The Blue Flower

Just a few days shy of the coming sede vacante in Rome, I am brought to think of something I wrote back in 2005, when I had not yet joined the TAC and was living in the Vendée part of France. I was writing a blog of sorts called Ramblings of an Unchurched Cleric as part of my website. I still have all the files on my hard disk.

Pope John Paul II died on 2nd April 2005. Like this year, Easter was in late March (27th in 2005) and it was a cold spring. I remember long conversations with a friend in Paris about the stagnation in the final years of the John Paul II pontificate. We looked for change and hope, whether we were “in” or “out”, because it seems clear that the credibility of all Christianity depends on the fortunes of the Roman Catholic Church. If the Vatican goes down, we all go down and the atheists will cry Victory!

2005 was a year when I felt very worn out spiritually. Shortly after the election of Benedict XVI, I took up contact with Fr Graeme Mitchell, a priest of the Traditional Anglican Communion serving in Australia with the intention of making an application to Archbishop Hepworth in view to joining the TAC. The Archbishop has always been known for not responding to mail, so I had this idea asking this kindly priest to do the necessary prodding and motivating. Roman fever was in the air, but far off as yet. The Archbishop interviewed and accepted me in August 2005 as he made a visit to England and made a detour to Paris.

Anyway, in April 2005, both before and after the conclave, I was an outsider with memories of having been a seminarian and a cleric in the RC Church. I was filled with foreboding, and I still have the impression that the Benedict XVI pontificate was like the suspension of a death sentence. Perhaps that is the way of church history, Pope to Pope, day by day, brick by brick. Brick walls can be painstakingly built and demolished in seconds. As then, we are all concerned for what is happening, and that Christianity may not be forever blackened by the example of bad clerics in the most powerful ecclesiastical institution.

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5th April 2005 – Sede Vacante

As the media chafe at the bit in furious speculation as to the future Pope, I allow myself even at this stage to give a few reflections about this time of emptiness, hope and clamouring for knowledge of what is to come.

As I write, thousands of Catholics are paying their respects to the late Pope John Paul II as he lies in state in the Vatican Basilica. With the whole Church, I will observe the novena of Masses and prayers for the repose of his soul. Unlike the presumptuous statements of journalists and misguided bishops, Pope John Paul II is not a canonised saint, and he needs our prayers. If he has millions of faithful praying for him, he needs these prayers, for the prospect of a Pope facing God’s Judgement fills us with great foreboding as we redouble our prayers and supplications.

In our mourning, we cannot but think about the future as we react to the asinine stupidities of press reporters who know so little about the Faith and Catholic customs. The bookmakers begin to take bets, like so many crows waiting for their share of the carrion. For this reason, I permit myself these reflections.

Some are asking for the Church no longer to be the Church. In modern Anglicanism, everything is allowed as the “revisionists” want: moral permissiveness, women “priests”, lay people taking the place of priests, and so forth. The religious practice of Anglicans in England and Episcopalians in America has plummeted even lower than in Catholicism. This is sure proof that the solution to the crisis in the Church is not the curing of a strep throat with an injection of cancer cells.

The notion of a dictator Pope à la Opus Dei is going to alienate the Roman Curia even more from the long-suffering faithful. Why impose family / sexual morality and priestly celibacy when the very purpose of these noble ideals is undermined? Who wants to be a celibate priest (or even a married one), devoting his whole life in a sacrifice for his flock, when the life of parishes is blocked by bureaucracy and petty-minded pseudo-clerical laity wanting the “power”? We are no longer in those far-off days of 1978. Who still talks about P2 and the Vatican Bank, or the tortured agonies of the dying Paul VI bewailing that the smoke of the devil had entered the Church? Twenty-six years have passed, and the concerns are no longer the same, nor are the Cardinals (only a couple remain from the Paul VI era). Over these last years of the John Paul II pontificate, we have felt the stagnation, the waiting, the loss of hope. The page must turn and something must move.

It is no longer about conservatism and liberalism like in the old days, those mythical beasts Scylla and Charybdis on opposite coasts of the sea waiting to swallow straying ships whole. We need to return to transparency, the simplicity of the Gospel, freedom for the practice of our Faith in the celebration of the liturgy, the promotion of an authentic Christian culture, eons away from the 1960’s and 70’s. We need to be able to find beauty in worship far from the Mega-Masses and loud brashness of mass hysteria. The beauty of holiness is an icon of Truth and Love. Cardinal Ratzinger said a few years ago that the only apologia of Christianity is the beauty of worship and the holiness of the Saints.

The pressmen regurgitate the old litany of permissiveness, divorce, contraception, women priests, the old worn-out anti-clericalism, the equally exhausted Marxist class struggle. They come out with the same oppositions between the revisionists and political radicals versus the Curial conservatives. They have forgotten that what is at stake is the Mystical Body of Christ. If they don’t believe in Christ, how can the Church make any sense to them?

I look at the parade of papabili, see their faces and look at their profiles, and my heart is heavy. Going by the old Roman saying, Chi entra in conclave papa ne esce cardinale. I indeed hope that the more papabili they are, the least likely they are to get elected! We can only be grateful that the Conclave will be held in secret behind locked doors, the trash and clamour of the world shut out, away from the influence of the media – and our curiosity.

In the absence of an obvious solution for this eclipse of the Church, we can only pray with increased fervour, knowing that we are probably at the end of the “Constantinian” Church – not the end of the Church (et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam) – but the end of a certain institution.

As on Holy Saturday, the statues are as if veiled, the tabernacle is empty, the altar is bare and gathering cobwebs, the Daughter of Sion stands desolate. We pray, we wait and we hope for the first striking of the New Fire and the singing of the Lumen Christi. We have at this point to ask ourselves: What do we believe in? As our senses fail us, faith alone will bring us through the trials to come.

We returned home last Thursday after having buried my beloved mother, and having seen her body lying cold and flat in the coffin in the chapel of rest the day before. I said the Subvenite and the Libera me and associated prayers from the English Ritual, as this would be my only chance to do so. I had already said a Requiem Mass the day my father broke the news and another on the eighth day. They were sad events, even for believers as some of us are, and they seemed to pull our family together as funerals usually do. New intuitive understandings came through the sadness and the resolve to go forward in life courageously. Having lived many years on the European Continent, I had forgotten how English our family is with our sense of discretion and dignity in all adversities!

I had the use of our laptop computer and wi-fi was available everywhere we went, so I was able to keep up with e-mail and service this blog. I got rid of a couple of trollish comments, the usual “convert to the true church or <whatever>” slogans, and approved others from new commenters. I wrote up my interesting experience of attending a Baptist service in Leeds (not wearing clerical dress) and a reflection about the Pope.

The articles flying around the internet and the newspapers are very disorientating as we are led into the same old dilemmas of conservative rigidity against doing away with dogma (theological or moral teachings), ordaining women and applauding the LGBT agenda. It all seems to be about categories of thinking that are foreign to any individual human being! Last week, for me, was just not the time for thinking about all that.

What does this papal abdication mean? Has he really just discovered a gay clique in the Vatican? If so, he’s bloody slow on the uptake since the rest of us have known or heard about it for thirty years! Is he giving up because men in the Curia won’t let him do anything against the “new orthodoxy” going back to the time of Paul VI? That’s what a pontificate of unfinished jobs seems to point at. We seem to have had a Pope whose intellectual work and thought fill us with admiration but who never had any kind of practical sense. There are so many possibilities that are probably just as wrong as each other.

If people want to lay bets on who is going to be the next Pope, that’s up to them. I find such speculation idiotic. However, the general future direction of the Church is a concern of all of us, even for those of us who didn’t do any Tiber-swimming last year or the year before. If it all continues as now, some will suspect a conspiracy of the “bishop emeritus of Rome” secretly governing through a “puppet” papacy. We’ll see how big the cranky fringe gets. Many would like the Church to go like ECUSA with Ms Jefferts Schori at the helm, taking traditionalists to court if they don’t hand over their property and claim to use the word “Catholic” to describe themselves. That seems to be what Hans Küng and the various large liberal groups of the English and German speaking worlds would like. Then there is a Southern Cone tendency as in the Anglican Communion, but which in the case of the Roman Catholic Church would probably mean writing off the western world. There is of course the possibility of a return of the intégriste and conservative right with a new Pope from Opus Dei, perhaps open to a deal with the Society of St Pius X. Such a Pope might take a name like Pius XIII and a certain proportion of folk would be happy to read infallible pronouncements every morning at breakfast on the BBC news on the wireless! Maybe as much as 80-90% of the Catholic world would be alienated.

Has Benedict XVI realised what effect his abdication would have? Perhaps, like in The Name of the Rose, he has ignited the dry tinder that would bring down the entire corrupt institution, from which a new Church would grow “brick by brick” in some far-off future. Some refer to the “prophecies” voiced by Ratzinger in the 1960’s according to which the Church would be something other than the Vatican and old institutions of Europe. At the end of the 1960’s, like Louis Bouyer and others of the ressourcement school, Ratzinger perceived a crisis in the Church. Church buildings and institutions would rapidly become things of the past and there would remain few faithful. He saw the need for a less clerical priesthood involving ordaining men established in life and their occupations or giving them non-ordained ministries. He clearly hoped for a more interior and spiritual Church, and some way to bring back the alienated popular classes.

This blog has had some lovely comments these last few days, especially from Michael Frost and Stephen K. There are some real pearls of wisdom. The conservatives and liberals might make a caricature of Benedict XVI’s idea of the small and “pure” Church. The concept simply means different things to different people. At the extremes, the Pope is accused of being some kind of Donatist or Manichaen sectarian, and on the other, of seeking to further the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy” of destroying the Church to foster the goals of the Devil. Neither agenda seems to be in character.

What would remain of Catholicism if the entire clerical structure were discredited as the anti-clerical media is obviously hell-bent on doing? We have to see between the cracks, between what the journalists want in terms of women bishops and gay bishops, birth control, abortion and the rest – and what really seems to be wrong. There is a real problem with the bureaucracy and the Vatican that seems to have become something like the Court of Versailles in the 1780’s or Moscow in the 1980’s. If there is some kind of upheaval to come, would that make things even worse or bring good? I am unsure.

Another idea comes into my mind, why the abdication came just before the beginning of Lent. The message of Benedict XVI is one not of following the political agendas of the day, but of introspection and examination of conscience. The themes of Lent come through: our mortality and the fear of God, temptation, the light of God in the soul, the Transfiguration, the exorcisms of the rite of Baptism and finally the Paschal Mystery of the Transitus Domini. It’s all being timed liturgically. That’s how it looks to me.

Benedict XVI was always one for mystagogical catechesis, a point that will certainly be missed by those stuck in theological systems that ignore the tradition of the Fathers and an earlier vision of the Church.

Wait and see…

Sandro Magister has written an article Last-Ditch Appeal: The Pope Should Withdraw His Resignation making the case for a hypothesis of Pope Benedict XVI withdrawing his abdication before the end of this month.

Of course he would lose all credibility. This abdication does somewhat demystify the Papacy and undermines the heritage of Pius IX and Vatican I – the infallible “demi-god”. Are future Popes going to be like eastern patriarchs or chief executive officers of modern states or large business corporations? Either way, we could see the fulfilment of Malachy’s prophecy: the end of the Papacy as it has been known over the last thousand years or so – but not the end of the world.

It also depends on who gets elected – the person and the chosen papal name giving the message of the course to be steered.

Could it be that the Orthodox, Anglicans and even many Protestants have not been wrong with a more spiritual definition of Christ’s Church? The future could be very interesting indeed with a kind of “1989” in the Church and a different idea of a new spring…

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Also see Benedict’s Wager, with a HT to Deborah Gyapong. This is an interesting viewpoint.

I could also call this article The Wacko Factor!

Another British conservative press article: Pope Benedict XVI resigns: he won’t be a recluse, so could he divide the Church?

I see the conspiracy theories coming! Thirty years ago I was hearing from some of the more extreme cranks that Our Lady had said in a place called Bayside in the USA during the pontificate of John Paul II that Paul VI was still alive (had been replaced by an impostor until the impostor’s death in August 1978), drugged and kept in some Vatican dungeon. I don’t believe any of this rubbish, but I know that some people will believe just anything.

The scenario seems straightforward. A new Pope will be elected sometime in March, and Bishop/Father/Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger will spend a time at Castel Gandolfo, and then will be unconcerned for anything than living in retirement with his books, piano and cats. It happens in any diocese when the old bishop retires and a new one is appointed. But, the Papacy is enshrouded in irrational belief and the idea of infallibility that has been instilled into Catholic minds for a long time.

The news came out yesterday that the See of Rome will be vacant as from the end of this month and there will be a conclave to elect a new Pope. The bookmakers are taking bets and calculating probabilities, based on I don’t know what expert advice or data. We know that Benedict XVI intends to retire into a life of prayer and study. Will he spend the rest of his life in the old Vatican nunnery we read about or return to Germany? At this point, speculation is unhealthy and idle, and will do none of us any good.

What is still interesting me is to read informed viewpoints, not only from those who applaud every gesture of Benedict XVI, but also those with a more critical viewpoint. Other than the racaille calling out for same-sex marriage and women cardinals, there are some sensitive spirits around. I already quoted Damian Thompson who is a respected journalist and a devout Roman Catholic. The American journalist Rod Dreher has written Viewpoint: Benedict a disappointing leader in troubled times in our very mainstream BBC news. Former Catholic? I bristled, wondering whether he was now a militant atheist. No, originally a Methodist, he converted to Roman Catholicism, and again to Orthodoxy – a traditionally-minded Christian likely to have a more interesting critical viewpoint than many in his profession.

The real issue in the Church, the elephant in the room, has been, since the pontificate of John Paul II and before, clericalism. That would be, in this journalist’s analysis and that of many others, the underlying cause of the complicity by silence of just about the entire clerical caste in the sexual abuse of children by priests. The present Pope saw the extent of the disease whilst he was yet at the CDF under the dying John Paul II. There was no end to it. Whilst John Paul II was alive, next to nothing could be done about it.

Back in April 2005, the sclerosis seemed to be at an end with the Pope’s death, and it seemed that the only thing to do was to abandon the Church of Europe and America to its fate and base a new effort of renewal on the Church in Africa and South America. Let Islam or Big Brother have Europe – and good night! Then Cardinal Ratzinger was elected. I had not yet joined the TAC and I lived on my own in western France as a vagante priest. Would reconciliation be possible with a Church more concerned with “restoration” than the status quo of the clerical bureaucracy? I welcomed Benedict XVI, but quickly saw that anything positive would take decades and longer than our lifetimes. We began to read on the blogs “the Pope of unity” – but “brick by brick“. This great theologian would continue to inspire us by his writings as an intellectual, but he would try to govern by persuasion than constraint. I agreed, as I was already through with the conservatives who wanted everyone to suffer except themselves, rather like those who want the end of the world but at the same time to survive it.

I was already far from the RC Church. I lived in my house in the Vendée, did my translation work and ministered to those traditionalist Catholics who were not concerned about my not being ordained by as kosher a bishop as others would prefer. I was far from it all but connected by Internet, and I had a kind of “blog” on my website called Ramblings of an Unchurched Cleric. Day after day, I looked at the Vatican watching blogs, especially Father Zuhlsdorf’s entries between feeding wild birds and Italian cooking, reminding me of an Austrian priest I knew in Rome in the 1980’s, Fr Gregor Hesse.

I noticed that the traditionalists and conservatives hung onto every word of the new Pontiff, and quite frankly projecting their wishful thinking onto what he was actually doing. Benedict XVI has been for a reform of the reform, allowing the old liturgy for those who want it – but we have to remember that he and Cardinal Ottaviani thought differently at Vatican II in terms of theology and the clash between the ressourcement theologians and neo-Thomist scholasticism. The vision of Benedict XVI is radically incompatible with that of the Society of St Pius X and the old Roman School it seeks to restore and perpetuate. The differences reveal the same dead end as under Paul VI in the 1970’s.

Rod Dreher describes his feeling as one of disappointment. What happened between Summorum Pontificium, Anglicanorum coetibus and the appointment of Archbishop Müller to the CDF after the just as enigmatic and paedophilia cover-up tainted Cardinal Levada? I remember a film with Harrison Ford addressing the American President, and the latter enticing the character Harrison Ford was playing, saying that he “had a chip in the big game”, the old Potomac Two-step. One dances from one foot to another, without principles or coherence, merely as a political strategy. I have had my suspicions that Benedict XVI was a profound cynic. How does one get into the most powerful position in the Church and then become Pope without being like most politicians? The way Anglicanorum coetibus was implemented was deceitful and messy. Of course the conservatives would say that was all part of God’s will and that the arrangement is perfect. It destroyed Archbishop John Hepworth, rooted out those who had received orders in the RC Church (as was written in Levada’s Complementary Norms)  and seems to have taken in a small number of TAC clerics and laity, just as long as they had never had any previous RC involvement. I am happy to see the success of the Ordinariate in Canada and the USA. Australia seems to be doing well, and the English one has taken on a few TAC men. As Deborah Gyapong and I discussed in 2010 and 2011, the whole thing was outsourced to men without the least sympathy for what had seemed to be the vision of Benedict XVI.

I don’t think the Pope is a cynic, but his advisers are!

Frankly, we seem to have seen quite a few half-finished and botched jobs, presumably because someone said to the Pope “You can’t do that. We’re not allowing it“. For Benedict XVI in 2005, it was a raw deal. No one could satisfy anyone, for the same man would be too conservative for the liberals and to “modernist” for the conservatives and traditionalists. Who in 2005 could have done better?

The real obstacle was certainly the Vatican bureaucracy. I tend not to believe in conspiracies. No one forced Benedict to abdicate, but they might have told him that he would henceforth be no more that a rubber-stamper for the bureaucracy. Who would want to continue being Pope in those conditions? Note that he was never able to undertake a real reform of the Roman Curia since the Animal Farm pigs took over under Paul VI and John Paul II. The poor man probably “saved his soul” by resigning. We can only hope that Boniface X or whoever it’s going to be isn’t going to put his predecessor into Paolo Gabrieli’s old dungeon cell and make him die of disease and starvation!

What could have been done by the sex abuse crisis? We know what most of the liberal journalists would say – make the RC Church a worldwide clone of ECUSA under Ms Schori! My answer to that would be completely unexpected. The problem of both Rome and ECUSA is clericalism. How do you deal with clericalism? Get rid of priests and bishops? Clericalism is not a problem only with priests but with any elite that considers itself as above the norms of the rest of humanity. I sometimes find lawyers and surgeons more clerical than priests I know – when they are arrogant, unaccountable to anyone, and maintain their power through secrecy and intrigue.

In order to deal with priests who rape and bugger children, you have to break down clericalism, the mechanisms protecting the guilty. I know what the clerical game is like. When I last wrote about my experience in seminary, I mentioned that we were trained in clericalism and the art of using secrets and secretiveness to gain power over others. Secrecy is a cult, and not merely for the protection of persons who have confided their sins to a priest as they confide their physical ills to a doctor and the injustices committed against them to a lawyer. The cult of secrecy goes much further and serves clerical power for its own sake.

I was just a few years in seminary and just a few years in country parishes, but Benedict XVI has been in it up to his neck since the 1940’s when he went to seminary.

What next? Logically, they could make Bishop Fellay a cardinal and elect him, putting the SSPX in the position the Jesuits occupied in the Counter Reformation times. The trouble is that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were kings and princes in the Church’s pocket. They whipped their subjects into compliance. Unleash an über-traditionalist Church on the world today, and what would we get? I can only imagine the cartoons in the newspapers! The thought is absurd. You need men like Mussolini, Franco and Pinochet with their secret police, torture chambers and places where people can be made to “disappear”. Otherwise, religion depends on convincing people of its intrinsic truth. Is it true? Do we believe it to be true? Or, is the object of our faith our power to manipulate other people and play God?

Benedict XVI has always been realistic about the limits of Catholicism in Europe. The game is over, though one may be permitted to believe in some divine miracle. The traditionalists expected too much and projected their wishful thinking on a man who wasn’t going to play their game. He kept his silence, an idea we will be reading a lot about in the liturgy in about six weeks time…

Dreher’s conclusion, as one who went Orthodox, is that the game is over in Europe and Canada, and increasingly so in the USA. All churches are declining, the liberal ones faster than the conservatives. It’s all being thrown away like the household rubbish we put out in the street each week.

I don’t know if clericalism has the same meaning in those parts of the world where Christianity is thriving. It would seem that the only way the Church in the west can be reformed is to leave it to die its death. There are fewer and fewer priests in the parishes, and soon there won’t be the money to keep the provincial dioceses going. Our churches will be demolished, sold, redeveloped or put to secular use.

We seem to be confronted with the same reality as in 2005, only that the sentence was suspended for a while. The last chance of 2005 is now blown. It would seem that Europe belongs to Allah or Big Brother, as may also be the case in the other western countries. Perhaps it is time to leave the western world, except that the peoples we once colonised are hardly likely to want us on their doorstep. Bernard Moitessier was not so wrong as he set out for his second circumnavigation. We can hole ourselves up into our micro-churches, but that will only be a temporary stop-gap and band-aid on the wound. I have no illusions about our little Anglican communities, as they are just as fragile as a boat in the Roaring Forties, but being on a boat is better than swimming.

I remember a friend talking to me about the change of civilisation from the one whose death we are witnessing, and that we will not have the consolation of seeing what will replace it. Even the assumption that Europe would become Muslim or as “atheist” as Albania in the Communist era is open to criticism. Muslims, when they get money and the amenities of western consumerism become less interested in the Mosque and the Koran. They discover pleasure! Pressure is also building against capitalism and consumerism. Where would that lead? The future is as obscure as the conclave in Rome next month.

For the Roman Catholic Church, there may be twists in the plot as this month nears its end. Certainly the traditionalists have their hopes for a climatic declaration of the canonical regularisation of the SSPX, leaving them to oppose Vatican II and every kind of theological work outside the neo-Thomist Roman mould. I can only see problems, and the man Joseph Ratzinger would still be alive to be made to pay the Devil. This Pontificate could simply come to its last day in silence and nothing to report. That seems more likely to me. There is nothing to understand! Foucault’s Pendulum – it just goes tick-tock.

Perhaps this should be our thought as we hear the words tomorrow – Remember, o man, that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. That is our reality, as it was many times for the unfaithful of Israel.