Radical secularisation?

Posted on Sunday, 1 March, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have been having more of a look through the website of the Nordic Catholic Church, and in particular a short posting by Bishop Flemestad on The Church of the Future. The thought appears to be cogent, since it is a meme that has gone around the Roman Catholic and Anglican world for decades. I remember my seminary days in Rome (1985-86) at the Nepomucene College with a very dour American community called the Oblates of Wisdom. Msgr John F. McCarthy and Fr Brian Harrison still have a study center in America, and their writings are always interesting. Alongside this community, there were also a few French and Swiss seminarians and priests studying at the Angelicum after having left the Society of St Pius X. Hardly a day went by without hearing the “satisfying” ideas of some catastrophe from which those who assiduously said the Rosary or wore their scapular would be spared. In particular, it was to be a civil war or a clash of civilisations.

Obviously, in such a paradigm, the world has to be made to return to Christianity – but such an idea seems to be unlikely to say the least. I grapple with these ideas myself, and I look wistfully at Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option on my bookshelf which is still waiting to be read. It would seem that if the modern world is not ready to return to Christian Civilisation, an alternative world has to be devised. It seems to be Christenheit oder Europa or Berdyaev New Middle Age theme. The latter would seem to be as much of an illusion as the first. Where does that leave us? I will try to comment on a few of Bishop Flemestad’s ideas.

The collapse of faith in Western society is clear. No less palpable is the cultural collapse around us. The fragmentation of society has imprisoned the individual in “the culture of narcissism“. For the Christian an additional problem is that the moral disorientation is correlated with the destruction of the Christian patrimony.

Here in France, there is a residue of society that still attends Roman Catholic parish churches and cathedrals, nearly entirely in the cities. The traditionalists, both the Society of St Pius X and the “recognised” communities, have now become quite “mainstream” and no one talks about them outside their own circles. Outside churches, religion seems to be as irrelevant as anything outside the immediate experience of the person we are talking with. We tend to take the idea of individualism for granted – make people conform to the collective under threat of punishment, and they will be good Christians. That is the opposite of this supposed excess of individual freedom and ensuing bad morals (sex outside marriage, contraception, etc.). I suspect the contrary is more true when I see the way people dress, get themselves tattooed and sport stereotyped hairstyles. They are following the dictates of fashions and group behaviours. The world is collective, not individualist. It takes a great effort to come to self-knowledge and be oneself. To be brutally honest, when one comes to a degree of self-knowledge, it is impossible to go back to the compulsion in which we have lived in the crowd. I admit my being influenced by Berdyaev when he says: No one who has left a Christianity based on authority can return to anything but a Christianity which is free (Freedom and the Spirit). However, freedom is a gift for those who are free and noble within. This is essentially the gnosis of which authoritarians are so afraid. Therefore gnosis is condemned together with the worst Gnostic excesses in history.

Concerned about the future of the European civilisation after the second world war, T. S. Eliot argued that it is the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is and he concluded: “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes”.

What kind of Christianity? Is it the humanism than Christianity engendered or the authority structure of the Roman Catholic Church able to wield authority over secular rulers? Has culture gone? It is true that people don’t seem to care about each other. They no longer read books, not even light novels, and the mobile phone has taken the place of addiction to television. We love repeating that meme, but many people do not fit the profile, even when churchy and religious things are off their radar scanner. It helps to live a little in this world to see how the opposite is true in so many of our contemporaries – those who have learned to be themselves, or at least to be on the way.

I would go even further and maintain that people seek gnosis (knowledge of themselves and the universal consciousness beyond themselves) because churches are too inadequate to give them what they seek. What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? (Mt 7, 9).

This notion of radical subjectivism keeps recurring. It is not wrong, but it is not universal, even if it appears to prevail. Humanity is at its most stupid in the collectivity. We seem to be looking at things at different levels, so being simplistic is just not going to give an adequate explanation.

There are many layers in modern society, beautifully described by the – – – Gnostics when they divided humanity into those whose principle of life was spiritual, the good law-abiding and rational citizens and the mass of materialists living only for sensual pleasure. For the real Gnostics (the Valentinians), there was no transfer between the three castes, so the mass was predestined to annihilation or damnation. If anything, the most authoritarian and dour Christians are the most “gnostics” however little knowledge they actually possess. The word Gnosticism is made to mean the most contrary of concepts. It is a word that is largely without meaning.

Ends of worlds are very attractive ideas to latch onto, like the end of the modern age or the end of the middle age. For the latter, Berdyaev proposed the idea of living through the dark night of the soul in positive terms. It would bring something far more luminous than the Renaissance that ran out of fuel by the time of the French Revolution and a fortiori the Russian one. If modernity is at an end, what follows it? Boom?

After the war Christian thinkers from different denominations foresaw the displacement of Christianity by an aggressive secular humanism. Of particular interest are perhaps the Roman Catholic voices as one might think that this mighty church would have faced the future with no little self-confidence.

Christians are not the only ones to be making such predictions of doom. Just listen to the radical environmentalists and how the solution is to abolish modern technology within ten years. Imagine it. Most people would have nowhere near the skills needed for a pre-industrial revolution life. It might happen, but not in the way they think. There are also the preppers, especially in America, who hoard up on food and arms. I thought of them this week as my wife and I bought enough provisions for a month in quarantine against Coronavirus – should it actually come to that. Be prepared. Have oil in your lamps, lest we should be told to go away because the time is past. That is Christian eschatology from which so many others have borrowed with so little understanding.

Quarantine? The faithful remnant? It is all so relevant to our anxiety, but we have things to share with the world and our testimony for those who are ready. Our retreat can never be total. Berdyaev also said: Had the Gnostics won the day, Christianity would never have been victorious. It would have been turned into an aristocratic sect (Freedom and the Spirit). For me, this means that there had to be a balance, a via media, between inner knowledge and the Church’s service to humanity at large. The message I see behind Novalis’ parable Die Christenheit oder Europa is that we cannot actually go back to the pre-modern period of history, but we should project its ideal values forward into our future

However, already in 1950 Romano Guardini, a dominant Catholic intellectual in his time, wrote an analysis of the emerging European culture under the title The End of the Modern World, concluding that with the other traditions also the Christian patrimony will be lost. Strikingly, Guardini did not meet this loss by positing the return to a premodern alternative, but with a new way of living the faith. Homeless in this confusion, the Christians must distance themselves from the cultural chaos and seek together in what he called an eschatological togetherness, based on mutual love.

Indeed, we have to find a new way of living the faith, ideally as a balance between the eschatological longing for the Kingdom and our establishment in the world for the service of humanity. We live this eschatology in a small way as our way of life is presently threatened by an enemy that is so small that it cannot be seen without a very powerful microscope. There has always been the distance from the word, yet a presence in the same world in order to serve.

I already mentioned Pope Benedict XVI as a theology professor predicting a new survivalist form of the Church. It is precisely the way of Continuing Anglican churches or traditionalists, though the tightness of “quarantine” has loosened as in the history of the Church since the Peace of Constantine. The expected persecutions and troubles never happened, at least not generally.

The survival process will be painful and the small communities of those who come out of the difficulties, will have to restart from the beginning. Thus, a simple and more spiritual church will make bigger demands on the individual members.

However, one has to be an individual in order to be of use to the collective. I have already observed the stupidity of groupthink, and the need for individuality in order to make creativity possible.

Bishop Roald seems to latch onto Dreher’s Benedict Option, but what exactly is that in terms of something that could exist in reality? Some Catholic version of the Brüderhof and the serious risks of sectarian drifts, notably mental manipulation by people with twisted or psychopathic personalities? That world would certainly be much worse than the modern world we live in. It seems that emphasis is more on individuals and families taking inspiration from monastic rules than the foundation of alternative towns and cities.

Persecution? Obviously, Christians in Muslim and Salafist countries are being persecuted and killed. In the modern secular world, it is much more subtle. You can get hauled up before the courts for hate speech or for torching an abortion clinic. Religious freedom is not there so that we can become bigots, discriminatory and worse than the sinners we are condemning. Political fanaticism does more harm to the Christian way of life than anything else. We cannot lord it over the non-Christian world.

Today, we are living to see the fears come true. In fact, we are the last Christian generation having been brought up in a culture oriented towards humanistic and Christian values. The destructive effects of this moral chaos will necessarily differ according to time and place. Sure is, however, that we are now at a turning point. The radical secularisation entails that church life in the future will not be a prolongation of the past. From the crisis the church of tomorrow will emerge without privileges as small communities of engaged believers, served by tentmakers in the power of faith. In this perspective it is worth to notice that in former core Christian areas like Germany and France, pastoral theologians across the denominational divide are discussing a church model for the future based on the house church. Without the buildings of times more privileged, the altar might again be the living room table.

This is something for which we need to be prepared, as for the Coronavirus. However, we must not extrapolate. We still have opportunities to help and serve humanity, practice good works without which our faith would die. We can still build modest churches and welcome those who want to come to them to attend services. We don’t have to use living room tables. If we are incapable of doing some manual work for ourselves, how do we expect to survive without electricity or supplies from retail shops with empty shelves. If we develop our skills and learn building, woodwork, electricity, plumbing, etc., we can build small churches with beautiful altars, a sanctuary of the Mystery.

Perhaps we are jaded with diocesan structures, committees, Charitable Status Registration, insurance policies and spending money on buildings. Obviously, here in France, I have none of those things other than a converted outbuilding for the chapel. Perhaps I have failed in my mission as a priest because I have not built up a community or “planted” a church. Perhaps my vocation lies elsewhere. These are ideas that disturb my peace and make me question things so much. I participate in my Diocesan business in England, and try to contribute good ideas if I have them. As in that quote in Berdyaev, there must be a “normal” church life alongside our innermost aspirations and longings. Normal church life is always possible even if the contact is only occasional.

The crisis of faith in Western world has left all denominations bewildered, even paralysed. For struggling Old Catholics and Anglo-Catholics the challenge is to find a way forward in a common faith and tradition. Hopefully, the Union of Scranton will serve as one of the vehicles which could begin to stem the tide of a post Christian culture.

I don’t think that a crisis of faith paralysed denominations, but rather the men of those denominations became complacent. They were no longer in adequation with the faith they claimed to profess. We all share in this same inadequacy, and for this, we need self-knowledge and inner gnosis, our true individual creativity and personhood. I hope and pray that the Union of Scranton will prove to be an instrument of this new Christianity in our world. So much progress has been made between the PNCC and the G4 grouping of four main Continuing Anglican Churches, and the official position of the NCC is obviously to support this project. This is very encouraging, and I hope that the NCC will take on a little more American creativity rather than sink into European pessimism.

Perhaps I am being too hard or simplistic about these questions, committing the same faults as I am criticising. These questions are extremely complex as is the modern world and the distance between ourselves and ancient Greek philosophy. As I have suggested in Romantic Christianity, the dualism between eschatological and institutional Christianity can be balanced out to some extent as events come and go in our human history. Sometimes, the going gets tough, and sometimes we can work with other influences for good in the world. I also conceive of the possibility of a new initiatic way, a sort of disciplina arcani to surround the liturgy and the Sacraments, and something like a “church of catechumens” where people can hear Scripture and pray both with the community and alone. In such a way, preparation for the Mysteries can be progressive as it was in the early Church for the catechumens – the very origin and purpose of Lent with its scrutinies and exorcisms in preparation for Baptism. I think there have been experiments along these line in the RC Church since Vatican II, but perhaps their philosophical foundation was faulty and wrong assumptions were made. I would even add something between the “Quaker temple” and the “church of liturgical mysteries”, a kind of school for teaching not only the catechism but also elements of philosophy, history and culture.

At the basis of all this is that I do not believe that most people are “radically secular”, but deep down have a notion of transcendence and universal consciousness, a longing for something they do not yet understand, a deep dissatisfaction with scientific materialism and consumerism. We need to hold onto a certain degree of optimism about most decent people, so that we do not ourselves become the worst Pharisees.

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The Nordic Catholic Church and Gnosticism

Posted on Thursday, 27 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Update from 5th March 2020.

I have received various bits of new information and I am concerned not to be an obstacle in the developing relationship between our churches. Bishop Flemestad has a remarkably lucid philosophical view of the fundamental incompatibilities between orthodox Christianity and the modern world. We all need to evolve in our study and understanding of these issues, and I am far from possessing all the answers. These discussions are intended to help this process of understanding.

I am waiting for delivery of a book by Eric Vögelin to try to understand what his comprehension of ancient Gnosticism was, and whether he made the distinctions we make today in view of extensive studies of the Nag Hammadi texts and other recently discovered sources. We have then to look at modern or post-modern culture and discern whether its influences are indeed some modern form of Gnosticism or some other phenomenon to be called by a different label. A physician has to make a careful and profound diagnosis in order to prescribe the most effective treatment for his patient’s illness.

I will respect the anonymity of my correspondent, and merely summarise some of his notions, whilst adding my own thoughts.

Gnosticism was an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon in the late Jewish, early Christian and ancient pagan world. Some tendencies were quite wild, and others would be refined in time into the spiritual and mystical dimension of orthodox Christianity. The issue, which we must not forget, is to try to trace the origins of the kind of nihilism and individualism (as opposed to personalism and nobility of spirit) that were bewailed by Nietzsche and other philosophers over the past couple of centuries.

I think Bishop Flemestad’s first concern was not Gnosticism but the question of whether Christianity has any relevance for people of our time. It has for some and not for others. Some aspects of our society are homogenous, but others are extremely fragmented. Which people does a Church try to reach? Myself, I would have had a better understanding of the conference in Germany had I been present to hear the talks, ask questions (or listen to other questions and answers) and talk with people I would have met. I am concerned that some of my criticisms below may well be unjust. I am told that all the Churches of the Union of Scranton are concerned for the development of relations with the G4 Anglican Churches and the movement towards unity.

I ask my readers to read the earlier article in this light of all of us who are trying to understand issues as best as we can and showing the best possible sincerity of will to achieve unity between ourselves.

It might also be reassuring for you and your readers to learn that Bishop Flemestad (…) did in fact emphasise the priority of seeking dialogue with Continuing Anglicans with the goal of welcoming them into the Union of Scranton.

Without usurping the position of our Bishops in such matters, I think it will remain to be seen how the Union of Scranton and the G4 of Continuing Anglican Churches would be united – in the present Union of Scranton or some other entity. That will depend on those at much higher “pay grade” than I.

I am certain that our vision of Church unity will continue to show our common esteem for diversity in things like philosophical and theological speculation and study as well as pastoral methods and liturgical rites. None of us seeks to impose uniformity over the other or the fruits of our own experience. This is the wonderful thing about the kind of ecumenism that seeks unity in essentials, diversity in what is not set in stone and mutual love in all things (expression of St Augustine).

* * *

Something very interesting has come up on the side of the Nordic Catholic Church, the European member Church of the Union of Scranton with the PNCC in America.

The talk by Bishop Roald Nikolai Flemestad (NCC): The Loss of Transcendence and the Collapse of Faith is particularly fascinating.

I have two main observations. The first is their concern for sacramental unity with Orthodoxy. There is no mention of any dialogue with Continuing Anglicanism either side of the Atlantic. The second is the tendency to blame everything on Gnosticism in the same way as Pope Pius X grouped every scrap of non-scholastic theology he could find and call it all Modernism.

They call the present challenge to Christianity institutionalised individualism. It seems rather simplistic to me, since the secular world is returning to collectivism – but an anti-Christian form of it. Individualism or personalism are not necessarily nihilist or Gnostic. In history, there were several types or degrees of Gnosticism. Some were totally unacceptable to Christianity, especially the dualist types. Fathers of the Church like St Clement of Alexandria and Origen accepted some aspects of Gnosticism but not all. The distinction has to be made. Without any esoteric dimension, Christianity will become like salt that has lost its savour, to be rejected as something illusory and false. Their epistemology is also too simplistic, because some truths are foundational and others are transcendent. Their approach is quite dialectic, all-or-nothing, black and white in their opposition between the individual person and the community, or between personalism and individualism. Would they too like to find a kind of garrotte-wielding Caudillo who could be “used” for the enforcement of “true religion and virtue”?

I frankly do not find the influence of Gnosticism (Valentinian or not) in the modern world.

(…) this reorientation “back to basics” cannot be done as a nostalgic effort to “restore” an idealised past.

What does this mean? If the past is no longer relevant in any way, they have no option other than sucking up the “future”, even if it is not their future. Perhaps they are having a go at what I keep writing! Perhaps I flatter myself…

We have heard a lot about the “faithful remnant” over the years, and the novelty of it is wearing off. Instead of ironically seeing themselves as the pure ones, the meaning of the word Cathar, perhaps we can see ourselves as sowing seeds that others will harvest after we are gone. We cannot go into quarantine against this world, because we live in it. However, there is nothing wrong in our getting into little groups to try to do some good in whatever way we can.

I have always had a lot of esteem for Bishop Flemestad, but I do think they need to give more thought to things. I resorted to Romanticism, in spite of the fact that some Romantics were not Christians, atheists in some cases, because there is a general mindset that can work above the dialectics of ultra-rationalism and irrational conservatism. They don’t seem to realise that Nietzsche has also to be read and understood before he is accused of being an insane nihilist. I am not a fan of Nietzsche, but I appreciate what is germane and cogent in his work.

They are not wrong, but too narrow in their criticism. They need to go much deeper in their knowledge of historical Gnosticism and questions of personalism / individual freedom as we again may face new forms of collectivism and totalitarianism. I wish them the best in their continued research and a more balanced evaluation of things.

In some cordial correspondence with one of the French NCC priests, the elephant in the room between them and the “G4” Continuing Anglican Churches is their denial or doubt of our Orders and Sacraments. The PNCC was once in communion with the American Episcopal Church.

So the question is whether their dialogue with the Orthodox will go anywhere…

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Romantic Reconstruction or Intellectual Prestige

Posted on Thursday, 27 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The question keeps nagging away in my mind. A little handful of people in the past and today keep producing books and articles about the Rite / Use of Sarum but cannot get through the barrier represented by the fact that it is irrelevant in today’s churches. As I did a couple of Google searches, I came across this horribly expensive anthology written by a number of distinguished authors connected with the Ordinariate in some way – Newman and the Intellectual Tradition, in: Portsmouth Review, Sheed & Ward 2013. I was able to copy the following extract from a facsimile on the internet:

Newman was actually repulsed by much of what passed for prayer in the churches of his early years and said that the thought of the Anglican service made him “shiver.” The services in his own university church of St. Mary in Oxford were “intensely dreary.” The Tractarians spent little time on the liturgical romanticism of the ritual movement which was to follow. But that movement was a recovery of a patrimony not unique to the English church. Perhaps in recognition of this, ii has been suggested that the new personal ordinariates should revive the Sarum Rite to be distinct. In my Anglican days. I knew no one who had ever seen the Sarum Rite. That would just be a home-made historicism, which in part is why a proposed revival of the Sarum Rite for the new Westminster Cathedral was rejected in the nineteenth century. The personal ordinariates will fail if their concept of preserving a cultural patrimony is the creation of an Anglo-Saxon Theme Park, or an ecclesiastical Williamsburg. It would lack the spiritual dynamic the Church needs for revitalizing a dispirited segment of our anemic culture. Pope Benedict’s focus has always been on Newman rather than on Anglicanism, but in the foreword to a book Turning Towards the Lord by the Oratorian priest Father Lang, he commended the “ad orientem” position of the celebrant at the altar and described “the contribution made by the Church of England to this question and in giving, also, due consideration to the part played by the Oxford movement in the nineteenth century….” Many of the present Anglican clergy were not reared in the Anglican tradition themselves, and this adds a difficulty if the “patrimony” which the Constitution .seeks to encourage is in no small part an “ethos” which comes by a long lived experience; of a cultural heritage.

This paragraph enables me to understand the mindset of many priests and lay intellectuals in the Ordinariates in spite of the initial support of Sarum or “bits of Sarum” by Bishop Peter Elliott and Msgr Andrew Burnham among a few others. To be honest, it represents a general turn in the Anglican world towards the early twentieth century from the heritage of the Romantic movement to aping Rome in view of a corporate reunion between Canterbury and Rome. This union would not be on the basis of liturgical life but theological scholarship and a ressourcement alternative to neo-scholasticism.

Indeed, any attempt to found a liturgical revival, whether neo-medieval or neo-baroque in appearance, on the spirit of reconstruction and “play-acting” would alienate most Christians. The alternative is to accept modern forms of service. The ironic thing is the intense dreariness of modern rites, just like the 1662 Prayer Book at Oxford University in, say, the 1820’s. History comes round full circle. I have had experience with the “Bishop Elliott” type of modern Roman liturgy, from the baroque splendour of the London Oratory to the French Benedictines and a small American community in Rome where I was a seminarian in the mid 1980’s. It was all generally about the authority of the Pope and obedience, obedience and obedience. It took away my joy and conviction about being a convert. It took another ten years to have the courage to come to terms with my own reality and the limits of my own romanticism.

I am not in the Ordinariate, nor do I come from the old Forward in Faith milieux. As an Anglican in the Church of England, my role was with church music and not the liturgy. I remained blissfully ignorant for a very long time, except that I was repelled by the casual modern-language eucharists celebrated facing the people from the early 1970’s.

I am realistic enough to come to terms with the fact that the parish in the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church or even the Anglican Catholic Church is not the place to introduce a medieval liturgy. The eccentricities of St George’s Sudbury and Chamblac in the Eure were possible, but as those priests died, the churches were closed down, absorbed into the diocesan parish ways or given over to the Fraternity of St Peter or the Institute of Christ the King for a more standard Tridentine fare and the authoritarian spirit those priests exude.

Perhaps, the Continuing Anglican world with its tolerance of liturgical diversity (mostly the 1928 American Prayer Book, the English Missal and the Anglican Missal) would be favourable ground for medieval liturgies, but outside the parish context. It would seem to be precisely the fogies and the Romantics who would be interested and who would benefit spiritually in a way they could not in parishes. The Church in general needs to come up with a half-way house between parishes and the monastic life for those who are ready for such a commitment. In some parts of the world, there are confraternities and guilds for the pastoral care of those who for some reason are outside parish life.

My own intuition is to go beyond the boundaries of present-day institutional churches that know only the diocesan and parochial models of community life. I recommend friends getting together to work on these questions, regardless of which church they belong to. Services in common should be limited to the Office, and priests of different communions can go off and do their own thing in their spare time! Keep it academic and intellectual for the time being, and spend time singing the Office and in personal prayer.

In the Oxford Movement days, Newman represented a transition between Romanticism and Roman Catholic realism. Neither the Anglican establishment nor the Roman Catholic Church was concerned in the 1840’s for any change to the liturgical status quo. Nor was Newman. He did the best thing – get out of England and go to Rome, and experience the Roman liturgy dans son jus. His concern was improving the Church’s theological work and rediscovery of the Fathers and the Catholic patrimony from before Scholasticism. He had plenty of work to do. If the Ordinariate sees itself in that role, the train seems to have left the station, given the work of theologians like Ratzinger, Bouyer, De Lubac, Fribourg University and so many others of the ressourcement. What has Anglicanism to contribute now? A lot in the nineteenth century, but much less now with what has come from France and Germany. The Ordinariate has by and large rejected the restoration of the medieval liturgy with the exception of bits and pieces to mix in with the amalgam of the American Prayer Book and the modern Roman rite. The idea of basing Anglican patrimony on scholarship is thin, given the Continental competition.

Guilds, confraternities and other names for alternative communities seem to be the way ahead, with members meeting once or several times a year for seminars, a retreat and Office in common. Such ideas need to be made to work and maintain unity. Churches and diocesan bishops may in time accept such alternative communities, as is already the case for the Charismatics and Pentecostalists. France was probably the most advanced after World War II with the foundation of alternative communities like La Mission de France and worker priests. This time, it would be about scholarship, certainly in theology and the liturgical sciences, but more about big questions of culture, philosophy and new forms of the Church as the old ones crumble away.

I welcome new ideas for a Christianity that depends more on liturgy, spirituality and the sense of the transcendent than authority and obedience – the present spirit of conservative Roman Catholicism. It isn’t even a question of who is right and who is wrong, but the desperate need for a new breath of oxygen.

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Modern attempts to revive the Use of Sarum

Posted on Tuesday, 25 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

For the sake of completeness, I published the following article on my old and long-defunct blog on 17th July 2006. Indeed it is a long time that I have been banging the drum, but my philosophical basis has evolved. The article has been on freerepublic.com for all this time, so I copy it here.

In a comment I wrote at the time, I said:

When attempts to restore Sarum (pre-Reformation English rite) were made, it was generally the 19th century and the general mood was Romanticism and nostalgia for the medieval era.

I frankly see little point today of restoring Sarum, because first of all you need a minimum of “culture” around it, and it just won’t wash with modernity or post-modernity, even among “fogeys”. A good question to ask is whether our nostalgics of today would be prepared to go back to medieval penitential discipline and general conditions of life in the 15th century (fanatical inquisitors and all).

You also need the liturgical books and clergy who know the ceremonies. Everything is well documented, and “reconstructions” have been performed in various churches in England and Scotland. It has historical and aesthetic value.

What about the liturgy of the future in an Anglican context, or that of a part of Anglicanism in communion with Rome. I think the Anglican Use is on the right track, but it needs revision to remove the influence of the Novus Ordo – for example the Offertory prayers. The Sarum or Dominican prayers could go in the place of the Novus Ordo formulas. The three-year lectionary is a positive development and is widely used in the TAC to which I belong.

I have always felt that the Tridentine Rite is not really the thing for an Anglican context, and in the Roman Church it did need reform. The problem is that it didn’t get the right kind of reform. The subject is too vast to expound upon here.

The real issue is that Christianity is in a critical situation. There are Christians who need to continue to sustain their faith with traditional liturgies. The Church also has the job of evangelising, and liturgies have little role to play there – not with the kind of people who haven’t discounted belief in Christ, but who would never set foot in a church.

We have this vocation if all Catholic and Orthodox Christianity is not to go the way of Sarum.

My thought about Romanticism was entirely undeveloped and quite typical of what many people think of this subject. I made no distinction between the Christenheit oder Europa of Novalis or the New Middle Age of Berdyaev, and the historical knowledge we have of the period as portrayed by Umberto Eco and others. However, I recognised the need for a cultural context, which is not found in any Church at this time. I was at the time more on the same kind of wavelength as Msgr Andrew Burnham – the use of some Sarum elements in a newly formulated liturgical rite. This was also the opinion of Archbishop Hepworth. Shortly after this time, I resumed the Tridentine rite to which I was accustomed as a Roman Catholic. I took up Sarum in about 2008 once I found the books and learned the ceremonies.

Minds change and evolve over the years. My intuitions were not very different then from the way I think now. In my recent book A Twitch on the Sarum Thread, I recognise that Sarum could not be revived in an ordinary Roman Catholic or Anglican parish. I am unsure about which context would be right. Perhaps we need to be working on the context by gathering intellectually and aesthetically sensitive souls, the remnants of Romanticism and a common mind to rediscover the roots of everything.

* * *

Most of my readers may be familiar with the fact that pre-reformation England had a number of diocesan uses and variations in the liturgy. It was the same in most European countries. The Use of Sarum became increasingly standardised in the early sixteenth century, and the Convocation of Canterbury imposed its use to replace the other uses in 1544. It was replaced by Cranmer’s first Prayer Book in 1549. The Use of Sarum had a great deal in common with the Norman rites, such as those of Rouen and Bayeux, though Sarum kept some of the old Gallican and Celtic prayers not found in northern France.

The Use of Sarum persisted among some of the English recusants as late as the seventeenth century, and it had been printed in Rouen as late as then. The Bull Quo Primum of Pius V, issued in 1570 with the Tridentine Missal, provided for its survival, as for any other rite of more than two hundred years standing. It has been occasionally celebrated in Roman Catholic places of worship, notably in March 2000 by the then-Bishop of Aberdeen, the Rt Rev Mario Conti, as celebrant. It was held at King’s College Chapel, the oldest building of the University of Aberdeen, in celebration of its 500th anniversary. As the Una Voce report on the event put it, Bp. Conti “wore borrowed vestments appropriate to the period and used authentic chants which he said had taken a fair bit of practice at home”. In 1984 a proper funeral service according to the Use of Sarum was given to the bodies of the crew of several hundred sailors from the English Tudor warship Mary Rose, which had sunk in the Solent, the channel that separates the Isle of Wight from the English mainland, back in 1545, after the point when King Henry VIII had broken with the Pope but before the appearance of new burial rites in the first English Prayer Book of 1549. There was much discussion of what to do after the sailors were raised from the deep in 1982, and they were finally given solemn burial in 1984 with both Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy participating in the service at Portsmouth Cathedral according to the old Sarum rites of Requiem that they would have expected in 1545. The ordinary of the Mass was in Latin with the lessons, bidding prayer, Lord’s Prayer, and committal in English, and the music was of that era, by John Taverner, Christopher Tye, and Thomas Tallis. When the English Roman Catholic hierarchy was re-established in 1850, Pius IX offered the possibility of reverting to the Use of Sarum, but the English bishops preferred the Tridentine rite. There was a possibility that Sarum would be instituted in the newly built Westminster Cathedral, but in 1903, the pro-Tridentine party gained the upper hand and the Tridentine rite was adopted for London’s new Roman Catholic cathedral.

Some Sarum customs and ceremonies survived in the Anglican Church, and attempts to restore the full Sarum Use happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, for the most part, Anglo-Catholics introduced Sarum usages into the celebration of the Eucharist following the official 1662 Prayer Book rite with the Prayer of Oblation following the words of institution. See this link for the Alcuin Club’s pictures of a Dearmer-ite liturgy. The pro-Sarum movement had a considerable amount of influence and led to the use of the Sarum liturgy in some Anglican monastic communities, such as the Sisters of St. Mary at Wantage (now a prestigious girls’ boarding school), and the publication of many Sarum texts and chants in the English language. Percy Dearmer’s The Parson’s Handbook is a monument of this movement. There are many churches in England fitted out in the Sarum style, with the famous riddel and dossal curtains and posts at each corner of the altar. St. Cyprian’s Clarence Gate in London is a beautiful example of this style.

There is something I once read in an e-mail list, but I am unable to find the exact details. Apparently, some traditional Roman Catholic students at Oxford University had the bright idea of reviving it in one of the college chapels as a way to “get round” the Indult, but its use was condemned by the Congregation of Divine Worship as an “abuse”. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, initially not opposed to these celebrations, was obliged to put a stop to the Sarum Masses in Oxford. I would be grateful for any detailed information about this point.

An English musicologist, Nick Sandon, published material from the Sarum Missal and Gradual. These books may be ordered from Antico Edition. The texts are in the original Latin. The existence of these books shows the continuing interest in the Use of Sarum and a survival of the Oxford Dream.

The Use of Sarum has found favour in some Orthodox communities wishing to restore a western rite, particularly in the Russian Church outside Russia and the Milan Synod. Finally, a somewhat byzantinised version of the Sarum Missal in English was published by Fr. Aidan Keller in 1998. An English priest of the Russian Church outside Russia, living in Tasmania, has published a “Sarum” tendency liturgy in his St. Colman’s Prayer Book.

There was an interesting phenomenon in London a few years ago, an Old Catholic priest (ordained by the American bishop Walter Xavier Brown) celebrating the Sarum liturgy in his home. I once met him, in the company of a friend, and found that the chapel was assembled from bits and pieces recovered from what we English cynics would call “tat shops”. He was something of a curiosity among the fogies of the London Oratory and some of the Anglican ritualist hang-outs. I later learned that this priest had been murdered in his home in some sordid affair, the details of which are unknown to me.

Contemporary use of the Sarum liturgy can seem somewhat as an eccentricity for liturgical fogeys and can easily distract from a more “mainstream” sense of the Church. Restorations are often done in a precious spirit, born of Romanticism and an unreal vision of the unattainable past golden era, something that led to the decline of the Anglican ritualist movement. Furthermore, Sarum books are extremely hard to find, even in reprints, whether in the original Latin or the various done into English versions from the late nineteenth century. I would personally be favourable to a revival of the Sarum movement, if the result would be more than an antiquarian curiosity or something to which ordinary Christians cannot possibly relate. Celebrated in full, Sarum was a highly exuberant rite, and would require no less than a very large church for its full deployment. It was a part of a whole culture that was destroyed by the Reformation and the Ultramontanist influence of the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation. The French rites of Normandy survived into living memory, and with them, something like a Spirit of Sarum. I have myself seen choir rulers in copes and little boy servers in miniature blue dalmatics at Father Montgomery’s parish of Le Chamblac (Diocese of Evreux), and the “prayers at the foot of the altar” said in procession. A convert from Anglicanism in the early 1940’s, Fr. Quintin Montgomery-Wright went to a Norman diocese (Bayeux) to find the Spirit of Sarum! I attended a Mass in a parish church near Fécamp in the 1980’s, said by a priest who was so old he had to be helped up the altar steps. An old lady played a harmonium placed right in the middle of the choir, and there were a few old men in copes. The old priest has since died, and the parish closed. Very, very little remains.

Could Sarum ever be restored as a living liturgy in our present-day circumstances? The survival of the Tridentine rite is still very widespread, and officially recognised by Rome, but the Use of Sarum has almost died, as have the other great Uses, even the Ambrosian Rite of Milan. As in the past, most Tridentine priests (SSPX and Indult) despise local uses and adhere strictly to the 1962 Roman books. However, it is an element to consider in discussions concerning the Anglican Catholic identity, a notion of liturgical tradition and an alternative to adapting rites of Protestant origin for Catholic use.

Sarum liturgy links :

* New Advent Encyclopaedia article * Article by Canon J. Robert Wright * Order of Mass in Latin * Order of Mass in English * Russian Orthodox version * A link with some pictures of Dearmer style / Sarum altars

A brief add-on after some reflection:

Having read some of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (or at least dipped into it), the typical parish scene in the late 15th and early 16th centuries would not have been some nice romanticised 19th century building by Pugin with Pusey or Keble as the parish priest. It would have been a part of a rural culture that was something akin to la France profonde – little villages and small towns where people were, as now, concerned for their work, family lives and – above all, what happened to them when they or their loved ones died. I think most of us are realistic enough not to see the period as the Oxford and London ritualists saw it, but as something more rustic and real than any modern city dwellers could imagine it.

Pre-reformation parish life had nothing to do with the city-dwelling fogies of London, Oxford or Philadelphia. There was certainly nothing precious about the priests who were distinguished from lay men only by their tonsures, their feelings hardened by seeing public hangings and animals slaughtered in the Shambles, people pouring their excrement out of their windows into the streets. Whether English parish life was steeped in superstition and immorality, or in genuine piety, would depend on the place and quality of formation of the priest and parish clerks. I have heard 14th century English parish life compared to that of some of the Greek islands of today or even Islam in Morocco, where the church was simply a part of life. One lived and died in it. It was all taken for granted – until the day it was all taken away…

Is it possible to revive the liturgical tradition of this general culture that was totally destroyed by both Protestantism and Roman Catholic Ultramontanism? I consider the RC Tridentine scene, which is less interested in the liturgy than politically conservative agendas and a vision of life that resembles 20th century totalitarianism. Roman Catholic traditionalism, like Anglo-Catholicism, is so self conscious – unlike some of the old priests in France I have spoken with who remember the old days and the different attitude they had. They just had Mass and Office in the parishes and didn’t think anything of it. I ask myself if the liturgy in itself is of any interest to anyone other than enthusiastic fogies and monks.

Where would I go with such reflections? Is it possible to integrate the liturgical tradition into modern life, whether it is Sarum, Tridentine, Prayer Book, Byzantine – or anything? The 19th century ritualists were able to introduce the liturgy into the poorest parts of London and other English cities. Now, the people of the “working classes” are alienated from institutional Christianity, but readily resort to superstitious practices – witnessing to their belief in the supernatural and non-material phenomena. They want cures from their illnesses and a way out of their poverty and hardship. This certainly happened because institutional Christianity – Roman Catholic and Anglican – became too precious, elite and intellectual, too “reformed”. Orthodoxy too adopts a “reformed” mentality as it comes into contact with the western world.

Most of us who are interested in Sarum like the nice clean Anglican churches in England and elsewhere, not too many statues, horribly ugly sets of Stations of the Cross or other things of questionable taste like in some of the Roman Catholic churches geared to popular devotion. My stomach turns when I go to Lourdes and see all those stores selling such crap to the credulous. Times don’t change very much!!! But, does our good taste remove our liturgical life from its cultural context? Is a balance possible between popular religion and good liturgical taste? Do we try to inculturate into modern secular enlightenment values like the revisionists and Novus Ordo people do – or do we go with the ghetto mentality? It’s a very difficult one to answer.

On a positive note, what is needed in Continuing Anglicanism is an expression of the Catholic faith in the English idiom. We English-speakers are worthy of a customary and it would not be fitting for us to be moulded in the uniformity of the Novus Ordo or even the glories of the Byzantine Liturgy. Unfortantely, Anglo-Catholicism has tended to force English Christianity into a Tridentine/Counter-Reformation mould. The core of the Tractarian movement was not in favour of adopting the Council of Trent and the Counter Reformation, but for restoring the English tradition. The Traditional Anglican Communion desires communion with Rome, and this is altogether laudable, but the Roman Catholic Church herself has left the Counter Reformation behind. We are sometimes called Anglo Papists because of this desire for unity with Rome, but we do well not to imitate the style of the traditionalists.

Liturgically, it would be wrong to seek to ape all the details of the Dearmer movement – the riddel posts, gothic vestments, apparelled amices and albs and all the trappings of the nineteenth century Sarum revival. However, traditional Anglicanism needs a wealth of rites and customs. There is no reason why the Use of Sarum may not provide the basis of an enhanced Anglican Catholic identity, and undergo a judicious reform and simplification in the line of Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium and the Liturgical Movement. For instance, the rites can be celebrated in traditional English, in any becoming architectural or cultural setting – whether gothic, baroque or modern – and in such a way as the people may actively participate in the celebration. In many respects, the Prayer Book of 1549 went in the right direction, but it did away with the venerable Roman Canon and many ritual aspects that would have done better to be retained. An Anglican liturgy based on Sarum would do a great deal to reunite the Prayer Book tradition and English spirituality with mainstream Catholicism without going the Tridentine Counter Reformation way – or the way of the present modern rites.

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Liturgical Ressourcement

Posted on Sunday, 23 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have made yet another discovery, of a blog on the liturgy with a difference – Canticum Salomonis, a blog for liturgical ressourcement. I was brought to this blog by my stats page which tells me which sites link to my blog when someone clicks on that link.

I am particularly impressed by the article Claude de Vert’s Simple, Literal, and Historical Explanation of the Ceremonies of the Mass: A Watershed of the Catholic Enlightenment.

In his Institutions Liturgiques, Dom Guéranger objected that what lacked in many of the Enlightenment attempts to produce a simplified and rational liturgy was unction, a sense of the sacred. However, Guéranger’s remedy was not a return to medieval standards of liturgy but adopting the Tridentine rite and the Ultramontanist papal ideology.

I see in this blog a serious attempt to recapture the spirit of medieval liturgy rather than the “1950’s” approach of many political traditionalists.

One published book that shows a similar attitude is Geoffrey Hull, The Banished Heart, Richmond (Australia) 1995. I have already published an article by Hull in this blog at The Proto-History of the Roman Liturgical Reform. Dom Alcuin Reid also shows this viewpoint of “liturgical ressourcement” in his book The Organic Development of the Liturgy and his edition of the T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy, an anthology to which I have myself contributed.

The more we study the liturgy, the more we are dissatisfied with the angry disputes between “traditionalists” and “liberals”. The malaise goes back much further, and this is the major reason for seeking the spirit of the medieval liturgy.

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A Twitch on the Sarum Thread

Posted on Wednesday, 19 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have just published this new book after quite a lot of feverish writing and recycling of some of my blog work. I have also included Canon Warren’s translation of the Order of Mass with the rubrics (in italics).

See my Lulu Bookshop and the book description. I still have to evaluate the printed book before making any revisions (very minor) and giving final approval. Here is my preface:

* * *

Following the fragmentary and personal style of my previous book Romantic Christianity, much of this volume is inspired by material previously written on my blog The Blue Flower. However, they are for the most part rewritten. This book is a set of reflections and does not pretend to be an academic work. Thus, I am not treading on the feet of those who, after considerable research into the sources, have begun to produce usable books for the Mass and the Office. In the bibliography, the reader will find everything I have been able to find on the history and celebration of this Use.

In Romantic Christianity, I emphasised the notion of beauty, together with truth and goodness, as the greatest apologia for the Christian faith. In my early twenties, I embarked on a course of instruction to become a Roman Catholic. During this time, I became fascinated with the pre-Reformation liturgy and the way it influenced late medieval English churches. Ironically, I probably learned more about the Church of England as I was leaving it than over the years when I played the organ and sung in choirs at school and in various parishes. The quote from Cranmer in his introduction to the Prayer Book is particularly haunting:

And whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm; some following Salisbury Use, some Hereford Use, and some the Use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln; now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use.

Later on, I would discover that France too, up to a certain time, also had a diversity of rites and uses according to the multiplicity of dioceses and religious orders. Why did this diversity disappear? They were not formally abolished by Pius V in 1570, since he wrote:

(…)  and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription – except, however, if more than two hundred years’ standing.

Roman Catholic canon law places jurisprudence and custom over codified law, and thus the authority of the so-called Tridentine liturgy was not to be absolute. In this way, most religious orders continued to use their old liturgical books as did many dioceses like Milan, Paris and Lyon to name the best-known.

Diversity in the liturgy was largely a victim of two phenomena of the Renaissance: the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. A whole ethos of the Church was not abolished but allowed to die as priests and bishops adopted the new ways in the latter half of the sixteenth century.

My romantic imagination pursued the lost and the marginal, seeking out the last remnants. It motivated my journey to France in July 1982 and my stay with Fr Montgomery-Wright in his country parishes in the Eure department of Normandy. Fr Quintin, as many knew him, preserved many of the old Norman ceremonial usages as he used the standard Roman rite of 1965. He had been an Anglo-Catholic priest in London during World War II, became a Roman Catholic and went to France in the late 1940’s and was ordained by the Bishop of Bayeux. He had a considerable influence on my own developing thought. During my time as a Roman Catholic, I chased dreams and the truth and beauty of my own imagination, oblivious of the bleak reality of the French Church of the 1980’s and the severe ideology of the traditionalists.

Since those days, I became more of a realist, studied theology at the University of Fribourg after having parted company from the traditionalists. I spent several years in the seminary of the Institute of Christ the King in Italy, to an extent inspired by the Oratory of St Philip Neri, but something else made me continue to yearn and dream. It is my hope that I will bring others to understand my motivation and attraction for this lost world of which the average English parish church stands as a silent witness.

More recently, I was brought to a brighter epiphany as I discovered the Romantics and their love for a romanticised Middle-Age as opposed to what was in all likelihood the historical period. My Romantic initiation came, less through Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron, but rather through reading Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher who had emigrated to France, and Friedrich von Hardenberg, the German poet, philosopher and mystic who died very young from tuberculosis. The Romantic Middle-Age is a Platonic idea that is strongly present in our minds as a human culture that is open to the message of Christ and the plenitude of divine revelation. Friedrich von Hardenberg wrote his dream: Die Christenheit oder Europa in 1799 which is capable of a highly cynical interpretation if the Romantic notion of reality is disregarded.

Unashamedly, I identify with this particularly German brand of Romanticism and its notion of beauty, truth and goodness. It is a world apart, where disappointment and unhappiness are unknown. It is heaven on earth.

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The Sarum Effect

Posted on Tuesday, 18 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

The recent Sarum Vespers in America has made quite an impression, as The Legitimacy of the Sarum Use attests. Our Rad Trad (I wish he wouldn’t use that name!) has often come up with extraordinarily sensitive reflections. I have always found him sympathetic with me. He wrote in this article:

More famously, Fr. Anthony Chadwick celebrates the Sarum Use in his chapel in France. Much like the Oratorian celebrations in Oxford, Fr. Anthony does not make his Masses an act of historical play acting, replete with period style vestments and vessels. He uses what he has from his days observing the Tridentine books and does his best. He has even put out videos of his low Masses, one of a straight through low Mass and the other an instructional. Both are the only videos of their kind available now.

I have been banging a drum about this subject for more than a decade, but my perspective has evolved from a precise rite to the religious culture that surrounded it. This is something that was brought home to me as I came to France and saw some last remnants of popular parish culture involving a spirit that was totally different from the traditionalists. The priests I met in the 1980’s and 90’s are now dead.

I am presently planning a new book on the subject, and I find that Rad Trad’s methodology and mine concur: the question of reviving Sarum in Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Western-Rite Orthodoxy. Then I am thinking about the question of whether it can be revived and in what kind of cultural context. Naturally, I bring in that “universal panacea” of Romanticism, which, in the nineteenth century, revived France’s devastated Church and developed Wesley’s inspiration of bringing God back into the Church of England, restoring the country’s medieval churches and making the Prayer Book Communion Service look a little more like the medieval liturgy through the use of vestments and an eastward-facing altar.

I seem to be almost the only priest using Sarum as my ordinary spiritual fare, but I am alone and getting on in years. Come the inevitable, my Sarum life will also pass into history as did the remnants of the Norman uses in the 1980’s and 90’s. Perhaps the way the traditionalists (SSPX and with Rome) are evolving would surprise me, but I no longer live in their world and I am out of touch. Their priests are getting older and more mature and may end up like old parish priests. We have not to forget that the Tridentine liturgy is also a medieval rite in its essentials (with all the elements going back to the early Church) and can be celebrated without everyone getting anxious about the Mass being invalid if Father forgets to put on his maniple!

Sarum is more symbolic than anything else. It is the last medieval rite (use) to be used in England before the iconoclasm of the Reformation and the changes in the Roman Catholic Church to restore its credibility represented by the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation. It represents an idealised and Romantic view of a longer history of the Church than only the last four hundred years of constant bickering between Protestants and Catholics. We now live in a time when society shows no interest in any churchy things and humanity seems to be on a “race to the bottom” like the 1930’s.

I am in no illusion about (neo) Romanticism, because its being popularised would destroy it as happened in the late nineteenth century. It needs to be an unpronounced word among thinkers, writers, musicians, artists and sensitive souls. The best we can hope for is to sow seeds for the future, all too aware that the future may bring Götterdämmerung and the continuation of mankind’s fall. Perhaps there may be another brief window like roughly 1790 to 1830 and 1890 to about the 1960’s. On my own, I feel very inadequate and quite overwhelmed by the Philistine. I will join a few friends next October in southern England, and hope to be able to sow seeds of ideas which those gifted in leadership can plant and grow in humanity’s garden.

Rad Trad does legitimately ask what would be the right setting for Sarum. The Dean and Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral are obviously not going to do it, at least beyond a few nice processions. Its being celebrated in America or Canada seems something of an anomaly, though it can be seen as a little more normal in Normandy. Perhaps I should use the Use of Rouen, if I can find books older than the Neo-Gallican overhauls of the early eighteenth century. But, I am not a priest of the Archdiocese of Rouen or even in communion with Rome. I suppose I am English and belong to the English diocese of a Church of Anglican tradition – but my Bishop uses the Anglican Missal and not Sarum. Perhaps a solution would be to say that Sarum belongs to the English and northern French world as a descendent from the rite of Rouen. Here in France, there have been some celebrations of the Parisian and Lyon rites by priests of the Fraternity of St Peter.

Perhaps what needs to be revived is not so much Sarum but the liturgy itself, turning away from both the Tridentine crackdown on abuses and the post-Vatican II ideas of archaeologism (restoring rites from the early centuries of the Church on the basis of scant documentation) and inculturation on the basis of modern mass culture. I think we should encourage bishops and priests of all Churches to go back a few hundred years and be flexible about the practical aspects like the use of the vernacular and Latin. We must also not forget that the liturgical life has been, and should be, a preserve of the initiated elite and not the mass of the (baptised) catechumens.

The Ordinariate(s) would have been a most appropriate context for reviving Sarum, which altogether justified its use in Philadelphia in a Roman Catholic parish church. The appropriateness comes not from the place, but the attempt to bring the positive and Catholic elements of Anglicanism into a Roman Catholic context.

Here is a quote from my unfinished book:

What I find so tragic is that never were the Anglicans and Roman Catholics so close spiritually and culturally than in that period shortly predating the paroxysm of Roman triumphalism and the authoritarianism of Pius IX. The Anglicans sought their medieval roots, and the Roman Catholics sought their Recusant heritage, both from exactly the same source.

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An Excellent Initiative – Experience of Worship

Posted on Sunday, 16 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My attention has just been drawn to this site of resources on medieval liturgy:

Since I had not known about this site, I must assume it is quite new and will evolve in time. My congratulations go to the person who runs the site.

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Scepticism and Freedom of Thought

Posted on Tuesday, 11 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

We begin to breathe at the end of Storm Ciara, a particularly vast and nasty one that has caused a considerable amount of damage in the British Isles and northern Europe. My house just suffered a loose tile that I was able to put back without doing anything dangerous. High winds and rattling roof tiles cause anxiety, and the natural reaction, when possible, is to get into bed and somewhere warm. I remember such storms as a child in the 1960’s in the north of England, with the Victorian sash windows rattling away with each gust. The Atlantic storm coming in with the Gulf Stream is nothing new, but it is worrying when it happens, and a challenge to our illusions of human omnipotence. We can be thankful here in Europe that we don’t get tornadoes and hurricanes like in America, because they bring total destruction to homes, human property – and lives.

I will not mention any names, but I was surprised yesterday by the accusations of being a climate change denier by someone close to me. I was like a “heretic” facing an “inquisition” enforcing a new orthodoxy – one taught by Extinction Rebellion and the secretive political and business-motivated forces sponsoring Greta Thunberg. I spent a considerable amount of time last night learning about Green New Deal and the European variants that various far-left political parties try to propagate. I try to be open-minded.

I wrote an e-mail to the person expressing my shock in the face of such accusations coming from a radicalised mind. To be fair, we English-speakers talk of denial rather than scepticism as the French prefer in regard to us “enemies of the people”. The “dogma”I am expected to accept and profess is that the temperature of earth’s atmosphere will be so high by 2050 (sometimes 2030) that human life would become extinct, and therefore protest groups like Extinction Rebellion are justified in their demonstration to force the USA, the European Union and national governments to eliminate all carbon emissions within ten years. I know that such radical action would be impossible, and that such a radical position is by now largely discredited. The Right has won in England, and Trump has shaken off an attempt to impeach him. The Democrats must now be in tatters! I am of the mind to believe that if global warming is as they say, then there is nothing humanity can do about it.

I was yelled at yesterday for being “sceptical”, and I replied that I am indeed sceptical in that I suspend my judgement on the subject not being in possession of scientific data that I could trust is not influenced by political ideology. In postmodern French political culture, scepticism means denial, but I prefer to use words according to their etymology and conventional meanings. Sceptical philosophy, founded by Pyrrho of Elis (Πύρρων), is about suspending judgement whilst seeking for truth (or the nearest we can get to it). Scepticism calls us to act according to our limited state of knowledge of things.

When reason confronts fanatical certitude, the only answer is silence. However, I find myself with the duty of finding out what I can about solar activity (we seem to have a minimum presently), the movements of sea currents, content measured in ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and other factors. I am quite curious, since sailing caused me to take some interest in meteorology, learning to read the weather. It is extremely unpleasant to find myself confronted with the beast of totalitarianism, thought control and everything else Orwell wrote in his dystopian novel.

Where can we find information that is not influenced either by “green totalitarianism” or Trump’s triumphalist capitalism? I do find it reasonable to believe that humanity puts a lot of carbon dioxide and toxic gases into the atmosphere, then decimates the forests of South America and other parts of the world, disturbing the natural regulation of carbon dioxide by vegetation that needs it. Industry is still tipping vast quantities of plastic into the oceans. Indeed, there is a dramatic ecological crisis. I have a lot of respect for those who invent special ships for recovering as much of that plastic as possible, a lot more than for stupid people gluing themselves to roads and railings in central London to cause the maximum amount of disruption and bitterness. Our world is in trouble, and I am all for efforts to clean up industry, reduce pollution of the air and sea, reduce intensive farming and air travel. We all need to go from a consumer paradigm to being a responsible citizen of the world.

In some ways, I could be tempted to want to go back to an eighteenth-century lifestyle, but that would be the end of my blog, e-mail and my computer. It would be worse for me than someone like Novalis in the 1790’s, because he never had the experience of what we have now. The thought is actually terrifying. I would have to learn to handle horses and have grazing space for them (my garden is on the small side). Goodbye, antibiotics, and we would have to be ready to die of diseases like tuberculosis and other bacterial infections. Most people survive coronavirus, but I’m not sure I would, given the hard time I have recovering from common colds! Goodbye, electricity, but I would (like everybody else) still have to send smoke into the air by burning wood to keep warm and lighting candles indoors. So, I don’t think Miss Greta’s ideas are so practical. Maybe the idea she has in her mind is something along the lines of Logan’s Run, a 1970’s American re-run of Huxley’s Brave New World. She and her minders, of course, would have the pots of money and status to live in some nice country mansion away from the glass-domed cities of οἱ πολλοί. Please excuse my sarcasm. No, we need to look for a moderate way of thinking about this problem without getting emotional or hysterical.

After my experience of radical Catholic traditionalism and things like sedevacantism, I have come to apply the principles of scepticism to the notion of truth itself. Truth exists, indeed, but is for the most part beyond us. Pilate asked What is truth? He doubted whether truth existed apart from the pragmatism of the moment. Jesus responded that he was the truth, the transcendent to whom we all aspire and yearn. We have to seek it and be humble as it brings out of us the sense of wonder. Following the Idealists and Romantics, I now know that we cannot possess the truth or impose a caricature of truth on others. The freedom of thought and expression (within the limits imposed by other people’s rights) is inalienable. I apply the same scepticism to right-wing agendas as well as left-wing ones. Environmental hysteria is political and is concerned for controlling people and taking freedom away in the name of collectivism and the sacrifice of the human person to the state or whatever.

Whatever problems there are with the environment, I am not sure that man’s responsibility goes beyond a few percent, even with all the smoke belching out of factories mostly in China, Russia and America, and out of the exhaust pipes of millions of cars and freight vehicles. It seems to me that Extinction Rebellion has done a lot of harm through its totalitarian ambitions. I am just as careful about conspiracy theories like those saying that we would all be forced to live in glass-domed cities, given artificial food (we already eat enough junk food!) and forbidden from going into the re-wilded countryside. I have a nagging doubt, but I don’t believe anything earthly as absolute truth, especially when there is a hidden political agenda behind it.

As I live in this ugly time of history, I am taken back to the time of the early Industrial Revolution, William Blake, children working in factories with dangerous machines. My own reaction is as angry and revolutionary as that of Shelley as he wrote in Prometheus Unbound, championing free will, goodness, hope and idealism in the face of oppression.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Everything seems to be closing around us, with Brexit, other similar tendencies in Europe. It is quite dramatic here in France, with people not so concerned with half-baked solutions for the environment, but with their livelihood. There doesn’t seem to be much of an alternative to President Macron, who got where he wanted by exposing all the petty corruptions of all the mainstream candidates. Now, the only alternative is Le Pen. Perhaps that might not be a bad thing pour mettre les pendules à l’heure. After all the right-wing that has seduced the working classes got its victory in the UK. It seems to be the future.

The future seems to be authoritarianism, the end of thought, beauty, truth and goodness, the end of art and literature as man’s spirit gives way in obedience to the “new orthodoxy” and its “inquisition”. Some of us will resist and survive. Others will give their lives in seemingly futile gestures.

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.
In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure is taken for misery,
And their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace.
For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet is their hope full of immortality.
And having been a little chastised, they shall be greatly rewarded: for God proved them, and found them worthy for himself.
As gold in the furnace hath he tried them, and received them as a burnt offering. – Wisdom 3, i-xix.

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Candlemas Mass and Office

Posted on Monday, 3 February, 2020 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

At last, someone has made the full video available of the Sarum Mass celebrated in Merton College Chapel in Oxford. It was celebrated by the Roman Catholic priest Fr Sean Finnegan in 1997. These were the Masses allowed for Roman Catholics by the then Archbishop of Birmingham but forbidden by Rome. It gives some idea of the complexity of High Mass, and the care taken to recapture the beauty of the music and ceremonies. Until recently, it was split up into ten-minute segments as per the former YouTube rules.

This year on 1st February, I Vespers of Candlemas was sung in St Patrick’s Church, Philadelphia, also under Roman Catholic auspices (Ordinariate). This ceremony was organised by an extraordinary young man by the name of James Griffin. Here is the video:

See the congregational booklet. It can be downloaded.

It is heartening to see interest in the Use of Sarum and another liturgical tradition that transcends both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

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