Hw-ay Gai

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

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

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.

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

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

"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

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...

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?

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

"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!

GRATIAS AGO SANCTE PATER!

Et cum fratribus nostris absentibus

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

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?

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

A word of reassurance...

...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 Trad Archipelago

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

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

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

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

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