Facing a World without Christianity

Posted on Friday, 18 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I occasionally look at the blog of Fr Ray Blake, who is a Roman Catholic priest in Brighton. He bewails the increasing secularism in England through his entry of yesterday, Like the Monks of Egypt. I have very simple questions to ask.

Essentially, what is it that Christians do that annoys the powers-that-be? I think it is two-sided. I have personally been “out of it” for too long, unused as I am to urban life, to say much of value, but I can offer a guess. On one side, I can only guess that there are hot-headed Evangelicals constantly “witnessing” and bothering people, and a very small minority of right-wing Catholics who think everything is due to the Church – all one-way. On another side, a nurse who holds the hand of a dying person and says a discreet prayer can lose her job. For the sake of the zealots, all Christians can be put into one basket and assumed to be “enemies of the people” – (Now where have I heard that one?).

It seems to be simple. If you are brash and bother people, the system will fight back. What place is left? Fr Blake suggests a return to the monastic life or something like the catacombs. Frankly, I think it would do us all a lot of good! The atheist and secular backlash must be reacting to something. On one hand, it may be inventing its own enemy like the Nazis when they burned the Reichstag and blamed the Communists! On the other hand, there has to be something to react against – bigotry and intolerance. Society then becomes increasingly polarised when everything is related to homosexuality and people wanting to “change sex” becoming something normal.

I had a long talk with my wife about the demonstration of last Sunday in Paris against the Socialists’ project of introducing same-sex marriage. Of course, we are talking about civil marriage, what happens before Monsieur le Maire before the couple goes to church for a sacramental wedding if they are believers and want a church wedding. The real issue here is not so much the couple of men or women, but that heterosexual married couples and single people can adopt children and the children have the right of paternity from their mother and father, or single parent. There is a problem when a child of two same-sex parents (the child being adopted or the result of artificial insemination in countries that allow it like Belgium) suffer from the separation of the couple or the death of the legal parent. The person who is not the legal parent cannot adopt the child and has no rights. Civil marriage of two persons of the same sex would resolve this legal difficulty so that all children would have the same rights as those of heterosexual married couples.

Of course, we could go back to imprisoning homosexuals like in the nineteenth century – but the genie is out of the bottle. Hitler stuck pink triangles to them and sent them to concentration camps and most were murdered. Nowadays, we have no choice other than to accept the trajectory of history, knowing there will be other changes and reactions in the future if the provocation is too great. For those who are Christians, the priest is called to minister to them pastorally like anyone else. Then it is a question of persons and conscience.

We are of course talking about civil law and people who for the most part are not Christians or believers. Intégriste Catholics go from the standpoint of the “social kingdom of Christ”, the rights of the Church over all humanity and the moral duty of all to convert to the true Church. Vatican II introduced ecumenism, the inter-religious dialogue, religious freedom. The 1983 code of canon law states that the Church claims jurisdiction only over baptised and practising Catholics. No claim is made over others. The Inquisition dies hard!

We Christians may disapprove of homosexuality on moral grounds and wish that society were more influenced by Christian tenets, but that is no longer the case. There is also abortion that involves the taking of human life. Abortion is wrong, but doctors and their clients will still do it. As a lesser of two evils, it seems better to allow abortions in proper surgical conditions than forcing the women concerned to resort to the use of knitting needles and coat hangers! And that after having shown the woman what abortion really involves, the bloody and gory killing of a human being. The Church can teach its own faithful about sin and wrong, but not those outside and beyond. The secularists now have strength and have the advantage over religious organisations and believers. Do we still go on rattling the sabre and provoking trouble?

It certainly doesn’t seem wrong to believe that secularism is showing an ugly side of intolerance and hatred of belief and Christianity in particular. English society is side-lining Christianity, and here in France, Christianity is closing down. French secularism has always been vigilant about les dérives sectaires, sectarian tendencies with a number of characteristics that present real dangers to the weak and vulnerable. To be fair, there are some very unpleasant organisations coming over from America, very aggressive, totalitarian and very interested in large amounts of money! There are always two sides to everything.

In recent history, France had anti-cléricalisme from about 1880 up to World War I. There were similar movements in Italy, and corresponding in time with the infallibilist movement of the 1860’s and Vatican I, amidst a number of skirmishes in Europe. Germany had the Kuturkampf, and the Church had to suffer. The clash was essentially an Enlightenment world view against the visceral anti-liberal combat of Pius IX.

How far can the Church go without ceasing to be the Church? In those days, it was a question of separation of Church and State and the believer’s attitude to science. Now, the extremes are pushed ever further apart.

Some unmarried young people might feel inclined to enter a monastery, and others are drawn to “alternative” lifestyles by buying abandoned villages in Spain and elsewhere and living the “good life”. Most of us have to stay where we are, dictated to by our jobs and need for money and the material necessities. We depend on the politicians and the businessmen, and they are holding the aces.

I have no simple answer to everything or even anything. However, I think we can make certain distinctions that will make it less difficult for Christians to live in a secular or even a hostile society. Perhaps in America, you can still knock on doors and “witness”. If I had some kind of “witness” at the door, even if he wasn’t from some weird cult, I would not accept Christianity coming from there. No one I know here in France would either, especially if the religion on offer is something irrational and inhuman.

We have to think as individual persons, think outside the box, and be sober about everything. People will do what they want, and we might feel offended. People have always done their own thing, including wrongdoing, and they haven’t always been punished by the law. We live in an unjust world. We are also “doing our own thing” by being Christians and doing what Christians do. Our rights find their limit at the beginning of other people’s rights, whether they identify with another religion or none.

We will probably be called to worship in houses and small churches, rediscover prayer and the value of spiritual experience. We will certainly need to rediscover the underground church like in China today, in the Soviet Union yesterday or the Roman catacombs centuries ago. The French réfractaires also survived when they didn’t get killed by the revolutionaries, and many of those people really gave their lives for the faith and not for politics and bigoted opinions. We can resist and fight like some people did against the Nazis in France during the war, but not be surprised when we suffer the consequences.

Above all, Christians are no longer the owners or policemen of the world. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, as he responded to Pilate that awful Friday morning. History is no longer in our favour, and it probably never has been. So, it is not a surprise that if we put our head on the block, we are likely to get it chopped off. We cannot provoke without expecting a reaction. So, it seems to be ad fontes!

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Euthanasia and Young People

Posted on Thursday, 17 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Euthanasia and Young People

One evening, my mother and I were sitting in the lounge and we were talking about life and death.

I said to her: “Mum, never let me live in a vegetative state in which I would have to depend on machines and bottles. If you see me in that state, disconnect the machines keeping me alive. I would prefer to die!”

In a spirit of admiration, my mother got up and disconnected the television, the DVD player, the cable Internet, the computer, the MP3/4 player, the Play-2, the PSP, the WII and the telephone. She took my cell phone, my IPod, my Blackberry – and threw away all my bottles of beer.

I nearly died!!!

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From the TTAC Website

Posted on Thursday, 17 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

A reflection on What makes the Traditional Anglican Church of Britain Traditional? has appeared in the TTAC website. It dates from the very beginning of this year. It seems as though the English member Church of the TAC has a new acronym, the TACB (Traditional Anglican Church of Britain).

The text begins by resuming the history of Continuing Anglicanism and the TAC in particular. Not once is the name of Archbishop Hepworth mentioned. The principle of Continuing Anglicanism is outlined together with the notion of Tradition.

The narrative about the ordinariate movement and the TAC’s role in it is interesting:

In recent years, rather than concentrating on promoting the Anglican Way and repairing the breaches among the ‘Continuers’, the Traditional Anglican Church in Britain, and the TAC as a whole have been  heavily preoccupied with attempts to achieve a spectacular goal; the healing of the rift with the Church of Rome with its more than one billion members. The TAC was led to believe that this might take the form of a coming together of what Pope Paul VI once described as ‘sister Churches’ in mutual reconciliation.

At the height of their hopes, in 2007, the then members of the College of Bishops and Vicars General, meeting at St Agatha’s, Portsmouth, solemnly signed a copy of the ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church’ which had been placed upon the altar, as an expression of their desire for such an outcome, and petitioned Rome for a response. After a wait of two years, however, it was made clear that although Rome was willing to provide special jurisdictions for former Anglicans in newly-devised ‘Ordinariates’, in which various aspects of Anglican culture would be preserved for the enrichment of the whole Roman Catholic Church, this could only be by means of individual conversion and implicit, if tacit, rejection of much of former Anglican sacramental ministry, whether exercised or received. And at the end of the process, the TAC would cease to exist.

The Vicar General of the TACB seems, as he has written, determined to engage a process of reconstruction and a recovery of a sense of identity and mission. Numbers of clergy are increasing, so we read, and St Katherine’s church in Lincoln is to be the cathedral for the future Bishop, who in his own words has been elected to be the TACB’s Bishop.

A lengthy section deals with the unacceptability of recent decisions and orientations in the Church of England, which would strengthen the basis of legitimacy of a traditionalist Church. The text is worth reading, and you readers may have your own ideas to express.

* * *

An interesting posting from Deborah Gyapong – Interesting (revisionist?) history from England’s TAC. An expression of post-modernism? An interesting perspective. Still, I have a reader who promises to go and visit the TACB church in Lincoln and see what there is other than the cultural / educational centre and museum. As for letting the fox into the TAC hen-house and scavenging the scraps:

I still think the process could have been done with some more pastoral finesse, but I’ve come around to being thankful for what is, despite the many huge disappointments along the way.

Anyone who has run a farm will know that a fox will kill 50 chickens just to eat one! Well, perhaps the TAC chickens weren’t so tasty after all.

As I have said before, weakness and sin in others can be tolerated and we get on as best as we can, but how do we deal with evil? Most people simply don’t bother with church any more.

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A TAC Census

Posted on Thursday, 17 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Deborah Gyapong has a post on her blog (no comments as yet) – A TAC census. I link to it on account of my earlier project of trying to find out what the “pre-ordinariate” TAC consisted of and what remains.

She lists the situation in Canada, which in late 2009 and early 2010 consisted of about 1,200 souls. She then lists South Africa (28,000 souls) and India (91,600 souls), both of which are not affected, at least in theory, because no ordinariates have been established in either of those countries. She also appeals for informed readers to verify these figures if possible.

Dr William Tighe did some research in 2006 on this subject, and this is his article. There is another relevant article by the same author: The Genesis of Anglicanorum Coetibus. Here is an old article I covered on Christian Campbell’s blog three years ago: Traditional Anglican Communion Statistics. It gave these figures:

Territory Attendance Proportion
India 130,000 54%
Southern Africa (including Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia and the Eastern Cape) 65,000 27%
Central Africa (including Kenya, Cameroon, Eastern Congo and Tanzania) 26,000 11%
UK and Europe 1,800 0.7%
Canada 2,000 0.8%
USA 2,500 1.0%
Central America 7,000 2.3%
Australia (including Torres Strait), New Zealand, and Japan 6,500 2.7%
240,800

It might seem like crying over spilt milk and that numbers are unimportant. Perhaps they are, but history is vital given our tendency to change history in favour of the winners of this world.

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Nutty Archaeology, this Time in Church

Posted on Wednesday, 16 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

In a half-asleep stupor, I could imagine the Vatican Congregation of Rites in the mid 1960’s, Monsignor Annabile Bugnini in his office answering the phone and hearing knocks at the door as scholars and leprechauns brought their ideas in. Like the cranky gardener who took rusty spanner “dinosaur bones” and plastic dog-chewed doll’s head “fossils” to the Smithsonian Institute, or the eccentric inventor with his infinitely variable gearbox or perpetual motion machine, there must have been hundreds of ideas for the Novus Ordo.

That’s probably not how it worked, and Bugnini pieced together a massive tome about his liturgical work from his arrival in the Vatican in 1948. Here is the bibliographical reference for those who are interested: Annibale Bugnini, La riforma liturgica (1948-1975). Nuova edizione riveduta e arricchita di note e di supplementi per una lettura analitica. Rome 1997 (BEL.S 30) [1st ed. in 1983].

My purpose here is not to knock the RC Church. I am no longer one of its clerics, and I care little for what they do in their churches. It’s their problem, but I mention the example of Bugnini since there were some characteristics in common between his reform of the Roman liturgy and that of the English Reformers four hundred years before. In addition to the idea of producing a restoration of the pristine purity of the liturgy in the ancient Church, Bugnini wanted to acculturate the liturgy to “modern” western mankind of the 1960’s.

Lest I should reinvent the things I have written on this subject, I refer you to an old Anglo-Catholic article on mine, Liturgical Archaeologism and its comments. Since writing that article, I am more critical of the Newmanite development theory, but I cannot deny any notion of “organic” growth whatsoever. None of us knows what the primitive Church was like, but we probably would find it extremely confusing were it possible to go back there in a time machine. I wrote the article when war was on with a certain priest of the Anglican-Catholic Church, who has been ill quite recently and publishes his profound sermons for Sundays and feast days. How things have changed as the bottom fell out of the polemics!

Whatever is done to the liturgy or whatever is not done to the liturgy, we will probably never be satisfied. Something doesn’t seem quite right, so it has to be changed, either to make it right for modern folk or chase after the dream of some obscure rite found in a clay jar near the Pyramids! Once we start messing about, people are angry, and not merely bored as they were with the old status quo. Everything is made that much more suspect when the “new” liturgy is made mandatory and the old cast into the fire in a craze of euphoria.

Make what you want of it all. When I read my old articles, all I can think is how less naïve I am about everything! The subject is hacked to death, but some people might like to reflect a little more. It’s up to you…

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The Affirmation of Saint Louis as a Hermeneutic Key

Posted on Wednesday, 16 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Sorry, hermeneutic key simply means something that enables us to interpret data, without which interpretation might be ambiguous or simply wrong. It’s a fancy term I only ever heard about in university, but it has become quite popular when it came to interpreting Anglicanorum coetibus from November 2009 until mid 2010.

Cough! Cough!

I have discussed the recent difference between positions in the Continuing Anglican Churches regarding the formularies and authoritative texts that guide our belief and life in communion in the Church. Here is an article from February 2010 in which these issues are discussed, explicitly naming Archbishop Haverland on one side and Archbishop Peter Robinson on the other.

The essential issue here is whether the Affirmation is simply a key to interpreting the older Reformation formularies like the Articles, Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer, or a new formulary that replaces and supersedes them and founds the jurisdiction and legitimacy of the Church body.

I’m not really one for nit-picking and using proof texts. It just isn’t my style, but I find two contrasting visions of the Anglican Church and what it means. One is essentially a Protestant notion open to a Catholic interpretation in the quest for a via media, and the other is essentially pre-Reformation. Archbishop Haverland expresses the notion of a “Henrican Settlement”, presumably meaning the status quo during the reign of Henry VIII after he had broken from Rome but before Cranmer got a free hand to import continental Protestantism, Calvinism in particular, into England. I have often read into this kind of narrative the idea of an “English Gallicanism”. Imagine if Henry VIII had been a little clever like Louis XIV of France and advised by a man of the calibre of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet!

I think Archbishop Haverland is thinking also in terms of creative anomalies and analogies rather than the unpleasant reality of a tyrant king who had the head chopped off from about everything that moved! Archbishop Robinson bewailed the idea of Anglicanism becoming a form of Old Catholicism (episcopal Gallicanism). He sees the Counter Reformation basis of European Old Catholicism, in liturgical and spiritual terms, in spite of its conciliar ecclesiology and refusal of papal absolutism. English Anglo-Catholicism, the big six and altar cards, fiddleback vestments and devotions for the laity… English Ritualism drew more upon the Counter-Reformation for its inspiration than it did upon the English Reformation and its distinctive Elizabethan Settlement.

We seem to be presented with a binary choice between baroque Catholicism and the Reformation – as if the pre-Reformation English Church had never existed. Nothing is mentioned of the Roman-Norman tradition of which the Use of Sarum is a part. Very few have even thought of it, yet it represents a third way between the baroque continental style of worship and the stripped bareness of pre-Tractarian Prayer Book worship. Obviously, the liturgical style is the first thing someone sees about a given church or parish, and that will indicate the inward state of mind.

Another assumption needs to be challenged – the authority of the Reformation formularies in the light of historical research and criticism. In the sixteenth century, for example, the Roman Canon was assumed to be of modern (medieval) and scholastic origin, and it was ignored that this anaphora of the Eucharist went back much further in the history of the Church. The great French theologian Louis Bouyer characterised Reformation liturgies as medieval lay devotions having been kept after the really ancient and patristic elements had been scrapped. That was something of an exaggeration, but Cranmer and the other Reformers were no more infallible than anyone else!

I have done some research into the liturgy during the Reformation era, and the authors I find most trustworthy tend to challenge the Reformed assumption that everything before was absolutely evil and corrupt and everything afterwards was “pure” Christianity. Manichaeism indeed! I tend to trust historians like Eamon Duffy, the author of The Stripping of the Altars. My guess is that fifteenth-century English parish Catholicism was little different from its northern French counterpart in the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries. There were weeping statues and credulous folk looking for miracles and healing – I am much less severe about folk Catholicism than I have been. If the Church cannot look after the simple, then they will go after real superstition! Anyway, we are drifting off topic.

I have argued for a long time about the Rouen-Sarum tradition as a third way and a get-around for this Reformation versus Trent dilemma.

These two approaches, while not utterly dissimilar or without any common ground, nevertheless present two fundamentally contrary and ultimately irreconcilable understandings of the Christian Faith — one being grounded in the developments and accretions of the medieval Latin church minus the Papal Claims, and the other looking to, and being guided by, the “consistent mind and voice of the most ancient Fathers,” as Queen Elizabeth I put it. The choice is ours to make.

This affirmation is extremely loaded for someone who has read Eamon Duffy’s books. I also question the identification of medieval liturgical usages with the (counter) reformed missal of Pius V and the Congregation of Rites. I also question whether the various versions of the Eucharistic rite in the different editions of the Prayer Book truly resemble rites of the early Church – any more than Bugnini’s second eucharistic prayer may be identified with the canon of Hippolytus. The fracture lines begin to be blurred and nuances creep into the picture.

I have also mentioned the possibility of retro-futurism in a frame of mind similar to nineteenth-century Romanticism and some sub-culture movements in our own time. Archbishop Haverland himself evokes a kind of Henrican Catholicism to denote a form of pre-Reformation Church without the worst abuses, presumably pecuniary-motivated, as were alleged to have happened under the jurisdiction of Rome. There is a kind of “creative anachronism” involved there. Unless we are to acculturate into the modernity and post-modernity of our own times and do away with Tradition altogether, or create some kind of “pristine primitive purity” that probably never existed, then some “creative anachronism” is necessary.

I don’t think this kind of “crisis” or dilemma is limited to marginal groups of Anglicans, but it is found also in Roman Catholicism between various kinds of traditionalists and the so-called revisionists. We find ourselves at the very limits of credibility, and perhaps even at the doors of the psychiatric ward, but something a little less than “authentic” has to be admitted to allow something to work and move forward.

Many of us have our own minds to clean up and sort out, let alone reforming churches!

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Nutty Archaeology

Posted on Tuesday, 15 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Going through my oldest hard-disk archives, this one seems to offer a little levity. Moral of the story – if you find something in your garden, do exercise Occam’s razor. When there is a multitude of explanations, the simplest is likely to be the right one.

* * *

There is this nutcase in Newport, Vermont, who digs things out of his back yard and sends the stuff he finds to the Smithsonian Institution, labelling them with scientific names and insisting that they are actual archaeological finds, explained the introduction to the following e-mail. This guy really exists and does this in his spare time! Anyway, here is the actual response from the Smithsonian Institution.

Smithsonian Institution
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institution, labelled “93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post . . . Hominid skull.”

We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago. Rather, it appears what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff believes to be Malibu Barbie.

There are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1.   The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilised bone.

2.   The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately nine cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.

3.   The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Plieocene clams that you speculate roamed the wetlands at that time.

This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Let us say that:

A.  The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.

B.   Clams do not have teeth.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our laboratory must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon-dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record.

To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to AD1956, and carbon-dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results. Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiffarino. Speaking personally, I fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was voted down because the species name you selected did not really sound like it might be Latin.

However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen. While it is not a Hominid fossil, it is another example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly.

You should know that our director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution. We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the director to pay for it.

We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe
Chief Curator – Antiquities

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A Clerk of Oxford

Posted on Tuesday, 15 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

A very interesting blog has been linking to my blog for some time, and I enjoy its poetic and artistic contents – A Clerk of Oxford. There are quite a few poems, hymns and devotions from the pre-Reformation era, well worth reading and meditating upon.

The person running this blog is “a post-graduate student in medieval literature. I blog about medieval saints, hymns, churches, folklore, history, Vikings, Victorian poetry, and anything else that takes my fancy“.

I recommend it.

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Is the Society of St Pius X Old Catholic?

Posted on Tuesday, 15 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This question is asked by Bishop Chandler Holder Jones in SSPX.

Here is his article:

The Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, the most well-known Latin Rite traditionalist movement, now appears to be, by the description of its Superior General Bishop Fellay, Old Catholic. That is, its position is precisely analogous to the status of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands, the Dutch Roman Catholic Church of the Old Episcopal Order, in the years 1723, 1870 and 1889, as it has refused definitively to accept the ordinary magisterial authority of the modern papacy. The SSPX places the Tradition of the old Latin Fathers of the ancient Church and the consensus of the Fathers above the teaching office of the contemporary Roman Communion. This has been exactly the historical position of Old Catholicism, and yes, Anglicanism, from the Reformation forward…

Fascinating.

Orthodox Anglicans and orthodox Old Catholics are, of course, sister Churches and have historically enjoyed full sacramental communion on the basis of the shared Faith of the ancient and undivided Church of the first millennium, the Faith of the One Church East and West, as expressed in the Western Rite. What could the future hold for the SSPX?

Yes and no… The story is incredibly complex. The SSPX upholds post-Tridentine and nineteenth-century Ultramontanist ecclesiology, so the historical and doctrinal questions are just not the same. They have (officially) avoided the sedevacantist solution – see my recent articles A Few Links to the “Intégrisme” Theme and An Excellent Explanation of French “Intégrisme”.

There is a certain analogy to Old Catholicism – schism from Rome in the name of Tradition and resistance to innovations, whether they be the papal bull Unigentus against Jansenism, papal infallibility, religious liberty or the Novus Ordo. Comparisons are possible, but they are only very rough and about as different as apples from oranges.

Will they go the way of ecumenism and liberalism like the Union of Utrecht, or like the Raskol (Old Believers) of seventeenth-century Russia? Speculation is possible.

Any religious community needs a foundational myth, a reason for its existence. With the SSPX, it is not the liturgy but intransigent Roman Catholicism claiming spiritual, moral and political ownership of the entire world. How they will do that without being in communion with the Pope or becoming sedevacantists, I cannot imagine. The mind boggles, and I don’t envy them.

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The Benedictine Monks of Saint Maurus

Posted on Tuesday, 15 January, 2013 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Abbaye_Saint_Germain_des_Prés_en_1687

Before the French Revolution, there was an illustrious congregation of Benedictine monks under the patronage of Saint Maurus who was a disciple of Saint Benedict. The introduction of the monastic life into France is attributed to Saint Maurus. Today, January 15th, is the feast day of this Saint.

This Congregation was called the Mauristes, and it was founded in 1621 and excelled for the high level of erudition of its monk scholars. By the seventeenth century, most monasteries had fallen into bad organisation and laxism, and not least the old Cluny Congregation houses. The mother house was at Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris (the church is now a parish church and the conventual buildings have disappeared). The idea was for the Congregation to distinguish itself for its literary and historical work, but also to return to a strict monastic discipline and the Opus Dei in choir. This strict monastic life was maintained until the Congregation was dissolved by the Revolution in 1790. Some forty monks were taken to the guillotine.

A good amount of material from the Maurist Constitutions was incorporated in those of the Solesmes Congregation by Dom Prosper Guéranger when he founded his community in 1833. The Solesmes or French Congregation has distinguished itself for its work in the field of Gregorian chant, and has kept most of its liturgical traditions. Some houses, like Fontgombault and Triors, use the 1962 Roman liturgy and the old Monastic Office.

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