Hoc Sacrificium Novum

Posted on Sunday, 23 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Update: Hoc Sacrificium Novum (2) However …

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Fr Hunwicke is coming up with a new set of articles, for his piece Hoc Sacrificium Novum (1) has the number one between brackets.

When I first began to use Sarum some six years ago, I had scruples about In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, acceptum sit omnipotenti Deo hoc sacrificium novum. One accusation by the Protestants about priests celebrating the old liturgy was that they claimed to make a new sacrifice, distinct from the unique Sacrifice of Christ. I was faced with the alternative of renouncing Sarum as a suspect rite or removing the word novum from the formula. If I did that, surely I would be committing the same error of modifying the liturgy for theological reasons.

My instinct is to follow a liturgy and not invent something of my own. Therefore, I had no alternative than to interpret this prayer as asking God to accept the sacrifice of the New Testament. Therefore, the Sacrifice of Christ is unique, but the Mass enables this unique Sacrifice alongside the entire Mystery of Christ to be made present for those of us who were not contemporaries of the earthly Christ. The liturgy gives us something that secular or religionless Christian moralism could never give.

Fr Hunwicke concludes this first part of his article by saying – “Calvary … and the Eucharist … conjointly, in that sense, are a new Sacrifice in as far as they are the Sacrifice Novi et Aeterni Testamenti.“He leaves us with the teaser of beginning a second part with the word “However”. That promises to be interesting.

We are forced to observe that no liturgical form or rite is perfect or perfectly coherent in a rationale. All rites are relative and contains defects in theological terms, or simply because of copyists’ errors, and those errors became almost of the same status of inerrancy as the Scriptures! I will also finish with a however, but certainly different to that which Fr Hunwicke intends to publish in the next day or two.

However, we need to have something, and meddling and tampering only make things worse. Certainly, leaving it untouched lessens the multiplication of corruptions and “accretions”. We humans have forgotten how to tolerate imperfection and approximation. That could be the subject of some very interesting discussion…

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Religionless Christianity

Posted on Sunday, 23 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This is a theme that emerged from an exchange of comments with Stephen K. A search on Google brings up quite a few articles related to Dietrich Bonhöffer. This one is an example – Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity.

What does the idea of “religionless” Christianity mean? The closing down of all churches? The running down of the priesthood and finally the suicide of institutional churches? My own mind asks one further question – Why not forget about Christianity once an for all and worship our bank accounts, cars and electronic gadgets? The thing we often hear is “I’m spiritual but not religious“. Very often, people are just that.

Is it, or should it be, the proper of Christianity to break with both Judaism and Paganism and express itself in a secular life guided by some moral ideas of Christ from the Gospels? It is not easy to get at what Bonhöffer is really trying to get at in the quote in the posting linked to above.

First of all, the scandal of churches collaborating with evil regimes just to keep their influence and property is one of the greatest obstacles to faith. It appears that Pope Pius XII is innocent of accusations of collaborating with the Nazis, but many bishops did and many innocent people died. The plug is pulled for what we believed underpinned our faith. Once that is gone, only atheism remains – or does it? Bonhöffer asks the question differently:

The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God–without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even “speak” as we used to) in a “secular” way about God? In what way are we “religionless-secular” Christians, in what way are we those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation?

I too have asked this question, and the only answer I can come up with is a kind of silent monastic or quasi-monastic witness. Do we have a right to withdraw from the “world”, or do we have to trash religion, go and live in a city and get involved with politics and humanitarianism?

Was the Redemption and salvation about being free from religion, ie: the empty ritualism of the Scribes and Pharisees? It’s a thought that can come into our minds. Was that the intention of Christ? No one has one single answer. On the other hand, religion seems so fragile, especially in a world that has trashed it. Our living in a godless world devoid of beauty or even humanity would bring us into a state of sharing Christ’s sufferings. Perhaps I would recommend that some religious bigots should live in places like Evry or the “working (unemployed) class” suburbs of Paris, Lyons and Rouen and spend their Lent in complete nihilism, far from churches. Perhaps they would be nearer to God in that desert than ever before.

How does the slogan go? Wear a hoodie!

To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man–not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.

Perhaps it all seems rather boring. We trash churches and religious art, all the monuments that lie around us. Alternatively we resign ourselves to the “museum of religion” being a permanent reproach, taunting us and forever bringing our sins before us. The idea that the Gospel is simply being about being good persons, law-abiding and with qualities of empathy and compassion, seems to reduce it all to a tedious moral code. Yet another moralising sermon and a return to the eternal hollowness.

Such thoughts make us relativise issues of liturgy and church furnishings. Should religion be hidden? I continue to celebrate Mass and do my priestly duties, but my religious life is hidden because it is absolutely senseless to make it public, provocative, and add to the scandal of religious symbols meaning something completely different and opposed to my inward convictions. For me to walk about with a cassock and very short hair would convey the message to many people here in France of far-right politics – to which I am opposed in the name of humanity, freedom and life. I experience many of the things that drove Bonhöffer to such a radical way of thinking, stopping a little way short of the nihilism of Nietzsche.

One of the themes of Lent is making our inner spirituality and humanity match what we do outwardly. Religion is vain when empathy and all human qualities are absent, when it is incoherent – as with the Pharisees or a “religious” person collaborating with the Nazis or other totalitarian regimes in the century of my birth.

Certainly, if religion is not to be trashed, we need to go through a real scouring-out and renewal of our inward life and our willingness to be human and humane. We need to heed the criticisms made against Christians, for our hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, cognitive dissonance, lack of care for others and our general “your death is my life” attitude. It is up to us. Very little is left.

Perhaps, some American soul might challenge me and ask me why I remain in Europe. Why not go to America where people are still religious and would pay me to be a full-time parish priest? I answer like the Germans who did not flee in the 1930’s because it was their country, like the Russians who stayed and suffered from persecution under the Communists. I am an Englishman, a European, and have no desire to move to America. Apart from the fact my wife would be against it, I find the present economic and political tendencies in the USA very frightening. The present situation with the US and Russia over Crimea is also very scary. The worst part is not knowing which side is the real enemy.

I go on because I know no better way. Perhaps I should have lived my life a different way, but I didn’t. I can only be where God has called me to be (otherwise I would be elsewhere). Why rack ourselves with that much speculation? Life is irrational at the level of our defective and fallen powers of reason. Sometimes we get the short end of the stick. It happened to Bonhöffer as he bravely walked to the gallows at Flossenbürg. Thus we participate in God’s suffering – and his Resurrection.

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The Rite of Spring

Posted on Friday, 21 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Fr Jonathan Munn has just written Springing into the English Lent or Lenting into the English Spring?

I don’t think we need to be too hard on the old Pagan feasts, since I often mention the “two Old Testaments” – that of the Jewish people and that of the rest of our ancestors. Both announced, through signs and symbols, the Advent of Jesus Christ and the Universal Church. But I think Fr Jonathan is “up to speed” on this point.

Nature itself is a sign of the Resurrection, which is already present in Lent. In the Use of Sarum, we have the Transfiguration Gospel on Ember Saturday (the Roman rite has it on the second Sunday of Lent). The glory is already there and we are shown what we are preparing for.

Indeed, though I am just over the Channel, in a part of the world that gave us English much of our culture, I miss many of the traces of pre-Reformation Anglicanism. He has some rather beautiful ideas about Lent. If it were meant to be torture, I would suggest as a penance living in a concrete city listening to modern noise and bustle and communicating only by mobile phone, Twitter and Facebook! For me that would be like a stint in Supermax Prison in America! Lent is not about punishment or torture, but about finding the essential by shutting out the maelstrom and the noise.

Lent is about finding God and ourselves through silence – inner silence, the silence of harmony. We do well to spend time in nature, away from towns and modern life. There is also human art and music, and Lent can be a time of honing our finer senses. It’s a most thought-provoking article and another look at this season – which some find interminable! The French say aussi lent que le Carême – as slow as Lent! For me, Lent is a time to treasure and take day by day. There is a Ferial Mass for each day during Lent when there isn’t a nine-lesson feast, and each Epistle and Gospel guide us through the stages of becoming as interior as we are exterior before we come to meditate on the horrors of human evil.

This year, we are invited to commemorate the beginning of World War I and what was effectively the end of World War II in much of Europe. As I have written in other articles, they were humanly the end of our civilisation – and we are either facing the end or a transition to something new. Perhaps this waiting is at the same time an Advent and a Lent. Last night, I watched the film Massacre in Rome, made in 1973 with Richard Burton as SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler. There are only two ways to react: deny God and sink into nihilism and despair – or seek to transcend the evil and allow Christ to conquer death. These are the themes we will follow as we reach Passiontide.

Treasure each day of this Lent. It goes too quickly!

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Mankind Returns to Childhood

Posted on Tuesday, 18 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

In my search for comparisons between Romanticism and Post-modernism, at least in terms of philosophy, I discovered this frightening article The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond.

Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.

It is something I suspect as we become increasingly depend on hand-held electronic devices.

With our saturation in floods of information and our decreasing consciousness as we use these machines, we seem to be playing with toys, surrendering our humanity for which Romanticism and Post-modernism fought. The ingredients are there for the fulfilment of Orwell’s Big Brother prophecy.

Can anyone be reassuring, or can you only confirm these fears of someone who could only say that he is glad to be a good way through his lifespan?

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Mal du Siècle

Posted on Monday, 17 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I often ask myself why people around us often seem sad and bored, especially young people, and especially in Europe. One thing I have discovered when reading about Romanticism is how similar many aspects of our time are to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Romantics denounced the same things as we do today: the dark satanic mills and extreme financial difficulties of countless people, victims of pitiless capitalist economics. The years following the French Revolution were also a period of materialism and spiritual emptiness. In the upper classes, a certain spiritual ailment reigned. It was called in French the Mal du Siècle, inability to live in one’s time. It was a kind of boredom and melancholy, something between acedia and clinical depression.

Victor Hugo described it in Les Travailleurs de la Mer – “La mélancolie est un crépuscule. La souffrance s’y fond dans une sombre joie. La mélancolie, c’est le bonheur d’être triste“. Melancholy is a sunset. Suffer melts into dark joy. Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

We often find this sadness among the artists and writers of those days when Napoleon’s France and George III’s England were still at war, when the map of Europe was being redrawn. The individual feels unable to relate to society and revolts against a political system that crushes the artist. We feel a feeling that there is no past and no future. Alfred de Musset wrote On ne sait, à chaque pas que l’on fait, si l’on marche sur une semence ou sur un débris. Each time we take a step, we don’t know whether we are treading on a seed or debris. It is surprising to find as much in the way of nihilism in those days as now among our post-modern young people. We can hardly mention Musset without also bringing up Chateaubriand’s René.We find many of the same themes in Delius’ opera Fennimore and Gerda.

We doubtless find the same spiritual emptiness and apathy to beauty as in those days two hundred years ago. The parallels are the same between the rationalism of the eighteenth century and our own atheism, the industrial revolution to the development of the same thing today.

Two hundred years ago, it was the period of Romanticism, when some reacted through moroseness and others through art and beauty. It was a sort of “counter-enlightenment”. I am sceptical about “counter” movement as with the Counter Reformation (and the Reformation). Apart from the moroseness of some, I see a great amount of energy and unity in a movement of extremely diverse personalities over a long time scale. Romanticism is a consequence of the French Revolution, and many of its proponents had a wide range of conservative and progressive views.

We find many inner goals in this movement, namely a Platonic notion of beauty, spiritual freedom and creativity, the ideas in later Russian philosophers like Berdyaev whom I have admired for many years. There is a notion of freeing the heart and emotions from the dictatorship of reason. Romanticism and its era in the early nineteenth century reflect many of the things we think, feel and say today.

There are many popular subcultures evoking ideas of Romanticism, and I see strands of continuity. We should try to live fully in our own times (we cannot live in any other) but with many of the more positive and constructive ideas Romanticism had to offer in its own time. It is a world view with which I sympathise.

To provide lines for comments, I would like to put out several ideas with which some of us might identify:

  • A reaction against the intellectualism of the Enlightenment, against excessively rational theology and thought,
  • A reaction against the rigidity of social structures protecting privilege,
  • A reaction against the materialism of an age which, in the first stirring of the Industrial Revolution, already shows signs of making workers the slaves of machinery and of creating squalid urban environments.
  • A response to emotion and the ‘heart’ more than reason, the desire for mystery rather than clarity of concepts, the primacy of the conscience and the person over social conventions and demands, perhaps underpinning many of the cultural characteristics of the 1960’s.

I also recommend an attentive reading of this article.

They felt that, for human beings, it was our own day-to-day living that was the centre of our search for the truth.  Reason and the evidence of our senses were important, no doubt, but they mean nothing to us unless they touch our needs, our feelings, our emotions.  Only then do they acquire meaning.  This “meaning” is what the Romantic movement is all about.

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Sarum in the Roman Catholic Church

Posted on Sunday, 16 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have just been revising the fascinating article The Legal Status of the Sarum Use in the Catholic Church and the comments that followed it. In embarking on my own attempts to do something, I am eager to see what mistakes have been made in the past.

The Sarum liturgy was used in Merton College Oxford and celebrated by the Roman Catholic priest Fr Sean Finnegan. You can read the article to see how the whole thing was derailed through legalism and petty jealousies. Fr Finnegan inclined to authority and the Sarum masses were stopped. Sarum seems to be one of those cases of a custom which has not been forbidden, but for a Roman Catholic, the canonical status of Sarum is uncertain.

For me, it is clear that Sarum cannot be entrusted to the hierarchical authority of the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England. It has to be kept out of institutional churches in order for it to flourish in freedom. I am a priest of the Anglican Catholic Church, and conform to its normal liturgical standards (Anglican Missal and 1549 Prayer Book) when serving existing parishes, but take the liberty to engage in initiatives outside the canonical confines of our Church. There are no Anglican Catholics here in France. I go further. Anything that will be successful in reviving Sarum would necessarily be lay and independent from institutional Churches. I will respect this neutrality and put my priesthood to its service.

I have seen so many wonderful inspirations, all nipped in the bud and crushed out of existence. I visited St George’s, Sudbury, a beautiful Arts & Crafts church – which apparently has been gutted. However, Fr Clement Russell did not use Sarum, but the Roman rite with Sarum usages, something like what Fr Montgomery-Wright was doing here in Normandy.

On re-reading this article, I discovered the existence of a Society of Saint Osmund. My own ideas are far from original. The difference with me is that I am not tied to Roman Catholic authority and my continuing Anglican Bishop has no problem with my doing Sarum, just as long as I don’t impose it elsewhere in our Diocese. In the Roman Catholic Church, there is a real problem with custom and legislation in canon law, and custom is just not respected by those authorities. Might is right! I am counting on a small number of people who are prepared to stick their middle finger up at such stuffiness and a very Pharisaic leaven that is choking the life-blood out of what little is left of Catholicism. We are just not interested in Quo primum or Summorum Pontificium. They are not our problem.

Thus is born the Guild of Saint Osmund to which members belong by invitation. Perhaps that sounds stuffy too, but it’s for our protection and neutrality in institutional terms. On this basis it will be possible to organise Sarum liturgies and conferences from next year – when we have had time to organise ourselves and do something of value.

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Refresher on the Holy Week Rites

Posted on Sunday, 16 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Last year, I published Holy Week Rites, showing that criticism of post World War II reforms in the Roman rite is more mainstream than some imagine. There are no fewer than forty-one comments on this posting.

We have discussed question of timetables for the Triduum and the perceived pastoral benefits of tampering with the rites according to more or less arbitrary criteria. There is an emotional / spiritual approach to liturgy, that of the laity, and the intellectual approach of “specialists”. I would like to see a balance, and above all a conversation that is intelligible and respectful of persons.

Again, the older I grow, the more I believe in diversity and simply removing the shackles. There may be horrible abuses, as there are now in some places, but the liturgy would self-regulate – as nature does when the harm man does to it is removed. I am inclined myself to “read the black and do the red” – but not in a frightened and neurotic way, just in a sense of filial obedience to the liturgical tradition in all simplicity. We in the ACC (using the Anglican Missal) use the old Holy Week rites, albeit in a spirit of pastoral sensitivity, as I have read in very kind e-mails from my Metropolitan Archbishop in America.

Keep up with the reading and reflecting. A Roman Catholic monk wrote to me asking me, whilst being kind and courteous, why we bother about liturgical forms that are not available. I answered that they may not be on the menu in his Church, but they are in mine and some others. Point taken.

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Orthodox to hold “Ecumenical” Council

Posted on Saturday, 15 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

HT to Bishop Chandler Holder Jones.

This is one stupendous piece of news I missed! Reuters reported this one on 9th March – Orthodox Churches Will Hold First Ecumenical Council In 1,200 Years In Istanbul. More accurately, this would be a Pan-Orthodox Council, unless the Pope and a representation of Roman Catholic bishops would take part. I remember reading about this possibility on one of Bishop Kallistos Ware’s books in the early 1980’s. They are finally going to do it – in 2016.

The crisis in the Ukraine is high on the agenda, as is the unity between the autocephelous and autonomous Churches that recognise each other as Orthodox. Another point is the lot suffered by middle-eastern Christians under extremist Islamic persecution.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has excellent relations with Pope Francis, but how sympathetic is Moscow to this accommodation? Will the Patriarch of Antioch be involved?

The Council (Constantinople V?) will be held at Hagia Irene,

a Byzantine church building in the outer courtyard of the Ottoman sultans’ Topkapi Palace. Now a museum, it has not been used as a church since the Muslim conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

This is most intriguing. Will it be a “pastoral” Council, a “dogmatic” Council, Orthodoxy’s version of Vatican II and aggiornamento?

Comments and accurate information would be appreciated.

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Growing and Flowing

Posted on Friday, 14 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Update: As I am finding comments to this posting rather sympathetic, I give the link to my men’s long hair forum. Men’s Long Hair Hyperboard. Please see the forum rules and FAQ before posting, and be advised that new contributors are moderated. See especially the Repetitively Asked Questions and the forum’s policy on off-topic posting. There are some very good men on this forum, and there is nothing indecent or explicitly sexual. For those who are genuine, I recommend it.

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I seem to have missed a vital article when I wrote Vestri Capilli Capitis a couple of months ago. This article is one written on Modern Medievalism in 2012, “Scissors or Sword?” Why medieval men might choose death over a haircut. This is truly about the philosophy of long hair on a man’s head, and not merely a question of fashion or personal taste. The young man running this blog is himself a longhair.

In the case of medieval kings, long hair was a sign of privilege and power, and if they lost their hair to an enemy, they suffered great humiliation and even the loss of their throne.

Short hair on men has always been a sign of servitude. In the armed forces, a man must surrender his personality to become part of the fighting unit entirely under the command of an officer. In the middle ages, short hair was a sign of low standing. Clerics received a tonsure, but often, the hair on the outside of the shaved part was left long. Christ has always been portrayed with long hair. He would be unimaginable with a crew cut as many conservative priests wear.

Long hair on men went in and out of fashion from the middle ages to the Renaissance times.  In the English Civil War, the Cavaliers wore long hair to show that they were high Anglicans or Roman Catholics. The Roundheads were precisely that – with closely cropped hair. They were Puritans and hated beauty or any kind of image. At the Restoration, long hair returned to the royal court.

The French Revolution cut hair as well as heads!  Long hair returned among romantics and medievalists. Short hair was the result of two world wars and a modern version of conservatism and humiliation. Like all my colleagues at seminary, I had short hair, even though medium length hair was tolerated at my school in the 1970’s. Nowadays, in the 2010’s, modern fashionable hairstyles resemble the 1920’s and 30’s.

Myself, I have now been five full months without a haircut and will soon complete my sixth. It is a choice I have made in this stage of my life, and I am confident I will pull it off, since I have no pattern baldness and my grey shag is thick and only slightly wavy. It is now in the “awkward stage”, and has to be lived with patiently. In a little less than one year, it will be possible to tie it back and keep it perfectly neat and tidy for all social settings. Throughout the growth process, it has to be kept perfectly clean, conditioned and groomed. That’s the way it works.

It certainly marks me apart from traditionalist Roman Catholicism, and as a priest with another message to bear. It is important here in France where a mere cassock is synonymous with extreme right-wing politics and ideology. The philosophy and message of long hair depend on many things these days, especially one’s dress and cultural references. There are so many reasons for this option of about 5% of the male population in Europe. I don’t agree with them all but I respect them.

I participate in a men’s long hair forum, and I have been most edified by many who post there. I feel I should not link to it from this blog, at least at this stage. Most of those men are masculine, married with families and sometimes former servicemen. It is not something “camp” or effeminate, but rather a way that a man affirms his own personality and self confidence. Whether they are former hippies, men of science, teachers, working men or in the fine arts – there is even a Rabbi, I find the same aspiration to freedom and a philosophy of life that differs radically from this world of power, money, possession and violence. The ancient symbolism is known to all, however subconsciously.

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Liturgical Extremism / Fetishism

Posted on Friday, 14 March, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Strong words in the title! Seriously, I have been looking at an interesting dialogue between Patricius and Modestinus. Both positions need to be read and understood. If I have understood Patricius correctly, the reforms introduced into the Roman missal under Pius XII in the 1950’s and enshrined in the John XXIII edition of 1962 constituted a completely new rite, and thus could correctly be superseded by the Novus Ordo of Paul VI in 1969. Therefore, those using the 1962 liturgy would be false traditionalists and doing the wrong thing.

Modestinus adopts a courteous and conciliatory tone. He points out what the average layman might have noticed in the 1950’s. Those who went to the Holy Week ceremonies would have noticed major differences, and not only in the timetable. Between the mid 1950’s and 1962, few would notice any difference. Do these differences really matter? Do they matter compared with worshipping in one’s parish or other community peacefully and just getting on with life? It seems a reasonable attitude coming from a Roman Catholic.

Patricius blames the use of 1962 by traditionalists largely on Archbishop Lefebvre. I was with them in early 1983 in their priory in Bordeaux. The issue of the moment was purging the sedevacantists out of the SSPX, because there was question of reaching an agreement with Rome. Nine American SSPX priests left and set up their own society (St Pius V) and the question of the liturgy was evoked as a major reason. Until then, Fr Black in England was doing the old Holy Week ceremonies, but the French chapels were generally doing 1962 or even 1965 in a few places. The SSPX differentiated between the “old” liturgy up to the first Paul VI version of 1965 and the Novus Ordo of 1969, because it was clearly a new rite and not a revision of the “old”.

Are the editions of 1962 (including the Holy Week rites of 1950 and 1955), 1965 and 1967 to be assimilated to the series of editions of the 1570 Pius V liturgy (not forgetting the Breviary), or to the Novus Ordo of 1969? Whatever may be the answer to this, it appears that 1962 became the means by which Archbishop Lefebvre purged the influential sedevacantists of 1983. The history of the SSPX has been one of purges of those who were too eager to sort things out with Rome or the opposite. Archbishop Leferbvre tried and largely succeeded in keeping an apparently unified SSPX through treading a via media between the “liberals” and the “sedevacantists” or at least the “hard-line” represented today by Bishop Williamson.  The 1962 was a way of playing brinkmanship with Rome, with Cardinal Ratzinger, and it would be a compromise to avoid Rome insisting on the introduction of 1965/67 or a compromise rite with features like the 1969 lectionary and calendar, necessitating radical adaptations to make it “work”. I have seen this sort of thing at the Abbey of Fontgombault and some other monasteries of the Solesmes Congregation.

I make these observations from a more detached point of view, since I only spent a short period of my life as a “convert” to Roman Catholicism from my native Anglicanism, and I am not bound by these problems of authority and ecclesiastical politics.

What about this one?

Besides, those who obsesses over liturgical particularities reveal, as Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais once opined, a superficial and ungrounded faith more concerned with form over substance. Whether one agrees or not with the SSPX’s apostolate, it was never undertaken for the sole purpose of advancing the cause of liturgical fetishism.

I would ask them why they don’t just use the Novus Ordo. Like the 1983 Naughty Nine, the reason is political and the liturgy is only the war banner, the trademark by which people can know which side they’re on. It is only a matter of degree. It is true that there is a problem with a person or a group if form is placed over substance, and concern for the liturgy is out of proportion with deep faith and spirituality.

How is this issue addressed? When I was at seminary, we had Fr Frank Quoëx as MC and specialist in liturgy. He was against the Pius XII and John XXIII reforms, and did what he could to do things the “old way”. Thus at Gricigliano was born the “usages” of using folded chasubles, doing a true Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday and some subtle restorations of the Holy Saturday rite. Even though Fr Quoëx, ever courteous and diplomatic with the superiors, was too “extreme”, some of those “usages” remain to this day and are even approved by Rome. Fr Quoëx, like others, believed that these issues could be addressed, not by bitter polemics and conflict, but by research and serious academic work, by writing and giving conferences. Polemics only make the adversary stall and refuse all dialogue!

In the Roman Catholic world, it all seems academic with the abdication of Benedict XVI and Pope Francis’ apparent indifference in liturgical matters. Nothing will be achieved at anything like an official level for many years, assuming that the next Pope has “Ratzinguerian” inclinations.

Modestinus argues from the point of someone who has his place in the traditionalist Roman Catholic world. Patricius has nothing to lose and has gone on the warpath. He has no concern for his own credibility, which may be a good or a bad thing. At least no one doubts his sincerity. Fr Quoëx’s way was something like that of Pope Benedict XVI – the library, the conference hall and the private chapel. I suppose it is mine too, as I have no parish ministry. I am older and saw many of these conflicts thirty years ago, and the fact that nothing has been achieved. Some of the Naughty Nine have stable ministries and have obtained the Episcopate from dissident Roman Catholic lineages. One of their sites is St Gertrude’s Church. They have done much better than many of the vagantes through their sense of mission, professionalism and already having significant numbers of faithful and financial resources. At my stage in life, I find Patricius’ unrestrained rhetoric unnerving and embarrassing.

I don’t have a party line to uphold, but as a priest in a serious ecclesial body, there is a certain gravitas and restraint to observe. I believe in the intellectual and courteous approach, and that is what the Guild of Saint Osmund is all about (about which I will shortly write as it has not yet been introduced). I speak respectfully of Roman Catholic authorities, also of traditionalist clergy and others. Courtesy pays. At the same time, I ceased to use the Roman rite in 2008 – and I had been using the 1920 version with the old Holy Week and all. I reverted to Sarum with the only difference of using the Gregorian calendar. It is my intimate conviction that liturgical diversity, not uniformity, will solve many of these issues – and the liturgical life of the Church will eventually regulate itself.

I know Patricius is burdened by a condition that used to be known as Asperger’s Syndrome and is now considered by the medical profession as a part of the autistic syndrome. To be frank, I have many doubts about the value of psychiatry and its scientific validity. We all have our temperaments and personalities, and we are all conditioned and affected by our childhood and other experiences in life. As adults, we have the duty of living with our difficulties and compensating. A blind man develops his hearing and touch to compensate and overcome his handicap. Patricius is frank about his condition on the internet, and I do not feel as though I am breaking any confidences here. Growing up is about making our narrow interests a part of the whole, learning to overcome our social difficulties by developing empathy. We need to learn to listen and take interest in what the other person is expressing, even if we think the person is wrong. There is always a grain of truth somewhere. Yes, it’s about growing up and making our emotional life match our intellectual capacities. I’m far from perfect and have my own issues to solve, but I’m probably further along the way through bitter experience.

We can love the liturgy and resist tendencies to tamper with it and make it into something else. Everything depends on how we do so. Fr Quoëx has left behind him a legacy of influence and memories from the day he tragically died of cancer in January 2007 at only 39 years of age. Another influence was Dr Ray Winch, the eccentric Oxford don, who never ceased to be courteous in his dialogues and vocation to teach. I have known others, including some of my schoolmasters, whose words and example remained. I wonder if I’ll leave as much behind when I pass away one day! At least there will be this blog if nothing else…

For the charge that our faith, spirituality and knowledge need to be in proportion to our love of the liturgy, this is something I take seriously. I am still a priest and do my duties, but my life is no longer spent in the sacristy (I spend about 5 minutes a day in mine to put vestments on and take them off after Mass, sometimes longer if I need to do a tidy-up). Diversifying is very good for the soul. That is something good that comes from being married. We go to singing lessons and quartet or choir rehearsals. I go sailing and get involved with clubs and boat gatherings. I pride myself on getting on with ordinary people. All this makes me no less interested in liturgy, but it puts things into perspective.

I’m a Sarum man. I don’t care about 1962 or 1920. I use the Anglican Missal when required though pastoral necessity in my Church. I believe that diversity will solve many of these issues and prevent liturgical rites being used as ideological banners. Just undo the screws! A lot will come undone, but will self-regulate in many places. Then we will celebrate the praises of God through love and not through mechanical authority and fear of sanctions.

Perhaps one needs to be a priest to understand many of these things!

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