Notre Dame de Pontmain

Posted on Monday, 24 May, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

It is a long time since I made a pilgrimage to a place of Marian apparitions. I had previously been to Lourdes and Fatima, and was struck by the intensity of people offering their prayers and asking for favours, especially healing from sickness.

Pontmain is less known, but is nearer my home in the direction of Brittany. Its history is set in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War declared by Napoleon III in 1870. Pontmain was then a tiny village of some 500 inhabitants, typical of many places around here in the Mayenne. Two young boys were helping their parents do some work in their barn. When one, Eugène, looked out of the door towards the starry sky, he saw an apparition of a woman wearing a blue gown covered with golden stars, and a black veil under a golden crown. The full story can be seen here.

On the same evening, the Prussian army ceased to advance towards Laval under superior orders. This apparition marked the end of the war. The apparition was quickly approved by the Bishop of Laval and the parish priest of Pontmain. This place is associated with a sign of hope in the midst of war. Quite a few pilgrims from Germany visit the shrine as well as those of us living nearby. Indeed, I heard German spoken by some people around me as I found a place in the church to spend what I hoped would be a quiet moment.

It was Pentecost Sunday and there were about a hundred people on the square in front of the church. There were two bishops in copes and mitres. I noticed how conservatively they were vested. There were many young men in cassocks and religious habits and also a large number of nuns and sisters. There had been the Synod of the Diocese of Laval. There had been a ceremony in the church and they quickly moved to the hall where they would have their meeting and talk business.

My own impression was that there were many people engaged in their prayers for this or that intention, as I was. There were a few strangely dressed people with a behaviour that suggested some degree of fanaticism or crankiness. I was not in clerical dress for the reason of avoiding being noticed and asked the usual questions of what community I belonged to or what I was doing in France being an Anglican. At the same time, the young men in cassocks and religious habits talked in small groups seemingly impervious to any world around them. The cassocks seemed to indicate the Communauté Saint-Martin who are charged with a parish in Laval. These are not traditionalists but conservative mainstream Roman Catholics.

I felt quite alienated from this ecclesiastical world and found it best to have decided to dress casually and anonymously. Going into the shrine church, many people were chatting in groups like in the supermarket, completely oblivious to anyone who might want to pass through the group blocking the way. We were all wearing masks as required by the Covid crisis. What I felt around this community of diocesan Catholics was an invisible wall, them inside and the rest of us hardly even existing. That was just an impression. I talked with no one, recognised no one, and reminded myself that I was not there to meet people but to combine a pilgrimage with an afternoon away from home.

Is there a certain hollowness in this expression of Christianity? Who am I to judge? Am I any different from them? I doubt it, apart from my feeling of alienation from a Church I never really converted to. I surmised that I might feel the same way in Walsingham with a pilgrimage of Church of England people. Yet, Pontmain is much less crowded than Lourdes and Fatima. They are places that concentrate practising Catholics, the curious and those who are seeking help for particular problems, especially health. I went with the idea of sitting somewhere quietly to say Vespers, but there were too many people, too much bustling and too much noise. The breviary stayed in my pocket.

I returned home feeling quite unfulfilled, even though I had expected little. Again it is the question of those who need other people to find spiritual energy, and others who find it within themselves and their solitude with God. Is there any real difference between a place where something miraculous happened in the past and any other place? Historical events do leave their imprint in a place. I found the same thing in reverse with places associated with evil like Dachau concentration camp near Munich or Oradour sur Glane where the SS murdered the entire population of the village. However, here in Pontmain, the beauty and grace of Our Lady seemed to be elusive, almost as if it had “worn away”.

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Mendelssohn Flies Away…

Posted on Sunday, 23 May, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I wrote the article O for the Wings of a Dove a few months ago at a time when my life was becoming increasingly conflictual. Finally the dove flew away and found its dovecote. In that little article, I reflected on the relationship between solitude and loneliness. I was not alone but lonely.

A part of my choice of a place to live in the Mayenne countryside was financial, another part was the calmness of an independent house as opposed to a flat in a block of identical flats. Mostly, it came from a conviction that I was a mess mentally and spiritually. I got into that mess in 2005 when my thought was much less mature and I believed that an intimate relationship was desirable.

As my dis-ease evolved over the years, I sought to understand a number of currents of thought like Romanticism. Emerson’s Self Reliance has also confirmed many of my own instincts. This essay has been translated into French under the title Confiance en Soi, Self Confidence. Where is the dividing line between such inner strength and sinful pride and selfishness? We are brainwashed in our corporate and collectivist world to eschew such individualism and seek relationships and social contact at all cost. After all, man is a social species like many others.

In Christian spirituality, there are alone-times that are recommended. The ultimate is the hermit, the contemplative solitary. On a more temporary basis, there is the retreat which is possible in a monastery guest house or alone in nature with a backpack and a tent. Most years since I learned to sail, I have been on a dinghy cruising journey both to enjoy nature the way very few people do and to live that jewel of solitude. When we are on our own, it is a test that can be painful or consoling – it depends on what state we are in. When we go into ourselves, what will we find? God? Evil spirits? Nothingness? If we find nothing within, from there comes the illusion of having to find what we are looking for in another person. That is the root of personality disorders.

If I were to prepare a couple for marriage, something I feel eminently unqualified to do, I would ask both of the persons whether they are ready to respect and uphold the solitude of the other. Few things are worse than one person who takes away the solitude and identity of the other. So many times, we see in a film the nagging woman wanting the attention of the man who is in his laboratory engaged in some inspired work. She is trying to drag the man into the “conformity mould”, get him to work as a civil servant or an accountant – but yet the result would be a destroyed individuality and a failure of that lust for the man’s soul. I won’t be “sexist”, because the possessiveness roles can easily be reversed.

If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t get married (Anton Chekhov)

We all experience the same paradox. I remember the words of my brother a few years ago in regard to my Aspergers autism diagnosis – “You have to come to terms with it”. I would add a layer of understanding to these words. Terms – terms are words with meanings. This is a concept I find in technical translating, where words are used in special meanings by different fields of knowledge and practice. As this reflection is written with words, it is good to give definitions. Isolation comes from the Latin insula, meaning an island, as in John Donne’s No man is an island unto himself. Loneliness more implies the lack of companionship. Solitude comes from the Latin solus. This is a word that is often used in the liturgy to underline the uniqueness of God. Thou alone art holy. It can mean not only the absence of relationship but also the existential integrity of the subject.

For many years, I have grappled with the idea of otherness. Why are we all human, yet only have the experience of being ourselves? The other person seems to be alien (not from another planet, but simply other), yet we are a part of the same humanity. It reminds the theologian of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Humanity and the person are just as mysterious and ineffable. The essential of our experience is to be alone, and this has to be accepted. Then comes the question of the limits of individualism and what can become selfishness and lack of respect and compassion for others. Whatever our moral obligations towards others, we are unique persons and respond to life differently. We cannot be another person, though we can and should experience a degree of empathy. Psychopathy is defined as the absence of empathy, which leads to inhumanity.

If our experience has diminished our belief in humanity, the work of reconstruction has to begin from oneself. The foundation is self-awareness, experience of God’s immanence as well as his transcendence. We live in a world of extraversion, of mass tourism, crowds and noise, “hanging out” with friends, the ideology of collectivism. Always being with others becomes overrated because of that notion that the object of desire is only in the ineffable other because we have nothing within ourselves.

Since childhood, I have been aware of the dangers of following the undifferentiated and unconscious herd, the mass, the current conformity fashion. Being capable of being alone, at least at times, enables us to live consciously, to develop that nobility of spirit of which we read in minds like Berdyaev and Thomas Mann. Solitude is the only thing that can heal our wounds and make our personalities mature.

Carl Gustav Jung describes this process as individuation, probably the one concept that was most understood by the Romantics. Each of us is alone to have our combination of skills, talents, personality and experience. I am frightened to be speaking with a stranger and find that this person is as alien to me as I am to him. What does this do to groupthink? I am amazed to see how corporate decisions can be so lacking in basic common sense and rationality. Collectivity brings stupidity, unless the group is made up of mature individuals. We can only become mature individuals by being ourselves, beginning with solitude.

Solitude brings strength and divine grace. We have to be strong to endure solitude and loneliness, to find our creative energies and sense of purpose. Others may be struggling with their meaning of life, certainly because they have looked for it in other people, who cannot give it to them except at best in a distorted form of an ideology.

The experience is painful. It leads many to serious errors like a poorly founded marriage, or “getting in with the wrong set”. No one else can do it for us, not for all the money in the world. We have to assume responsibility and rely on our own resources. No one else can understand what is within us any more than what is at the bottom of the ocean or on another planet. The only advice possible is in the form of general principles or platitudes at worst. This is how we grow up and acquire resilience and true stoicism.

The answers do not always come quickly. Our society is not given to waiting. Patience is a forgotten virtue. We often feel we are not getting anywhere, and often have to reculer pour bien sauter – the notion in the noble sport of fencing of taking a step back to make a better attack. I have learned many things about depression and differences between true clinical depression the falls under the competence of professionals and the results of binary and all-or-nothing thinking. We often have to go to those dark moments to find the light of our spark of divinity. Our only way is finding what lies within ourselves and facing it without the fog induced by seeking our “supply” from others, chemical substances or other extrinsic forms of stimulation.

This work is not navel-gazing but doing things that are both necessary (earning our living for example) and pleasurable (making things, reading and study, music, sports, whatever). The important thing is being ourselves. Of course, this will alienate us from the herd and the expectations of others. It is the work of heroes. I make no such claim, nor do I want to rely on human forces that will inevitably let me down. Why make the effort? We become less “in need” in our relationships with friends and family, more honest and aware. As the Americans say, we cut the crap.

As we grow, we become less dependent on that need for “supply” to compensate for our interior emptiness. Perhaps that mystery of “otherness” can be resolved in a new way, as unity of persons transcends nature – think of those old dogmatic lectures on the Trinity. Personhood exists at another level from crude individuality.

We become more authentic by being ourselves. Friendships become founded on higher principles. We develop a more ethical and moral sense of doing the right thing. If we are involved with other people, we like to do so on a basis of clarity of saying what we mean and meaning what we say. We stop looking elsewhere for authority and validation. This is particularly important in a world that seems to be sliding back to the 1920’s and a new era of ideologies and dictatorships.

Being creative will fill us with energy, doing the things we enjoy as well as things that can enable us to earn our living, at least to an extent. Our society is sick, to the extent that being sick is the “new normal”. We have to react against that ant colony and its bullshit. Solitude will bring us independence of mind, self-sufficiency and being able to resist the anthill and be ourselves.

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Settling in…

Posted on Sunday, 9 May, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The settling-in process is coming on. It is the prerequisite for being able to take life in hand and return to writing and making videos. I built my bookshelves last week, and there are just as many in shelves the other side of the room, and in a bookcase above my bed head. This is my bedroom, but also the library and sewing room. This is a small house, so two of the three rooms are multi-purpose. Only the oratory is exclusively dedicated to worship and sacristy.

I am presently working on my workshop which has been a real mess. The floor is beaten earth. Perhaps I will put planks in, but not yet on my budget. The building needs good ventilation, otherwise it will get damp and the tools will go rusty! Ora et labora – the workshop is just as important as the oratory.

The library will need radical sorting according to subject, and that is a job in itself. My office is downstairs and shares the space with the kitchen, refectory and music room (where the organ is going – more on that in the coming weeks). This is where I earn my living and do other writing work.

I have not yet fitted the curtains, but they are on the way. I need to cut them to length and sew the hems, then put up the curtain rails and rings. That will give a little less austerity to the rooms. The oratory will not have curtains on the window.

For music, the pipe organ is not yet reassembled. It also needs a modification to the case because of the lower ceiling. The 8ft stopped bass needs lowering and the conveyances lengthened. It will be quite a challenge. I have a MIDI keyboard which plugs into my computer which has the programme Grand Orgue which is similar to Hauptwerk. The principle is that the sound of each and every pipe of an organ is recorded in *.wav format. The result is as imperfect as a pipe organ and the result is impressive, and unlike most electronic organs, even digital ones. If I ever receive the visit of an organist friend, we could play Antonio Soler’s Seis Conciertos para dos órganos.

All this home-making is important, just like anyone else, for personal stability and a sense of belonging even in the quasi-absence of social life. I have yet to sail this year. Weather in April and May so far has been mediocre and my time has been taken up with removing my possessions from my home in Normandy to bring them to this lovely corner of the Mayenne. I started the process in about mid-March, buying large quantities of cardboard boxes and finding my rented lodgings and a removal firm with some help from my family. I have nearly all my things with me, which is a blessing in such a situation.

I feel more settled, though it will take time before this house is shipshape and Bristol and I can think about more books, articles and videos. Already, these blog articles of my new life are being posted, and they represent my social life as a human being and my ministry as a priest. One by one, the tasks are being done. I will be getting my second Covid shot in June from my old doctor in Yvetot. I hope and pray that this and millions of other vaccinations will bring the virus to become no more harmful than the common cold or the seasonal flu. The pandemic still impedes travel and many things I would like to do in England.

My little Sarum group will certainly organise a Zoom meeting, because we need to motivate each other and get more of an impression of working as a team, each with our particularities of publishing, academic work, the philosophical and cultural context and so much more to revive a notion of the liturgy in the wider Catholic world that has largely fallen into desuetude since the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This is just one example of a true priestly ministry as a solitary.

The work goes on. I am about to go and say Mass for this fifth Sunday after Easter, the last before the Ascension and Whit Sunday. I will be doing more workshop this afternoon, the coarse work before the fine-tuning and making of more shelves for tools and materials. It is the same in the library and especially in the downstairs room. I am going for my “new” (second-hand) fridge this afternoon to replace the one I have just scrapped because it was freezing the contents and couldn’t be adjusted. Little by little. Every situation needs careful analysis and anticipation, something I learned during my harpsichord-making course back in the 1970’s.

Your prayers are appreciated as I rebuild my life and learn from the past.

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New Oratory

Posted on Friday, 30 April, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have already posted these photos to Facebook to announce the “birth” of a new oratory in my little house near Ambrières les Vallées in the Mayenne. I have resumed the dedication to St Martin of Tours of my old chapel in the Vendée. Interestingly enough, the Vendée and the Mayenne are part of the Pays de la Loire. The fatherhood of the holy Bishop of Tours is a part of this area, though my present home is barely out of western Normandy.

I use the term oratory to mean a place of prayer as opposed to a mission or a parish church. I make no pretence to any relationship with the Oratory of St Philip Neri, though I have a great admiration for the Fathers and the spirituality mapped out by the extremely eccentric Apostle of Rome. This is the intimate heart of my life as a priest and a contemplative. I keep an image of St Philip Neri near my stall.

I made the altar when I was in my old home in the Vendée (until 2005). The sacristy  needs elements still in cardboard boxes somewhere in my workshop or in the two large tents I pitched in the garden for temporary storage. I made this altar when I was still under the influence (not of drugs) but my time at Gricigliano, though I went more for Renaissance simplicity than flamboyant baroque. I have had to forsake the “Dearmer” style for lack of space. I intend to make some altar frontals. I will offer the first Mass on Saturday, Feast of Saints Philip and James.

The chapel is installed in a tiny upstairs room with the altar to the side to avoid blocking the window. The single choir stall faces the altar, and the rest of the room is taken up by the sacristy. Without any physical barrier between the chapel and the sacristy, the room is divided into two.

This oratory is not intended to receive churchgoers, but is a my private place of prayer and liturgy. Should a ministry be needed in the future, it would be possible to look into an outside place for a mission and I could provide the altar (presently dismantled) from the chapel in Normandy. A chaque jour suffit sa peine…

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Oratoire Saint-Martin

Posted on Wednesday, 28 April, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Here is a brief posting to replace an earlier one which expressed a lack of prudence on my part. The most I will say is that I am now separated and many things remain in the air. In the meantime, I have a new rented home in the Mayenne and will make the best I can of life.

This experience has brought home to me the idea of self-reliance and taking responsibility. There is no place for “quietism”! My life will be centred around the little oratory (place of prayer) where I have an altar to celebrate Mass, the workshop and my office and library all over the house.

I hope to continue my ministry of study and writing, promoting the practical revival of the use / rite of Sarum and an authentic contemplative life without delusion or pretension. St Martin’s Oratory will also be a kind of “sanatorium” to recover from many things I fail to understand fully myself. The essential is to take everything day by day, baby steps in this kind of “re-birth”.

These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,
Where have ye been? behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?

When silent I
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
How could I smiles or tears,
Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.

I that so long
Was nothing from eternity,
Did little think such joys as ear or tongue
To celebrate or see:
Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,
Beneath the skies on such a ground to meet.

New burnished joys,
Which yellow gold and pearls excel!
Such sacred treasures are the limbs in boys,
In which a soul doth dwell;
Their organizèd joints and azure veins
More wealth include than all the world contains.

From dust I rise,
And out of nothing now awake;
These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,
A gift from God I take.
The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies,
The sun and stars are mine if those I prize.

Long time before
I in my mother’s womb was born,
A God, preparing, did this glorious store,
The world, for me adorn.
Into this Eden so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come His son and heir.

A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,
Strange all and new to me;
But that they mine should be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass. – Thomas Traherne

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Sarabande for the Morning of Easter

Posted on Sunday, 4 April, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

One of the glories of Herbert Howells to wish all my readers a happy Easter. I will shortly be going to my chapel to restore the Blessed Sacrament to its place in the hanging pyx above the altar from where it has lain in the Sepulchre since Good Friday (Use of Sarum). That little ceremony will be followed by Mass.

May this Easter bring us all increased faith and hope in these times of uncertainty and the continued scourge of the coronavirus.

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Catholics, the Paradox

Posted on Sunday, 14 March, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Most of my readers are probably familiar with this film giving a caricature of the Vatican II reforms in the 1960’s and the following decade, and of the traditionalist reaction. The drama is centred in a monastery on the remote coast of western Ireland.

As the film progresses, we gradually move from a rough bog-Irish traditionalist rebellion to a battle for faith. I see in this film a very interior conflict between a certain form of exterior religion and its inadequacy in dealing with the great existential questions of humanity in the face of God and his own inner consciousness.

Indeed, I always return to the same thought: as religion became more exterior and concerned for very little other than morality, it lost its essential meaning. I see this both with the “modernism” coming from the clerical bureaucrats in Rome and this kind of rough and mechanical Deus ex machina. The rough and untidy appearances of the lay faithful and the monks show a resemblance to our conventional notion of the medieval era shortly before the Reformation, something Romantics tend to idealise. Having studied the period a little, I am ready to believe that medieval Catholicism was very healthy in most places as attested in Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, but compromised by superstition and externalist “pharisaism” in other contexts. Several commissions of prelates at the Council of Trent reported some quite serious liturgical abuses as they recommended that the Roman liturgy should be standardised and codified. Here is not the place to go into the details. I touched on this subject in my university work Missa Tridentina, which you can download and read.

The film and its leading actor Trevor Howard playing the part of the Abbot bring us the audience to some fundamental questions about the nature of prayer, whether it is truly a way of communicating with the Divine, the raw existential questions. How do we deal with the challenge of it all coming to an end and being replaced with someone else’s piety and ideology?

Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down – Mark xiii. 2.

In particular, we need to ask ourselves what it all means to us, whether it is just tradition and “what we do”, or whether there is truly a spiritual transfiguration in the liturgical symbolism through initiation and liminality. The questions being asked here are the meaning of the old liturgical rites and the notion of miracles, especially the pilgrimages made to Lourdes by quite materialistic-minded people for the sole purpose of their physical health. The film is remarkably well acted with this understanding in mind.

Whilst I have no sympathy with the 1960’s construction intended to construct a “new orthodoxy” and a religion for modernity, as if we were all as “modern” culturally, I can understand how it all happened in the late 1960’s and the early 70’s. At the time, I claimed not to believe in God though I was a little boy. I was attracted to my native Anglicanism and later to Roman Catholicism through beauty and the notion of a culture that stood away from modern brutalism. My scepticism, or rather my mind to suspend judgement until I would be convinced by the evidence, stayed with me. I could not fit into the mechanism of the well-honed machine or the political ideology of l’intégrisme.

I recently wrote on Facebook:

What we call fundamentalism is above all a literalist interpretation of the written word, where an allegorical, analogical or symbolic interpretation would be more appropriate. We tend to use the word “fundamentalism” like “intégrisme” in French. It is a radicalised attitude admitting no dialogue or healthy doubt or scepticism of the lower “degrees” of truth. Like political fascism, it has to define itself in opposition to its “enemy”. It also reveals a particular personality profile assimilated to “cluster B” disorders.

“Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.” ― Umberto Eco, “The Name of the Rose”.

Much of Christ’s teaching against the leaven of the Pharisees needs to be meditated upon to grasp its inner meaning.

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. (…) Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. – Matthew xxiii.

In the end of the film, the Abbot loses the ability to pray the Our Father. The monks behind him are waiting for the firm and fatherly leadership they were used to. But that is now gone. The Abbot reacted as many did in those days and now. What was the use of it all in the face of the challenge from Rome, the collapse of any coherent underpinning of what they believed they stood for? What is the alternative?

There is another meaning which I sense with the current pandemic and the destruction of social life in most of the world. The “progressive Catholic” agenda largely came from a reaction against the totalitarian regimes that caused World War II. We lived a time of individualism, humanism and liberalism. We now arrive at the dystopian spectre of Orwell and Huxley, which they could see in the 1940’s long after the death of Hitler and the defeat of Nazism. That spectre is something typified by the Chinese-style lockdowns to contain the spread of Covid 19. Humanism can and must be sacrificed by those intégristes of medical science.

Our love of tradition and beauty are a double-edged sword, holding us suspended between our aspirations and loyalty to tradition, our love of freedom and our fetish for bondage. I fear much more than insipid ideas of uniting Christian churches and Buddhism. I see the harshness of Russian and Chinese authoritarianism bearing down on the world as our democracy buckles and collapses under the weight of populism. As it happens in exoteric religion, it happens in politics.

The only way is inwards, the quest for God and our own consciousness of the spirit. If liturgy can arise from that vision, then we will have something that nothing could ever break. The producer of that film was remarkably lucid in his time (1973).

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Le Mieux est l’Ennemi du Bien

Posted on Monday, 1 March, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I am quite impressed by the way academics, politicians, lawyers and others are reflecting about our society and the unhealthy trends that need to be challenged. The French lawyer Mireille Delmas-Marty summed it up as “The dream of perfection is transforming our constitutional state based on the rule of law into a police state”.

This observation immediately refers to the present pandemic and the various degrees of lockdowns and other restrictions designed to relieve the hospitals of excessive numbers of sick people needing intensive care. Then, in came an insidious ideology that determined the way things were done in New Zealand and Australia together with a few oriental countries – Zero Covid, meaning maintaining lockdowns regardless of the human and economic cost until the disease is totally eliminated. On the surface, it seems a very good idea, but is it realistic?

Recently the media ran a story about a young man who was sanctioned during the first lockdown by the police even though his attestation of being outside for exercise was in order. The police decided that his wearing flip-flops instead of proper running shoes was proof that he was not out for exercise. He appealed and it seems that he has good grounds for winning. A woman was also sanctioned for buying sanitary protection in the supermarket with her “essential” foodstuffs, because the police saw the hygienic product as “non essential”. I think she also got her fine quashed on appeal. Zero Covid, zero risk, etc. The powers being given to the police, or simply being assumed arbitrarily, are quite alarming. France is quite particular in that the ideology of the Jacobins has never really gone away. They don’t chop off heads any longer, but France is Paris and Paris is France! In other countries, England has always been a country of fairness, dialogue and reasoned debate, but it is drifting. Ireland has the strictest lockdown of all.

The keyword is safety and security, the two words being the same in French, sécurité. In past years, the political authorities vowed to eliminate terrorism after the atrocities committed by Daesh and other religious groups. The beginning is appealing, but then what is the cost of such safety and security? It is a dream of a world without risk, without crime and without sickness and death. No one must be allowed to die of anything! The price of such a dream is the nightmare of fear.

Many of us remember our childhood in the 1960’s or 70’s, or earlier. We took more risks riding bicycles around town, climbing trees and buildings. I once rode my bicycle into the side of a car. One second earlier and I would not be writing this article now. The driver took me home to my parents, and I told them the truth that the accident was my fault. I still have a photo from about 1970 of our school recreation at Millan Park in Ambleside and boys jumping off rocks about six to ten feet high.

Such a feat can result in a broken leg or a sprained ankle, but I never knew such a misfortune to happen. We learned the parachutist’s fall as he makes his legs give, and he rolls over on the ground to absorb the final shock of landing. Then we climbed up and did it again! I suppose it was no more dangerous than skateboarding.

O felix culpa! is an exclamation sung by the deacon at the Paschal Vigil. It is an understanding of the Fall and sin as having a positive outcome. It is a paradoxical idea. The Redemption would never have happened without the fault of Adam. This is a notion we will find more profoundly expressed in Jakob Böhme’s theology of the Ungrund. Similarly, to deprive mankind of any risk or danger in a prudent balance between risk and the desired result is to deprive us of our humanity. Many things we do are potentially dangerous, from getting out of bed in the morning to driving a car, repairing an electrical device (of course we are going to switch it off and pull the plug out!), crossing a road, going sailing, anything. We measure the risk and decide for ourselves to what extent that risk is acceptable.

Much has been said about the Nanny State and citizens being treated like children. In the case of the Covid pandemic, most of us follow the rules, wear masks, sanitise hands, greet people by an elbow touch. Some couldn’t care less and crowd into limited places without barrier gestures, and we all pay the price through the next lockdown. Perhaps the law courts should bring back the pillory and the stocks for those flouting the rules without care for anyone else! Another Latin expression came into my mind, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. In law, it means that if a witness tells a lie, he has no credibility in anything else he says. Here I have the impression that the ZeroCovid people would find a case of the virus in one place and everywhere has to be quarantined. Not everywhere has the same density of infections.

I think there is progress at the level of the French government. It looked like a general national lockdown at the end of January. At the beginning of March, Dunkerque and Nice are in local lockdown for a few weekends and on the same curfew as the rest of us during the week. Decisions are currently being made for other places according to the levels of infection by variant strains. Already, President Macron is talking about loosening some of the restrictions in four to six weeks. It sounds just like Boris Johnson in England. Political points? Certainly, but maybe a break in the monolith of the ZeroCovid ideology which is more far-left than anything else.

It is still not easy to anticipate where things will go. Hopefully, most of us in the riskier age groups will be vaccinated by this summer. Here in France, I don’t expect to get my jab before mid May 2021, but maybe the Johnson & Johnson will make a big difference to the slowness of the operation here in France. My sisters in England are already vaccinated. I surmise that what is in the heads of presidents and prime ministers is that as many as possible will be protected and natural “herd” immunity will hit the younger age groups with few or no symptoms. Some scientists are more optimistic about longer-lasting immunity. Then of course, there will be other strain mutations and it will end up as just another version of the common cold. The question now is finding an acceptable level of risk against the needs of human beings to live normally and the state of the economy. A more pragmatic approach is prevailing, and this seems to be to be wise.

We still have many things to watch out for in the way as a gradual slide into totalitarianism and a post-human future of “perfect” technology. The reality is that our technology is far from perfect and banal faults and outside interference can stop something from working properly. I was brought up in a time when you gave a faulty machine a good bash with a hammer or a fist – and that would overcome the bad electrical contact and the machine would work again without an expensive repair job! Humanity trumps the machine.

Again, I bring up the notion of Romanticism, of rational humanism, the triumph of man over the machine. Here, the machine can mean a car or a computer, but also an ultra-rational system that replaces intuition and the kind of thought that includes risk in the paradigm. It is the abiding theme of Frankenstein and nearly all science fiction books and films throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to our own time. They are prophecies.

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The Force of Scepticism Grows

Posted on Thursday, 18 February, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have already written on this subject, and I remind the reader that for me, scepticism means having an open mind because truth, which is transcendent, cannot always be perfectly known. You are most welcome to peruse my old articles of this subject as it has evolved in my mind.

There is a recent article by Freddie Sayers We need Scepticism more than ever.

Freddie Sayers is a journalist and interviewer who runs the UK-based alternative media platform UnHerd. He is critical of the policy of lockdowns in most countries that have implemented them and has been supportive of the Great Barrington Declaration and scientists like Dr Sunetra Gupta.

Without expertise in epidemiology and virology, I can only say that I find a great diversity of expert scientific opinion about what to do about the Covid epidemic. I was taught at school and university that science was supposed to be more objective than that – the deduction of certainty from repeatable experimental evidence. What I do find alarming is the association between some opinions and political positions. I am also frightened by the prospect of dystopian policies being promoted by extremely rich people and politicians who should be more responsible. Am I a conspiracy theorist? I don’t know, but Nazism in the 1920’s to 1940’s was a conspiracy, and was very real to those who died under that regime. It can happen again, and I fear that it will.

One thing that contributes to this fear is what the Dutch thinker Rob Riemen called mass humanity. Modern humanity is leaning increasingly towards an ideology of resentment, inciting anger and fear, the need for scapegoats and hatred of the free mind. In his book To Fight Against this Age (New York 2018), Riemen draws on the wealth of humanist thought of Thomas Mann and Albert Camus among other lights of the twentieth century.

It is important to question the prevailing status quo and “orthodoxy” of science (based on conjecture) and political ideology. It was only during the Enlightenment that scepticism became more mainstream. Can anything in the world really be known?

Sayers packs a lot into his article, which you can read from the above link. Perhaps scepticism of the open-minded and enquiring kind will prove to be a light in the darkness in these coming years.

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Post-Institutional Catholics

Posted on Sunday, 14 February, 2021 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Update: this article of mine inspired another blog article Is the Pope Catholic? Who cares!?

I have already criticised Pius IX’s infallibilist ideology as something that is intellectually absurd, and which is in fact the basis of sedevacantism. I find this interesting:

Three dominant narratives have framed Vatican II : forced continuity (Conservatives); formally authorized secularization to religious institutions and theological propositions (Liberals); and demonstrable discontinuity, with a helping of latent apocalypticism (Traditionalists). There is an emerging movement. The Traditionalist narrative has a certain amount of momentum – there are, as De Mattei notes, more voices questioning the events of the 50s through the end result of the 70s.

Catholicism in the 1950’s, often seen as halcyon days, contained the seeds of its own destruction. Alan Watts was writing in 1947, in the heady days of Pius XII! Perhaps there may be a new tendency that combines liturgical traditionalism with a critical attitude in regard to the Papacy.  I encountered this when I was at Fribourg University, especially with a few German priests I knew.

* * *

I am thankful for the work Dr William Tighe does most days to provide a few interesting links to current events surrounding the Church. This link made my blood boil.

I don’t know which planet those people, including the Pope, live on – but most of us are worn down and alienated, or never had anything to do with this clerical organisation.

I was talking with a friend of mine a couple of days ago. We both know a brave parish priest in the area of Sens who came up with the most damning reality check. When I was a seminarian in the early 1990’s, we had a visit from a French archbishop looking for traditionalist priests. During a talk he gave us, he forecast that most French dioceses had about ten years’ life left in them. The statistics of French people going regularly to Sunday Mass in their parish churches was averaged out to about 5%. That was early 1992. This priest in France (for whom I have installed an organ in his church) talks of 0.06% in a particularly degraded diocese with two cathedrals and a large area. What do we conclude? It’s finished.

The Pope seems to be pandering to Mr. Biden and an American world, but American Christianity too is dying. As often, I return to the quotation from a man who was far from being a saint in his 1947 book, Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion.

The present low ebb of Church religion consists in the fact that rarely, even for Church people, does it give the soul any knowledge of union with the reality that underlies the universe. To put it in another way, modern Church religion is little concerned with giving any consciousness of union with God. It is not mystical religion, and for that reason it is not fully and essentially religion.

If we are going to talk of institution, authority and magisterium, we have to remember the foundation of all that – Christ and an idea of life that contradicted that of the world of which the institutional church (and Old Testament Judaism) is a part. Pope Francis cites the example of the Old Catholics rejecting the definition of Papal infallibility at Vatican I, and uses the example to condemn dissident and even critical minds of our own time about Vatican II. The old cracked record goes on and on in a kind of infernal circle. Perhaps Francis the Jesuit sees himself as the new Pius IX who feels infallible *. Quite honestly, it is revolting and supremely cynical.

* I have mentioned this notion is several postings in this blog, and I really think I should give my source: August Bernhard Hasler, How the Pope Became Infallible, New York 1981, p. 113 “Many people claimed that Pius IX actually spoke of feeling infallible”. I must admit that Hasler was of a similar mind to Hans Küng, namely theological liberalism. At the same time, his historical work seems to be honest. Pius IX was on record as having shown signs of what might now be interpreted as mental illness and an inflated ego. Naturally, the notion of infallibility will be an insult to an evolved notion of truth and foundationalism.

In his criticism of post-institutionalism (if anyone would use such a label to identify themselves), Mattei makes a distinction between those who are keeping their heads below the parapet and those in “open revolt”. So post-institutionalism is a dead end… Fine by me, since I am neither pre, post or institutionalist. My own world is so far away from that polarised world in America that is now influencing the media and popular culture over here in Europe.

I belong to an institutional church as a priest, but one that is anchored in Anglicanism. Most of us ordinary folk are far from the authoritarian culture of Rome since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the days of the three popes strutting around Europe like some caricature from Palmar de Troya! It is legitimate to aspire to a different form of Catholicism, something like the vision of Western Orthodoxy, a more spiritual than political Old Catholicism and Anglican Catholicism. We can unite body and soul without getting into the kind of cognitive dissonance associated with the modern Papacy, the Vatican Bank, paedophile clergy, big money and favours gained from American presidents. If that is the institution and spiritual life is not possible without it, it is time to read Nietzsche!

In my conversation with my friend, we talked about the traditionalist societies, fraternities and institutes we knew, and how everything has remained so static and sterile in the name of stability. Doubtless, those men have lived through their inner conflicts and Angst. Like a man stuck in a toxic and childless marriage, they are unable to see a different horizon. Am I able either? It is the question I keep asking.

Such a level of thought is probably going to bedevil every man who is considering the priesthood, whether in a diocese, a religious order or some traditionalist institute trapped in its pseudo-baroque rigidity. Many have fallen by the wayside as priests or seminarians. They would be dismissed as the chaff who were not part of the elected and chosen elite. These are human souls, and most of us have turned over the page and moved on. A part of the purpose of this blog, especially when I once called it New Goliards, is a testimony from the casualties of the anti-Christian ideology represented by Papal institutionalism.

In my thoughts, I keep returning to Oscar Wilde. He was not the wisest of men and got himself put in prison through his own appalling choices, but he took the consequences with courage.

You may realise it when I say that had I been released last May, as I tried to be, I would have left this place loathing it and every official in it with a bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned my life. I have had a year longer of imprisonment, but humanity has been in the prison along with us all, and now when I go out I shall always remember great kindnesses that I have received here from almost everybody, and on the day of my release I shall give many thanks to many people, and ask to be remembered by them in turn.

The prison style is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give anything to be able to alter it when I go out. I intend to try. But there is nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of humanity, which is the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who is not in churches, may make it, if not right, at least possible to be borne without too much bitterness of heart.

I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very delightful, from what St. Francis of Assisi calls ‘my brother the wind, and my sister the rain,’ lovely things both of them, down to the shop-windows and sunsets of great cities. If I made a list of all that still remains to me, I don’t know where I should stop: for, indeed, God made the world just as much for me as for any one else. Perhaps I may go out with something that I had not got before. I need not tell you that to me reformations in morals are as meaningless and vulgar as Reformations in theology. But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become.

What has become of Roman Catholicism represents for some of us a spiritual prison, condemning us to circular ways of thinking and endless paradoxes. Wilde did not know the infallibility of Pope Francis, but of Pius IX, the bourgeoisie and the clerocracy. Christ was absent from all that. The body of the Church had to be elsewhere if the spirit could be recognised. The Victorian prison killed Oscar Wilde, not immediately but through the illness that would take him after his move to Paris and his inability to rebuild his broken life.

Some of us have been broken to a lesser extent by what proves simply to be unredeemed human nature, sadism, pride, cruelty, dominance, hypocrisy and every other sin of the spirit. If institutionalism is merely a cover for these sins in a corrupt state like many governments of countries have become, then the institution no longer means anything.

That, my friends, is the cause of empty parish churches and empty seminaries.

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