The Minority of the Minority

Posted on Friday, 26 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The Real Live One blog, to my delight, has truly come alive with thought-provoking reflections. The two I most have in mind are the most recent.

Gathering a Sense of the Lay of the Liturgical Land : Traditional Catholicism

From 1981 until off-and-on between 1996 and 1998, I had first-hand experience of the traditionalist Roman Catholic world. I found the Society of St Pius X intolerant and authoritarian. I went from one illusion to another and in the 1990’s went the way of the Ecclesia Dei lot and the sterile aspirations of being the future majority once all the liberal fuddy-duddies had died off.

JV’s analysis is quite germane, and I detect the influence of people like Geoffrey Hull who quickly sensed a difference between “conservative” and “traditional”. The former would uphold the means (authority, infallibility, etc.) and the latter would uphold the end (the Church’s liturgical life as actually lived out). The latter would be ready to adopt a kind of “Gallican” ecclesiology if the Roman authority was of a mind to destroy traditional liturgical forms in favour of a reformation. He makes a further distinction between traditional Catholicism and traditionalism. The former would represent a “natural” and non-reformed state of the Church, and the second a “semi-reformed” state – admitting the principle of reform and modernisation but refusing the later consequences.

I don’t know if there are many priests doing what I do: using old local uses like Sarum and other diocesan and religious order uses in more recent usage. JV refers to the question of western praxis before the Reformation / Counter Reformation cycle. I have often written on this theme, and even in my lifetime have found bits and pieces of this older conception of Catholicism in France. An eccentric parish priest of Scottish-Cornish origins in Normandy, a brave priest who stuck his heels in and held his ground, a few bits and pieces in Normandy and around Paris. There was precious little of it in the 1980’s. Now, those priests are all dead and the parishes concerned are closed down or “reformed”, or occasionally given to the Fraternity of St Peter. The eccentricities were discontinued and replaced by the standard 1962 fare as provided for by the rules. I am lucky enough to have a large-minded bishop in the ACC, and I can do what I want in my own chapel, but I would be expected to conform to the standard Anglican Missal (standard Roman missal of c. 1920) if serving in a parish over in England.

The objection can be made. Why not drop it and put it all in museums and libraries? After all, this is the use the modern world has with “culture”. So-called “culture” is apart from life, from homo technicus, and made to be dosed and contained at will. It is only one step from destroying all the evidence. Even the French revolutionaries and Bolsheviks in Russia preserved cultural artefacts whilst they killed people.

What really alienated me from Roman Catholicism was this insistence on nothing outside the Reformation / Counter-Reformation dialectic, whether in theology or rigid rubricism in liturgical practice. At one time, what JV refers to as traditionalism seemed to me to be a lesser of two evils – between tight and scrupulous rubricism on one hand and the kind of liturgical abuse one would expect to find in parishes trying to be “with-it”. It is not what my experience with Anglicanism brought me to hope for and expect. Indeed, what I have tried to do is an eccentric’s task or the lonely research of a scholar. The kind of theory and praxis to which I aspired depends on a decentralised notion of the Church, something dangerously in common with the “liberals”. I discovered a lot when comparing Modernists like Tyrrell to demytholising, secularising and moralising liberals like Bultmann and Harnack, promoting a kind of “atheist Christianity”. Tyrrell worked to debunk the Germanic secularisers and seek a more mystical vision of Catholicism. Authoritarians like Pope Pius X simply rolled them all together and opposed both tendencies against orthodox scholasticism. Thus came the dialectic between Modernism and Integralism spreading into both religion and secular politics.

What does it all matter? I would ask them the same question about why it matters so much to them to narrow everything to their knife-edge criteria. Diversity and difference don’t enter their formatted categories. I suppose that if I were not a priest and I was living where I am, I would have to make choices between the available options: the traddies in with Rome, the SSPX, the local parish, some community of enthusiasts or a monastery. It is a consumer’s choice between one brand or another on the supermarket shelf! That is what it has come to. There is also a Church of England community in Paris. There are also a few Lutherans and Eglise Réformée communities dotted around…

JV more recently added Gathering a Sense of the Lay of the Liturgical Land : Traditionalism. He traces the history of pre-1962 modernisation, especially through the Pius X reforms in the Breviary. I assume he will comment on the Holy Week rites of Pius XII later together with the reinforcement of the Papal office through treating canonised popes as something other than the confessor and martyr bishops they were. I have no need to go into all the details.

In the end, it comes down to ecclesiology, because authoritarian papalism leads to a dichotomy between tradition ad authority. If you “convert to the true church”, you then have to accept ecumenism, religious freedom and a whole paradigm that undermines the Counter-Reformation notion of the “true church” designed to trash Protestantism. You then have to create some kind of ecclesiastical Empire of Romantia for yourself, or begin to ask questions. The problems come when we begin to seek intellectual coherence rather than be bludgeoned into being formatted into ideologies (black is white if the Führer says so). After all, has Catholicism not been a load of fairy stories for children? My wife often speaks of her old grandfather who preferred to have la foi du charbonnier (the faith of the coal-man or the ploughman) rather than ask questions whose answers would seriously compromise his innocence and sincerity. I am brought to think of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited saying to Julia – “You do know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?”

At one level it is all bosh. At another level, man comes to a new awareness of things and a new understanding of Christ’s mission. It is situated at the level of the spirit.

The traditionalist reaction has served to open up these assumptions to question, and they represent another side of “Modernism” as opposed to obedience to the totalitarian system. The notion of infallibility has at least to be minimised to the exact terms of the Vatican I definition (designed to placate the inopportunists) if not quietly done away with. Benedict XVI and Francis began along this line in a quiet task of deconstruction. Paul VI and John Paul II were the last of the ultramontane pontiffs.

In my own thinking, I could only go a step further and reverse my assimilation of the various papal pronouncements designed to trash Anglicanism (even the kind of Anglicanism trying to continue the medieval kind of ecclesiology based on the Kingdom and the Episcopate). There was no question of returning to the Church of England, so the way was continuing Anglicanism.

Now, is traditionalism a kind of “subtle Gnosticism”, term defined as a minority believing it is right against the majority? This hardly seems to do justice either to the heretical Gnosticism of Valentinus or the more “orthodox” Gnosticism of Origen and Clement of Alexandria. I have taken a great interest in Gnosticism myself (see Aristocracy of the Spirit) to the extent of reading books by C.G. Jung, Berdyaev, Elaine Pagels, Bishop Stefan Höller, the Nag Hammadi scriptures and Pistis Sophia. Too much of it creates a system of thought that becomes too high to assimilate, but the vision is profound and spiritual. It has appeal. I see little evidence of this way of thinking among most conservative and march-in-lock-step traditionalists. Rather to the contrary.

Can aspirations be fulfilled? Can anything be recovered? I begin to have my doubts, and their consequences would be too far-reaching for comfort. I have the impression of disciplining my thought and restraining myself very severely as I wait for dim flames of hope in orthodox (lower case “o”) Christianity. What would be my forecast for the future? The only thing possible is in the light of history. I see increasing polarisation and exhaustion in the extreme tendencies like sedevacantism (like with the Orthodox Безпоповцы and the Petite Eglise) and an increasing movement towards conformity on the part of the “traditionalist” groups. Outside the simultaneous movement of polarisation and exhaustion, people will increasingly seek non-Christian or “godless” Christian spiritual outlooks not depending on churches, communities or clergy. Of course, people might turn to totalitarian authoritarianism as they did in the 1920’s and 30’s in reaction to poverty and incompetence of their political leaders. Would the next Pope be a “reincarnation” of Pius XII, one who would take advantage of the upsurge?

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Young Fogey’s Latest

Posted on Wednesday, 24 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

John Beeler has come up with Catholic Defcon, the new Anglo-Catholicism, and more.

He makes much of my article about terrorists and liturgists, quoting it quite extensively. The question of Archbishop Marini is probably a storm in a teacup, since he is getting on towards canonical retirement age, unless the Pope wants a stand-in to do his worst “de-ratzingerization” in about two to three years. It’s their problem, not mine.

What does he pick up the most? There are my comments on the liturgical sensitivity of the Pope. Fine, he is not the first. It appears that Pius XII was not terribly interested in liturgical studies either! A second and more important point he makes is something he calls the Protestant Endgame. If there is no reason for Catholics to remain in the RC Church, they should become Protestants. Perhaps in America, but over here, they are “nones” – people who do not identify with any religion whether or not they are “spiritual” (not pure and hard materialists).

But if you really understand the teachings of the church, do you?

I think I know a few things having been to two theological faculties run by the Dominicans and a couple of years in an old-style seminary… The question then is one of schools of thought between ressourcement, the old scholasticism and the legacy of Nominalism and the “stingy” way of thinking. I have studied Thomas Aquinas, but have more in common with Tyrrell and the later ressourcement men. To me it is like colour photography after monochrome (though many of the most artistic photographs are black-and-white). I am also a Romantic having reacted against what I found to be excessive rationalism. I always have something to learn, and I read all the time, but understanding and ignorance are not my main “problem”.

Anglicanism, for example, which in its true form is “the ‘Reformation’ was godly, leaving England still Catholic but making it now the purest branch of the church,” isn’t the answer.

It may be the conviction of some Anglicans, but not mine. I have discussed the “two Anglicanisms” before, each defining Anglicanism its own way between the English version of the Reformation and its adoption of both Calvinist and Arminianism, and the English version of Gallicanism. I and most of the ACC Diocese to which I belong see things through the latter point of view. Some of the theories going around about Henrican Anglicanism are open to question and discussion. Personally, I refer more or less to what there was in common between Anglicanism in the 1520’s and the French Church in the 1720’s. Those two periods were far from perfect, like every other, but I prefer to follow a model than try to invent something of my own, which would be vastly inferior. I have many affinities with some of the early nineteenth-century Romantics, but their time must have been pretty awful between the London of William Blake and Charles Dickens to the Napoleonic Empire being run from France. Perhaps they were exciting times when single persons could make a difference and everything was in flux – perhaps like our own future… Seriously, what really interests me is not so much the trappings but life in a world where social units involved fewer people and a more human approach to everything. No period was ever perfect, but some were less inhuman than others.

I too know the three places of pilgrimage John mentions, one in Westminster Cathedral and two in York. Protestants were behaving like ISIS with all the gruesome executions of the martyrs, and the Roman Catholics were no better in the brief time during which fortune turned in their favour under Queen Mary. Anyway, all that is thought-provoking.

I won’t go into the problem of admitting the divorced and remarried to the Sacraments. It is a tough pastoral problem with two sides to the argument. We in the ACC follow the same discipline as in the RC Church, and any question of annulment has to be decided by an ecclesiastical marriage tribunal run by competent canonists.

What about reactions to a degrading situation in the Church? The Pope loses all credibility and the sedevacantist “position” becomes “mainstream”. So-called “liberals” start killing conservatives and traditionalists (presumably after having siezed the secular power of some country). I find the speculation sterile, and can only depend on the usual “the RC Church is the true church”. If Catholicism is wider than that particular jurisdiction under the Pope, then we manage in a different way or decide that sacraments and churches are not necessary. Of course, being a priest in such a situation makes things easier, though one can only empathise with the plight of a lay person who is alienated.

What about the SSPX and Rome? The cracked record has been playing for years. They have a little more cunning than Archbishop Hepworth. They keep the dialogue going for years without anything ever coming of it. It confers legitimacy in the eyes of the faithful and they continue as an independent organisation. It could have been like that for the TAC, but unconditional surrender was decided upon, and we all saw the result. What was left was deeply humiliated and now has very little visibility on the Internet. The SSPX has its friends and critics. I was a lay “pre-seminarian” with them in France back in 1983 and got out rather fast. I find their “line” rather boring, but they are resourceful and prudent.

As for St Clement’s in Philadelphia, I would be interested to know what Paul Goings has to say, since I have never been there. If it is true that the new rector of that church is a woman priest, I can understand that many would be alienated and would become Roman Catholics or Orthodox or would join a continuing Anglican jurisdiction. I have seen it happen in England, but I am now out of touch with London spikes like St Mary’s in Bourne Street or All Saints in Margaret Street. I’m not sure that John’s analysis is entirely germane about “modernism”, “semi-congregationalsim” and homosexuality. I would need to read another opinion from someone who knows that parish.

Ms Schori is retiring. I’m sure she will get a very good pension and bask in the sun in her old age. Who will be the next ECUSA presiding bishop? Watch other people’s spaces. You will find out quicker than if you rely on me for the information.

Death of adulthood in American culture. What American culture? When I was a schoolboy, we used to joke about the thinnest books in the world like English Cooking, Italian Heroes, Polar Bears in Africa, and so forth. One such book is on American Culture. That being said, I am a great admirer of Walt Whitman, Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein among so many others, together with the great number of American musicians, artists, writers, poets and actors alive to this day. One thing that is beyond me is that some people are still nostalgic about ultra-masculinity, whatever that means. I am more of a fan of Carl Gustav Jung who taught that the integrated person was one who accepted the balance of his or her masculinity and femininity. One thing that strikes me about America is that large numbers of people do the same thing and conform to the same norms. Is this the New World, or the beginnings of old Europe as we were in the 1920’s onwards? I have travelled to the USA four times, once to Maryland, once to Florida and twice to Tennessee. I found it fascinating, but the only thing I could understand was the language with the drawling accents. Sorry.

Nuff for now…

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A Couple of Interesting Articles

Posted on Wednesday, 24 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

One of my readers, who has just sent a fine comment on another post, has recently published these two interesting articles:

This one seems to complement my own posts about liturgists and terrorists. I suppose that the inability of Roman clerics to understand the value of older forms of the liturgy could be compared with the tax authorities in many western countries and people’s need for their own money! Any ruling class ceases to have any understanding or empathy for the middle, working and assisted classes. It happened to the Church. When Church and State were together like in eighteenth-century France, the result was that the guillotine did not discern between the aristocracy and the clergy! The worst the clergy need fear today is indifference and seeing their own sense of vocation slip away. That is the subject of another posting of our reader.

Putting the boot on the other foot, I am considerably older than many who write on the Internet or seek their way as Catholic laity or clergy. I went through my most feverish spiritual searchings in traditional Catholicism in the 1980’s, which is thirty years ago. The youngsters today were born in the 1980’s and 90’s. What is new for them is old for us. We in our 50’s and older do have some historical context, and have lived in an era about which we have but little nostalgia. The tendency is to lose sight of any hope or sense of direction, feeling sorry for the younger generation and doing nothing to encourage them in their freshness and enthusiasm. In my 20’s, I often got the same damper from men born in the 1940’s and who also lost their sense of vocation.

There is a paradox with our generation, that of rebellion against the establishment, but yet the appeal of stability of what has been lost. Just yesterday, I was discussing with my wife the question of generations of priests. The tendency in France is the growth of a conservative elite, but few in numbers. Those clerics are recognised by their wearing clerical suits instead of the older roll-neck sweater and a tiny cross pinned to the lapel. She brushed the latter away as the old 1960’s worker priest model. Actually, the 1960’s were a turning point where people sought meaning rather than simply follow the status quo that had led to World War II. I caught the back end of that current, and it haunted me throughout the bleak and sober years of the 1970’s and 80’s and the swing back to conservative and conformist values. The twentieth century (at least the last third of it) marked me profoundly, deeply alienated me. The temptation is to be counter-cultural, and many of us find ways. I opted for living in the country and as far as possible from the cities. That is an illusion, because we are still using electronic technology (as I’m doing now writing this) and feeding La Gueuse and its welfare state with our money.

From the point of view of someone living in France, I see the RC Church as something quaint and increasingly distant from those of us who live in villages, and even more from those who live and work in cities. The churches are still there. A priest comes from the nearby town to say one mass a month in the village church. My wife and I once attended (I was wearing civil dress) and we observed the sadness and alienation. No one came anywhere near us, and we walked home afterwards. There is no contact, no interest in dialogue with a religious person from another Christian denomination with different views. For me to approach them would amount to some kind of “application” or request for something. I’m not interested. Modernity can removed our capacity to care or express the least curiosity. That is the ultimate pastoral challenge of any priest.

I am involved with music at the music school at Saint-Valéry en Caux. Our choral group and vocal quartet often sing concerts in village churches, and are often well- attended. Often, the Mayor is there, together with some official responsible for culture. But, there is no Christian witness of any kind from the priest (from the next town and responsible for the Pastoral Sector) or the laity. They are just a boxed-in club concerned for their own survival, perhaps their close-down strategy and their pride of being the “last ones”. I’m not sure that such nihilism even enters their minds. The church building is just a corpse, and the only question is who can afford to fork out for restorations and maintenance. Some villages do well and care for their patrimony, especially in Brittany, but others care even less than in the most irreligious days of the Age of Reason.

The other article that struck me was A Sense of Being. Another person who often comments on this blog seriously challenged my vocation. I am one of those people who take themselves so little seriously that the thought came into my mind to ask myself whether he was right. Is what I do as a priest no more than an addiction to eccentric behaviours that have little or no spiritual meaning? It does happen with those who are so desperate to get ordained that they go to vagante bishops. I have to face it that this is what I did myself. The reaction of any institutional church would be to consider me to have forfeited any vocation in the same way as a secular judge condemns a heinous criminal to death. There is no rehabilitation, no pity, and the person concerned has to ask fundamental questions. For example – Would I want to belong to such and such a Church as a layman? If not, I would certainly be very unhappy in it as a priest. Yet, something prevents us from turning away with the firm resolution of never returning.

Truth to be told, young men often have their ideas about Christianity and the Church that belong in libraries and books on church history. The reality is about as boring as the Civil Service or a large business corporation. The Romantic world-view involves the sacrifice of our chances of success in the establishment, but it was surely the way of Christ who turned conventional ethics upside-down and passed for a madman or a false prophet given to committing blasphemy. This is the greatest paradox with any Church. We sacrifice Christ and the values of the Gospel to the grey conformity of the institution, or we have to accept our own “failure” and condition as drop-outs and marginal people. This is where my Goliard idea came in, from the marginal clerics in the middle ages who challenged establishment conformity and ran the risk of getting into trouble with the Inquisition. I find that I am more a product of the 1960’s than I thought. Fine, I stopped cutting my hair!

The vocation is a sense of being, yes, but it is also our relationship with humanity and our world. That is if we believe in at least some participation of created being in the Divine Essence. Like many from the back end of the 1960’s, we take an interest in ecology and raising awareness about alternative ways of living, the possibility that the Establishment and La Gueuse are not life and beauty. This was the lesson of St Francis of Assisi, the many fools for Christ in history and people who have returned to the land. Most of those people rejected the baby of Christianity with the bathwater of failed establishment religion. Perhaps a priest can go to them in the same way as a worker priest embraced the ways of factory workers in the post-war years. One often hears of “niche ministry”, an idea expressed by independent “vagante” clergy when it is not completely self-illusory.

Traditionally, a vocation is a call from the hierarchical Church, the Diocesan Bishop and the Christian people who need a pastor. We in the ACC have very little, but the essential is there. I have often to remind myself that I do have the call of a bishop. I do all I can to participate in the life of our Diocese, mostly by being on the Bishop’s Council of Advice and potentially responsible for training new priests. For eight years previously, I had been a priest of the TAC’s patrimony of the primate, at a time when it appeared that the former Primate was respected, ratified and called by his brother bishops and had every appearance of legitimacy. Even with all that, I often find it difficult to muster a grain of self-esteem and confidence in this wilderness of western Europe. I answered at my interview the question – What can you offer our Diocese? I answered – Very little, just my prayers and intercessions as an essentially contemplative priest. Even with that, I am married and have to deal with too much noise in my life. I am no monk! It’s not easy…

We read about others on their tortuous paths, struggling with spiritual and emotional illness. Stability is a rare commodity these days. It is best to absolve such people for any “true church” claim and let them find their way as I have to. Most of us burn ourselves out and something comes or it doesn’t. Indeed:

We all have our stories. We have all been shaped by things we largely have no control over. I have known two very good men who truly had a vocation and pursued it. Many more, however, have been caught in mire. Some watched their vocations fade away. Some clung to vocations they may not have had for reasons only they know.

For many of us, if we have been ordained and especially if a bishop somewhere with some legitimacy has called us despite our failings, we have only to persevere in our wilderness and the humility God has imposed on us. If we have not, then it is perhaps best to weigh anchor and go our way, painfully seeking the divine will that seems most of the time to be arbitrary or illusory. Our greatest calling is to rediscover what Christ was really about, and being a fool for his sake, living with the thorn in the side St Paul had to put up with.

In our youth, we seek identity, and most of those who claim they can give it to us have their own agendas and vested interests. In life, we rarely find what we are looking for and the reality is the boring daily grind.

There is something that recently sounded a chord within me, the Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. A young lawyer seems to have squandered his life, but yet finds his true meaning by taking the identity of a man whose live he saved and offering his death. The closeness to Christ is plain. See the film:

or read the book.

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Of Terrorists and Liturgists

Posted on Tuesday, 23 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

There is the old quip about being able to negotiate with terrorists more easily than with liturgists. The steer looks wistfully at the slaughterhouse door as discussions are held about who will be responsible for the liturgy in the Vatican. Will it be Archbishop Piero Marini who was one of Bugnini’s men who reportedly rewrote one of the official eucharistic prayers whilst forking pasta and saltimbocca alla romana into their mouths in a restaurant?

Quite frankly, Rome and Vatican politics interest me about a much as Sarkozy’s sleaze here in France or the dinosaur of socialism à la François Hollande that now reigns. What would be the best thing? Clearly a system reboot, and a new beginning. This traditionalist Eponymous Flower article is significant. My own thought is the simple question: They believe it is the true Church or not?

There is nothing official about Marini, and the pundits may all be wrong. From all accounts, Pope Francis has about the liturgical sensitivity of Paddy O’Flaherty’s goat and has little or no sympathy with the traditionalists in the RC Church. He does little to shut them down, but supplies them with no fuel either.

I was at Fribourg University in the 1980’s and attended lectures given by “litnicks”. One class was on how to compose a eucharistic prayer. There is a basic theme and Gestalt (structure) on which you improvise. I really wondered what I was doing studying theology! Are the anaphoras we have from the East and West, including the Roman Canon, not enough? Do we have to reinvent the wheel. My love of sailing boats conveys the same message. Nothing new needs to be invented – you just do what has always been done.

One of the greatest concerns here is the continuation of tradition. Can something that is lost be revived? That is the whole question about the liturgy I use, Sarum, which was abolished by the Anglicans in 1549 and superseded by the Pius V rite in 1570 (with the theoretical possibility of being allowed to continue it). The Roman rite as it was in the early 1960’s was for a time only continued by dissident and disobedient groups. It’s use in the current RC Church seems to be on a par with “culture” in modern technological society – put in a museum or on CD’s to be looked at or listened to from the outside. I have often observed this difference between old mainstream religion and the traditionalists.

God help us! Some of them exclaim. But will God show them more concern than the sea for a tiny wooden boat? God helps those who help themselves and do something about their predicament.

Pope Francis seems to have been about making people uncomfortable. Again, it is like Hollande after Sarkozy, veiled plutocracy after the same thing without a mask. Perhaps there is the idea of making Catholics “pure” Christians weaned off addictions like nice churches and liturgies. If that is so, then why bother with church? Perhaps we would be better Christians by practising Zen or sailing the sea in a fresh breeze and an overcast day. Why bother with popes, priests and churches? That is the way most people see it.

I admire the traditionalists for trying to keep something going, but they have to adjust their ecclesiology to justify their disobedience. Some do it by denying that the Pope is truly Pope (sedevacantism) and being in the Church in an “extraordinary” way. Others simply admit that Catholicism is a wider category than canonical subordination to the Vatican and local diocesan bishops. I don’t envy them any more than we anyone else envies us continuing Anglicans. We all live in an absurd world in which God seems to take very little interest. Sorry if that sounds blasphemous, but I have had this thought for many years, even to the extent of wondering whether the time of the Redemption was over and we needed a third Testament. Only later would I discover Joachim of Fiore and his theory of the three ages, the age of Christ being over in his lifetime. Yet, we recite novi et aeterni testamenti as we consecrate the chalice at Mass. Christ’s Redemption is valid for all eternity, but does it look like that in our world? I suppose they asked the same question in the twentieth century, that long “great” war than started in 1914, ended in 1989, or can be argued to be continuing to this day.

Do we have the right to let go, or do we have to “suffer for the truth”? Where is our notion of vocation? Who is calling us to the Lord’s vineyard? Are we thinking of things the right way, without excessively pessimistic prejudices? If we allow ourselves to be influenced by the media, whose job is announcing sensational and bad news, we seem to have little to hope for. We have not to give up, but we have perhaps to look further afield for new horizons. That is indeed “dangerous” for the blinkered traditionalist.

2013 was the year that saw the abdication of Benedict XVI and the election of Bergoglio, and also saw the French presidential election. I accuse Benedict XVI of nothing, but he was unable to cope with the pressures from elements in the Curia. Francis seems to be doing better in spite of his vowed intent to clean the Aegean Stables. Hollande promised to purge the sleaze from French politics, but his popularity has declined. If Sarkozy remains the only mainstream alternative, the scales may tip over to the extreme right. Would that be a possibility in the Church? I don’t think so, because most people would not want to go back to the 1930’s or 50’s. We need to be careful about what we hope for, because we might just get it – and regret it bitterly!

Curia shuffling? It matters so little to we who are jaded and cynical (modern meaning) and our reaction is like the day of an election – Why bother voting? They’re all the same. The way of the Goliards seems not to be too bad…

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Another World

Posted on Tuesday, 23 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I took the boat out yesterday at Les Petites Dalles (cf. A Sense of Wonder. Yes I have been there before), and took a few photos, which I could not yet do the last time. I would have liked to sail to Saint-Pierre-en-Port to the west, but the tide and wind were unfavourable for getting back. I sailed east towards Veulettes-sur-Mer and then went out to sea to get some better views.

petites-dallesThis is Les Petites Dalles. The petites is a bigger village than the grandes! I had forgotten the beastly steep shingled beach, which makes for big waves at high tide. The cliffs at this part of the Côte d’Albâtre are majestic.

cliffI was just a few hundred yards away from the cliff. Here is a place where there has been a recent collapse, going by the huge pile of pulverised chalk and flint not yet eroded by the merciless sea. These cliffs are receding each year, and many houses on the cliff tops have to be abandoned as too dangerous. No one in his right mind walks under these cliffs!

deux-dallesAs I sailed out to sea on a beam reach, I saw the conditions becoming more gloomy and autumnal. The two gaps in the cliff are Les Petites Dalles and Les Grandes Dalles. The headland to the right (west) hides Saint-Pierre-en-Port.

barfleur-luggerThis last one was taken a couple of weeks ago near Barfleur a little way to the south of the Gatteville lighthouse and to the east of Cherbourg. It is a favourite spot for weekends and days off, not too far away from home and very unspoilt. This is a lug rigged fishing boat, and apparently still doing its job. There are quite a few of these “old rig” boats around the coasts of France, and there is a revival, both for semi-professional fishing and pleasure.

Sailing in a dinghy or any small open boat is so much more flexible for exploring coastal waters than a deep-keeled yacht. I have often dreamt of having a yacht, albeit one of no more than twenty-five feet, but lack of money for mooring and maintenance has put paid to that idea. I say so thankfully, because the dinghy offers so much more. It is its own tender, and it is possible to beach the boat almost anywhere, inaccessible to yachts. However, a dinghy is limited and cannot cross seas and oceans. If I want to sail in England, I just hitch up the boat on its trailer and get on the car ferry! Then I can “do” the coasts over there. I would in time like a bigger and more seaworthy boat, but that has to wait for the time being.

I have often written about the sea as the last area of freedom for the man who learns to sail a boat and takes the necessary safety precautions. It is a place a mystery that speaks more of God than any treatise on theology. The depths are less known than the back side of the moon. The sea and inaccessible parts of our coasts are where we can find nature with no more disturbance from man than a single, silent, non-polluting sailing boat. The sea still offers peace and freedom to those of us who learn to handle a boat and navigate.

Seeing the land from the sea is a rare privilege, available only to those of us who board a ship or sail our own boats. The cross-Channel ferry is a vast stinky and noisy machine that bellows out diesel exhaust, but the views of the land are breathtaking. Most people stay in the bars, restaurants and shops like the town dwellers they are. Only a few go out on deck – the cigarette smokers and the lovers of the sea. If you go to the weather side, you can avoid the smoke and the nicotine from the Polish lorry drivers! On the other hand, the land might be on the lee side, and you might have the luck to be upwind from the smokers! On your own boat, the rules are different – no engine and no people who have no business being at sea.

Navigating is one thing that man has done throughout his long history, whether for food, trade or the quest for liberty. Boats also bring men (and women too) together in peace around a common understanding of another dimension in life. It is different from stamp collectors or people who are enthusiastic about motor cars or aircraft. Boats take us back to the dawn of civilisation and along the timeline of our history.

When I first attended sailing school, it was all about racing and modern high-performance boats. I only discovered dinghy cruising as I went along. I just began to sail along the coast and explore, and then found out that other people did it too. There are dinghy cruising associations in many countries and men writing books about this revival of the open boat, especially the reproductions of the fishing luggers of old. I am grateful for the racing training I had and being desensitised from the “trauma” of capsizing. One learns to “self-rescue” and cope with any problem so that someone else doesn’t have to risk his neck to rescue you. Again, I warmly recommend the The Dinghy Cruising Companion by Roger Barnes. This book is smaller and lighter than Le Cours des Glénans, reckoned to be the bible of sailing, but so much fuller of common sense, experience and humanity.

This is the big difference of outlook on the world between the Romantic and the Modern.

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Huntingford Helm Impeder

Posted on Sunday, 21 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

What could this be? As I haven’t done a boating blog post for a while, and I usually share my technological improvements, here is my newest one.

The problem is the oldest one in the book. When you are sailing a boat, you have to hold the helm and steer your boat on the course you have chosen. You can’t let go of the tiller to go forward in the boat to sort out your rig or just to have a pee. You have to hold the damned thing all the time, otherwise the boat will go out of control and perhaps capsize. In the history of seafaring, there has always been the option of lashing the helm. This involves tying the wheel or tiller of the vessel with rope so that the rudder stays in a fixed position. Jushua Slocum could lash his helm (no fancy self-steering gear) and set his sails in such a way as the boat would sail an arrow-straight course for hundreds of miles, allowing a man to get a nap between watches. That being said, a thirty-seven foot ketch handles differently from a light ten-foot dinghy.

On my little dinghy, I have experimented with a bit of string to tie the tiller pushed hard over to lee for heaving-to. It was quite fiddly, so then I tried a length of elastic bungee cord from one side of the boat to the other. I would just decide what position I would leave the tiller in and wrap the bungee around a couple of times. I needed an easier way to lash and free the tiller.

helm-impeder01I didn’t need to invent anything new, but the solution came from a dinghy sailor by the name of John Huntingford. He explains the device on a page of the Dinghy Cruising Association website. Here is a photo of the device installed on a boat to help conceptualise it.

helm-impeder02For the technical details, I’ll leave the dinghy-cruising reader to see the link above and this pdf, Helm Impeder. I’ll give some impressions on the device as I installed it on my boat. To set it up, I needed to work out the proportions between the amount of rope going through the fairlead on the tiller and taken by the snap hook, the length of the piece of elastic and the rope going from the elastic, through the aft pulley and forward to its cleat on the tiller. I got it right by trail and error, given that my tiller is rather short.

I took my boat out yesterday in very calm conditions, though the wind did manage to give me seven to eight knots. I would handle the boat normally, and I set the sails for sailing windward against the tide. I then pulled the rope on the tiller to fix the helm and experimented with the mainsail and jib, adjusting my weather helm and lee helm. I still need to be able to cleat the mainsail. That is my next project. In calm to moderate conditions, the boat sails itself – well, almost. If the sails are not very precisely set, the boat will veer off course and either luff up into the wind or go to lee. The system is designed so that you can give yourself both hands free just for the time it takes to reef the mainsail, take down the jib, free a fouled line or just to take a leak, take a swig from your water (or something stronger) bottle or eat something, anything. You can release the helm impeder at any time, just with one hand and then steer the boat normally.

This device involves friction, so I don’t know how long the crosswise rope is going to last before it wears out. When the device isn’t needed, it can be unhooked from under the tiller, and there will be no friction on the rope, which then just flops into the bottom of the boat.

Dinghy cruisers sometime tend to over-equip their boats, and one fellow I know calls his hobby Mirror Mods (1 and 2), meaning that he “tunes” his Mirror dinghy like young people in the 1960’s embellished their motorcycles with chrome and extra headlights and rear-view mirrors. It becomes a hobby in itself, and one is never satisfied. On the other hand, Mr Sumner has given me the ideas I needed for my reefing sail, the most important modification to my boat after the adoption of the Mirror rig. I esteem him and his long sailing experience greatly, even though his presentations bring a smile to my face. Each boat has its limits, and it is perfectly possible to ruin something that worked well before. There is a balance between having what you need, whether it is a long cruise for several days involving bivouacking or just a couple of hours in the bay. My boat is too small for a full camping package, so I tend to trailer-sail and be land-based, taking the boat out for limited trips. A new book has been published on this fascinating hobby – The Dinghy Cruising Companion by Roger Barnes. This book brought me to discover the Huntingford helm preventer and many other useful tips about anchoring, trailers, coastal navigation and all sorts of things. His description of sailing in Brittany, including the trip from Loctudy to the Glénans, is exquisitely written. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys sailing for the sake of discovering a different kind of life than what is found on land.

I have often sung the praises of cruising as opposed to racing “round the cans”. The sea is a space of freedom and spirituality, but doesn’t give a damn about breaking a boat and drowning its skipper. If we approach with modesty and humility, knowing our own limits, it is possible to escape the cares of “real life” even if only for a few brief hours. Roger Barnes is someone I would like to meet, and that might happen at the two events I intend to attend next year, the Semaine du Golfe (my humble boat has been accepted) and the Route du Sable. He writes about his boat, the Ilur, which is a wooden lug rig vessel, fourteen feet long and very beamy, designed by the French boat builder François Vivier. I must say that such a boat would tempt me in the future for its seaworthiness and simplicity. We’ll see… It is true that an Ilur would expand my horizons, enabling me to camp in the boat, and therefore no longer be limited by where my road vehicle and trailer can go.

I know there are some sailors who read this blog, especially my Spanish friend Juan de la Fuente who has my sister ship. There may be others who are bitten by the bug!

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Another Hanging Pyx

Posted on Friday, 19 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

another-hanging-pyxHere is another hanging pyx, in Dennington (Suffolk), courtesy of Fr Allan Barton in a Facebook article. The church is beautiful.

I find it quite similar to mine (see Hanging Pyx Revisited), but with a more complex hoisting system involving compound pulleys. It appears one would pull down on the tassel, and the pulley gear would be counter-weighted.I would imagine you have to use some kind of stick to push it back up.

For mine, you have to go to the credence to take the rope off the cleat (yes, like on a boat) and lower the pyx to the limit of the rope (loop at the end hooked to the cleat on the wall). When not needed, the pyx is hauled up from the same place.

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Clerical Celibacy Debate

Posted on Friday, 19 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The thread on De spiritali amicitia that veered onto the subject of clerical celibacy in the Roman Catholic Church is now removed from that posting. The comments in themselves are germane and deserve to be kept, so I have transferred them into this new posting:

* * *

Robert
Submitted on 2014/09/18 at 6:03 am

Aelred of Rievaulx’s father was a married priest! (One of those so-called ‘celibate clerical marriages’ that conservative Latins like to think were the norm in the West).

The Rad Trad
Submitted on 2014/09/18 at 7:45 pm | In reply to Robert.

Why the disbelief? The Western preference for celibacy clearly did not appear out of no where or, contrary to a surge of junk history in the mid 20th century, from St Gregory VII’s monastic impulses. The West valued celibacy early and it eventually came to legal expression because, as is often the case in Church history, because of abuses to the tradition.

Robert
Submitted on 2014/09/19 at 6:04 am | In reply to The Rad Trad.

No disbelief here. What surge of junk history do you have in mind? The now discredited scholarship of Roman Cholij? (Who has not only renounced his theories, but has since been laicised and married). Yes, the West valued celibacy, but it was never a uniform tradition – nor was it a mandated apostolic tradition that all clerics be celibate. In early medieval Europe married clerics were common. Whether they were an abuse or not is an interesting question. Clearly Rome had an early tradition of promoting celibacy (from Leo I?), but the fact that so many diocesan ordinaries overlooked these admonitions for such a long time is an interesting fact to ponder. Perhaps they were just disobedient? Who knows.

Sorry if this is off-topic, Fr Anthony. Please feel free to send to the RC blow-out department.

* * *

This thread may be continued here or on the RC Blow-Out Department as you wish.

I remember Cardinal Stickler singing the praises of Fr Cholij’s book when he came to do ordinations at Gricigliano (including my own minor orders and subdiaconate). I can well believe that historians of repute relativise the value of this book which I have only read partially.

The real issue for priests today is one of the fundamental human need for friendship and being able to trust the other human beings around him. It isn’t sex, nor is it particularly the need of being a father of a family. It is being able to have relationships with other people, relationships of friendship and communion with others, the word being taken out of the modern hyper-sexualised context.

Have priests live in communities? I think this is generally a good idea, if the community is founded on friendship as in the Franciscans or the English Oratory for example. In many other communities, clerics are so aloof from each other, or even nasty, probably (at least partly) because of the fear that friendship might degenerate into homosexual debauchery! If clerics are expected to live as lonely individuals without any human warmth and affirmation, they run the risk of emotional and mental disorders, especially depression. After the era of St Aelred, most monasteries with the Rule of St Benedict discouraged friendship and any kind of intimacy between monks. It is understandable, but a monastic community is more “Orwellian” than most of us imagine. It involves the surrender of personality, and not merely self-will and material possessions.

The situation of a man in a marriage involving a mentally ill or manipulative woman can be much worse. Marriage is no panacea, unless it is built on true friendship and selfless love.

The real issue in the institutional Church seems to be money: having to support families on priests’ stipends and avoiding property of benefices from being left in wills to offspring and not to the Church’s patrimony. The RC Church, at least in the west, would not solve the dearth of priests by abolishing mandatory celibacy. The “system” needs to be shut down and given a complete “hard reboot”. That won’t happen.

I see little point in discussing such a sterile and tired subject, but I am open to new insight.

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For the United Kingdom

Posted on Thursday, 18 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The Scots have gone to the polls. I thought I should get this in before the results come out. I pray that the Scottish people will vote to remain with the United Kingdom and contribute to peace and our national stability. Of course I am English and biased, but I can’t change that, however many years I spend in France.

I gather that most of the “Yes” voters are left-wing militants. I too am appalled by corruption in our political establishments and big business, but our nations need to stay together. If Scotland stays with England and Wales (Northern Ireland is another problem) I only hope Westminster will keep its promises to decentralise many things like taxes.

I read the news and I don’t know what to believe, but it would seem right for the UK to stay united.

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De spiritali amicitia

Posted on Wednesday, 17 September, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

It is quite a while since I wrote Aelred of Rievaulx and Friendship on the basis of the famous dialogue by Aelred of Rievaulx. Fr Hunwicke has just written two articles in this vein with the problem of homosexual “marriage” in mind – Newman’s sexuality and The demise of Friendship. I am at the same time surprised and not surprised to find others reflecting a subject that has long fascinated me in this adventure of life.

My own experience of marriage has shown me the limits of “romantic” love – and I have always been attracted to the Romantic outlook on life, the reaction from the excessively rational in favour of the heart and emotions, the love of nature and a mystical view of spirituality and religion. In any relationship, the “in love” aspect withers away, as usually does the desire for sex. After this stage, either the relationship dies for want of a deeper basis, or transforms into what amounts to a friendship. I find myself in this watershed, waiting to know what the best things is.

My own relationship with a woman in marriage has shown that it does not have the quality of friendships between two men without sexual activity. Fr Hunwicke’s knowledge of the Classics shows that love was not understood in the same way by the Greeks as by post-Romantic moderns. One thing that often mars marriage is jealousy, and I talk generally, when the spouse is not totally absorbed in the relationship to the exclusion of all friendship or love for things that are not shared by both. Relationships are also harmed by the feeling of being imprisoned in some kind of cooking pot with the heat turned all the way up, in such a way as defects of both persons grow out of all proportion. At least in a monastery, a monk can have his moments of solitude. That is also true in my marriage, when my wife goes to town to work, and I sometimes get out to sea in my boat or I go for a bike ride in the country. A relationship cannot live unless there are these times of solitude. My wife also feels the same way, describing the way she would sometimes spend time alone in her grandparents’ country house near Blois. Perhaps a new phase is on the horizon.

Outside this peculiarly modern concept of the relationship in marriage and the demeaning of friendships (its ultimate extent expressed by the notion of the Facebook “friendship”), earlier periods had other notions. Marriage was essentially something pragmatic and geared towards procreation and the nuclear family within a tightly-knit local society. That didn’t happen with my wife and I, because we were unable to have children. We have a reasonable degree of social life outside home and work, particularly in singing and music. I have my contacts with people who love boats and the sea. Friendship, whether with a person of the same or the opposite sex, is entirely at another level – often triggered by a common interest or hobby.

We do well to return to St Aelred’s book to revise our understanding of friendship and its character that goes much deeper than our marriages and nuclear families. Friends are more than just “mates” or “buddies”, and we make but few of them in the course of our lives. Losing a friend to some ideology or change is a cause of great suffering as I have found in my life.

Perhaps it is a dimension that might convince us that humanity is, after all, not a failed experiment!

* * *

Update: Please see Romantic Friendships.

I am far from convinced that we live in any sort of renaissance of traditional relationships between persons—far from it. Yet, as the functional view of friendship and the hyper-sexual love relationships pervades, it will become a bore for a concentrate minority that includes myself and many of the people dearest to me, and perhaps even you!

Indeed, we live in an absurd world to which only love can give meaning. That sounds thoroughly banal until the meaning of ἀγάπη / ἔρως is thought out in the light of the Christian tradition and Greek philosophy. Love would have no place in an Orwellian dystopia. We of a certain “aristocracy of the spirit” still have hope that something good will come out of the woodwork… That essentially was the mission of Christ.

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