I have already written on Counter Reformation Catholicism on the Anglo-Catholic blog. Though this blog has been in hiatus for some time, we can be grateful to its moderator for having kept the existing material in place. I woke this morning with the idea of adding a few reflections. Perhaps this desire was triggered by seeing the Brideshead Revisited series that appeared on British television in 1981. There has been a recent remake, which apparently makes a huge concession to the LGBT agenda, certainly not intended by Evelyn Waugh when he wrote his book. I prefer the innocence of the 1981 version with the extremely well-studied character portraits. Waugh was a satirist and the characters of his novels are caricatures, but amazing well-constructed ones. It is available on Youtube in ten-minute segments, which is tedious. I suggest either buying the DVD or getting a software package for downloading files from Youtube onto your hard disk, and another programme for joining the *.flv files. You can then watch the series at your leisure.
My seeing this series left a deep impression on me, as it was the time I was converting to Roman Catholicism in London, largely attributable to a friend who was himself under instruction with a Jesuit priest at Farm Street. My first port of call was St Etheldreda’s Ely Place, and then having been quite shocked at some of the things the assistant curate responsible for my instruction said, I went to the Society of St Pius X. The Fathers of the Oratory had been suggested, but I just felt out of place other than by going to their famous Sunday Vespers with full ceremonies and music.
In 1981, I was 22 years old and incredibly naïve about what aspired to be a continuation of the Counter Reformation Church known by countless English Catholics in the twentieth century. In the chapels and churches of the Society of St Pius X, I met many who had been converts as early as the 1930’s and into the 1950’s and heard their reflections about how the dream was shattered by Vatican II and the changes. I befriended a man by the name of Ken Cooper, born in 1912 and converted in 1932, who has served in World War II in the RAF and was a prisoner of the Japanese. He was very devout and did all he could to encourage the youngsters without the crankiness he found among many of his fellow churchgoers. I also befriended a priest of the same age by the name of Fr John Coulson who had been converted during the war (he was sent into Italy and was part of the Bari beachhead) and stayed in Italy and became a Camaldulese monk. Many servicemen did in those dark days of destruction and the close of World War II. It is said that the American who pulled the lever to release the atomic bomb on Hiroshima became a Trappist monk at Tre Fontane in Rome. Wars do strange things, they draw agnostics to the faith and make atheists of believers. It suffices to read The Waters of Siloe by Thomas Merton to understand the sheer numbers of former servicemen knocking on doors of monasteries in the late 1940’s.
So it was the kind of Catholicism I believed at the time I should seek out, offering a clear truth and certitude against all the errors and incertitudes of Protestantism, liberalism, agnosticism, atheism and the modern world in general. Through my friend who was going through instruction with the Jesuit priest, I came into contact with the various groups of conservative Catholics in London mostly concerned with apologetics and upholding Humanae Vitae. A little retro-futurism sufficed to project Pius IX’s aura of infallibility on the still relatively youthful John Paul II. I sensed it was another kind of Counter Reformation, less concerned about the liturgical rites than the Lefebvrists.
The triumphalism and certitude of the Tridentine Church can instil a sense of wonder in the innocent and those who have suffered in life. This kind of Catholicism welcomes a man with a long confession to make and God’s forgiveness to receive. It was a kind of Catholicism that repelled as many as it attracted. It oscillated between Jansenist rigorism and Jesuit voluntarism, and by the 1950’s it concealed deep corruption, perverted sexuality and excessive punishment in the schools and convents.
The Counter Reformation was an attempt to clean out the system and bring in freshness and clarity, concentrating on catechesis and pastoral work. The sixteenth century was the period that saw the first vernacular Bibles and more healthy devotions for the laity. If one is going to have a celibate clergy, then it is better to have religious communities. The two great innovations were the Jesuits and the Oratory of St Philip Neri. There were also the Theatines and the Barnabites. Many of those priests were from the Italian nobility and those communities patronised the arts. It was also a period of uniformity and centralisation.
In 1981, one could find Counter Reformation Catholicism in London in plentiful supply. There was the Indult in England for the old rite Mass from 1971 and the Latin Mass Society was a stable and assured institution. Many of us went both to the LMS and the Society of St Pius X, though the clergy of the latter did not like two-timing!
When I finally went to university five years later, we had an excellent church history professor who had obviously taken a great interest in the Counter Reformation and the anti-liberal polemics of the nineteenth century. He was of great help to me when I researched into the missal of Pius V of 1570. What were things like in the Church in those days? We have little to go on except documents and narratives. The impression I have is that life was a struggle for raw power, and the fires were fuelled by religious fanaticism. When they killed, they did so with a maximum of sadism and suffering: burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, breaking on the wheel and everything the perverse human mind could imagine. The following century was no better. It was also a time of sublime beauty with the art of the Renaissance. There were saints and holy fools of God, probably like in Russia under the Tsars. We can only speculate. In England, as the message seemed to come over in school history lessons, a nobleman had only to say a word wrong and he would be sent to the scaffold for high treason.
Much of the old fanaticism was flattened out in the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment and the acceptance of scientific discoveries of men like Newton, Galileo and Copernicus. The eighteenth century was a time when one could breathe a little more easily – if you were from the right noble family. It all ended in the bloodbath of the French Revolution with a wave of fanaticism against its fanatic opposite number. In the nineteenth century, it could not possibly have been the fault of the infallible Church and Catholic apologists saw a conspiracy everywhere – the secret societies and the Jews. By the end of that century, the country folk and urban working classes were alienated. Then there was World War I and the slaughter of millions of young European men and the “lost generation”. Popes Pius XI and Pius XII did and said what they could about the latest threats of Communism, Fascism and Nazism. By 1945 it was known that many bishops had collaborated with the occupying regime for favours and a power base, and the young priests revolted, attracted as they were by Communism. So it seemed, only the Communist had real guts to oppose the Nazis. Of course, that was not true, since many non-Communists also resisted and paid with their lives.
I see the Counter Reformation period (Council of Trent to 1945) as one of Hegelian dialectics, one of massive mood swings from thesis to anti-thesis and back to thesis, and so forth. The nineteenth century was one of monstrous conspiracy theories which fuelled the anti-Modernist polemics of the early twentieth. They still continue in traditionalist circles, and they have republished many of the books written in the nineteenth century against the Illuminati, the Alta_Vendita dei Carbonari and especially the Jewish organisations like the B’nai B’rith. The famous and successful American novelist Dan Brown did nothing more than to exploit conspiracy theories that lay just under the surface of the collective consciousness. Nowadays, most of the conservatives have either rejected these discredited theories or are more careful about what they say in public.
When I think of it, it is shocking to see every means exploited to defend and promote the Church except prayer and the gentle non-violent way of the Gospel. That alone says so much. No organisation that fights for political power and influence is immune from the temptation to justify evil by a finality perceived as good. This is something of which increasing numbers of ordinary people are becoming aware, and as a result are leaving the Church either to find the ideals of Christ in some other form or embrace secularism and the contemporary form of the Enlightenment.
I think that it is likely that the Church will continue on a downward spiral until it runs out of money and worldly power as conferred by political leaders openly or under the table. The Vatican should lose its status as a nation and come under Italian nationality and law, just like any cathedral or parish anywhere else in the world. Already, St Jerome in the fourth century had noticed that the Church had become weaker in virtue as it accepted favours from the Roman Empire under Constantine onwards. Cujus rex ejus religio – that was the slogan of the sixteenth century in the Catholic and Protestant worlds alike. It was about politics and power and not about Christ. How can one kill in the name of Christ?
As a final word, I had hopes that Benedict XVI was enough of a historian and theologian to see this problem. He certainly has, but he is overwhelmed and can do nothing about it. It would cost him his life – perhaps as may have happened with John Paul I. It can’t go on forever.
The Blue Flower 
You raise many a good point in this post, father. I personally see the ”Counter Reformation period” (broadly speaking from Trent down to Vatican I, and beyond) as a long series of reactions by Rome against her perceived enemies. With Trent it was the protestant, and so they took on such things as Justification by Faith Alone (which itself by the time of people like the Wesley brothers had ceased to be the hallmark of protestantism) and turned them upside down, in impetuous fear that such things as arose in the minds of men against Rome had no validity whatever. Protestants said it was a sin to deny the chalice, and so denial of the chalice was made law, for example. Then along came Gallileo, whose work was condemned. The Jansenists came along and proved that Trent itself, heralded at the time (and since) as the greatest of all General Councils, had not solved every problem, and so Rome had to assert itself again. Into the 19th century Rome was in deep trouble against the Italians and, as is often the case when Rome is weak (vis Boniface VIII and the King of France), resigned itself to autocratic solitude by pronouncing its own infallibility heaped together in the person of the pope, and the pope himself refusing to leave the Vatican. Unprecedented liturgical reform came in the wake of paranoid condemnations of Modernism. Etc, etc. Rome today has lost all credibility and will, as you say, eventually be assimilated into the Italian Republic like every other church in the world and will eventually run out of money and priests, and followers. I only hope that I live to see it!
Thank you for your thoughts. I would not go so far as to wish to see destruction and misery. A lot of babies will go out with the bathwater. Though I wish no one ill, I am afraid something along these lines will happen, even if they try another counter reaction. France has preserved the Palace of Versailles very well, and it’s a lovely place to visit. Italy also looks after its ancient monuments as best as they can afford it.
By the end of that century, the country folk and urban working classes were alienated.
I tend to disagree with that one, living in a city that was the cradle of most prominent “social saints”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bosco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Benedetto_Cottolengo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Cafasso
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Allamano
These people weren’t the stereotypical clergy wondering around in cappa magna, still they were doctrinally rock-solid and didn’t have any problem with infallibilism (in fact, St. John Bosco advocated it). But they were men belonging to their time, not paranoid beavers incapsulated in some anti-semitic conspiration theory.
In Italy, country folk were definitively alienated in 1960s, when in fact their civilisation, the last relic of middle age still surviving in countryside and isolated valley, quietly disappeared, leaving empty farms and mountain stone house behind her. If you travel through some mountain villages of Northern Italy were there are no ski resorts, you’ll find something similar to Macchu Picchu: abandoned hamlets that at the beginning of 1900 had hundreds of inhabitants and now are deserted.
Urban working class (consisting in part of sons and grandsons of the mentioned villager, thus the depopulation) followed a similar path and its original culture went erased by consumerism, alienation and television.
It’s true that catholicism in the past two centuries may have not been be what the average FSSPXer or rad-trad dreams of (I remember well Fr Chadwick’s remarks about an old priest saying that religion at his time was different from what lefebvrites intended), but on the other hand I wouldn’t dismiss the deep connection between peasant’s culture and catholic spirituality – that I had the chanche to personally know in the flesh of my grand and grand-grandfathers – simply as devotionalism and/or pietism.
I have to concede that it was very different in Italy than in France. But there are signs of fissures, the anticlericalism that accompanied the unification of Italy in 1870 and Le cinque piaghe della Chiesa by Rosmini – among many other things. Apparently, Pius IX was detested by many of the Roman people and they wanted to throw his body into the Tiber. But, on the whole, Italian Catholicism has kept many more of the country folk and urban working classes than in France.
Interesting piece, Fr. Anthony, but I heartily disagree the Holy See should surrender its sovereignty to any other state. The Vatican has no real earthly power, no “divisions” as Stalin had said. The money is pretty tied up in preserving and protecting the deposit of art and history of western civilization that is of benefit to all.
I also don’t share your pessimistic view that the Catholic Church is a spent force. That has been written of her many many times before with perhaps better reason than now.
I also don’t share your pessimistic view that the Catholic Church is a spent force.
I hope you are right and not only in China and Africa. Sometimes the patient comes to once again after having received Extreme Unction for the third time!
Before accepting my present position, I worked on a small island in the Pacific, it was very beautiful, but there the Catholic Church, dating from the time of the forced conversions in the 19th century under the Spaniards, was indeed very, very powerful both socially as well as politically. And although this was only a few years ago, their misuse of this power was horrendous. What the priests said was law and no one ever protested. So I will, from experience, disagree with Foolishness on this one, the Roman Catholic Church does have power and they do wield it; and usually for their own benefit.
Without wishing to repeat myself, I think that the whole notion of “counter-reformational” anything reveals something fundamentally flawed right from the start. That anything in which humans are involved is incapable of being reformed – for the better – is a fundamentally perverse notion. The Roman Catholic Church is not the only Christian “sect” to assert a special, primal or inerrant identity, but it is the most obvious and most notorious example of doing so. This assertion, which culminated in the dogma of Papal Infallibility (however nuanced), is in fact very harmful in the long term to Catholics and their institution because it is essentially, or becomes, an inescapable and suffocating burden of arrogance or, perhaps more accurately – in physics-speak – of anti-humility. It underlies, like a subversive cancer, every dialogue or conversation, so that in fact it become impossible for a Roman Catholic to ever – I repeat, ever – have a healthily equal conversation with another as equals unless they interiorly make a conscious effort to reject the claim. They thus can only interact with other religionists or atheists in any spiritually humble sense – which is what I think is required of us – if they dissent, become a dissenter or heretic, and this becomes a terrible emotional burden on people who, as we all do, wish to feel at home in the hone to which they grow accustomed etc.
It is not a question, in my view, of saying that everything that Luther, or Wycliffe, or Hus or Calvin – just to take the 15-16th century figures – said or did was right or better, but rather of admitting that the very notion of the counter-reformation was fundamentally a dummy-spit, and not a humble admission of imperfection and the need for forgiveness.
This is an issue of spiritual psychology, not exegesis or logic. One cannot begin one’s day on the journey to virtue and connection with God if one proceeds with any vestige of a privileged or quarantined position. This is why the Roman Catholic Church is increasingly like a man knee-deep in mud, only able to make any forward step with the greatest of difficulty. It responds to the idea of any reform or self-cleansing only with great reluctance, and when it does, it is evident that its ideas of reform are in fact no more than Stalinist purges, where everyone is vulnerable to gulagisation except the ones in charge.
There are, of course, great acts of virtue and saintliness and honest attempts to love God and fellow amongst Roman Catholics as in all human societies, but I venture to say that they are not the result of any “counter-reformation”.
I won’t belabour my view that the “Church” is the great vast community of people with all their warts trying to or having some connection with or movement towards – however tenuously – to the Gospel, elusive as it sometimes is. Or that the Roman Catholic Church is simply a large chunk of the debris from the train-wreck of Christianity. As the Gospel calls us to a life and journey of continual re-examination and continual self-reform, so too must those charged with guiding, helping, problem-solving organisationally – the “Official” church (as opposed to the rest of us) – eschew or discard any claim to divine appointment.
Father Chadwick and other readers here express in one way or another their vision or understanding of the essence of what the word “Catholic-ism” means. I do not think it has anything to do with “counter-reformationism”, Tridentine or otherwise.
From a RC point of view, I’ve always found the term “Counter-reformation” a little derogatory. Historically speaking, Trent fathers viewed themselves as truly reformators, and considering what the Church had become in XV century, some of the reforms that were implemented after the Council were long overdue, for example a reform of religious orders, of indulgences, but also a general reordering in the liturgy.
I agree; and I must say that I find Stephen K’s initial statement, as with so much else that he writes, profoundly devoid of of a sense of historical context. “Counter-reformation(al)” does not, and did not, mean “against reformation,” but against “The (Protestant) Reformation.” That is why so many historians over the past three decades have abandoned the term “the Counter-reformation” in favour of “the Catholic Reformation,” at least here in the States.
Yes, it is so very important to be sure exactly “what Roman Catholic Church” one is discussing, because pace Newman, there have been radical changes over time (not the mere development of dogma).
So the Catholic (Counter) Reformation is tied to Rome’s reaction to the Protestant Reformation. But just before that the Catholic Scholastic “Reformation” (including the “reunion” councils involving the EO and the mess made of the papacy) had radically altered what had preceeded it. Just compare the RCC in 1500 AD to 700 AD. And like Trent radically changed things, so too does Vatican II. Just compare 2012 to 1912! And would anyone disagree that Pius IX and Vatican I significantly altered the RCC? Just compare 1812 to 1912. But then the same could be made of the Pope “Greats” from Leo thru Gregory to Nicholas? Or the change wrought by Augustine’s new theology? Or Aquinas’ systematizing? Or compare the West in 200 AD to the West in 800 AD.
Just think what Luther and Melanchthon would say today if they…attended a New Order liturgy in German, saw all the lay participation at the liturgy, received communion in both kinds, read the RC bible in German translated directly from the original languages, saw a married Ordinariate priest, and then read the recent Joint Declaration on Justification! Their minds would be blown…They’d assume that they won much of the Reformation Era arguments. And they’d be more than a little right.
The jumble above is deliberate because the RCC is tied to both time and thought and that thought changed over time. So where one sets down is critical to evaluating what one is looking at today versus the past and what followed.
But Michael, the same is very much true of Byzantium as well. There are actually modern-day Byzantines who will declare that St Peter Mohyla is not a saint of the Orthodox Church and that his Catechesis (1640) is heretical!!!! I heard this not from an ill-informed layman, but from an OCA bishop! In the last forty years there has been a major theological shift within Byzantium, some of it very much influenced by Vatican II (just look at how many Byzantines are now adopting the novus ordo no kneeling on Sunday fixation and wearing white vestments for funerals etc., etc.)
Dear William, thank you for your concise and gentle criticism of my statements “devoid of any historical context.” It is true that I took the term “counter-reformational” out of its 16th century context – though I did allude to the context a little further on. I am well aware that the modern custom is to use “the Catholic Reformation” and that, even in the older sense, the term “Counter-Reformation” means, extended, “the reformation counter to the (other) reformation.”
But, if the truth be told, my responses to Father Chadwick’s articles are not intended to be rigorously technical commentaries but personal angles to things his statements evoke. What are some of the things he says here?
“In 1981, I was 22 years old and incredibly naïve about what aspired to be a continuation of the Counter Reformation Church known by countless English Catholics in the twentieth century.”
Then, later, he writes: “So it was the kind of Catholicism I believed at the time I should seek out, offering a clear truth and certitude against all the errors and incertitudes of Protestantism, liberalism, agnosticism, atheism and the modern world in general.”
And again, speaking of the pro-life-focused Catholics: “I sensed it was another kind of Counter Reformation, less concerned about the liturgical rites than the Lefebvrists.”
Perhaps, finally, Father writes: “I see the Counter Reformation period (Council of Trent to 1945) as one of Hegelian dialectics, one of massive mood swings from thesis to anti-thesis and back to thesis, and so forth.”
Father Chadwick has no idea how his statements will be read or what they will stimulate. It’s remarkably like the Scriptures, in a way. What thought-threads is a passage or verse going to initiate in a reader? One can focus on the use of a participle, or the choice of a word, or ponder the verse in isolation, or in conjunction with another, or with the whole. You know what I mean.
I’m aware of historical contexts but I sometimes try to express something else, some sub-contextual idea, some underlying principle or overarching framework. I might be trying to identify something that I feel is missed when only the surface is examined.
So, I look back at the “Catholic Reformation” and consider my immersed experience in mainstream mid-20th century Roman Catholicism both immediately prior to and after the Second Vatican Council as well as reactionary traditionalism, my spiritual reading and encounters with other Christians and religionists, and the consistent language and politics – both ecclesiastical and otherwise – of the Catholic hierarchy in particular and I see something that can be obscure to the passionately loyal or tribal: a resistance to change and criticism. Sure, there have been changes but often only the result of pressure from outside the inner circles of power. The 16th century is a good example of this. Luther’s challenge was the culmination of a growing dissatisfaction and distress over both theological emphases and the governance and structural issues that flowed from it. That it reached that point is an indictment on the Church leaders of the time; that the challenge went further into critical schism is an indictment of the Papal response and to some extent the timing and character of the Council of Trent and the “reforms”. What is the tenor of the response that can be discerned in the history, if not in great part an attitude of “How Dare You!”
Then, for the next 400 years, in the wake of the disintegration of a purportedly unified Western Christendom, the Church’s history in relation to other developments in state and thought resembles nothing so much as a resentful and curmudgeonly opposition to a series of “enemies”. Surely the history in relation to the Eastern churches can be similarly viewed? And observe the generally belated and tortuous responses to the abuse crisis.
This is both a broad sweep characterization and a selective one, of course. I have enough of an historical sense to appreciate that events are at once more simple and more complex and that in a sense, history is what happened not and is not identical to the semantic and thematic constructions we organize in post-factum analysis.
It’s also a personal perspective and one that tries to make sense of the existential unity and continuity of human events. I do think that there is an important psychological consequence of holding to a position that one’s Church, one’s religion, one’s dogmatic formulations are infallible, divinely quarantined etc. that retards the ability to achieve communion let alone unity with other Christians, with other humans, and so one. I note that artists and musicians and poets and mystics and contemplatives often transcend this attitude and somehow break through where apologists and hierarchs often stall.
I am often very intrigued, and edified by the contributions and personal perspectives of other readers who clearly appear to have rich and thoughtful experiences and reflections of their own. I hope, William, that this clarifies somewhat what I was trying to express.
Dale, As regard ongoing beliefs and faithfulness to a heritage…Try a thought experiment. If St. Jerome were to return to us today in the flesh and attend your average Italian, French or Spanish RC liturgy this Sunday and see what his Church now teaches and how it engages the world, would he recognize it? Do the same for St. John Chrysostom in Greece or Russia. Both are from about the same era. St. John would recognize his Church. St. Jerome? Or take Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas, about 800 years later. Gregory would recognize his Church. Aquinas? I think both Jerome and Aquinas would recognize change in their Church that had taken place at a foundational level. A radical change in how it viewed theology.
I have absolutely no doubt but that if Luther and Melanchthon were to wander Germany in 2013 they’d be very pleased with what they ended up seeing changed in regard to Rome since their (German) Reformation. They wouldn’t be completely pleased on everything. But on the whole, they inspired major changes (that just took a 2nd RC Reformation, Vatican II to complete). Take liturgics, I suspect both would have little problem adapting the New Order liturgy to Lutheranism and vice versa.
Yes and no Michael, as you know, I am very much opposed to the novus ordo, but one could just as easily say that a pre 1666 Russian would find the liturgical tradition of the modern Russian Church very odd indeed (especially the with the lack of congregational participation and operatic music that is now so popular); this individual would only feel at home in a church of the Old Rite Russians, the same as a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic would only feel at home, liturgically, in one of the traditional old rite Roman Catholic parishes.
Albeit the change from the old to the new rite in 17th century Russia is not as complete a break as the novus ordo has been, it is still very startling. My own first experience in the old rite of the Russian Church was such; it is indeed very different; and makes the modern Russian rite seem to be not much more than simply opera, gone bad.
I wish to expand my previous comment, as it induced in me some further reflections on the definition of what is Catholic, and about the reasons that made me a “traditionalist” at a certain point in my life.
Reviewing my family’s history, I remembered that, out of my four grandfathers, all peasants or small landowners, one was communist, one socialist, one pacifist (he mutilated itself in order to avoid enrolling in WWI conscription list), then not the typical churchgoers of that time. The religious columns of the family were the devout women, thus apparently confirming the “pietistic” and superficial substance of the Roman Catholic religion and the loss of grasp of the church in the popular classes in the beginning of XXth Century.
Nevertheless, my great-grandfathers were no less “Catholic” in their culture than their pious wife, and not just or not only in the devotional or moral aspects of the religious life (on the contrary, it was the time when peasants families’ birth rate fell from an average of 5 – 10 son to 2 son for couple, and Mussolini had to grant monetary incentive to numerous family). They were Catholic in the sense that they lived in an integrated and structured culture, with its customs, passage rites (religious and not religious ones) and language (yes, different from Italian, they were dyglot with their local dialect) and a sense of community and solidarity that they derived directly, even if unconsciously, from the monastic communities that returned civilisation in the swamps that our lands had become after the collapse of Roman empire and the barbaric invasion. They could maintain their identity even when migrating in the USA, in Argentina or Australia; they reconstituted there their original communities and the Catholic Church, in a sort of catholic philetism, helped them to maintain their roots: for example, a large community of people from my family’s village settled in South Wilmington IL working there as miners; my diocese sent there a priest (himself originating from the village) that helped to maintain the contacts with parents overseas and built a church with the same patron saint, St. Lawrence. I’d like to note “en passant” that is the same that is happening now with the Eastern migrants, helped by their Orthodox branches abroad. This phenomenon, though, don’t preclude the integration in the host culture, but dilutes and reduces traumatisms in the process, that being one of the reason why Eastern Orthodox migrants tend to better integrate themselves in western countries than muslims (and not the simplistic view that they are “christians” and therefore they find themselves better in a “christian enviroment” that, by the way, doesn’t exist anymore).
Now, this is the Catholicity I missed when I became traditionalist. Not a return to the totalitarian order and the rigid boundaries in society, not bakelite radios and 1920s hats or pipes, not just the beauty of the liturgy, but the nostalgia for a more integrated society where the individual could find sense, purpose and solidarity, shaped by the monks in middle ages and handed (“traditio”) in various form until, in the mid of the XX century, consumerism, urban drift and television destroyed that cultural environment. It was a great loss, not different in its endings that tibetan genocide, only bloodless. An entire culture disappeared. Languages were forgotten, whole villages were abandoned, Romanesque churches, colourful votive pillars that dotted the countryside crumbled ruined. My grandfathers traded the communitarian life for the comfort and the dis-integrated tumultuous life in the city, and I can’t judge them as they survived WWII and had enough of discomfort in their life. But I feel profoundly nostalgic for that now disappeared world; I had the chance to know and live with its last survivors, pastors and peasants happy even if living in poverty, as it happens nowadays in some villages of Nepal, where famine is defeated, but the unnecessary is still not strongly desired. In conclusion, I know that the watch can’t be turned back and I don’t want to live in a world without antibiotics. But can’t we try at least to recover the good that that culture –a truly Catholic culture – had in itself and that lasted for thousand years?
“out of my four grandfathers” shall obviously be read “four grand-grandfathers”..arrière grandparents. Si je pouvais m’exprimer en Français, tout serait plus facile! 🙂
Great grandfather pour arrière grand père.
Frederick William Chadwick (1859-1939), Frederick William Chadwick (1901-1987), Frederick James Chadwick (born 1928), myself.
Moi je lis le français, mais il faut que ce blog reste en anglais! 😉
You wrote:
“My first port of call was St Etheldreda’s Ely Place, and then having been quite shocked at some of the things the assistant curate responsible for my instruction said, I went to the Society of St Pius X. The Fathers of the Oratory had been suggested, but I just felt out of place other than by going to their famous Sunday Vespers with full ceremonies and music.”
How interesting. We might almost have met, since when I was living in Mecklenburgh Square (from August 1979 to September 1981) I went to Mass most Sundays at St. Etheldreda’s, with occasional side-excursions to the Oratory and to various Eastern Catholic churches in and about London. I never knew what to make of the French assistant curate, who preached so winsomely, if occasionally strangely, but whose opinions de fide et moribus were so very strange and “untraditional” as one got to know him, as I did (but there were a considerable number of people who seemed to think that his monarchism outweighed his “religious opinions”); and I was shocked and saddened by the reports about the history of abuse that came out a few years ago, shortly before the death, on the part of the then parish priest.
I always found the Oratory a bit “over-egged” liturgically (or perhaps musically) for my tastes, but I remain grateful for the friendship I had with the late Fr. Wilfrid Tighe (d. 2003) of the Oratory. We decided that we were “putative cousins,” and I used to visit him regularly during the years I lived in London and as I could on subsequent visits, for the last time, I think, in 1998. He was a very sane and sensible down-to-earth former military man, perfectly orthodox (and conservative), but totally without affectation.
Now, now, Dale . . . You’re really grasping at straws. You said above:
(just look at how many Byzantines are now adopting the novus ordo no kneeling on Sunday fixation and wearing white vestments for funerals etc., etc.)
Well before V II it was of great concern to many traditionalist Orthodox that that kneeling on Sunday had become so common in some places. This, they declared, was nothing but an aping of Roman practice in spite of being forbidden by the canons. I’ve visited a number of Orthodox churches for Sunday Liturgy, and have seldom seen any kneeling. As to white vestments: they have always been permitted, as the Byzantine rite has no such concept as liturgical color. That is a strictly Western practice.. However, black would have been seen as strange at a funeral, as it was and is a very unusual color for Eucharistic vestments.
Perhaps you should do a little fact checking beforte starting on a rant.
Ed, until very, very recently black was used for Good Friday as well as for funerals; the use of white vestments in Byzantium for funerals is very recent, except for children. I am mostly aware of the Russian practice since I graduated from a Russian seminary (S Serge, Paris), but the Greeks used red for funerals, and never white, until recently. This change in colour, which corresponds to Vatican II is very recent.
Virtually all liturgical books had directions for when to kneel in Orthodox services (Indeed the Holy Week Manual of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese expects the laity to kneel for the Mass of Easter!), and on Sunday that was during the epiclesis, to kneel during the words of institution was considered as “Roman” or Uniate. And the actual canon spouted by the so-called traditionalists does not even mention kneeling, but prostrations, which are not the same.
The Greeks do not have a liturgical colour sequence, the Russians do.
The biggest theological change has been attitudes towards Roman Catholic and Old Catholic orders; until only a few years ago both Old and Roman Catholic converting clergy were received via vesting, now it has become a jumble; sometimes a priest will be received from Rome via baptism, sometimes via crismation, and ordination repeated. The Carpatho-Russian jurisdiction was received from Rome via a telegramme.
A seminary professor of mine was received in the traditional Russian method by vesting, when he went to Greece they demanded that he be re-confirmed, when he later visited Mt Athos he was rebaptised and recrismated once again, but strangely enough never re-ordained. I would hardly call this an unchanging and concise theological foundation.
My facts are quite correct, thank you.
Oh, by the way. Many Orthodox will pull the “That was never the practice in Orthodox church” song-and-dance; but those of us who still remember the church of fifty years ago will know that most of this is rubbish.