but furnished with battlements. The porch had stone benches, and a plain holy-water stoup, and malodorous matting that was beaten thin by scuffling feet - matting that was always sodden, and might have been composed of some thirsty vegetable matter.

The doorway had a round arch of a Norman persuasion, but no recessed arches, no little shafts, no ornament, not so much as a lozenge, a zigzag, a chevron; stern had been the mood the day that doorway was designed, and the door itself was strapped and hinged in a manner that put one in mind of siege warfare and starvation and a populace reduced to eating its rats.

Inside the church, in the pit-like gloom, there was a deep font, without ornament, with a single plain shaft, and big enough to cope with a multiple birth, or dip a sheep. There was a west gallery for the organ, with a patch of deeper blackness beneath it; the gallery itself, though you would not know until you had swum into that blackness, was reached by a low little doorway with junior siege-hinges, and a treacherous spiral staircase, with risers a foot deep. There were two side chapels, two aisles, and it was in the arcades that the architect's derangement was most evident, for the arches were round or pointed, seemingly as a consequence of some spur-of-the-moment decision, and as one blundered through the nave, the confusion of style gave the church a misleadingly heroic air, as if it had been built, like one of the great European cathedrals, in successive campaigns a hundred years apart. The shafts of the columns were squat and massive cylinders, made of a greyish, finely pitted stone, and their uncarved capitals resembled packing cases.

The lancet windows were grouped two by two, and sur-mounted by grudging tracery, here a circle, here a quatrefoil, here a dagger trefoil. In each of the lights stood a glass saint, bearing his name on an unfurling scroll, each scroll inscribed in an unreadable Germanic black-letter; the faces of these glass saints were identical, their expressions were all alike. The glass itself was of a mill-town sort; there was a light-refusing, industrial quality about its thick texture, and its colours were blatant and vile: a traffic-light green, a sugar-bag blue and the dull but acidic red of cheap strawberry jam. There were stone flags underfoot, and the long benches were varnished with a treacly red stain; the doors to the single confessional were low and latched, like the doors to a coalshed.

Father Angwin and the bishop came out through the draughty vaulted passage from the sacristy, and emerged by the Lady chapel in the north aisle. They looked about; not that it profited them. In all, St Thomas Aquinas was as dark as Notre-Dame and resembled it in one other alarming particular - that at any given moment, standing in one part, you lost all sense of what might be happening in another. You could not see the roof, although you had - in St Thomas Aquinas - an uneasy, crawling feeling about it, that it might not be so far above your head at all, and that it might lower itself a little from time to time, just that little inch or so that betrayed its ambition to unite, one winter's day, with the stone flags, and freeze into a solid block of unwrought masonry, with the worshippers between. The church's inner spaces were aggregations of darkness, with channels of thicker darkness between. There were plaster saints - which the bishop now surveyed as best he might - and before most of them, in severe iron racks that looked like the bars of a beast-house, devotional candles burned; yet it was a lightless burning, like marsh-gas, a flickering in an unfelt, breathless wind. There were draughts, it was true, which followed each worshipper like a bad reputation, which dabbed at their ankles and climbed into their clothes, as cats do with people who do not like them. But when the church was empty the draughts lay quiet, only whistling from time to time about the floor; and the candle flames rose up towards the roof, straight and thin as dressmaker's pins.

“These statues,” said the bishop. “Have you a pocket torch?” Father Angwin did not reply. “Then give me a tour,” the bishop demanded. “Start here. I cannot identify this fellow. Is he a Negro?”

Hilary Mantel – Fludd (Viking 1989)

Read this

2006-11-21T23:30:00.000Z

...wonderful essay.

(Picture courtesy of Rorate Caeli)

On The Farm

2006-11-21T22:11:00.000Z

There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.

There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.

R.S. Thomas

Did John Paul II write "pro omnibus"?

2006-11-21T14:58:00.000Z

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf @ 10:21 am

I learned about something at The Undercroft, stemming from something else at Valle Adurni ... something rather serious. I am obliged to add additional information to put things straight.

Some folks have incorrectly speculated that the late Pope John Paul II, in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, wrote "pro omnibus" instead of "pro multis"...

Read the rest here.

"Pharisaical nominalism..."

2006-11-20T21:51:00.000Z

Thanks to Fr Tim Finigan

Chris Ferrara on pro multis:

The development is also important for the traditionalist cause because it demonstrates that traditionalist opposition to this erring novelty was not “private judgment,” as neo-Catholic spokesmen insisted in their Pharisaical nominalism, but a mere observation of what is self-evident: that “for many” cannot mean “for all,” and that the Church has never sanctioned such an idea concerning the fruit of the Mass. Likewise, as this development certainly highlights, the rest of the traditionalist position is nothing but a systematic statement of the obvious about recent changes in the Church. Just as it is obvious that “for all” is a mistranslation, so is it obvious that the traditional Mass was never prohibited by any papal command—a fact the Vatican itself now openly acknowledges, despite decades of neo-Catholic advice to the contrary. Also obvious is that “ecumenism” is a pastoral program that can be abandoned as a failure, not an irrevocable doctrine of the faith—a fact that one can hope will soon enough be recognized as well by the Vatican...

Here.

You had to have been there...

2006-11-20T16:42:00.000Z

SEVERAL YEARS AGO BBC Scotland broadcast an hour-long programme in which three Scots clerics - a Calvinist minister, an Anglican theologian and a Cardinal - wandered around the Holy Land sharing their reflections on the life of Our Lord. The Calvinist Minister, a rare soul from the remote West Highlands, said a number of penetratingly beautiful things about Jesus; the Anglican, erudite and devout, offered a number of very interesting and orthodox insights; the Cardinal, God rest his soul, bored on almost exclusively, and to general incomprehension, about the Second Vatican Council.

Cathcon links to this priceless article, which begins as follows:

Noticing that the words “Vatican II” evoked no response in her high school students, an Irish nun recently told me she asked them what Vatican II was. After some time and with much hesitation, one of them asked: “Would that be the pope’s summer residence?”

The Central Event of Human History is receding from the consciousness of Catholics. It's not on the radar of the young. How can this possibly be happening? Sense the scandal, the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Savour it.

There's hope yet: anyone who imagines this unaccountable indifference among the young to the Second Pentecost might be reversed by earnest perusal of the memoirs of Fr Yves Congar belongs in a rubber room. But we knew that anyway.

Oh, my sides....

The "T" word

2006-11-19T23:12:00.001Z

CONSIDER the following heart-sinking exchange at NLM over the pro multis debacle:

If the Holy Father approves, that ought to be sufficient. Paul VI approved the existing translation, so it is valid. If Benedict XVI approves the new (and more felicitous) translation, it will be valid. Is that not after all why we have a Holy Father, that the Church may avoid the confusion arising from personal interpretation?
john m | 11.18.06 |

Does that mean that truth changes from Holy Father to Holy Father?
Rev.Hunter | 11.19.06 |

No, he's merely saying that one Pope said the one was valid; another said the other was valid. Paul VI, in confirming the validity of "for all," did not say that "pro multis" was invalid; Benedict XVI, if he prefers "pro multis," this does not imply that he thinks "for all" is invalid. There is no contradiction involved....
Bonifacio | 11.19.06 |

Pastor in Valle in the course of some very helpful sleuthing on the track of pro omnibus, raises more disturbing material, which I’d either forgotten about or hadn’t registered:

I had a memory that in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the encyclical of John Paul II on the Eucharist, that he had used pro omnibus for the words of consecration over the chalice even in the Latin text...

Can anybody doubt that solum magisterium is the operative norm in sections of the Roman Catholic Church today? Recently I referenced Dr Geoffrey Hull’s essay A Protohistory of the Liturgical Reform, which includes a vignette of the late John Paul II's subjective and postivistic attitude to liturgical rites; well, here he is, apparently, re-writing scripture to favour the universalist theories adumbrated by fashionable theological opinion. I really don't think it's possible to exaggerate how profoundly shocking and troubling this is.

If the liberation of the Mass is the essential condition of rebalancing the Church – the sine qua non - at another level it seems to me that some kind of major teaching document on Tradition and Magisterium is urgently required, on the basis that the only means of moving those who now appear to think that the Catholic Faith is whatever the present Pope/latest Council says it is (and who, in a sense, can blame them?) - is a Pope himself telling them otherwise. Last year's Christmas address to the Curia was encouraging, but pitched at dog-whistle level as far as the wider Church is concerned. I despair of ever seeing such a thing, for all the obvious reasons - but I’m convinced that the submergence of any clear, general understanding of what Tradition is, and what it’s for, is at the root of everything . I don’t think it’s only neo-catholics who suffer from this disability – I’m sure numbers of “traditionalists” exhibit it too, in a somewhat different sense.

I find the following analogy helpful. No doubt somebody will rush to deprive me of it on the basis of superior learning and understanding, but here it is:

JUST AS WE SPEAK of faith in two senses: the content of the faith (doctrine) and the supernatural virtue of Faith (the power, given by God, of believing the doctrines), so we can think of Tradition in a similar way:

1) The content of Tradition (as "incarnated" especially in the Liturgy).
2) The organ of Tradition – Magisterium, which exists to guard and faithfully transmit the deposit of Faith as present in Scripture and Tradition (in the former sense). It is by this "power" of the Magisterium (analagous to the virtue of faith) that Our Lord guarantees the indefectibiliy of the Church in everything necessary for salvation. It does not extend to anything new. It only enables the Magisterium to frame definitive formulations of what is already present in Tradition in order to make it more explicit, to remove doubt or settle a controversy by excluding an erroneous interpretation. Such acts of the Magisterium in turn build up the objective content of Tradition.

This doesn't mean that only the Pope and the Bishops have any responsibility for handing on the Faith and its practice; that responsibility belongs in a sense to all the faithful who as well as living it, are obliged to defend it from disruption and attack; the point being that an identifiable objective content exists to be handed on. These "norms" of Tradition should be present and operative in the forms and practices handed down and lived day-to-day in the Church. Consequently, they can never be considered as mere legal prescriptions.

Now, no-one would ever think of dividing the virtue of faith from the content of faith, in order to pit one against the other - but that's exactly what happens today in the case of Tradition. So, although it's perfectly correct to speak of "living Tradition"and of the Magisterium as a "living" organ of the Church (just as the virtue of faith is "alive"), liberals, modernists and especially neo-conservatives are all guilty of using and understanding this expression in a false and misleading sense, to indicate merely "the present, living occupants of the Magisterial office". What this false understanding of the term "living Magisterium" implies, and is intended to imply, is a level of possible opposition between the Magisterium "as represented by its living occupants" and the Magisterium as represented in Tradition.

"Tradition" in this one-sided conception, is deprived of objective content and reduced to little more than "the Pope of today telling us what he understands from yesterday". This, it goes without saying, “reduces the perennial ordinary Magisterium of the Church to a nullity” (Fr Parsons). This is precisely what the movement called "Traditionalist" exists to correct, not by deprecating the "organ" of Tradition but by reasserting the objective content of tradition to which the organ is ordered, and for the custody and transmission of which it exists.

In the absence of such a correction, we will continue to drift ever closer to the parody of Catholicism propagated by the Protestants - a kind of deterministic, totalitarean autocracy, having very little visible connection with the historic Faith

A History of the Church

2006-11-18T22:19:00.000Z

Apologies to Sellar & Yeatman - 1066 & All That

A LITTLE WHILE after Our Lord’s Ascension, He sent the Holy Ghost in the form of an Advocate* to frighten the Apostles into Doing Something. They ran off to the Market Place where they were supposed to have drunk New Wine, thus starting the Church of England. After that they did the Acts, at Home and at various Mediterranean Resorts. They were all killed, mostly by the Wicked Romans, except John, who went to the Greek Islands instead.

The Christians had to hide in Catacombs so as not to be fed to Lions by the Wicked Romans who were not Church of England and persecuted them. In addition, the Church was troubled by hearsay, put about by Bad Bishops and Vicars who Made It Up as They Went Along. They were sorted out by the Fathers who were Good C of E and remembered chiefly for having had very silly names, like Basil, Pseudo Denis, Turtlelion, Chris Tomtom, Origen of the Species and Cardinal Newman.

Everything got better when Emperor Constantine whose Mother was C of E from Essex stopped the persecution and made the Bad Bishops stay behind and copy out the Anastasian Creed, which took a very long time

An Emperor called Julian the Apostolate tried to stop everybody being C of E by Restoring the Gods. He got them out of Attics all over the Empire and began Cleaning them Up, but everyone just laughed. Soon all the Known World was Christian, except for some who went on spreading hearsay, and the Turks. The Turks captured all of the Middle East and North Africa, Spain, Constantinople and most of Eastern Europe. The Christians they killed and subjugated there were Decadent, not C of E, so nobody minded. The Crusaders minded, but they were Wicked Romans and Worse than the Turks.

The Pope was Top Bishop, despite being a Wicked Roman and living Abroad. He was fond of his indulgences, of which he had a great many, and was sometimes saucy with the girls. Lex Luther was a German, and he disapproved: girls were not for Popes to get saucy with, they were for Cooking and Children and Church. He wrote a list of ninety-seven things he disliked about Popes and their various indulgences, and nailed them to a door, thus causing the Reformation, which was a Very Good Thing. Lex Luther was not alone in doing the Reformation, but his friends are remembered chiefly for having had even sillier names than the Fathers - Kelvin Klein, Crammer, Zwingly and Melonthong.

King Henry VIII was married to Queen Catherine who was very beautiful and devout but she wouldn't give him any Air, so he locked her in a tower, which caused the King's Business. Cardinal Wolsey who was very fat, tried to run the King's Business for a while, but the Effort killed him, which was a Good Thing. Henry had the Sin of Lust. He met Anne Boleyn who had six fingers on one hand, so he married her instead of Catherine, which made the Pope very angry. Anne Boleyn wouldn't give the King any Air either, and neither would Sir Thomas More or Bishop Fisher, so he cut their heads off. Altogether he had six wives, and only one would give him any Air.

Henry told the Pope he wasn't going to let him be Top Bishop any more (being a Wicked Roman and living Abroad). There would be no Top Bishops at all. Henry would Do the Job Himself, and if the Pope didn't like it, he'd bring in Lex Luther instead (who was friends with Archbishop Crammer On the Quiet).

King Henry VIII didn’t much care for Lex Luther, but the Reformation allowed him to get back his money from the Guilds (associations of working men who had no business having it), and to let the Monks out of their Cells, on condition that if they wanted to go on Indulging the Pope they would have to do it Elsewhere. He had the Monasteries done up as Stately Homes and sold them to the National Trust. His daughter was Bloody Mary, who married the King of Spain and died, which was also a Good Thing.

Archbishop Crammer was awakened one night by an Angel, who dictated the Prayer Book to him, but that was later when the Air appeared. The Air was Sickly and was called Edward. He was very young when Henry died and the Nobles stuffed him full of Lex Luther so that they too could grab Church Property, do it up and sell it to the National Trust.

Good Queen Bess was very good C of E. She sent thirty-nine articles including a big Bible on a Chain to every Vicar in the Land. She also realised that all the Pictures and Statues of Jesus, Mary and the Saints stopped people thinking about God, so she had them all chopped up and burned and replaced wherever possible with a picture of Herself. She invented Shakespeare, the Armada and America, which was not such a Good Thing as it turned out. She politely discouraged the Jesuits, who were the Wickedest Romans of All.

Scotland had Ronald Knox. He had a very big beard and despised everything Roman. He wanted Scotland to have a religion of her own, so he brought in a new one from Kelvin Klein in Switzerland. Everyone had to have big beards and wear Hats in Church. Adultery was severely punished on the grounds that it might lead to Dancing. This was a very Good Thing for Scotland. He kept a Monstrous Regiment of Women who blasted Trumpets, thus causing the Salvation Army.

King Charles the Martyr was exemplary C of E, thus causing the Civil War, which he lost, and had his head cut off by Oliver Cromwell, who was a Good Thing Nevertheless, because he killed lots of Wicked Romans in Ireland. He liked the Scottish religion and introduced it to England for a while, but the English preferred Dancing, and so brought back the King, which caused the Restoration.

God was now so pleased with the British that he gave them Half the World to rule, heathen savages who had never heard of the C of E, and others who had been corrupted by the Wicked Romans. England beat Napoleon and the Germans (twice) before God got bored with Mattins and Evensong and sent them all New Books and lady Vicars.

THE END

*Scholars are divided over the precise nature of the apparition. According to translation, The Holy Ghost appeared either as an “advocate” or lawyer, or a giant parrot. Either rendering is acceptable in the context since there can be little doubt that both would serve equally to frighten your average Galiliean half to death.

The Baltic

2006-11-16T21:16:00.001Z

Whaur are ye gaen sae fast, my bairn,
It's no tae the schule ye'll win?'
Doon tae the shore at the fit o' the toon
Tae bide till the brigs come in

Awa' noo wi' ye and turn ye hame,
Ye'll no hae the time tae bide;
It's twa lang months or the brigs come back
On the lift o' a risin' tide.

I'll sit me doon at the water's mau'
Till there's niver a blink o' licht,
For my feyther bad' me tae tryst wi' him
In the dairkness o' yesternicht.

"Rise ye an' rin tae the shore", says he,
"At the cheep o' the waukin' bird,
And I'll bring ye a tale o' a foreign land
The like that ye niver heard."

Oh, haud yer havers, ye feckless wean,
It was but a dream ye saw,
For he's far, far north wi' the Baltic men
I' the hurl o' the Baltic snaw;

And what did he ca' yon foreign land?'
He tell'tna its name tae me,
But I doot it's no by the Baltic shore,
For he said there was nae mair sea.

VIOLET JACOB 1863 - 1946

Pandora's Box

2006-11-15T23:27:00.001Z

"To reverse the maxim, subordinating the standard of worship to the standard of belief, makes a shambles of the dialectic of revelation. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush, and what happened there was a revelation, not a seminar. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew the disciples to Jesus, and what happened there was not an educational program but His revelation to them of Himself as the long-promised Anointed One, the redeeming because reconciling Messiah-Christos".
Dom Aidan Kavanagh OSB

HOW DO PAPAL teaching documents come into existence? Many of us, I suspect, preserve a vague notion of the Pontiff labouring alone at his desk at the prompting of the Holy Ghost, in a manner reminiscent of St Gregory the Great in the familiar icononography. Of course we know it doesn’t happen in quite that way – all such documents are, to varying degrees, drafted, re-drafted, argued over and amended, at the hands of several parties. The Pope picks his men, commissions the work, makes his particular contribution whether formal or substantial, and sets his signature to the final document. Most of us know that the indefectibility of the Church is not involved in every minor detail or in anything beyond the narrow parameters of Pastor Aeternus.

Nevertheless, we sometimes seem to forget that the Holy Ghost’s protection from error operates chiefly in a “negative” way - even those of us who understand perfectly well that connecting the pipes and turning the tap doesn’t produce Pentecost on demand. Circumstances such as those surrounding the withdrawal and amendment of the original GIRM of 1969 are rare indeed; and although it’s appropriate to see in that particular episode perhaps one of the most explicit tip-offs from the Holy Ghost in modern history, it’s doubtful if a lively faith in the Church’s immunity from error could survive too many such incidents. More common are routine mis-statements arising from the exigencies of the times; minor in themselves, but not, perhaps, without consequences.

Consider the following extract from Mediator Dei (Para. 49)

From time immemorial…the ecclesiastical hierarchy…has not been slow – keeping the substance of the Mass and the Sacraments carefully intact - to modify what it deemed not altogether fitting, and to add what appeared more likely to increase the honour paid to Jesus Christ and the august Trinity, and to instruct and stimulate the Christian people to greater advantage.

This is uncomfortably close to being the very opposite of the truth. In fact “slowness” and extreme circumspection in introducing even the most tentative modifications or additions have always been the very defining characteristic of ecclesiastical authority in its dealings with the Liturgy; whatsmore, on every occasion when authority has intervened prescriptively to “modify”, the results have been, almost without exception, unfortunate. Trent, it would appear, is practically the only positive example of beneficial authoritative prescription in 1000 years. All of the rest - from Paul III’s disastrous Breviary reform, through Urban VIII’s mutilation of the Breviary hymns (corrected only after Vatican II) and St Pius X’s rearrangement of the traditional Psalter, to the reforms of Pius XII himself, have been questionable at best, deplorable at worst, and all disruptive of ancient forms. Even so, any idea that the liturgy may be made over in a spirit of pastoral or pedagogical expediency according to the subjective perceptions of a particular age, had always in principle been rightly and vigorously rejected.

I’m often puzzled by the extent to which "traditionalists" who rightly deplored the cult of personality surrounding John Paul II during his lifetime, and the santo subito agitations following it, themselves display an equivalent attitude in relation to one or other – or more usually all - of his pre-Conciliar, post-Tridentine predecessors. I often suspect such people aren’t really "traditionalists" at all, in any meaningful sense – merely ultramontane conservatives under the “wrong” Popes. The image of Pope Pius XII in particular as the “Last Great Roman”, the last faithful guardian of the flame of authentic Tradition and implacable foe of all of our present ills, after whom the Deluge, is still widely received. Mediator Dei in particular is routinely flourished by traditionalists to denounce the separation of altar and tabernacle, or the archaeologisms of the New Liturgy.

Dom Alcuin Read’s Organic Development of the Liturgy offers a more ambiguous account of Pius XII's relationship to the "reform". I was aware that plans for the Novus Ordo had been laid exceedingly deep, and that a blueprint had been prepared and circulated at the Lugano Congress as early as 1953 (attended by Cardinals Ottaviani - who offered Mass for the delegates versus populo - and Montini, on behalf of the Pope); that Pius, who took an active interest in the Liturgical Movement, had promulgated Bugnini’s Holy Week rites (now clearly revealed as a preparatory run for more radical incursions) and Cardinal Bea’s anti-traditional Latin Psalter (which rendered the Gregorian chant all but impossible, and was withdrawn by John XXIII). It is still a shock to realise the extent to which Pacelli was evidently in sympathy with those tendencies of the later Liturgical Movement which compromise the NO so deeply – an ultramontanist reduction of “reform” to considerations of mere legal prescription, bare sacramental validity and “pastoral” expediency, under which respect for Tradition as objective content is almost completely submerged.

In A Protohistory of the Liturgical Reform, Dr Geoffrey Hull cites Mediator Dei’s reversal of Prosper of Aquitane’s dictum lex orandi, lex credendi as “a Pandora’s box which (Pius XII’s) successors were tempted to open, and did”; and indeed this is much more serious in its implications than the minor mistatement noted above. Had Pius XII omitted this passage, or better, restated the traditional understanding more fulsomely and explicitly, the Bugnini project would certainly have been stopped in its tracks. Who was responsible, one wonders, for the drafts of Mediator Dei? Isn't it a fair certainty that the Pope would have commissioned the leading liturgical experts - the same favoured group of scholars working simultaneously on prototypes of the Novus Ordo, and the text of what would become Sacrosanctum Concilium itself; who unpacked and implemented it subsequently, post-'65?

In any case, we cannot simply go back and go on as before, as though nothing had happened. If resistance to what Mediator Dei at least partly helped to set in motion was just and necessary, it cannot be right to wish for a mere "restoration" of pre-Conciliar conditions, as though it were possible to consign to oblivion the knowledge of what was in fact done to the Church, by the Popes, in the second half of the 20th century. Undoubtedly it will take several generations for the fog to clear, whatever the judgement of history on those at the centre of events. Meanwhile, we, the living, do not have time to wait for the Church to “think in centuries” – we and our children, in order to fulfil the purpose of own brief passage here, need the sine dolo lac today. We will not allow ourselves to be deprived of it again.

No one, however, who has found his way, through sacrifice and trials, to the great Christian liturgy will allow any progressive or conservative cleric to deprive him of it. We must not think of the future. The prospects for a liturgical Christianity are poor. From today's perspective, the future model of the Christian religion seems to be that of a North American sect--the most frightful form religion has ever adopted in the world. But the future is of no concern to the Christian. He is responsible for his own life; it is up to him to decide whether he can turn away from the gaze of the liturgical Christ--as long as this Christ is still shown to us.
Martin Mosebach - from The Heresy of Formlessness

Lux perpetua luceat eis

2006-11-12T16:48:00.002Z

The Sarabite gives us the following thought-provoking prayer:

I am sorry, Lord, that I have wanted to be an angel and not a man.

I am sorry that I have expected others to be angels and not men.

Lord, grant me the strength to accept my own humanity.

Amen. It’s a standing paradox that “angelism” poisons the wells of our spiritual lives, precisely because everything becomes subject to a perspective that can never be ours. As a consequence, even things good and proper to us become suspect, or lose their former power to move us or to communicate the realities that stand behind them. This disincarnational spirit is everywhere today – in the liturgy and the liturgical arts most obviously, but as a consequence, perhaps, of an underlying drift into the notion that truth is a proposition rather than a Person (which amounts to a failure of faith); that the means by which we attempt to represent and communicate the Truth are therefore of marginal importance. Thin Calvinistic air starves our capacity to engage as we ought with things both seen and unseen. We are alienated and displaced in both worlds. It ought to be obvious to us that we can’t be integrated ourselves, or think in an integrated way about anything, if we start out by falsifying our own nature – but it isn’t.

The Catholic novelist Alice Thomas Ellis (RIP), in a riveting interview several years ago with “radio shrink” Dr Anthony Clare, described a protracted breakdown in her late teens, during which she received an intimation of Hell, not as a place of darkness, but of unendurable, inescapable, endless light. This marked the beginnings of her conversion. It has the ring of authenticity: the lux perpetua for which we pray is of course insufferable to souls separated from God; but it’s also a consequence of "angelist" theology that Heaven itself begins to assume an equivocal aspect - a place where nothing human can be taken, or found; a place that might easily be mistaken for the Other Place.

Edwin Muir’s poem The Good Town opened this blog as a kind of manifesto. Here’s another by the same author, who has also given consideration to The Good Man in Hell; I think of the following poem, “There’s nothing here…” as its complement - not quite “The Bad Man in Heaven”, but the natural man, in the "Heaven" of the Calvinists:

There's nothing here I can take into my hands.
Oh, for the plough stilts and the horse's reins,
And the furrows running free behind me.
The clay still clings to me here, and the heavy smell
Of peat and dung and cattle, and the taste of the dram In my mouth, the last of all.
These things are what I was made for. Send me back.
There is not even a shadow here. How can I live
Without substance and shadow? Am I here
Because I duly read the Bible on Sundays
And drowsed through the minister's sermon? I knew my duty.
But in the evening

I led the young lads to the orra lasses
Across the sound to the other islands. Summer!
How can I live without summer? And the harvest moon
And the stooks that looked like little yellow graves, so bonny
And sad and strange, while I walked through them
For a crack with Jock at the bothy : old-farrant stories
He had, I could tell you some queer stories. And then we would dander
Among the farms to visit the lasses, climb
Through many a window till morning. But that's no talk
For this place. And then I think of the evenings
After the long day's work ...

Paul VI’s idea that the church could move “as far as possible” in the direction of Calvinist-style worship without detriment to Catholic souls so long as the traditional orthodoxy continued to sleep between the covers of the Catechism, is a conception essentially “angelist”. It’s shared by a great many Catholics today, in whom a tenuous, theoretical orthodoxy coexists with indifference, if not aversion, to the traditional formulations of faith and worship. This manifests itself in the context of the sacraments in a kind of crass “validitareanism” that prides itself in emancipation from anything beyond the bare requirements of sacramental validity. “Oh, I don’t need all that…God doesn’t care about all that…”

Here's how pious Catholics destroy their own religion:

Point A - God isn't concerned about that
Point B - That's trivial - God doesn't care...
Point C - Come on - I don't think God minds very much...

These were all pretty minor things, so we'll also concede D - P as belonging to the category of trivialities, beneath the attention of the Almighty and superfluous to spiritual advancement. Nobody got hurt, so let's press on...

Point R - My faith isn't dependent on all that
Point S - I don't need any of that to worship God or pray properly
Point T - Haven't we got beyond all that?
Point U - What's the relevance of this is to Catholics today...

...and now we're getting on a roll. We've established a principle: that we can construct, reconstruct or discard according to our own perceived needs, without detriment to anything theoretically "essential". We've also started to alter somewhat the way our religious practice and beliefs look and "feel", because all those little minor changes of "unimportant" things, taken together, add up to something suggesting a real shift. We experience this shift as exhilarating and liberating and can't help feeling scornful of those who, unlike us "need all that". Forget them. They're the chaff, we're the wheat; nor do we consider ourselves under any obligation to take seriously the warnings of those who can see trouble coming: prophets of doom, reactionaries, Pharisees, fearful conservatives and others who never “got” the Gospel.

By now we're well on the way to re-constructing a truly “spiritual” religion entirely in our own image and likeness; but what was once, in our dim, distant and superstitious past something that brought to life the vision of Isaias or St John in the Apocalypse now consists largely of being read at by middle-class people in nice knitwear. Where did everybody go?

It’s a symptom of our disintegrity that the things we think and say about ourselves are often the furthest from the truth: and it’s precisely when a man proclaims his emancipation from “all that” that he reveals himself to be most conspicuously in need of it.

Solum Magisterium

2006-11-10T10:21:00.000Z

What is Sacred Scripture?
Sacred Scripture is Matthew 16:18.

What is Sacred Tradition?
See Matthew 16:18. La tradizione sono io.

The Cardboard Fence - A November Epilogue

2006-11-09T18:32:00.001Z

ABOUT THE AUTHOR - JULIA BROPHY 1943 - 1995

IN THE WINTER of 1950 from a basement apartment on Webster Avenue in the Bronx, a little girl of seven watched her father storm up into the street, propelled by her mother’s furious rage. She never saw him again. I never saw him at all, except in a single photograph, but pray often for his soul, wherever it is. He was the grandson of Irish immigrants - a kind, stocky man with troubled eyes and a love of music – a violinist. In the 40’s Roosevelt’s New Deal got him regular work with the Radio City Orchestra – between times he taught a little, took labouring jobs, began business ventures that petered out, married a beautiful girl from Buffalo with thick, blue-black Irish hair by whom he had two children, a boy - and this little girl.

The nuns at St Joseph’s school on Bathgate Avenue were austere and orthodox to a fault – the violinist’s little daughter learned her catechism, sang in choir, and waited in line for confessions every Saturday afternoon while her brother played stickball in the yard. She was bright, and the nuns, contrary to the 1950’s stereotype, were determined she should gain the most from such opportunities as this opened up for her, despite the little family’s practical dependence on the St Vincent de Paul Society. The Sisters coached and encouraged the little girl to gain a scholarship to a prestigious Catholic girls' school, run by Benedictine sisters in a northern suburb of the city. Her mother worked nights in a telephone exchange, while she travelled back and forth from school to the Bronx, dreaming on the “L” train of one day becoming a famous writer.

Her mother remarried (without dispensation) to a genial warm-hearted Jew, and moved with the girl to a more salubrious part of the Bronx. At seventeen, she had grown into the image of her mother, dark Irish beauty and dark Irish temperament. She resented the Jew and convinced herself she hated him; this alien interloper who had unaccountably supplanted her - by now thoroughly romanticised – father, and occasioned her mother’s excommunication. At the first opportunity she emancipated herself from the detested menage, by embracing the very thing that represented the death of her dreams: she “married an Irish cop” - a boy who had been besieging her since High School; he represented an “out” and she took it, though it meant the end for Columbia, where she’d already enrolled – the cop didn’t want an intellectual wife. She turned up for the civil ceremony in a black dress (this was 1961) and having burned her bridges with the Church, left him three months later following the first inevitable bout of abuse, running first to her brother’s artist’s studio in City Island (a portrait of her still hangs over a bar there) and then to the West Coast. San Francisco. 1962.

I met her by chance twenty-five years ago. Her lover, a little Scots guy playing the penny whistle in a damp November Athens street (an Oxford classics graduate as it turned out) invited me for dinner. We climbed the stairs in one of the old Plaka villas and the door was opened by this extraordinary figure, straight out of Hemingway: rich blue-black Irish hair, delicious smart-talking Bronx contralto well seasoned in whiskey and cigarettes; big jewellery, disreputable dressing gown, house impeccably tasteful, bohemian chaos; a nice little dog called Parnell. I was 24 and straight out of Glasgow. It was irresistible.

One day (some time after the whistle player’s departure) she asked me “Where d’ya keep slopin’ off to Sunday mornings?” I told her I went to Mass. Her face softened. “I ain’t been to Mass in twenty-odd years”, she said. “I heard they changed it all – what a stoopid thing to do!”. I told her that in Athens at least, things appeared to be much as they’d always been. She announced she was going to come with me. Sunday morning arrived and Julie was in a panic. She dressed as conservatively as she was capable and sat silent and pale in the streetcar all the way down Panepistemiou to the Basilica. As we walked through the west door she suddenly stiffened and gripped my arm “My bra just busted” she hissed. “I knew He was gonna pull some stunt like this on me – “Hey, Michael” he’s sayin, – “look at this!”” Mass was in Latin with Asperges and plainsong, but versus populo. “When’s he gonna turn around and get on with it?” she hissed during the Offertory.

Eighteen months later we were married in the same basilica of St Denis the Areopagite, and thus began an eight year theological argument, Julie kicking against the pricks, detesting “the changes”, me full of a new "Trad's" zeal and a young man’s inexhaustable curiosity. We moved to Sussex, and began trying to reconcile ourselves to English life; Julie also to later middle-age, a prospect that did not appeal to her remotely. Her drinking got heavier and then out of control. In the autumn of 1994 she started complaining of headaches and blurred vision. She flew suddenly into terrible, desperate rages which left her drained and weeping. By December she was diagnosed with an inoperable tumour in the brain, secondary to advanced cancer of the lungs and liver. “Get the priest” she told me.

By great good fortune I had made friends with a young curate, very recently ordained, who offered the Tridentine Mass privately. He brought the Blessed Sacrament to the house, heard Julie’s confession (which took most of the evening), gave her the Viaticum and the last rites of the Church. She emerged beaming with a radiance that hardly left her during the remaining six weeks of her life, despite the occasional bouts of fear and desperation. She took up her rosary almost, it seemed, at the point at which she’d put it down at seventeen. She told the priest and me on different occasions that she wanted to unite her sufferings with those of Our Lord for the conversion of sinners such as herself. He drove fifty miles from his parish to sit by her side into the early morning after her last admission to hospital. Her very last words were “Holy Spirit, give me strength”, after which she lost consciousness and died two days later, on the eve of Candlemas, 1995. She was 52.

I asked Julie what she wanted on her headstone. She thought for a bit and then said “Finally settled down” in that delicious wisecracking Bronx accent. That’s what it says. Below that, a line from the Song of Songs: Surge, amica mea et veni – "Arise, beloved and come."

Thank you

2006-11-08T21:57:00.000Z

...to all my visitors in this, my first week of blogging. Sincere thanks to those who have left comments, made favourable mention of the Undercroft elsewhere, or added links to their own sites.

DEUS, qui caritatis dona per gratiam Sancti Spiritus tuorum fidelium cordibus infundisti: da famulis et famulabus tuis, pro quibus tuam deprecamur clementiam, salutem mentis et corporis; ut te tota virtute diligant, et quae tibi placita sunt, tota dilectione perficiant. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum...
Amen.

De profundis for all your departed.

The Perambulator in the Hall...

2006-11-08T16:07:00.001Z

…was, according to Cyril Connolly, the deadliest enemy of Art. It’s the familiar manichaean, Brokeback Mountain account of soul-sapping domesticity, in which a man, having submitted conventionally to the slavery of biological and pecuniary imperatives, has his natural instinct for the good the true and beautiful crushed out by the burden of commonplace concerns and malodorous surroundings.

I ponder Connolly, one of the godfathers of what used to be called “the permissive society”, as a Brandenburg Concerto (period instruments) expands into the dimmer and dustier corners of the Undercroft like a brilliant and intricate planetarium made of sound. Philoprogenitive Bach (twenty children by two wives) is a favoured intellectual and aesthetic remedy around here for the generalised pretence and gimcrackery of modern life (a more satisfactory antidote, perhaps, than Sir William Walton, whose modestly attractive oeuvre we owe, by her own account, to the abortions he demanded of his young Catholic wife).

Connolly was an astute, erudite critic and a formidable stylist, who deserves to be remembered if only for such book titles as The Condemned Playground and The Enemies of Promise, even as the books themselves retreat from view. He believed that it was his destiny to deliver himself of The Great Novel – but he never did, despite the rational precaution of childlessness. The consciousness of artistic sterility tormented and further paralysed him, together with a semi-legendary, Oblomovian sloth. His wife, Barbara Skelton, describes him lying inert for hours at a time, the sheets (which he was in the habit of chewing) spilling from his mouth “like ectoplasm”. Naturally, he permitted himself to pronounce upon religious themes:

“In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt.”

Surprise, surprise, eh?

Imagination, Intellect and Will

2006-11-06T16:43:00.000Z

I WON'T BORE my visitors by pretending to be shocked by scenes from the Planet Novus Ordo. Every so often though, the radar picks up things from that strange, remote orbit that still have the power to render one speechless (or very nearly).

Paulinus, an English blogger, reveals that consideration is sometimes given to airing John Lennon’s Imagine in the context of the Liturgy. Now call me naïve, but I would have assumed hitherto that a lyric so crass as to be self-debunking would remain beneath the attention even of the most radically disconnected victim of the Hermeneutic of Rupture. Apparently not: Paulinus does the charitable thing, and joins the dots, provoking me to add a bit of colouring-in.

"Nothing to kill or die for…"

Okay – the old canard that people kill or die principally on account of “religion”; take away "religion", nobody will kill or die any more. Right.

People, as long as they are people, will die for (and sometimes kill in defense of) things they love and care about more than themselves. The world of Lennon's Imagine is therefore one in which no-one cares much about anything. It's the earthly paradise of the sublime egotist - an insipid nirvana empty of meaning or even natural human attachments. At best this represents a colossal failure of imagination - at worst it's anti-social, mendacious, self-centred and inhuman.

Let’s call things by their names. Imagine is sub-Rousseaunian mind-rot, packaged as chocolate milk and ardently promoted as wholesome by those who also hail its author as a genius and secular saint (what other promoter of the drug culture has airports named after him?). It’s gulped down eagerly by millions – billions; but the ideology it promotes and nurtures in undernourished imaginations is precisely – absolutely precisely – that of the Khmer Rouge.

Dominus meus et Deus Meus

2006-11-06T11:48:00.000Z

Thanks to Joee Bloggs (link right) for this.
SANCTE BENEDICTE, ORA PRO NOBIS

Châteauneuf du Pape

2006-11-06T10:06:00.000Z

Scene: A Wine Shop, in the Archdiocese of Bordeaux

Enter a Customer

Wine Merchant: Good morning Monsieur. How may I help you?

Customer: I’d like a bottle of wine, please.

WM: (sighs) Aaah. A Bottliste. How quaint. (sighs, rolls eyes) Tell me Monsieur: do bottles exist for their own sake or for the sake of the wine inside?

C: Well, for the sake of the wine, obviously…

WM: So why not simply ask me for wine, if it’s wine you’re after? What's all this about "bottles"? Why this obsession with confining the wine, with locking it up, sealing it in? It’s a glorious gift from God – the stuff of love and life – it ought to run free…

C: Very generous sentiments, I’m sure. It’s rather difficult to take home though, without a bottle.

WM: (rolls eyes) Look, this is the twenty-first century. “Bottles” are ridiculous in this day and age. Today, we use these!

C: That’s a paper bag.

WM: You know very well it’s not a “paper bag”. It's the most attractive, modern, practical and adaptable means of transporting wine. Do you suppose the first wine-makers used glass bottles? Of course they didn’t – they used wineskins – and as a matter of fact these bags are much closer to the idea of a wineskin than a glass bottle. You can get them in all sorts of colours and patterns – they’re fantastic! Look - we even do kitschy bottle-shaped ones for nostalgia addicts like Monsieur.

C: They leak. And they make the wine taste funny.

WM: Rubbish! They were designed by experts – they don’t leak. You’re simply not using them correctly. You should read the instructions. The “taste” thing is entirely in your imagination. Get over it.

C: Hmmm. I never needed to “read the instructions” to take wine home in a bottle. “Experts” or not, these things are always half-empty by the time you get them home, and what remains is indistinguishable from vinegar after two days. My wife started picking them up a while ago, till we lost patience with the leaks and the peculiar flavour. The kids thought they looked cool for about ten minutes, but they’ve never developed an interest in wine (I blame the peculiar, synthetic after-taste). They're into supermarket vodka, I fear…

WM: Oh, here we go…elitist snobbery about “vodka”. What’s wrong with vodka? Who are you to turn your nose up at vodka? Actually, we’re thinking about doing a line in vodka ourselves. You should listen to your kids, instead of sneering at them. How typically judgmental!

C: Look, I only came in here for a bottle of wine…

WM: No you didn’t. You don’t care about wine. You don’t understand the first thing about wine. You came in here to waste my time with your dead, sterile arguments about bottles.

C: Okay, can I have a bottle of wine please?

WM: NO!

C: All right - I get the message. By the way, I understand very few people come in here any more. Any idea why that might be?

WM: YES!! IT’S BECAUSE OF PEOPLE LIKE YOU!!!

The Border Widow's Lament

2006-11-05T18:16:00.000Z

REVIEW: JUNE TABOR - AN ECHO OF HOOVES

I AM PROBABLY of the last generation of wee Scots boys to have learned old “muckle sangs”, together with the earthier chunks of Burns, by heart before my teenage years. We took them for granted, and who can say to what extent their dark, beguiling cadences and macabre themes formed the stuff of our souls? In my own case “grain-belt” bipolarism – the unstillable oscillation between violence and remorse – survives the vanished appeal of heroic and romantic appearances – mere accidents of chivalric convention; like Webster, seeing “the skull beneath the skin”, the wee Scots boy knows that every suit of dazzling armour conceals a rotting and forgotten corpse. How many eight-year-olds today sing this?:

Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare,
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.'

'Mony an ane for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane;
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair,
The wind sall blaw for evermair

These are the Twa Corbies (Two Crows), planning with relish and efficiency the recycling of a “new slain knight” abandoned by his hawks, his hounds and his lady. The cold east wind playing everlastingly through a stripped, forgotten rib-cage is an image not easily effaced, especially when embibed in childhood, surrounded by the very moors, bogs and bleak uplands in which these events are set. Douglas, Percy, Lord Maxwell, Hughie Graham, Sir Patrick Spens - their grim, even when superficially heroic, ends - have, I suspect, coloured indelibly my view of the world, and especially of my own race, with whom, like the builders of those grim border “keeps” I maintain a complex and uneasy relationship.

“The Borders” (the lands on the Scots-English border) are Britain’s own Sicily – the violence and melancholy of the landscape finding a ready echo in the hearts of inhabitants who feuded relentlessly without reference or reverence to crown or law on either side of the river Tweed. Add a strong savour of Calvinistic pessimism and the ever-present consciousness of perdition, and you begin to get the picture.

Imagine, if you can, a nightclub in downtown Jedburgh or Coldstream, circa 1650 – the kind of place you’d go to unwind at the end of hard day’s blood-feuding. There’s whisky, tobacco and sheep's-offal with mashed turnips - but it’s the entertainment that really makes the rain-sodden slog here worthwhile. On the stage is a striking English woman at the height of her considerable powers, her dark, menacing contralto weaving the old tales in a new way, over the plangent, eerie-blue chording of piano, cello and bass. This is June Tabor, raising a familiar procession of Banquo’s ghosts to walk in their grave-clothes between the tables, indicating their wounds and the lamentations of their loved-ones.

Here is the new widow of Bonnie James Campbell, her barn to build and her baby unborn, tearing her hair at the sight of her husband’s good horse, returned with an empty blood-soaked saddle. Here is the newlywed laird’s vision of his chamber “full of wild swine and my bride’s-bed a –floating in blood”- his discarded lover, dead by her own hand, addressing him from the foot of the bed; a Bishop of Carlisle procuring the judicial murder of his lover’s husband – his blazing defiance from the gallows and avowal of revenge beyond the grave; the sleep-deprived fugitive duellist, who, waking in panic, fatally stabs his lover; doomed Sir Patrick “with the Scots lords at his feet” in the most genuinely moving arrangement of the old story I have ever heard. The Cruel Mother, new to me, almost unbearable in its bleak understated pathos:

Oh Mother, oh Mother when we were yours
You dressed us in our own hearts’ blood

You wiped your penknife on your shoe
The more you wiped the bloodier it grew

You buried us under the marble stone
You turned and went a maiden home

Tabor hardly puts a foot wrong: the arrangements are perfect – full of intelligence and authentic feeling for the old songs – but there’s nothing to match that voice, with its austere undecorated melancholy and seldom-absent note of menace. It fails only slightly when she succumbs once or twice to the temptation to over-egg the pudding; a slightly theatrical over-emphasis that mars – if only for a second or two – the masterfully understated quality of the whole.

The Twa Corbies themselves are absent – but their mocking cry and the moaning of the wind over bleached bones pervades the whole collection.

June Tabor – An Echo of Hooves (Topic Records TSCD543)

The Hermeneutic of Dissonance

2006-11-04T21:02:00.001Z

AS GK CHESTERTON observes, there are any number of angles at which one falls, only one at which one remains upright. That’s the context of the little diagram below. I’m aware of its deficiencies, and that it won’t pass for real theology. I’m aware too that it’s likely to make any kind of sense only to conflicted Roman Catholics of a certain persuasion (such as this blogger). Nevertheless I’ve found it helpful in sharpening my approach to certain questions and developments, so bear with me a little while; all will become obscure.

Think of the spot in the centre as a bird's-eye view of the end of a broomstick standing absolutely upright. It represents normative, traditional Catholicism. The ring around it represents the perimeter of the Church's faith, as defined by Scripture, Sacred Tradition (the content of Tradition) and the Magisterium (the organ of Tradition). The arrows represent three exaggerations, as directions in which the broomstick might be prevailed upon to fall. Now consider the following:

To suggest that doctrine can change at the behest of the reigning pope is to reduce the status of the ordinary universal teaching of the Church to a nullity, and to subvert its infallible certainty by a kind of dogmatic positivism. Papal remarks about universal justification, evolution, capital punishment and non-Christian ecumenism in subsequent years, have displayed this same tendency. The Fascists used the slogan Il Duce ha sempre ragione (The Duce is always right). The Ultramontane is a Catholic who asserts the same about the current policy (whatever it may be) of the current pope (whoever he may be).

If Eastern Orthodoxy can be charged with taking tradition as its operative norm, even to the obscuring of the present authority of the successor of Peter and to the loss of a centre of unity, Catholicism since the mid 19th century and especially since the 1960s, can be charged with taking the policies of the current occupant of the Holy See and a bureaucratic centralism as its operative norm, even to the obscuring of traditional formulations of belief and worship. In both cases there is an imbalance that needs to be righted.
Fr John Parsons

Briefly, the spot at the centre ought to be occupied by the official organs and institutions of the Church, together with the Catholic faithful. But it isn’t. They and their Ultramontane and neo-conservative apologists have, since the 19th century at least, been moving ever further “south”. This movement advanced without significant rumblings for as long as the Magisterium continued to uphold the normative, traditional praxis of the Church. Eventually, however we reached a point at which it was accepted, more or less without question or opposition, that “even … the traditional formulations of belief and worship” as incarnated above all in the Sacred Liturgy, could be suppressed legitimately by legal proscription – and that provided a theoretical orthodoxy was maintained, no harm could come of it, since the action was underwritten by Peter. In other words, a solemn anathema of the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicea was overturned without anyone much turning a hair.

Thence, Catholicism is more or less exclusively a question of “following Peter”, everything else being merely secondary and contingent. A loyal Catholic will therefore “accept” whatever an inimical bishop throws at him, because that’s the only viable definition of what a loyal Catholic is – anything else is “Protestantism” or “schism”. Thus, the Roman instinct for order and discipline is reduced to legalistic parody: Bishop X is “in communion” and in good standing despite the fact that he disbelieves openly in defined dogmas of the Church and promotes liturgical anarchy. Group Y, however, are “schismatic” because they wish to pray, worship and be catechised according to the immemorial traditions of the Church. From the perspective of those acclimatised to this view of things (looking at the diagram again) any attempts to restore the balance and persuade Catholics to re-occupy the centre, are seen solely in terms of movement “north”, and therefore in the direction of Protestantism or Orthodoxy.

The prototype of the Papacy is of course the Fisherman, who was famously inconstant, reckless, impetuous, and sometimes just plain wrong - but whose faith ultimately "would not fail" because the Lord, who called him 'Rock' and granted him the keys in spite of his human frailty, had prayed that it wouldn't. Modern Catholics, right across the spectrum, have forgotten Peter; “conservative” or “liberal” their idea of the Pope is a cross between Moses and Superman - the universal athlete, genius, poet, prophet, philosopher, saint. It is a conception essentially mobilist and positivist. "Follow Peter!" they cry, "that's what Catholicism is - anything else is Protestant!". But in what sense does one follow a Rock? Self-evidently this is not Catholic.

"Centrists" then, cast out of the bosom of the Church, persecuted and derided by their shepherds or marginally tolerated in precarious ghettoes, holding their breaths with every conclave to discover whether their religious existence will be protected or proscribed according to Papal whim or curial machination, are driven inevitably to ask hard, searching questions about the relationship of the Church to her past. In this, I always believed, they had a powerful champion:

For fostering a true consciousness in liturgical matters, it is also important that the proscription against the form of the liturgy in valid use up to 1970 should be lifted. Anyone who nowadays advocates the continuing existence of this liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the Church's whole past. How can one trust her present if things are that way?
Ratzinger - God and the World p416.

It seemed to me that Pope Benedict XVI really did intend to inhabit the “centre”, notwithstanding the reservations of many "Traditionalist" brethren who (unlike me) repine for the Tiara and the sede gestatoria. Self evidently, only the Pope is capable of reconnecting an ultramontanist to Tradition, and thus curing him permanently of his instability. So far, however, vaguely encouraging discourses and numerous rumours notwithstanding - nothing. And now, we hear, a coterie of French senior clergy, whose every published word confirms their terminal addiction to the “hermeneutic of rupture” and irremediable mental incarceration on the PlanetSoixante-huite, are making determined attempts to re-man the barricades. Will they succeed? If they do, is there any longer a point to the Papacy? If Benedict cannot make a home in the Church for normative Catholicism – who can?

What has brought this terrible crisis upon us, brewed apparently in the confrontation with modernity? I'm certain Fr Parsons' historical account is correct as far as it goes; but I'm increasingly convinced that a more radical aetiology is to be sought in the parting of the ways with the East. Afterwards, the lack of a "conservative" counterweight to the Roman adventure allowed a mobilist mentality to develop among westerners, already heady with renewed cultural and political confidence. The collapse of the East – marooned, supine and overrun by Islam seemed almost a historical vindication; in reality the Western crash has been on its way from the day we first monkeyed with the Creed.

I believe that one of the currents converging on the Second Vatican Council was an uneasy sense that something in the Church had gone too far, was becoming unsustainable and unbalanced. It's possible to see behind the Council's principle of Collegiality, for example, some sort of attempt at rebalancing, subverted at one level by that leitmotif spirit of bogus "democratisation" and at another, by its very prosecution as a project of the “new” Magisterium, to be pursued and imposed in an ultramontane manner, by agencies incapable of extricating themselves from an ultramontane bureaucratic mindset. The "party line" changed - the mentality and reflexive attitudes remained exactly the same. Revolution? We can "make" our own Revolution. God is with us! It can't fail!

Throughout it all one continues to believe that the Holy Spirit has been, and is, quietly at work - perhaps never more so than in the working-out of that explosive and toxic conjunction of ultramontanism and liberalism in the fall-out of which we grope our way today. To the ultramontane, legalist mind you need only the components – Pope, Bishops, Council - connect up the plumbing in the requisite order, turn on the tap and out comes Pentecost; but God, famously, “writes straight with crooked lines”. The Council was not "Pentecost". In consideration of its fruits and the darkness and confusion following in its wake, the suggestion is proximately blasphemous. Nevertheless, is it not possible that the aggiornamentist project, in its pride and folly, unintentionally set the match to an all-consuming fire – not of Pentecost but of Purgatory - from which a chastened, humbled and truly restored Roman Church can at last emerge?

The Cardboard Fence

2006-11-03T16:21:00.000Z

WEBSTER AVENUE
THE BRONX

BOLD FENCES MADE OF TIN and a lopsided garden of frail skinny flowers and beyond that, the Puerto Ricans working in a factory beyond a cardboard fence. A frenzy of childhood, facile and free, milk cartons and bruised knees, t-shirts and jeans, dirt and its musty smell, broken trees and lame dogs in a neighborhood of rusty weeds and Irish gossips with red noses. Mrs. Connelly and her moppy dog, beady eyes and wagging tongue who stopped by Mrs. Sullivan's window on a warm Saturday morning, Mrs. Sullivan appearing, a face in a dark window to share her one confidence and many tales they would stay for hours as we children played around Connelly's old-shoed feet pulling her dog's tail and him yowling, Mrs. Connelly so engrossed in gossip as not to notice her dog's suffering as we laughed in our dirty sleeves and reached for her pennies. Mr. Sullivan, sallow, calling to his wife and whispering in his thinness for Mrs. Sullivan to waddle her fat into the kitchen to make his lunch. Green lettuce and carrots, trees and spring worms from the ground that teased our palms and made us laugh with tickles and squirms and reaching behind the cardboard fence with bottles of soda to squirt the Puerto Ricans at their lunch. Clubhouses of old paper cartons and dirt that oozed into our souls and Let's Pretend on the radio with fairy tales to pillow our nerves and keep us whole for the falling leaves.

I HAVE A LITTLE CATHOLIC corner in my cupboard and reach beyond it for a prayer now and then; a world apart for lovers, with solemn chants and bells, feasting and sorrow and little trinkets, worry beads that speak I am hungry. School shoes, red ties, blue shirts and jackets, rosary beads and dirty fingernails and darkness, scapulars that glow in the dark; the confessional, and guilt streaming with the sun through stained glass. Mea culpa, lies to cover sins - broken windows, pawings in the dark. Behind a pew on wooden boards, red knees and aching back bless me father (I can't), sliding shutter and deep voice of the frocked priest and fear this is God I want to cry but there are no tears. Say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys on the marble floor before the altar and

DON'T DO IT AGAIN....

Into Christmas snow and Mass with blue ears and burning fingers at nine o'clock in the hoary morning when all little atheists are fast asleep under heavy blankets, not caring and damned, but warm just the same. Quick, the holy water bless yourselves and genuflect as the water drips from ashen foreheads and into the eyelids wiped hastily to read the troublesome Latin as it slips through mouths and fingers in lazy responses. Clipped hair, missing teeth, children in a desert of lonely voices that howl absently through the pipes with old Mrs. Browning in her purple hair and glasses and rolled stockings tied above the knees and sagging into the shoes pounding a tired organ Now sing children loudly above groaning pipes in the old choir loft, Alleluia! with the Latin chant of three young priests spilling incense into the sleepy eyes and noses of the dressed-up congregation. The pointed finger of Sister Freddie, tiptoe quietly past the center and never pass without falling to your knees. Be quiet, gold-ringed finger raised to her lips, Sister Freddie marches us up the aisle, the shiny brass bell held silently until all hell breaks loose on St. Joseph's church steps and the bell flashes clanging to life for thundering silence everyone hides behind the other kid Sister Freddie's bumpy red face sodden with anger, Father O'Hara appearing at the top flashing the shillelagh money changers at the temple in all God's wrath to wield the stick against the child that yelled. Father O'Hara drove away in his Cadillac then and tousled heads and dirty faces standing sullenly in line and hasty notes passed around behind the watchful eye of Sister Freddie's angry bell.

CONFESSIONAL at the creaky pews, kneeling on raw earth: footstools feel primitive, but never mind think of what you did, what did you do? Disobey your mother, tell lies, impurity, can't tell that, that's awful, but it's the biggest sin, okay won't tell that, so that's a sin of omission, one, two, three, five sins, okay, I'm ready: is that O'Hara they're sending me to? Hope it's Murphy, sweet old man, tell him anything he just nods wisely and gives easy penance, wish I were outside, dark in here and scary, kids playing stickball on Bathgate Avenue, can hear their voices. Holy Virgin with the candles in front, will she move and show me with a real tear on the marble cheek I am foolish not to become a nun? O'Hara's voice booming loud from the dark confessional and the window slammed; O God I'm next and it's O'Hara: offered the kid next to me the dime I don't have to change places with me - shuddered and wouldn't go for it.
- Bless me, father...
He knows it's me, his head is bent, what is he thinking of? It's so dark I can barely see him, pretend it's not me - too late, all right, on with it, police station next door and God behind the little red curtain and the devil in the basement kid just hit a home run heard the sock of the stick on the ball
- ...for I have sinned.
- How long since your last confession?
- Oh, yeh, I forgot, sorry...uh, a week.
What could I have done in five days quick think.
- lied five times
- Yes.
He doesn't believe me okay
- 'Scuse me father, six times.
- Make it seven.
- Yes, father.
- Say the rosary for your penance and make your act of contrition, child, get on with it, and speak up, will you?
His voice is loud I know the kids can hear it, OH, I FEEL SO BAD
his fingers are drumming on the wooden window impatient to slam it. It is so dark in here like a mother's womb or hell must be, can't stand it only thing in the darkness O'Hara's Irish face with his shillelagh somewhere floating above him ready to strike.
- loss of heaven and the pains of hell...
- Wooden window slammed, I didn't finish.
Search in pocket for the plastic beads an hour at least on the marble steps before the altar - damn O'Hara. Another sin. Oh for some sunlight!

GUY NAMED SODA down the block walking twenty times past the house burping and swiping at the kids with one milky hand while fondling a pigeon under his dandruff coat with the other, mumbling tears and anger under a cloudy sky past the Jewish school on the corner where the boys fly out circled yarmulkes on their heads, one long curl straddling each cheek and fifteen books under each arm us teasing in a sing-song voice. Why? said McGee transferring his cane to the other foot we are all children of God me not answering and upset but loving McGee just the same little man tall as my eight years living with the rocking chair lady in the boarding house around the corner, eighty year McGee smart as a whip and old Bill Davis with one eye on mom and the other on us picking up dirty candy from the street him chiding as tobacco drips from a chewing mouth to stain his white shirt front hoping for an extra cigar from the cronies holding up Ryan's saloon wall all day long, his friend with the cancer ridden face, nose and mouth in white bandages fumbles in his pants for the nickel to give us as we mess up Schwartz's paper stand grabbing for Archie comics. Old man Schwartz grumbles behind his egg creams passing newspapers to the gray man, oatmeal face above a bowtie who lives above us in a gray furnished room and makes the trip slowly under massive stone weight just for the papers and nothing more, from room to candy store and gliding back again, a silent ship not smiling once but watching always.

THE EMPTY LOT around the corner an abandoned house and sad broken windows creaky floorboards to disappear under, haunted we thought and played happily up and down the echoing stairs and hide and seek among the rooms deserted by its hasty long gone owners, threadbare rug used as a tent and teepee, dog just lifted his leg on as we chased him out, Willy Gabriel calling him gently then booting him down the stairs Willy's mother screaming from the floppy house, curlers in her hair boyfriend's arm around her waist and beer in hand, William don't tease that dog Willy cringing and saying damn her, then running into the next room to pull his sister Patty's hair and scare her into thinking he's a ghost. Mrs. Gabriel not pretty not caring reaching for her hot iron as the dog yelps between her legs, stepped on peanut butter and jelly, all over Patty's face her mother wiping with the dishrag.

Bernie Rochester playing basketball long and skinny and all freckles, eating baby food because he liked it even though we laughed. Never had a girlfriend, never ate a steak. Johnny Reese stringy hair rotten teeth, ate sandwiches made of sugar had a brother always angry, me chasing Johnny up a skimpy tree to grab a kiss to see what it felt like not caring that he had no teeth and ate all those sugar sandwiches.

A HAPHAZARD WOODEN FENCE around a beer garden where on Sundays the Irish came, stringing balloons and drinking beers, harmonicas in the night and us peeking through the hole in the fence; bar all lit up and kids on tricycles playing at the boozy feet all rubbed in gravel and empty beer cans, midnight and the kids still playing red faced mothers growing cozy and over their fences into the strange man's confidence as one hand slips around her shoulder, a woman slapping the child tugging on her dress be good we'll go soon stop crying Tommy damn it smiling up at the man no longer stranger after warmth of beers and romance of the fly-infested tinsel lanterns making it prettier to the loneliest. Reaching for a paper flower to pin in her hair, the woman slips down on her face over the picnic table helped up by her new friend his face turned but jingling in his pocket other coins and glancing secretly at his watch, thinking of the job calculating time and the kid's waking hours, Mrs. Connelly screaming from her third floor window, YOU KIDS GO HOME and me in the dark silence watching her red nose glisten in the moonlight.

IN MEMORIAM
JULIA BROPHY 1943 - 1995
Requiescat in Pace

Inter te et mulierem...

2006-11-02T21:45:00.002Z

MOST of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realisable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action. In the middle of the eighteenth century Johnson wrote: "We will not endeavour to fix the destiny of kingdoms: it is our business to consider what beings like us may perform." A little later Rousseau wrote: "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains." Johnson's sober truth kindled no one, Rousseau's seductive lie founded the secular religion which in various forms has dominated Europe since Rousseau's death.

Hugh Kingsmill - The Genealogy of Hitler

Sailing to Byzantium?

2006-11-02T00:00:00.002Z

I long for reunion with the Orthodox - but it isn't going to happen. Assuming my habitual role of Little Ray of Sunshine, it's my belief that disunity, dissent and infidelity are destined only to get worse until the Parousia. When Our Lord returns "will he find faith on the earth?"

How do you make three communions? Unite two. You'll have the new united Church and two irreconcileable "remnants". This is historically and sociologically true, but at a deeper level - at the level of the Faith and of theology, we cannot even agree on what "unity" consists of. For the post-Conciliar, Church-as-Communion Papalist, unity is a legal status. Christians are "united" insofar as the Pope acknowledges "communion" with them. This juridical and positivistic mentality is absolutely anathema to the Orthodox for whom communion is essentially a function of unity of faith and worship. The Orthodox Church is a juridical shambles - scandalously so. The Orthodox cannot (ergo do not want to) acheive juridical unity even among themselves. But in Faith and Sacraments they are far more united in fact than those "united" juridically under Peter - and that's the real scandal.

In the first millenium, we thought of the Church as Catholic and the Faith as Orthodox. The bifurcation of those two essential notes has damaged us all, beyond repair in human terms. In the Catholic mind, "orthodoxy" is essentially a question of theological correctness almost independent of praxis. In the Orthodox mind it's precisely the reverse: worship incarnates and therefore precedes doctrine (or lex orandi, lex credendi as we Latins used to proclaim). The Catholic mind approaches obstacles to unity in terms of theological or juridical "problems", admitting of theological or juridical "solutions"; and so we feel hurt and indignant at Orthodox intransigence. For the Orthodox, however, the Roman Church has departed from the unity of the Faith, and no juridical solution is conceivable, far less desireable, in the absence of repentance for, and repudiation of, her errors.

Considering all of this, I'm obliged to admit that it's only the insurmountable obstacle of Matthew 16, 17-19, and the unbearable sense of loss involved in relinquishing the Roman rite that prevents me from making my own "peace with the East".

Liturgical Reform

2006-11-01T23:05:00.000Z

Up until a few years ago we all lived together in a big old rambling mansion. Like most ancient buildings it had bits added, pulled down or replaced as the years passed; like most ancient buildings it was unique, and contained a number of priceless things - some highly valued, others shamefully neglected. Like most ancient buildings it had its drawbacks; rotting window frames, eccentric and inefficient plumbing, draughts, bats under the eaves. But it was home, and it occurred to very few of us that we might be happier elsewhere; however draughty and incommodious it seemed to some of us at times, it was beautiful, nurturing, the work of generations of our fathers with whom it kept us in intimate contact, and we loved it with a passion.

Then, when our leaders succumbed to the technocratic, rationalistic optimism of the 1960s, we were "rehoused" in our modern, purpose-built towerblock. A handful of old nutters, as always happens when progress breaks in on such people, barricaded themselves in the old place and refused to shift. Eventually the bulldozers were called off, perimeter fences erected and the leaders sat back to wait for the old nutters to die off. That ought to have been the end of it, but for an odd and unthinkable development. Numbers of young towerblock-reared families, sick of the vandalism, the condensation, the unworkable underfloor heating, the broken lifts and the always-absent caretakers, began returning to the old place. They found a hole in the fence, and discovered to their astonishment that the old nutters were still there, remarkably spry in consideration of their years and the privations they had endured while seeing off the now-departed demolition men. Gradually they were joined by others; all settled in much as though they’d never left – except that their love for their ancient home and appreciation of its uniqueness was even greater than before. They began doing up the old place and raising their children.

They would like their tower block neighbours to join them, but they can’t force them to prefer good air, fine architecture and organic produce. If the tower block dwellers won’t come back, their choice must be respected. However we're obliged to warn them: there are dangerous cracks in the foundations and the concrete reinforcements are failing; the chief architect and several of the contractors (you may not be aware of this) went to prison; your children can’t stand living there, and clear out as soon as they are able; those who remain run the gauntlet of the muggers and drug-pushers infesting the stairwells. And be assured further – no power on earth will ever drive us back there again.

The Good Town

2006-11-01T23:00:00.000Z

Edwin Muir's ostensible subject is mid-20th Century Mittel Europa; it's a poem which has great deal to say to Catholics too:

Look at it well. This was the good town once,
Known everywhere, with streets of friendly neighbours,
Street friend to street and house to house. In summer
All day the doors stood open; lock and key
Were quaint antiquities fit for museums
With gyves and rusty chains. The ivy grew
From post to post across the prison door.
The yard behind was sweet with grass and flowers.
A place where grave philosophers loved to walk.
Old Time that promises and keeps his promise
Was our sole lord indulgent and severe,
Who gave and took away with gradual hand
That never hurried, never tarried, still
Adding, subtracting. These our houses had
Long fallen into decay but that we knew
Kindness and courage can repair time's faults,
And serving him breeds patience and courtesy
In us, light sojourners and passing subjects.
There is a virtue in tranquillity
That makes all fitting, childhood and youth and age,
Each in its place.

Look well. These mounds of rubble,
And shattered piers, half-windows, broken arches
And groping arms were once inwoven in walls
Covered with saints and angels, bore the roof,
Shot up the towering spire. These gaping bridges
Once spanned the quiet river which you see
Beyond that patch of raw and angry earth
Where the new concrete houses sit and stare.
Walk with me by the river. See, the poplars
Still gather quiet gazing on the stream.
The white road winds across the small green hill
And then is lost. These few things still remain.
Some of our houses too, though not what once
Lived there and drew a strength from memory.
Our prople have been scattered, or have come
As strangers back to mingle with the strangers
Who occupy our rooms where none can find
The place he knew but settles where he can.
No family now sits at the evening table;
Father and son, mother and child are out,
A quaint and obsolete fashion. In our houses
Invaders speak their foreign tongues, informers
Appear and disappear, chance whores, officials
Humble or high, frightened, obsequious,
Sit carefully in corners. My old friends
(Friends ere these great disasters) are dispersed
In parties, armies, camps, conspiracies.
We avoid each other. If you see a man
Who smiles good-day or waves a lordly greeting
Be sure he's a policeman or a spy.
We know them by their free and candid air.

It was not time that brought these things upon us,
But these two wars that trampled on us twice,
Advancing and withdrawing, like a herd
Of clumsy-footed beasts on a stupid errand
Unknown to them or us. Pure chance, pure malice,
Or so it seemed. And when, the first war over,
The armies left and our own men came back
From every point by many a turning road,
Maimed, crippled, changed in body or in mind,
It was a sight to see the cripples come
Out on the fields. The land looked all awry,
The roads ran crooked and the light fell wrong.
Our fields were like a pack of cheating cards
Dealt out at random - all we had to play
In the bad game for the good stake, our life.
We played; a little shrewdness scraped us through.
Then came the second war, passed and repassed,
And now you see our town, the fine new prison,
The house-doors shut and barred, the frightened faces
Peeping round corners, secret police, informers,
And all afraid of all.
How did it come?
From outside, so it seemed, an endless source,
Disorder inexhaustible, strange to us,
Incomprehensible. Yet sometimes now
We ask ourselves, we the old citizens:
‘Could it have come from us? Was our peace peace?
Our goodness goodness? That old life was easy
And kind and comfortable; but evil is restless
And gives no rest to the cruel or the kind.
How could our town grow wicked in a moment?
What is the answer? Perhaps no more than this,
That once the good men swayed our lives, and those
Who copied them took a while the hue of goodness,
A passing loan; while now the bad are up,
And we, poor ordinary neutral stuff,
Not good nor bad, must ape them as we can,
In sullen rage or vile obsequiousness.
Say there's a balance between good and evil
In things, and it's so mathematical,
So finely reckoned that a jot of either,
A bare preponderance will do all you need,
Make a town good, or make it what you see.
But then, you'll say, only that jot is wanting,
That grain of virtue. No: when evil comes
All things turn adverse, and we must begin
At the beginning, heave the groaning world
Back in its place again, and clamp it there.
Then all is hard and hazardous. We have seen
Good men made evil wrangling with the evil,
Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.
Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace.
Look at it well. This was the good town once.’

These thoughts we have, walking among our ruins.

Edwin Muir