Fr Hunwicke and Orders

Posted on Monday, 27 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Clarification: In writing this article, I wish to make it clear that I assume readers to have consulted the following articles by Fr Hunwicke and read them fully.

I believe in Fr Hunwicke’s complete integrity as a priest and the honesty of his move to the Ordinariate.

I also assume that readers have read his articles on the Society of St Pius X for the purposes of a discussion of this subject in this article.

Furthermore, I believe that Roman Catholic orders conferred according to the new rite are valid, and that, logically, Anglican orders are also valid. I do not discuss the question of the ordination of women in this article.

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Fr Hunwick’s Mutual Enrichment blog is something that should never be neglected in our morning round of the blogs. It suffered a lull at about the time Father Hunwicke was waiting for re-ordination in the Ordinariate and when he had a dreadful accident whilst on pilgrimage to Rome. I have never met Fr Hunwicke, but I esteem his way of thinking and writing.

The moral dilemma suffered by Anglican clergy who become Roman Catholics and are required to receive unconditional ordination by virtue of Apostolicae Curae is not new. Only last night, someone wrote to me on Skype, having quoted Father Hunwicke on his certitude of having received valid ordination in the Church of England:

My question is if he holds this, that he was certain that his Anglican ordination was valid. Then what was his intention in receiving the second ordination from the RC Church? Had he the intention to receive ‘Orders’ or NOT, or just go through the motions?

If his intention in the second ordination of the RC Church was not to receive Orders because he said he ‘never doubted his Anglican Orders’ then that could have serious consequences!

In sacramental theology you know that would invalid the second ordination if he had not the intention to receive it because he ‘was certain he already had it’!

I find this argument tiresome, because the reality according to Roman Catholic theology is simpler. If his priesthood was valid in the first place (from the Church of England), then the Roman Catholic ordination added nothing regardless of the intention. The person who wrote this message to me seems to have something of an obsession about validity, something like some of the characters described in Peter Anson’s Bishops at Large.

We could look at another hypothesis. The priest in question believes his original ordination valid, but it was not objectively valid. He then “goes through the motions” and believes the Roman Catholic ordination would add nothing. He would emerge from that ordination just as “invalid” as before. We therefore get invalid Ordinariate priests because they were not sufficiently “purified” from their belief that they were priests in the Church of England, TAC, etc. It’s an interesting hypothesis, but one I have never read expressed by any mainstream RC authority. Of course, if you apply Apostolicae Curae to the post-Vatican II rite of Orders in the RC Church, they become just as invalid as some of the “extreme” traditionalists claim. Perhaps it would be simpler to go to the Eastern Orthodox view, and that would set the cat among the pigeons. Perhaps no one is valid! Those ordained “in the Church” but in the new rite by a bishop consecrated in the new rite are invalid, and those ordained in the old rite by the traditionalists are invalid because they were “outside the Church”.

Uuurgh! My head hurts. Let’s go and get drunk! As the Germans said to English servicemen they captured during World War II – For you the war is over. Sobering…

Rome and Orthodoxy fight over two different conceptions of the priesthood: something which has an ontology of its own and is irreversible, and is distinguished from its canonical exercise, on one hand, and a channel of grace that can be turned on and off like a tap because sacramental grace is the property of the Church. The latter is characteristic of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the former was expressed in the anti-Donatist writings of St Augustine.

I’m not inviting debate about this subject, because it gets about as tedious as a wasp in September whilst you are having afternoon tea in the garden. No matter how many times you try to swat it, it always returns to the same place on the rim of the jam jar. The implication about some of the priests who joined the Ordinariate is that they betrayed moral integrity to go where they felt they should go. I’m not going to go down that road. At the same time, it is good to read Fr Hunwicke’s reflections and discern the golden thread going through it all.

He also discusses the SSPX and their situation in respect to the Pope and Rome. Again, I don’t want to go into the exhausting polemics, but Archbishop Lefebvre needed to be cut some slack back in the 1970’s. Now, it is too late, and those people are used to their independence and their Roman Catholic identity to maintain credibility with their own tithe-paying faithful with their large families.

Frankly, I find it more honest to affirm a Catholic identity that does not attempt to equivocate on being in communion with Rome, yet disobedient to its authorities in the direction of the 1960’s and 1970’s reforms. At the same time, I know the French mentality – laws and authorities are one thing and everything is forbidden, but there is always a way round everything. The Italians call it La Combinazione. Here in France, it’s Tout est interdit, mais tout s’arrange. This is how it was possible that many French parish priests carried on with the old liturgy and resisted attempts of their bishops to remove them from their parishes. It sufficed to be popular with the people, and they would stand in front of the church door with tractors and pitch forks! That was the old spirit of the SSPX that I admired. As it became institutionalised, I find its message much less convincing.

Obviously, scrupulous Roman Catholics are not going to become Anglicans or identify with us, but if they find that what we are doing is Catholic, they won’t worry about some of the finer points. I don’t turn away Roman Catholics from the Sacraments, though I do make sure they are informed. No one is deceived or misled. That is what is important, and everyone commits his or her moral conscience.

The articles are interesting. Some say that the SSPX should have caught the bus whilst Benedict XVI was Pope before it all swung the other way, as in the wake of a General Election in most western countries. We get the Labour Party this time with more public spending and higher taxes because the Conservatives were in last time round. There is a more profound way of seeing the Franciscan papacy, but many of us feel a strange detachment and lack of motivation about it all.

Fr Hunwicke’s blog is worth reading, and don’t forget to look at the comments. With so little information from the Ordinariate world, this blog gives us a look at the “weather report” – if you get my meaning.

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Writing Comments

Posted on Sunday, 26 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I thought I would ask readers who post comments to make their writing transparent and easy to read. Nearly everyone who writes here expresses himself or herself in good grammatical English. I have occasionally moderated readers for rudeness or worse, and I believe in the lightest and most tolerant and moderate “censorship”. I have already written on “trolling”, and I won’t repeat myself here. Nearly all my readers are not moderated and are trusted to write constructively and with the whole “community” at heart.

I warmly recommend that texts should be in relatively short paragraphs. A long text with very long paragraphs can strike the reader as a mass of text, and can thus be discouraging to read. Some very great authors write with very long sentences and paragraphs. Long sentences with too many subordinate clauses are difficult to write and “pull off”, and can tend to be “run-on”. This is often what I find translating from French, especially when the author is trying to impress his readers. A technical manual isn’t a piece of literature, just something to make sure the factory worker operates the machine properly. This blog is a little more literary than that, but my technical translating work does influence me in the way I write. Keep things concise and simple. The style might seem to be terse and less “learned”, but it will be much easier to read. This is all the more the case when a text contains a rich and instructive content.

I also ask that between paragraphs, you hit the enter key twice. WordPress will automatically separate the paragraphs like in a formatted Word document text. Otherwise, the text appears like an opaque block, even though there are paragraphs, simply because there is no space between them. I often edit comments in this way whilst endeavouring to respect the author’s style and content.

Another thing to be recommended is to write the comment in a MS Word (or similar word processor) document without formatting. For example in this way, you don’t get breaks in lines, sentences and paragraphs. Proof reading is made easier and the result is more attractive to the reader.

You can use html code to italicise texts or put them in bold type. The respective codes are:

<em>text</em>

and

<strong>text</strong>

This greatly enhances the appearance of a comment.

Thank you.

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Vincent of Lerins and Organic Development

Posted on Thursday, 23 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Perhaps it is time to move back to theology as a less provocative approach to this blog, since someone rightly observed that I have no real parish life (I live in France and proselytism to continuing Anglicanism is rather dimly viewed here, as we are not a cult). I can see how a discussion of men’s hairstyles can get up the noses of certain conservative Americans living in the southern States!

We continuing Anglicans have different approaches to things in order to distinguish ourselves from post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism. Our ecclesiology resembles Old Catholicism to an extent and we tend to consider ourselves as western Orthodox (ie: adhering to conciliar ecclesiology but worshipping like Roman Catholics before Vatican II). It is difficult to be coherent.

Coherence is the problem of many of us. Newman’s theory of development was never a perfect analogy, and the distinction between genuine organic developments and perversions – whether by way of heresy or “accretion” – is hard to make to any degree of scientific rigour.

We have the famous  “canon” of Vincent of Lerins (d. 450): We hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. The problem is that if everything is rigorously subjected to that test, very little would remain. We would have to find out whether something has been held by the RC Church and the Patriarchate of Moscow, but also whether it is held by the East Syrians, the Copts and the Syro Malabar Church. Such a criterion is difficult to reconcile with honest historical study. Embarrassing sore thumbs tend to get chopped off to keep the ever-narrowing orthodoxy more or less credible!

Protestant doctrines are variously perceived as innovations and restorations of the standards of the early Church. Which is it? Vincent’s canon is often bandied about by RC convert apologists, and they create more problems than they solve. Newman was confronted by the historical fact that Catholics were believing things that were not explicitly found in the Bible or the Fathers of the Church. On one hand, there is the liturgical life of the Church and the role of the Sacraments and iconography.  On the other hand there was the famous “development” of Papal infallibility that he had to justify in order to become a Roman Catholic with some intellectual integrity.

We seek stability, but we also seek coherence and a certain amount of freedom. Go too far along the development line, and just anything can be justified. Therefore, we get the qualifying adjective organic. There has to be growth, using the analogy of biology. An acorn becomes an oak tree, not a London bus.

The interesting thing about Vincent’s canon is that it is appealed to by some of the Protestants themselves. They justified their Reformation by the notion of cutting back developments and accretions to restore that pure and pristine faith and religious practice of the early Church. The canon is made to justify two radically opposing systems of theology and belief. “Good” developments are condemned because there are “bad” developments. The biggest problem with this approach is having a perfect level of historical scholarship. The elephant in the room is the fact that the early Church was a mess, a horribly divided mess.

There has to be some limiting mechanism for development, from whence the notion of organic development and identity of type. Newman’s criteria are very carefully thought out and quite convincing. He puts them in a nutshell before explaing them and expanding his reasoning:

Taking this analogy as a guide, I venture to set down seven Notes of varying cogency, independence and applicability, to discriminate healthy developments of an idea from its state of corruption and decay, as follows:—There is no corruption if it retains one and the same type, the same principles, the same organization; if its beginnings anticipate its subsequent phases, and its later phenomena protect and subserve its earlier; if it has a power of assimilation and revival, and a vigorous action from first to last. On these tests I shall now enlarge, nearly in the order in which I have enumerated them.

Since reading this book, I have found such notions a lot more credible than the notion that they had Sacred Heart devotions and the Tridentine liturgy in the second century, or that a Calvinist service really restored what they did in the early days. Newman’s theory really was the only one possible, other than debunking Christianity totally. The problem is using this theory for defending ideologies that cannot reasonably be defended – like Ultramontanism.

Newman was strongly opposed by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, so we see the same appeal to the Vincentian canon and opposite conclusions. Newman’s theory is as imperfect as the Vincentian canon when it comes to continuing the reasoning to its logical conclusion. The more I read and think, the more I realise that much of “classical” Christian teaching reposes on a very weak intellectual structure. Both Newman and Vincent of Lerins are used to justify just about anything, including “pop” liturgies and women priests.

A considerable amount of time has been expended in the twentieth century to understand an essentially “immobile” tradition and the more dynamic notion encouraged by modern Roman Catholic theologians. The notion of development had been carried much further than what Newman intended. It, combined with  philosophical trends like historicism and immanentism, was the subject of the Modernist controversy under the pontificate of Pius X (1903-1914), condemned in the encyclical Pascendi. In varying degrees, men like Alfred Loisy sought to wrest the notion of tradition away from the restraining influence of the Vincentian canon to justify an evolving notion of the Church.

We will live with these contradictions for many generations to come, as the credibility of Christianity unravels in the eyes of our contemporaries. I have for a long time felt that Christianity cannot be justified and defended by apologetics, or by conservative ideologies, but by a profound vision of contemplative life.

There are no prizes for guessing who said:

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendour of holiness and art . . . than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history.

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Vestri Capilli Capitis

Posted on Tuesday, 21 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

brantholme66When I was a kid, I hated haircuts. Who did I dread most? The doctor, the dentist or the barber? I remember the place I went on the corner of Anne Street and Wildman Street in Kendal. The barber had his shop upstairs from a newsagents shop, sparsely furnished with the chair, not much different from a dentist’s chair, except that it just went up and down with a foot pump, a little shelf for the barber’s clippers, scissors and razor, and somewhere for the cash register where you paid him his one-and-six when the job was done. For a small boy like me, my Saturday morning haircut was done in about ten minutes flat – snip, snip, snip round the head with scissors and comb, a neat fringe at the front and the feel of cold metal as he took the clippers to my back and sides. I felt bare and quite mutilated! Then, home to play in the garden or go for a bike ride…

My father went to another barber in town, one he called Slash Harry. This was in the 1960’s, and I took all this for granted until the first time I saw a man with long hair. I was fascinated. About the same time, my sister decided to grow her hair and style it in different ways as girls do. Why couldn’t I do the same thing? It’s not done! Around about the age of 12, I was allowed to have a little more hair, covering the ears and down to just touching my shoulders.

micklegateAfter about the age of 16, I let it grow to just below my shoulders when I left home to work at the organ builders. There, I had to be careful because those north-country guys would not like something looking effeminate, and in any case, operating woodworking machinery with long and loose hair is dangerous. So, the regular visits to the barber resumed, but just for a “trim” now and again. It was at its longest when I was about 20 and my parents were horrified. On becoming a Roman Catholic at age 22, I kept the long-ish hair until the priests of the SSPX chapel where I was going to Mass suggested that I should get it cut.

From about those days until presently, I have dutifully maintained an austere crew cut, often doing it myself with clippers and different sized combs. The advantage of it is that it needs no maintenance other than twice-weekly washing. No brushing or combing. That is how it was when I was a seminarian. We had a seminarian by the name of Claudio Fauci, one of the only two Italians in the place dominated by Frenchmen, who was quite good at hair cutting and doing a nice job. Throughout my clerical life, short hair was the done thing, and the French often had the shortest, what we English would call the crew cut, or the Saint-Cyr military style. It symbolises the old French establishment incarnated by General De Gaulle and generations of military and political figures.

saint-cyrEven over the years when I was alone in the Vendée, I kept cutting my hair as a part of my clerical identity, and I never questioned it. So many years later, with almost a divide between the clerical stereotype and my determined attachment to my priestly vocation, I began to rediscover earlier symbols of my own being and identity. One was the sea and sailing, going out in a boat to experience the silence and freedom of the sea. What is it about hair? The Bible is full of symbolism about the length of hair, and we find that orthodox Rabbis and Orthodox priests and monks have long hair. Hindus have long hair. Buddhist monks have shaven hair. The Japanese Samurais had an extremely precise hairstyle. English soldiers and sailors before the end of the eighteenth century had long hair and a ponytail in a kind of net. The Red Indians had long hair. It is all connected with religious symbolism. Long hair means something, and so does a shorn head.

Mozart in 1766 without a wig

Mozart in 1766 without a wig

After the beginning of the twentieth century, public authorities took an interest in hygiene and found that too many men and boys had lice. Two world wars and the short back and sides stuck and became synonymous with respectability and conformity. To this day, the armed forces of most countries require their servicemen to have very short hair. The rule prevails in schools and businesses, and only now has become a little more relaxed.

In history and western culture, short hair is the condition of the slave or the person who obeys. The man with his place in society gets regular haircuts and shaves every day. The hair is no more than three inches on top and tapers to nothing above the shirt collar. We find the same rule in citizens and slaves in antiquity, medieval monasticism and modern social and business conventions. But, it is unconsciously for most of us. Jung came out with a theory of the sub-consciousness and archetypes. Telling a man to get a haircut is asserting domination over that person. In the Army, soldiers who tried to bend the rules a little often got their heads shaved forcibly.

Within Christianity, as in many faith traditions and Judaism, rules about hair and beards are quite diverse. The Eastern Orthodox has a totally different notion of monastic life from that of the west. Orthodox married priests also have beards and long or longish hair. In the order of nature, hair is a part of us, like our fingernails. Men and women have hair on our heads (unless we suffer from baldness or some pathology) and men have facial hair and differing amounts of body hair. We normally cover the body hair with clothing, so the head is the subject of discussion. What is the difference between growing hair and cutting it? The first is a natural process and the second is an action using a tool, like tending a garden.

The human head is the sign of the whole person. We recognise a person by the face, the appearance of which we have memorised. Our face is our identity card and is unique to each person, and there are billions of humans in the world. The hair on the head and face are parts of these characteristics. Decisions to allow hair growth or cut it off have their effect on the personality. Long hair is often a sign of independence and ideological opposition to “the establishment”. A long haired man is a free man. The beard also has its role, but I will discuss only the head hair in this article.

As long hair is the rule in Eastern Orthodoxy, its absence is a mark of western Christianity. In ancient Greek culture, youths sacrificed their hair on reaching manhood. This custom is reflected in France at the end of the nineteenth century.

petit-garconWhen I first married my wife, I was highly impressed on seeing a painting of her grandfather as a little boy in the 1900’s. He had beautiful long locks of hair, like a girl, and wore something looking like a sailor’s uniform. It was cut off as the boy reached puberty. Here in France, many people kept their hair in a bell jar. At home, my father has four “baby books”, and mine contains a lock of hair from “My First Haircut”. Old symbols endure.

The western clerical tonsure is something curious. In the ceremony of the Tonsure, the bishop takes a pair of scissors and cuts tiny tufts of hair from the back of the head, the front, each side and from the crown. The new cleric then gets his surplice. The shaved tonsure is not much in use these days but I have “worn” it. A circular shape is shaved from the crown of the head, about the size of an old English penny. The monk has his head shaved except for a crown of short hair. In the Congregation of Solesmes, haircuts are every month. In the middle ages, clerics did not wear cassocks in the street but the ordinary dress of a gentleman. The tonsure alone set him apart, and helped the cleric avoid various urban temptations. Saint Paul condemned long hair for men in I Cor xi.14: “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?” The Synod at Elvira forebade a woman to have anything to do with long-haired men, under penalty of excommunication. It all seems very strange, since Christ had long hair if we go from all the iconography from the mists of church history, sappy Sacred Heart statues and the Shroud of Turin itself.

christ-longhair

In the Old Testament, there is the Vow of the Nazirite is found in the book of Numbers, chapter six. A man who consecrates himself to God does not cut off his hair. This prescription is observed in Orthodox Judaism and the Eastern Church. Rastafarians also do not cut their hair. They grow it into “dreadlocks”, and the Vow of the Nazirite is a part of their religion. Leviticus xix.27 and Deuteronomy xiv.1 also order the keeping of long hair and beards. Sunni Muslim men are expected to have beards, though orthodox Islam now discourages or even forbids long hair. Native Americans also have long hair because they believe that a man’s vitality and strength reside in his hair, as do the Sikhs in India. The hair is cut, as in other cultures, for mourning.

It is highly significant that shaving a man’s head, as for when it is done to a woman, is a sign of humiliation and giving that person a feeling of nothingness. Julius Caesar made the Gauls shave their heads as a sign of submission. French women who collaborated with the Germans during the Occupation (1940 to 1944) had their heads shaved after the Liberation, sometimes as a prelude to being raped and shot. Convicts have their head shaved on admission into prison, and not only for reasons of hygiene. We take haircutting and shaving for granted in our society which is as characterised by class, wealth and poverty, domination and obedience as ancient Rome. The symbolic meaning is the same, but unknown to most of us.

Powdered wigs in the seventeenth century

Powdered wigs in the seventeenth century

In western secular society, long hair became associated with marginal subcultures in the 1960’s like the Hippies and various men who ride motorcycles in groups or perform rock and various types of modern popular music. Long hair is seen to stereotype artists and some academics. It is more acceptable these days as cultural reasons for having long hair are more diverse. For many, it is a sign of personal growth, identity and freedom.

longhairWhy do some men go for long hair, as only about 5% of western men do so? Most modern hairstyles are short and there is a tendency to reproduce the styles of the 1920’s. Long hair has never in recent times in secular life been in fashion. It has been a characteristic of subcultures associated with various types of popular music or political ideologies. The common stereotypes are hippies, bikers and rock musicians.

I read on the Internet that most men with long hair are heterosexuals and quite masculine. They have no effeminate affectations as a rule. The gay community is mainly short-haired following current fashions.

Many men who have long hair affirm it as a part of their identity and childhood desires. I have to be frank and admit that it was as much a childhood dream as sailing, and I hated haircuts. It is a sign of cultural independence, even when a long-haired man does not use drugs, go in for rock or ride a motorcycle (though I had a Suzuki T200 when I was 20 and rode it from London to York, enjoying every minute of it). A long-haired man just doesn’t care, and if people like him, it’s because of his personality and not because he conforms to fashion or the old historical opposition between dominant and dominated. Our identity is generally formed in our childhood years, and we are fools to shut it out of our lives. It is easier to go with the flow, but our characters are formed by being truly ourselves.

Goodbye, scissors?

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Links on long hair (both male and female) in history and culture

An interesting fact is that the pair of scissors in its modern form was invented around 1760. See scissors.

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UKIP Shipping Forecast

Posted on Tuesday, 21 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I got the link for this on one of my sailing e-mail groups. I don’t discuss politics very much on this blog, but this is hilarious.

Trouble on the high seas…

This site goes on to play various spoofs on the shipping forecast. Sometimes, one does well to keep the boat laid up!

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A Sarum Question

Posted on Monday, 20 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

A correspondent wrote to me with a question on the Use of Sarum.

At solemn high Mass ad usum Sarum, where was the Gospel proclaimed? And facing which direction? And do you know the origin of the Anglican tradition of chanting the Gospel in the nave facing west?

I answered with the rubric from the Sarum Missal as translated by Canon Warren, which is found in the first Sunday of Advent.

At the end of Alleluya or of the Sequence, or of the Tract, before the deacon advances to announce the Gospel, he shall cense the midst of the altar only ; for the lectern should never be censed either at mass or at matins before the Gospel is announced. Then he shall take the Text, that is to say the book of the Gospels, and bowing to the priest standing before the altar, and facing east, he shall say thus without note: Bid, Sir, a blessing. The priest shall reply : The Lord be in thy heart and in thy mouth, that thou mayest announce the holy Gospel of God. In the name of the Father, etc. But if the priest is celebrating by himself, he shall say privately : Bid, Sir, a blessing, and afterwards shall say to himself : The Lord be in my heart and in my mouth, that I may announce the holy Gospel of God. In the name of the Father, etc.

And thus the deacon shall advance through the midst of the Quire, solemnly carrying the Text itself in his left hand, with thurifer and taper-bearers preceding him, to the Pulpit. And if it be a double feast the cross shall precede him, which should be on the right hand opposite to, that is facing the reader of the Gospel, the face of the figure on the Crucifix being turned toward the reader. For whenever the Epistle is read in the Pulpit, the Gospel should be read in the same place also. And when they have arrived at the place for reading, the subdeacon shall take the Text itself, and hold it in the left hand of the deacon himself, being, as it were, opposite to him, while the gospel is being read, the taper-bearers standing by the deacon, the one on his right hand, the other on his left, and turning toward him. But the thurifer shall stand behind the deacon, turning towards him. And the gospel shall always be read by a reader facing north. And if a Bishop be the Officiant, all the ministers in the quire shall come forward to sing the Sequence, when there is a Sequence, except the principal deacon and the principal subdeacon. And the deacons and subdeacons, together with the rulers of the quire, shall remain in the middle of the quire until the principal deacon returns from the pulpit through the quire, after reading the Gospel. But when he begins the Gospel, after The Lord be with you, he shall make the sign of the cross over the book, then on his forehead, and afterwards on his breast with his thumb.

This resulted in another question:

As usual, the Sarum rubrics are a bit confusing to me. Does this suggest that ad usum Sarum the Gospel is always read from the pulpit? And when it is read from the pulpit, by “pulpit” does it mean rood-loft? And if the rood-loft is not meant, what does it mean for the reader to face north in the pulpit? Isn’t there only one “natural” direction for a reader to face while reading in a pulpit (i.e. in the same direction in which he preaches)?

I had to be honest and say I was somewhat unsure.

The pulpit we know nowadays is largely an invention of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. Few pulpits are older than the 16th century. The pulpitum is a big stone choir screen as can still be found in most of the English cathedrals. The width of those structures (from the west side to the east side) is quite considerable, often some fifteen feet, making it possible to install an organ from about the 17th century. Facing the north as in the Roman rite is perfectly feasible. I imagine that during High Mass in a parish church, the rood screen is too flimsy for a whole load of guys to climb up onto, and they would have remained at floor level like in the Roman rite. That’s my guess.

Patricius has written a very interesting article – Northwards… I like his final reflection:

My inclination, nowadays, is that the proclamation of the Gospel, being at once for the edification and sanctification of the people as well as an act of liturgical worship, the Word ought to be brought into the midst of the people and proclaimed facing eastward.

I remember this very arrangement when I was in the choir of Kendal Parish Church in the mid 1970’s. When the priest or deacon reading the Gospel was in the middle of the nave facing east with the acolytes either side of him and someone holding the book, all the people in the congregation would instinctively turn to that point. The symbolism is quite beautiful.

Have any readers any other suggestions?

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Inject, Shoot or Hang?

Posted on Monday, 20 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The USA is just about the only western country to have kept capital punishment. I have written on this topic before on Capital Punishment. I have noticed in various articles that prison facilities concerned with executing people who are condemned to death are unable to find the drugs used for a “humane” lethal injection. Here is an article from the viewpoint of an Orthodox priest.

The Americans have always been bunglers and have always made the worst decisions in matters of this kind. It involves a lot of hypocrisy, between giving the appearance of killing humanely and the frequent lack of professionalism in the matter. It is not as if there was not the example of British or French efficiency. The English hangman was highly skilled and did the job properly every time. The French guillotine did its job reliably – as long as there was no error in assembling the apparatus. If the Americans really wanted to kill “humanely”, it suffices to make the condemned person breathe pure nitrogen.

The other approach, of course, is eye for eye – using a barbaric, gruesome and spectacular method like before the French Revolution to cause maximum suffering. I hardly imagine people these days buying tickets to see a hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn, but perhaps human nature has changed less than we imagine!

Perhaps the greatest argument against capital punishment is the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Their criminal justice has big holes in it. Many inmates on Death Row have been found to be innocent on more thorough investigation of the evidenced used to condemn them. People commit very evil deeds, and the apologist of the death penalty reminds us about the victim of a crime having been wronged in the first place. That has to be understood, but is it right to render evil for evil?

One man is particular importance in this question, one who was not a lawyer but England’s official hangman. Albert Pierrepoint (see the film by finding it in parts here or buy the DVD) came to the conclusion that the death penalty was only revenge. It is useless as a deterrent and has not prevented a single murder. He wrote:

The fruit of my experience has this bitter after-taste: that I do not now believe that any of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.

Those who are opposed to capital punishment, as I am, are often accused of lacking compassion for the victims of murder, rape and other violent crimes. Perhaps some criminals can be rehabilitated after long prison sentences, but most very evil ones can only be removed from society permanently. We are brought to think of the worst psychopaths, serial killers and child rapists who show not the slightest remorse for what they did. It seems logical to kill them – but where is the line drawn between them and someone who committed a crime de passion and got a raw deal at his trial?

The usual alternative to death is life imprisonment, either literally – until the prisoner dies – or for something like twenty to thirty years followed by a long period of parole. Prisons are also very heavy financially on the taxpayer. Is it right for such people to live on taxpayers’ money?

Another alternative is re-establishing the penal colonies. The problem is that they were originally established by countries with extensive empires like the UK and France. No independent country nowadays wants someone else’s trash and dangerous criminals on their doorstep! England had Botany Bay in Australia and the French had Guyana and Devil’s Island. In the old days, a convict was sentenced to a time in prison, which was followed by an equal amount of time as a colonist and working in the general interest. He earned his living and lived in extremely harsh conditions. Many of us have seen the film Papillon with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Here is another article worth reading – French Guiana and New Caledonia: How Much of the Myth Was Reality?

Even in the nineteenth century, the essential purpose of penal colonies and prisons was debated between the destruction of the convict’s possibility to offend and the possibility of rehabilitating him into society.

French government and the prison administrations never resolved the contradiction between the desire to rehabilitate the bagnards and to give them a new start in life and the desire to punish. But this contradiction continues to be prevalent in the criminal justice systems of many countries, particularly the United States.

Are there not enough islands in the Pacific to send those prisoners to? Make sure they can’t escape and leave them to get on with it with the one proviso that if they build a boat to get off the island, they’ll be blown out of the water… An alternative for the Americans might be somewhere in the middle of the Nevada Desert. Hawaii? The essential would be a facility that pays for itself and is sufficiently remote to reduce the possibility of successful escape to the minimum.

Perhaps it’s just another method of execution and revenge. On the other hand, if the penal colony system was modernised and brutality replaced with creative possibilities for convicts to find redemption in some way, that might be more the thing to do.

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Does Christianity need Liturgy?

Posted on Sunday, 19 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The question has been in my mind since I read Mosebach’s book and gave some general comments in Mosebach’s Heresy of Formlessness. What kind of Church would there be if there were no liturgy? Mosebach has a captivating anecdotal style, describing Mass in a chapel in a remote place and the simple things the priest did to transform a neglected place into a church worthy of the Holy Mystery. It takes practical sense to convert something dead into something living and which gives life, but also it takes vision and faith to answer the question of why we should bother going to all the trouble. He gives an answer to that question by going through the Mass in slow motion, savouring the spiritual meaning of every text, gesture and symbol.

Mosebach’s technique is quite stunning by the use of contrast, building up the reader through his description of the spiritual experience, and then presenting the case of an “authentic” Christianity without a liturgy. Surely, Jesus was as the Protestants and the 1960’s reformers portrayed him. The Gospel shows little sign of any ritualism on the part of Christ. If anything, he seemed to oppose such an obstacle to simplicity, innocence and authenticity judging by the way he blasted the Scribes and Pharisees. It looks as if Christ not only intended to sweep away Judaism with its Law and traditions, but all formal religion. We seem to be reading about the ultimate anarchist!

From the beginning of church history, we find reforming movements laying waste churches, images, monasteries and priests and all the paraphernalia of liturgical worship. The same movement springs up again and again, in the Franciscan movement – not only in the order approved by Rome but also the marginal movements like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Fraticelli and the brothers of Fra Dolcino. We have the Lollards in England and the Hussites, and then finally the Reform movement exploded in the sixteenth century. Within Catholicism, it resurfaced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Jansenism and in the wake of Vatican II. This mindset obviously has very deep roots in Christianity itself, and we can only ask ourselves if it represents true Christianity.

Mosebach then brings this anti-ritualist movement into the events of his own life, his Protestant father devoutly reading the Bible and his mother holding to a minimalist understanding of Catholic religious practice. After this, he asks the very question of whether ritual is alien to true Christianity and the Gospel. The key is asking the question of knowing why Christianity came into being, and who for – the Jewish people or the Gentiles, the people of all other faiths and cultures. Most of us reading this blog are certainly not of Jewish origin. Go back a thousand or fifteen hundred years and we were pagans. Why did Christianity get so mixed up with Odin, Zeus, Dionysius, Mithra, Isis and Osiris and Plato’s philosophy? As I mentioned in my earlier article, Christianity has two-stepped between the Jewish Old Testament and the Mystery Religions of antiquity.  Ever since, the two pillars of Christianity have played tug of war against each other.

What does we know of Christ’s intention? We could pore through the Gospels, as that is just about all we have outside of a notion of an esoteric tradition. There are also the Gnostic Gospels for those who are ready for a challenge. There is evidence that Jesus spent parts of his life outside the Jewish world, and indeed Joseph and Mary with the infant Jesus lived in Egypt when they took refuge from Herod. What really makes Christianity unique is that it is not simply a book or a set of doctrines, but a person – a divine Person who fulfilled everything that was prefigured, not only by the Old Testament prophecies, but also by the Mystery religions of Greece and Egypt. Thus the Gospel writers did not plagiarise the old stories of Horus and tales of virgin births, but related what they saw and experienced. The antique Mysteries prefigured and prepared the ultimate Mystery, and mythology became historical fact. This is the Incarnation of the Mystery, of the true God.

This is about the finest and most profound chapter in Mosebach’s book, and I have already been familiarised with these notions through reading Dom Casel and Louis Bouyer among others. Without the incarnate Mystery, Christianity could no longer be a person, but simply a message, an ideology, a political or revolutionary ideology. Mosebach and I are on the same page here.

St Paul described the Church as the body of Christ. Theologians speak of the mystical body, a sacramental reality, something much higher and beyond the materialistic notion of a human institution. The humanity of the Church is only a symbol or an image of her divinity. Bodies grow and develop from conception, birth, childhood, adolescence and ripening adulthood – and then decline towards death and resurrection. Apologists of the traditional liturgy talk of organic development in the same way as Newman formulated his theory of doctrinal development – and the difference between developments and heresies. Pope Benedict XVI made much of this notion in his writings and his attempts to foster a quiet and prayerful revival of liturgical tradition. I have given careful thought to the “immobilist” notions held by Protestants, many Eastern Orthodox, Old Catholics and reformers in Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism – the back to the “pristine” sources ideology. I can never been able to become convinced even though I did not go through with the Ordinariate movement. Now, Benedict XVI is in retirement, no longer the Pope… The notion of development justifies a rite and tradition that did not exist in the early centuries, but which contain all the seeds from those forgotten times. The big problem with this is considering the future of the liturgy. Should it decline and die like a human person who has grown old and is singing his Nunc dimittis? Should it be reinvented or done away with altogether in order to restore pure Mosaic Monotheism? These are questions anyone will ask, and our answers are often woefully inadequate.

I don’t think all the questions can be perfectly answered to complete satisfaction. They need further thought, and we are always haunted about whether Jesus should continue to live among us in signs, symbols and veils – or allowed to die in order that the pure message of love and generosity between humans may be proclaimed in a new secular world purged from superstition and fanaticism. Jesus himself could be advanced as the ensign of the new atheism!

I think we need to ask a question. If all churches disappeared and we were persuaded to believe that the Christian priesthood is worthless, the notion of mystery no more than an illusion, would we continue to be Christians? If Evangelical groups were all that remained after a successful purge of all liturgical and sacramental Christianity, would we go to their services? I think most of us have been to the Baptists to accompany our siblings and friends in their prayer and commitment to the Christian way of life in terms of being good and eschewing evil and sin. I have prayed with Baptists, but I have never been inclined to join them or affirm them to be the true church. In my thought over the years, if such a thing happened, I would see no need to join a defined church community and would certainly prefer to take my place in secular life. Certainly, I would continue to make the Gospel message my rule of life to be good with other humans, kind, compassionate and self-sacrificing – but invisibly without trying to persuade others to adopt the same philosophy of life. Perhaps I might be inclined to study the old Pagan ways and spiritualities, seeking spirit in nature and the life of this world. Perhaps sacramental Christianity could be found in another form, in another pre-Christian prefiguration, the cycle beginning anew as we wait for the Redeemer.

Such an extinction has not happened, and Catholic Christianity continues in its various manifestations and ecclesial communities, from the great Patriarchates of Moscow, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople and others to the small Churches like our own going by an ecclesiology akin to that of local Orthodox Churches. In our communities, we may not understand things in the same way, but we all seek to continue to have our beloved Saviour with us, not only in memory, but in Mystery and Sacrament.

I am deeply edified by the devotion and sincerity and a-liturgical Christians like in my sister’s Baptist community. Those are solid people like the Jewish people of old and the Reformers themselves who endured dungeon, fire and sword for their beliefs. Fr Dolcino, Wycliffe, Cranmer, Luther and Calvin were passionate men who sought the truth and who denounced the evils of institutional corruption and popular religion gone wrong (or adapted for clerical business profitability). They share this solidity with the Fathers of the Church and with generations of monks, prophets and saints. At the same time, one who has seen the sun is unwilling to go back to living in a cave! Those of us who have eaten meat cannot be satisfied with milk alone.

I can only think a moment and remember what brought me to Christianity. We are all different, and our experience is not the same. I cannot help but think that what really makes the difference is our experience and inner knowing and not listening to a barrage of words and more ideologies and information.

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Predictions about the Future of Christianity

Posted on Sunday, 19 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Two interesting links have been sent out this week by Dr William Tighe, one to the future of Christianity being conservative Evangelical – Atheism is doomed: the contraceptive Pill is secularism’s cyanide tablet.The other is Why Millennials Long for Liturgy. I have found them intriguing as I tend to take an interest in predictions and conjectures about what Christianity might look like in ten years or so, a time scale in which most of us who are not too old reasonably expect to be still alive.

When I have written on this subject, the reactions often tell me that I am too pessimistic and that we should be more upbeat about prospects in the future. Perhaps, and in any case we should be positive and affirmative, since experience has often shown that we often get what we “want”. This is one difference between Americans and Europeans, with the British being somewhat apart.

The prediction of the victory of Evangelical Christianity seems as simplist as hearing Mayor of Brescello Peppone from one of the Don Camillo films expounding on Marxism and the fight of the proletariat against capitalism and the black clerical reaction. At least this is how it strikes me.

The devil in this story is liberalised sexual ethics and the white knight in shining armour is the conservative Evangelical. It’s all about large families of children suitably indoctrinated to outnumber atheists and baby boomer liberals. The ideology sounds just about as hollow as the stuff you probably still get in North Korea, not that I have ever been there! This ideology opposes the older one consisting of saying that when people become comfortable in life, the belief and values of Christianity go out of the window. According to this article, the victors won’t be Muslims but conservative Evangelicals of the American variety.

The alternative to the conservative ideology would be liberal religious people embracing atheism. The idea seems cogent, since this is what seems to have happened. The article says it clearly

Fundamentalists are largely immune to their [those of the atheists] attacks, and become only stronger as the more committed members of the established churches head their way. Those religions that survive will become more conservative.

We hear the same about traditionalist and conservative Roman Catholicism. The Roman Catholic Church becoming “smaller but more committed” as the atheist Left attacks it is lifted straight out of the old musings of Cardinal Ratzinger. The interesting thing about this article is that it is not an apologia for the American Tea Party and the kind of politicians who would send troublesome children to the electric chair, but a view of a similar movement occurring in English Conservatism.

Naturally, Christians can only condemn abortion because it is the taking of innocent human life, however tragic the circumstances usually are. But from there to affirming that Christianity will win out by having conservative families have lots of babies lacks credibility. Most of the children of clergy and other devout Christians I have known have taken other directions in life.

Evangelicalism? I have a brief brush with it in the 1970’s as I would go, after having sung Evensong in our Parish Church choir, to where my sister attending a Fellowship service at our town’s other Anglican parish, an Evangelical one. On getting married, my sister became a Baptist, and I attended a service in their church last February a day or two before my mother’s funeral. See Sunday Evening Worship with the Baptists. They are good people, but like many religious communities, they can suffer from the fermentum pharisaeorum, the leaven of the Pharisees, self-righteousness and intolerance.

Evangelical Christianity is growing in many parts of the world, including England, but I don’t think the liberals and atheists have any more to fear from it than the Muslims.

The other article brought to my attention affirmed the idea of large numbers of “millennials” being drawn to liturgical Christianity like traditional Catholicism, Orthodoxy or high-church Anglicanism. I myself am one who was initially attracted to Catholicism (I mean generic Catholicism) by church buildings, choral and organ music and by the liturgy – once I had discovered it in the Milner-White legacy at York Minster. How many others of my age were also interested in such things. There were about 400 boys in my school, and daily and Sunday chapel were compulsory. At school, we had Prayer Book Evensong and optional Series II Communion, rather simple and middle-of-the-road. The incense and processions were down the road at the Minster for things like the Epiphany Procession and the Feast of St Peter, and they were joint services organised with our school choir and the Minster choir. In short, all 400 of us got a good exposure to these ceremonies and regular services, heard the Word, but yet few of us would remain interested in “church”.

I am very sure that most of those 400 young men, a few of which have already died, were not attracted either to the liturgical wealth of York Minster or even to the Evangelical services over the road at St Michael-le-Belfry. A few boys were interested in introducing guitars and the “modern style” for some of our services. I don’t remember many boys being attracted all of a sudden to Christianity because the music was sometimes a little more “catchy”.

This other article advances the idea that post-moderns are yearning for “meaning” through rich liturgy and ceremonial. Some young people were joining Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox communities. In the 1970’s a few of us did, but most did not. The weakness of this article would seem be that of extrapolating from a tiny minority of young people who did get interested in the liturgy and its aesthetics. But so many others say the same thing. There are remarkable examples of the most unlikely and culturally marginal people being attracted to Catholicism, like the band of bikers with long hair and leather jackets in America reading St Thomas Aquinas and becoming Catholics. Things do happen, but it is far from being a general movement. Many of us are attracted by beauty, but only a few are.

The story of someone’s passage from the barest version of American Protestantism to Anglo-Catholicism is moving and impressive, but this is the case of individual people. One thing that shook me to the quick in the traditionalist Roman Catholic world was that most people were not attracted by the beauty of the liturgy even though they were attending the old liturgy – but by religious and political conservatism. There is quite a lot in common between French traditionalists or intégristes and American fundamentalists.

I dare say that if more traditional liturgies were available, a greater cross-section of society would discover what they offer. Most traditional liturgy groups advance this notion of large numbers of young people being attracted by the old rites. Certainly, many young adults are bowled over by what they discover. Are the numbers so high? There are striking events like thousands of young people on the Chartres Pilgrimage each Pentecost, closely associated with scouting and the Benedictine abbeys being filled with young men. That is undeniable. The notion that any young people are attracted to traditional liturgies is something that deeply disturbs some of the old liturgical “dinosaurs” of the church establishments.

Here in France, some of the old Charismatic communities slowly evolved into a more monastic spirituality as they “re-ritualised” the new liturgy. There are quite a few articles on the Internet showing this idea that young people are returning to the older forms of liturgical Christianity.

I think a lot of study needs to be done on making the distinction between those attracted by the liturgy and the contemplative dimension of Christianity, on one hand, and those who are more motivated by politics and the anti-liberal reaction. I am at a loss to find objectivity in this matter, and would appreciate comments.

From a certain point of view, it would look as if the future belongs to conservatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, anti-liberalism, intolerance and even fanaticism in some cases. It looks to be a dark prospect, if the far-right is the only alternative to the dying relics of socialism, capitalism and the many things we fear. I would be very sceptical about liturgical Christianity becoming a mass movement, dominated by political ideology and force rather than a discreet leaven of discovery and spiritual growth.

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Mosebach’s Heresy of Formlessness

Posted on Friday, 17 January, 2014 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

A month ago, I wrote Does the Liturgy ever Exist in a Natural State? and this project brought me to buy Martin Mosebach’s book The Heresy of Formlessness. I have just finished reading it.

Though an accomplished novelist and writer, Mosebach is a layman, from which viewpoint he gives an extraordinarily candid and personal view to the liturgical shipwreck in the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote this work in German, and I read it in its exquisite English translation by Graham Harrison. Mosebach’s approach has clearly been influenced by the writings of Monsignor Klaus Gamber and Pope Benedict XVI rather than the more polemical hard-line traditionalists. His understanding of what went wrong with the liturgy long before Vatican II is subtle, profound and spiritual. This gives the book a considerable amount of credibility and respect. The theological vision that impregnates this work is that of an Orthodox incarnational approach, a healthy neo-Platonism and the spiritual aestheticism of Urs von Balthasar. In this second consideration, we find it in a nutshell:

Right at the beginning of Christianity, visible in the conflict between Peter and Paul, there were very different attitudes to paganism. On the one hand, there was a strict, puritanical rejection of any connection between the “pagan abominations” and the new faith; and, on the other hand, there was a universalist attitude that saw paganism as a second Old Testament, in which the Holy Spirit had prepared the way, through art and philosophy, for the coming of the Redeemer. For this latter tradition, the fact that the Catholic priesthood preserved elements of priesthood of all times was entirely natural; for the former tradition, it was suspect and odious.

This fundamental notion exactly underpins the whole paradigm of the use of symbols, images and art in the liturgy rather than have people read the Bible and reduce the anamnesis of Christ to a mere memory of something that happened two thousand years ago and remains only in the mind and emotions. Here is our difference as Catholics from the Protestantism of either the sixteenth or the twentieth centuries. Another thing Mosebach brings up. The reforms of Calvin, Luther, Cranmer and others were passionate and came from men of utter conviction and willingness to die for their beliefs. Not so with modern “reformed” novus ordo Catholicism which came from weakness and compromise. This observation writes volumes!

Does the Church need a liturgy. This passage has haunted me over the past month, and it is that much more impressive in its context:

We must not think of the future. The prospects for a liturgical Christianity are poor. From today’s perspective, the future model of the Christian religion seems to be that of a North American sect–the most frightful form religion has ever adopted in the world. But the future is of no concern to the Christian.

North American sect? From a European point of view, this would mean the so-called mega-church where services are based on mass entertainment. Possibly he thinks of the small provincial town Baptist church with the enthusiastic preaching and Gospel music. Or yet, he might be thinking of the big Billy Graham rallies in football stadiums. Perhaps, but the imagination is fired up.

Another point, which I find fascinating, is the notion of innocence and the fact that various issues, including the liturgy, are torn out of the context of the whole and given importance as “specialist” subjects. Mosebach discusses this notion in his second chapter Liturgy – Lived Religion, which colludes with my article on the liturgy in a “natural state”.

Perhaps the greatest damage done by Pope Paul VI’s reform of the Mass (and by the ongoing process that has outstripped it), the greatest spiritual deficit, is this: we are now positively obliged to talk about the liturgy.

Even those of us who love the old liturgy are obliged to be experts in it to counter the arguments of those who would take it away from us “for our own good”. We lose our innocence and the sense of a wholeness rather than a spiritual experience of a discrete series of single issues. This seems to be an important point. We could not even convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, because we would never belong like those who are born into that tradition belong. One thing that has been taken away from us is the sense of belonging and stability. Lay people are brought to evaluate the liturgy as if they were choosing consumer goods and getting the best value for money.

Many Catholics try to keep this innocence by going along with the reforms and not thinking about it – having the foi du charbonnier, or the faith of the ploughman as Eamon Duffy portrays the English lay Catholic. The problem is that it doesn’t work. The result is complete alienation from the wholeness of the liturgical experience – the indifferent “cultural” Catholic. I know plenty of them here in France.

This is why our attempts to restore the liturgy have remained exactly that – restorations, reconstructions, what some call British Museum religion. Can the genie be put back into the bottle? Can innocence be restored after we have the knowledge of liturgical good and evil? I think you can see where this might be leading. Perhaps the soufflé is ruined and all we can do is start over again. Nearly everybody has given up and lapsed into agnosticism or a vague “spirituality”, yet something tells us to carry on and keep working at it.

As I have mentioned before, perhaps innocence can be found by our soldiering on with our liturgical life but with other things to think about in life. We certainly need to learn to relax and do things the southern European way – I say so as a “northern” Catholic. Take up sailing! I am thankful to have read these reflections so clearly articulated.

We might smile a little at Mosebach’s desire to revive the allegorical way of living the liturgy à la Durand of Mende in the thirteenth century, expressed in the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum. It goes against the grain of our university liturgical studies – but perhaps this is what is needed.

I would definitely recommend this book.

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