It’s all the fault of religion!

Posted on Friday, 18 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I had a phone conversation with my father a few days ago, and the subject of the troubles in the world came up. My father reacted by saying “It’s all the fault of religion”. Now, what should I have said? Should I have tried to tell him to make distinctions, for example between fundamentalist and liberal or whatever? I felt as spiritually exhausted as he does in his late eighties but managing extremely well since my mother died nearly three years ago. What does “religion” mean? It can mean “re-tie” (re-ligare our relationship with God through a system of belief, prayer, sacraments and community worship). It can also mean man’s desire to apprehend and appropriate the mystery of what lies beyond our understanding.

If I’m honest with my father, or with anyone else expressing this reproach, I can hardly contradict him. The three most intolerant religions in the world are all monotheist. They (at least Christianity and Islam) expect everyone in the world to join them on pain of eternal hell because their existing belief systems are bogus and graceless, and because they need to be brought into conformity with the religion’s moral principles. From this point of view, mankind would be better off without these root causes of historical and present-day religious warfare, slavery, colonisation and extermination of indigenous populations, etc.

Then we can retort that much more suffering was caused by atheistic or neo-pagan ideologies like Soviet Communism and Nazism. Could Christianity be justified because it makes people suffer less than under unredeemed human nature in all its cruelty? Should Christianity be allowed to cause any suffering at all to remain credible? I don’t think there are any convincing answers.

One big problem I find with Christianity (since I am myself a Christian and a priest), is that it claims to be the only way, whether through an infallible Pope and Church, an infallible Bible (complete with passages that are just as bad as the equivalent or comparable passages in the Koran) or via some imaginary relationship with Christ. What do we make of the claims of Christ himself saying things like “I am the way, the truth and the life…”? What do we make of the mandate to go and convert the world and that those who refuse the Gospel will be damned? Are we not bound to these words, or are we not bound to reject them and everything else in that belief system?

Whilst doing some research to see if anyone had ever come up with a convincing argument that Jesus was insane, I came across a description of Lewis’s Trilemma. This is an apologetic argument by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity to claim Christ’s divinity with the only two alternatives being that he was evil or insane. It is an interesting one. I have to admit that I find many things I read in the Gospels deeply disturbing – for example the claim to be the only way to heaven, some of the eschatological imagery he used like the fig tree, or sending demons into pigs. Surely the narrative of these words and events has allegorical meaning, like the interpretation of the Old Testament, but they still leave us wondering.

Was Christ a control freak in opposition to the establishment (Temple, Sadducees and Pharisees, etc.) or was he the “cynical” anarchist we prefer to see in the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount? This is what it boils down to. The real problem is how one goes “through” Christ, in the same way as you would go through your local Bishop, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or the Pope: an application letter and an interview (if you’re lucky enough to get a reply) – or in some allegorical and metaphorical way. It would seem to me that the only way to defend this notion of Jesus’ way being the only way is his divinity. He was speaking as God, not as a mere human figure, the incarnate God. This God, the God above God, is the one divinity of all.

It gets worse when we start to dismantle and criticise as biblical scholars have been doing since at least the nineteenth century. There have been men like Bultmann and Harnack who sought to debunk and deny the very possibility of miracles and wonders. There have been more intelligent exegetes since then like my own Old Testament professor, Fr Dominique Barthélemy OP (his obituary). There are discrepancies, failed prophecies, something completely incoherent about many things we read in those pages. Unless we reject the Bible as junk, we can make some sense by different levels of reading and understanding as Origen proposed. Much can be read as allegory or poetry, or as analogy to explain myths that are too distant in the past to be remembered. Christianity itself has evolved over the centuries through its various compromises with human power and ambition.

I have already criticised the notion of an eternal hell and its being the means to force everyone into a single system through blackmail. That Jesus would be the only way out of the cosmic “concentration camp” seems just to be a means of political control. Is it possible to be a Christian whilst believing that everyone else is also right or in good conscience? If not, Christianity itself, like certain forms of Islam, is to be blamed for human suffering like the political ideologies. We can’t be black-and-white about this. Christianity is true, but so is Hinduism, Buddhism and tribal religions. The liberals of the early nineteenth century had a theory of a “primitive revelation” made by God (just one name for a universal consciousness) to all people, whether they were monotheist or whatever. The Bible contains wisdom and beauty, but so does the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, not to mention the recently discovered texts of Nag Hammadi including many Gospels to add to our New Testament. We all have our “dark side”, and so do all these holy books. What these books really reveal is man’s quest to understand our life and search for meaning. We live in history and a vast human context involving traditions and collective consciousness.

I was struck by a passage in a Don Camillo film, where the good priest begins a hunger strike to protest against his Mayor’s decision to twin the village with a village in Soviet Russia. Don Camillo asks Jesus how he could approve a union with a godless place. Jesus answers that there is nothing and nowhere in the universe where God is not present – and this persuades Don Camillo to have the feast of his life. God can bring good out of anything, even ignorance and sin. This is the most profound message of another Christianity that has been drowned out by all the noise.

This presence of spirit and consciousness everywhere is a part of revelation in history and the experience of those who have told their tales. The Bible narrates many such revelations and experiences, but I imagine that most remain unrecorded.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Many people discover these ideas that transcend materialist understanding, and can find light in the doctrines and creeds of churches. Such formularies are teaching devices to convey ideas in simple terms, but they are not the limit or end of knowledge. Like the skeleton gives shape and form to a human body, dogmas are there to point the way and help us, but we don’t stop there. We have to accept the fact that that most people nowadays have no use for churches, either because they are materialists or because they expect light that is much more transcendent and deeper than what a church could give them. To say that one size fits all is simply not possible.

We priests often complain that there are only two or three in our churches, or none at all, but perhaps the complaint is “We go to all to this trouble and no one is interested” or simply that we are on our own to finance our “plant”! A church community unifies a group in shared beliefs, makes liturgy and sacraments possible, justifies a man who chose to become a priest and builds a whole culture around it. Many of us need this kind of support, or feel that they need to give this support to others. However, there comes a time when it is sloughed off like when the child becomes an adolescent, or it acquires a new and deeper meaning. This is a terrible responsibility for a church community and its priest. Perhaps what we can do for people is to offer them experience of the divine through the liturgy and some sign of our own transfiguration by Christ.

We in the Anglican Catholic Church are very lucky to be so small and marginal, because this truth is brought home to us. We were too big in the 1990’s, and the “bishops’ brawl” was the result, the split-ups due to hurt egos and frustrated politics. Lessons have been learned, but we know it could happen again if we let it happen. We have to be humble, and priests before being clerics! Being in a Church can give us a sense of structure, confidence and purpose, but it can close down our critical sense, close our minds and tolerance. It can become the phenomenon of the totalitarian cult. Churches bring out both the best and worst in people.

Many years ago, seeing the decline of churches in the west, I had a discussion with a priest and asked him the question – What if the Redemption has been undone? Could it be like before Christ, when – we are told – everyone went to some “temporary” hell to await the Messiah? I think that the idea of Redemption needs to be understood afresh, and this is not what Christianity was about. This would come over as a terrible heresy, but it is the one cause of the “our way or the highway” thinking and all the drifts. What difference did the events of Christ’s life make? Visibly, not a lot. We still hate and kill each other, we still get sick and die, we still suffer from accidents and natural catastrophes. A lion doesn’t lie with a lamb without eating it! Obviously it isn’t situated there.

It’s either nonsense or beyond our understanding. We all see things differently from each other and answers cannot be expressed with mere words. There are many things I experience without being able to describe them, mostly “flashes” of things that have no origin or obvious purpose. I have read the theory according to which a schizophrenic is not mad or sick, but perceives reality differently. Joan of Arc heard voices, dressed as a man, got burnt as a witch or a heretic – and is a Saint of the Church. If there is a Redemption, it isn’t automatic or given merely though joining a Church and getting baptised – it has to be found beyond everything we know and understand. It obviously concerns a world that is not the one we know. Ever heard of the multiverse theory? There might be an infinite number of existences like all the different radio frequencies in which we die old in one, die young in another – an infinite number of possibilities. We struggle with quantum physics, which seem to be nonsense, whilst giving us scientific data that flies in the face of Newtonian physics.

What is original in another way of seeing things is seeing Christianity as true, but Hinduism and Sufism too. Other religions bring people to supernatural life and goodness. Who are we to say that they are false or inspired by the Devil? But, doesn’t that say that Christianity has no meaning or purpose if it isn’t the one true lifeboat that can save the shipwrecked from drowning?

There is much wrong with the world, and we might even be on the way to World War III and our annihilation. On the other hand, diverse cultures and beliefs are something good and beautiful. God is present in our modern cities like in the Russian village with the Communist mayor. There is more light and goodness in the world than sin and darkness. Each person is on a journey, unknown to the rest of us. What right have we to stop that person, demolish his self-esteem and offer the remedy in the form of a spiritual straitjacket? I am sure they are better You-name-its than we Christians!

This is where we have to baulk at the idea of converting people and bombarding them with Christian propaganda in the same way as a washing powder manufacturer tells us that its product washes whiter. How can everyone be right? Is there not a principle of non-contradiction, in which two contradicting propositions cannot both be right? One is right and the other is wrong, or they are both wrong. But mystery is above conventional reasoning, logic and epistemology. Different religions, philosophies and cultures seem to be so many facets of a single transcendent reality. Deep down, the various experiences of the divine do not contradict each other but compliment each other. It is because of this that I have been interested in Gnosticism for many years, reading the various available English translations of ancient texts, knowing about various unorthodox spiritual movements in history like the Cathars and the men of the Renaissance, modern depth-psychology. It brings many aspects of exoteric Christianity into perspective, and brings a new understanding. I have readily accepted the so-called Universalist theories expressed by many and even aspects of so-called Pantheism. One name given to God these days is “universal consciousness”, a kind of Platonic universal idea of us all containing an image of God or the wholeness of God. As a little boy, I wondered whether atoms were not little solar systems containing planets and life, and that our solar system was not an atom forming a part of a macrocosm. Reality transcends our little minds!

Why belong to a Church? One of the ideas I found in Nicholas Berdyaev was the notion that we need to have some constant reference, a discipline that gives us structure and which moderates us, bringing us to think and be self-critical. A balloon filled with hot air or helium needs a tether to keep it close to earth, and it uses weights to control its altitude. Otherwise it would rise to the top of the atmosphere and then explode due to the decrease of atmospheric pressure. Pure Gnosticism cannot survive in the world or in history. It isn’t made for the collectivity. We are all a part of humanity and we are social creatures. However imperfect the Church is, we need it, and in an ideal world it would need us. We can all too easily arrive at that Church’s limits of tolerance, and if the point of rupture is reached, the cycle has to begin anew.

How do we live our spiritual life? To begin with, it seems to be simply living and treasuring the moments that bring us something special and unexplainable. I am most likely to find this kind of experience in nature – on land or at sea. We begin to find that “hell is” – not – “other people” to give a contradiction to Sartre’s famous idea, but that they are finding their paths which may be similar to our own or so radically different we can’t imagine ourselves belonging to the same species. Many people are going to seek their way without having anything to do with a Church. Most people I know have nothing to do with churches, but few of them are really atheists.

I can make a case for multiculturalism in the west as we have, with different races and cultures having taken refuge for political or economic reasons. The objection would be made – what if they are Daesh terrorists come to kill us? Christians centuries ago did the same thing, and more recently to “savages” in those places we wanted for our empires. Europe could all become part of a caliphate in which public executions would become commonplace like the seventeenth century in Europe – but it is unlikely it would go that far. Even in Putin’s Russia, there are different immigrant cultures of people who have had to learn to live in Russia. We will just have to take what happens (hoping that the more unpleasant people will blow themselves up or get shot).

In every religion, there is a contemplative and spiritual tradition. There is the Kabbal in Judaism, Sufism in Islam, and various Gnostic resurgences in Christianity, invariably bumped off by Constantine’s goons or the Inquisition. It is amazing how similar these spiritual traditions are, and that is not to mention Buddhism in the Far East and the mountains of Nepal.

One of the heaviest weights man has had to carry is fundamentalism, whether in Christianity or any other religion. It destroys nations and persons, it causes war and untold misery. It is the conviction according to which “we” possess the truth and anyone outside of it is unworthy of life, happiness and freedom.

I have often thought I would like to visit countries like India and Nepal. My brother once did as a medical student and brought back some amazing photos and anecdotes. Many did in the 1960’s and certainly enjoyed smoking many a good joint of best Afghan or whatever the west forbids on pain of very heavy prison sentences! Seriously, even if we never get to travel very much, we can at least keep our minds open and wonder what it would be like for a white European or American to live in a strange culture and make the best of it.

I would like to take time and open my mind to new realities, which we can do next to our own doorsteps thanks to immigration. There aren’t too many possibilities in my village, but I have lived in Marseilles where I felt well in my cassock next to the Tunisian or Moroccan street trader wearing his jubba or thobe. Live in the East End of London, and you get an idea of Bangladesh or Pakistan. The cooking smells can be quite exotic! Perhaps a few of those would like to get back at us for the old British Empire – but most are open to those who respect them.

I am constantly brought back to Fr Charles de Foucault who went to Algeria and got knocked off by Muslims. His life seemed totally pointless and a waste, yet he found holiness and gave his life for God and kindness to his Muslim neighbours. Perhaps they beat the hell out of white Europeans for whom the world is just money and more money! Fr Charles did not seek to conquer or convert. He still got killed, but his message was one of love and compassion – and that is our Redemption through Christ.

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A new (but not so new) way forward

Posted on Thursday, 17 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

We bloggers (floggers?) tend to come to a watershed sooner or later, especially when we become aware of bad feelings and occasional hostility. I have certainly discussed “true churches” exhaustively and I haven’t much more to say on the liturgy that doesn’t belong in books rather than the internet.

Historically, I made my name on The Anglo-Catholic, banged a drum on the English Catholic blog and set up this one on the basis of interest in the Sarum liturgy. I developed an idea in parallel based on the old Goliards – the rebellious clerics who lived in the margins of Church life and wrote daring poetry. As time went on, I traced a whole tendency of humanity surviving the dominating strategies of the powerful and rich of this world, in Romanticism and modern sub-cultures. I am still interested in the Sarum liturgy: I use it and I read about its history – but I have nothing more to write about it.

My experience of life has pushed me to the very edges of Christianity. I remained orthodox enough to join a continuing Anglican Church and find my spiritual home in its English diocese. That being said, I am anything but a conservative. Why should people who are not Christians be forced to become Christians so that someone can “civilise” them by his standards? This question is all the more germane as we discover the truth of what western empires did in the parts of the world they conquered for money, justifying their thirst for power by the notion that they were “civilising savages”. Christ’s mandate meant something else, but what?

I came to the idea of what brought me to Christianity in the first place. It was beauty and a higher view of life and love of other people, and especially compassion and empathy for the weak. If it is the ideology of the strong and powerful to gain control over the “little ones”, then it is the Pharisaism that Christ violently condemned. It might be religion, but it is not Christ and what he represented. Love of beauty brought me to be attracted to churches and liturgical music, especially the Anglican choral tradition in which I was myself nurtured from my early adolescent years.

I have written on a number of themes that need to be developed. I am not interested in online preaching like some good priests do on their blogs. In particular, there is the spirit behind Romanticism (no matter how dissolute men like Lord Byron were!), the ancient Gnostic “heresy” and Jungian psychology. In the 18th century, the antidote to religious obscurantism was believed to be reason and enlightenment. But, science alone can be used for evil – like eugenics, genetic manipulation and psychiatry. Science also becomes a religion. We need to be enlightened with knowledge, γνῶσις, and be profoundly tolerant and have empathy for others, refusing to consider anything to be inferior to oneself.

In a context of Jungian psychology, another theme is uppermost in my mind, on which I have written, psychological androgyny – not wanting to be a caricature of the opposite sex or prance about in drag – but becoming more human by assimilating the female within us as an antidote to male domination and thirst for power and money. Such an idea attracts the ire of conservatives with ideas of gender identification in reaction against feminism, transsexualism and homosexuality. We are what we are without labels, but with a desire for empathy, softness, homeliness and humility. Is that why I wanted long hair on my head? No, hair is neutral, like it was until the mid nineteenth century and even later for unbreeched boys. These days, there is more of an agenda in very short hair than anything else. Might we see one day an unbreeching ceremony for men like the “burn the bra” movement among women in the 1960’s? I muse jokingly, but…

I reject ultra-masculinity as evolved in the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth. It is grotesque and a reflection of that Nazi monster Heydrich I mentioned a few days ago. Some think I am obsessed with Nazism. It is the single event in the twentieth century that has drawn the judgement of the world on the various programmes it promoted. I name one in particular: eugenics. Social “Darwinism” goes back far in history. Hitler is dead, but the lust for Nietzsch’s Ubermensch, power, money and “racial purity” is still with us. That is why I have studied that ideology, its history and crank philosophy to understand things better. I have no personal political opinions except opposition to large anonymous and unaccountable authorities like the State. I have sympathies with anarchism even though I remain highly critical of that set of views.

As a good “post-modernist”, perhaps I should avoid “meta-narratives” in a discovery of a Romanticism for the twenty-first century. As with “psychological androgyny”, it is not a matter of trappings, appearances and labels – but a profound path towards spiritual knowledge and experience, something above all interior and within. I will try to progress in this vein…

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Incitation to Hatred

Posted on Sunday, 13 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have had to refuse another comment, and I had to make another examination of conscience. Do I have the right to refuse comments because I do not agree with the expressed opinions? I have said it before – I think I am open-minded and prepared to discuss.

I posted an article that would inevitably be open to comments about the Welfare State and themes that would bring the 1930’s and the 2010’s to have all too much in common. Before I closed the comment box, I found a pending comment supporting the current political tendencies towards the “extreme right” and an attitude of hatred that would only ignite more bitterness and hatred. We have Le Pen in France and there is Donald Trump in the USA. I think we will regret it if either of these two demagogues get into power, just as we languish in hopelessness in the current climate of oscillation between “conservatives” and “socialists”.

The general situation is getting very ugly, and articles I read in the “alternative news” give reasoned arguments about the imminence of a new world war, which would escalate and kill us all. The “enemy” isn’t only the others. It is ourselves and the political leaders some of us would like to put into power. Who would I vote for in France? I do know that increasing numbers of people are voting with blank ballots, because there is no solution and no hope in the present system or what any that untried parties are proposing.

In spite of our dead-end situation of check-mate, the solution for a better world is not hatred and violence. Wars will be fought and will have to be fought, unless we want to finish up under Daesh or Big Brother – or under the Jackboot!

I will not allow comments that incite hatred, and I wonder how many “borderline” comments I have allowed. It is a difficult responsibility. I ask commenters to self-moderate. I tolerate many things, but gratuitous hatred is something else…

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The Banality of Evil

Posted on Friday, 11 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Last night I watched the incredibly well-acted film Conspiracy with Kenneth Branagh as the monstrous Nazi SS psychopath Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942) who was nicknamed the Butcher of Prague. Click on the title of the film for the best description I can find. The full movie doesn’t seem at present to be available on Youtube, but I am sure the DVD can be found and ordered.

Here is a brief presentation which in itself is chilling:

How is it that such a cultivated man with a wife and family could turn to such monstrous evil, obvious in his manipulation of the Nazi bureaucracy at the notorious Wannsee Conference of 1941?

Those of us with feelings for other people and an ability to read and feel their emotions will never get round this terrifying mystery of pure evil. Are some people born psychopaths with something wrong with their brains? Do we all have it within us in such wise as we would be like Heidrich, Himmler or Hitler himself in the “wrong” circumstances? How far would any of us writing or reading this posting be complicit if we lived in a country run by criminals and the same kind of ideology as that of the Nazis.

It can happen again, oh yes, it can! The current situation in Syria scares me, and I tend to find Putin’s words more credible than our western countries. Can we be on the “wrong side”. I hope not and pray not, but there is no guarantee. I don’t trust my Prime Minister and I don’t believe a word of what’s coming from L’Elysée or the White House either. Putin seems to be alone in defending Christianity, but will we be disappointed?

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God.

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The grotesque side of Christmas

Posted on Thursday, 10 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

father-christmas

It is not difficult to understand the captions: –

Le village du Père Noël – The village of Father Christmas, the dark satanic mills of China where children labour excessive hours with about the equivalent pay of children in the early nineteenth century in England.

Ses Elfes – His elves. These are no mythological creatures, but real exhausted children who should be at school and with their families. They appear to have been allowed a “quick break” to sleep for a few minutes.

Son traineau – His sledge. This one isn’t drawn by reindeer! This is one of the biggest cargo ships in the world bringing plastic toys, television sets and who knows what else all the way from China to our great European ports. Even more overheads can be shaved away so that the maximum profit is made from Europeans paying European prices for Chinese goods.

Commercial Christmas is horrible beyond description. People are going to stuff themselves with rich food, get drunk and give family members and friends various consumer goods that may be more or less useful. Easter is a greater feast than Christmas, but attracts much less hype – other than rows and rows of Easter eggs almost before Septuagesima! Going to do a bit of shopping yesterday evening with my wife, we found the Galette des Rois for Epiphany, an almond cake made with puff pastry with some little thing made of pottery that designates the winner of the cardboard crown. Who would buy such a thing so long in advance of the 6th January? The supermarkets are floods of light, colour and tinsel – and the real brunt of the Christmas shopping has hardly started. The shelves are full of stuff from that ship, assembled in the factory by those exhausted kids employed by Ching Chong Hung Chow Dark Satanic Mills & Co. Ltd. I once knew a couple of Chinese takeaways in London. One was called the Wan King and the other proudly bore the name Foo King. A northern lad with a smutty sense of humour might make something of those names! What does Christmas means to non-Christians?

There is no need to be puritanical or to deprive ourselves of the festive atmosphere after Mass in Gallicantu, some good company with family and friends, a glass of good Champagne and something nice to eat. Christmas Day sees a family Mass on Christmas morning, a good meal with a stuffed duck or guinea fowl washed down with some fine wines. Presents can be things we make for each other from local materials. The ladies can get their knitting needles out, and the men can make things out of wood – or the other way round! There are still some goods manufactured in Europe and America, and we should pay our money to some of our own workers and retailers. We can make efforts to buy things in small shops rather than supermarkets, even if we have to pay a little more for less.

Needless to say, I am preaching to the choir! We approach the third Sunday of Advent and the great O Antiphons. I hope we can capture something of the prophetic spirit of Advent in spite of the noise and commercial pressure to buy, consume, buy and consume…

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Anarchy and Community

Posted on Wednesday, 9 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I greatly appreciate the reflections of Fr Jonathan Munn in Possession, pomposity and power, in which he makes the point that true monastic obedience is in regard to the community and not simply the Abbot.

Many years ago, I was interested in the idea of the Oratory of St Philip Neri. As can be seen by the Institutes (reproduced below) of that congregation of Roman Catholic priests, there are striking similarities with the Order of St Benedict. Each monastery or congregation is independent and authority is vested in the community and not the strongest personality or the constitutional head elected by the community. The Oratory of St Philip Neri is more an idea than an organisation, despite the fact that it is a canonically recognised entity in the Church. Each house (London, Birmingham, Oxford, etc.) is independent but “federated”. Any group of priests may found an Oratory (presumably through permission from their local Bishop) and there are no vows. It is something that is completely original and without any similarity in the Roman Catholic Church. How such a thing ever got approved in the “totalitarian” Church is a mystery and a miracle! It just shows that the voice of prophecy is never completely excluded by authority, hierarchy and bureaucracy.

The influence of the Acts of the Apostles and other early Church documents is apparent, and perhaps there are applications possible for those who are married, not priests or even living under the same roof. The Institutions are worded in the mentality of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Rule of St Benedict for its time, but intelligent adaptation could certainly be thought through to suit a specific application.

Another thought came into my mind, that of marriage. All too often, the husband or the wife tries to get into a position of power and domination, and creates the situation of a stifling and unhappy marriage. Maybe, an adaptation of such a paradigm could be introduced into marriage preparation programmes. Two persons is as much a community as greater numbers. A couple should be working in the perspective of finding a common mind and heart rather than looking for ways to manipulate and coerce the other person.

It’s a thought to be discussed.

* * *

The INSTITUTIONS of the CONGREGATION of the ORATORY

Continue reading →

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Borscht for Brains

Posted on Wednesday, 9 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I am increasingly enjoying Fr Hunwicke’s wit and sense of the absurd. The question is asked: Who is entitled to use the Pope Francis Missal? Where have I already seen the nit-picking among some members of the Roman patriarchate? Oh yes, when discussing the Use of Sarum… The good Father from Oxford treads carefully, knowing that many of his fellow clergy have no sense of humour.

It is an old accusation by traditionalists that there are two standards in the Roman Catholic Church. Anything goes for the liturgical deconstructionists, and the full rigour of canon law is applied against traditionalists. Very politically correct, all that! And how Orwellian!

The best thing for those over-scrupulous clergy is perhaps not to do something if they are worried they are not allowed to do it. They can stare at a brick wall or “become a goat” (devenir chèvre) as the French say. Indeed, borscht for brains, as a Russian character in a James Bond film coined. Eventually, they have to draw conclusions…

Surely, there are ways to twist things around, which is quite ironic considering the old Church of England clergy using the Novus Ordo in their Anglican parishes before the moment to catch the Tiber Express presented itself. They did what they thought best, and now the huge gorilla in the room is Pope Francis, who is increasingly hated by conservatives.

Probably, the biggest obstacle for the average English Roman Catholic priest not in the Ordinariate is not Rome – but his own diocesan ordinary. That’s another problem.

I won’t knock these poor chaps, whether they are “cradle” or “converts”. They do what they can as we in the “little churches” try to do too.

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2016 Ordo

Posted on Friday, 4 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

For those who do not yet have their liturgical calendars,

Anglican Catholic Church – based on the 1928 American Prayer Book and the Anglican Missal. It is ordered online. It contains the essential information needed for the Mass and Office, including special celebrations of our Province and Dioceses. It is also graced with fine and high-quality illustrations.

Sarum – Kalendar 2015 for this Advent and Christmas period until 31st December, then Kalendar 2016 from 1st January to 31st December 2016. This calendar, following the Gregorian computation, is in English. It is free and in pdf format for printing.

Roman – in accordance with the Pius X – Benedict XV rubrics. You pay for a beautifully printed booklet which is highly detailed and in Latin. This is the best ordo I know for the Roman rite.

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Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop

Posted on Wednesday, 2 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have always appreciated the writings of Umberto Eco. He made his name as a writer through the story most of us know, The Name of the Rose. Like Foucault’s Pendulum, it is a story of intrigue and teasing the human imagination only to leave the reader disappointed. The monks of the abbey sought a supernatural explanation for simple human skulduggery. The great conspiracy in Foucault’s Pendulum whittled down to nothing, to mere futility. That is often how things are in life.

Conspiracies recur in Eco’s work, especially that of the so-called Protocols of Zion, a forgery formulated to justify the persecution of Jews. Hitler made the most of it as a part of his big lie. Conspiracy paranoia is a temptation we all suffer from to a point. What we don’t know, we make up, and we experience this in the present situation in Syria between Russia and NATO. I tend to believe the Russian side of the story, but I still get nagging doubts. Perhaps godless capitalism and creeping Orwellianism are on the side of the Angels and we are not indoctrinated (cough, holy) enough to believe it. Sorry, forgive my cynicism…

Eco knows that dictatorships use the conspiracy theme to achieve their goals of domination. He saw this in Berlusconi in Italy. He is firmly on the political left and is not a practising Catholic in spite of being an Italian. Umberto Eco is a university professor and an academic who made a success of novel writing. His writing is a challenge, something I enjoy in a good book.

He has recently written in the Telegraph an interesting article, God isn’t big enough for some people. The article can be read in its place. I will merely pick up on one or two things. The first is that it would be hard to go through life without religion, without hope, faced with the stark reality of our mortality and seemingly no guarantee of anything beyond the grave or cremation furnace or whatever. Even the most hardened materialists have to find something, like scientists being involved in spiritualist séances.

Death is the great leveller. It does not discern between rich and poor, the successful and those who have failed in life. It, with the idea of justifying our existence, is the one great motivation for religious behaviour. That religion is fading away in Europe. Communism is gone, capitalism is now bubble-and-bust banking. Catholicism is dying.

Inevitably, Eco would bring up the saying attributed to G.K. Chesterton:  “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything“. Nature abhors a vacuum, so we are given to believe. Like the monks in the dark Italian abbey of the early fourteenth century, we are incredibly credulous. Watch out for what purports to prove life after death. Many mediums have been exposed as frauds, and the “ectoplasm” turned out to be a bit of cheesecloth hanging out of their mouths. Those who get worked up are often crushed with disappointment.

Perhaps it is through having read some of Eco’s work that we don’t get worked up by something like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. It’s a great yarn, but that’s all it is. Eco expresses his disappointment with modern humanity yearning for something impossible.

We sometimes need to be more Enlightenment and Classical to offset the excesses of Romanticism! Our great warning is how easily Hitler got into power in 1933 through making people believe in such rubbish as “Aryan supermen”. We are ashamed to see just how crappy Nazi mythology really was and how it took in millions of Germans and people in other countries. I have often mentioned Julius Evola and some of the intuitions he expressed, but he too was a charlatan. Perennial Traditionalism just whittles down to nothing in spite of all the efforts to revive something great.

I appreciate Umberto Eco for bringing us back down to earth. Should we suck up materialism and the idea of being worth no more than the meat we eat? Should we return to mundane parish Catholicism in spite of the changes since the 1960’s and the banality? Religion and belief are part of us whether we like it or not. I note that Eco is not an atheist but rather an Italian lapsed Catholic. He likes to leave the reader dissatisfied, which seems to me to be intentional. Whichever way you turn, you’re not going to find the perfect answer. You will keep searching or will give up the search.

I do think we should allow ourselves to be challenged, because it is good for our sense of integrity and autonomy of mind. I have often offered outlandish ideas in this blog, but always with the reserve that I am not sure. It’s just what’s happening in my mind faced with alternative and mainstream news about the Middle East situation. We have to sober up from time to time!

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Christian Anarchism and Universalism

Posted on Wednesday, 2 December, 2015 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I was a little peed off this morning as I set about deleting a draft project in which I had lost interest. In its place, I deleted my published article of yesterday on the Christian anarchist view and universalism which takes away the threat “Convert to the True Church otherwise you’ll be damned when you die”. It’s gone and I can’t get it back [a kind reader saved it and sent it back to me, for which I am grateful].

I need to disconnect from the previous article. This isn’t about knocking spots off people who tell us that we all have to be Roman Catholics or Orthodox and trash what we do belong to. The starting point for such a discussion can be a consideration of how authority has been abused in history, but that would only be a part of it. The real issue is what the historical Christ intended by the evidence of the canonical Gospels and the various other ancient manuscripts from Nag Hammadi and elsewhere.

The great patron of Christian anarchism was Tolstoy. It will be a challenge for me to read his work. In much of what is written about Christian anarchism, the themes are similar. Authority, political power and money are perceived as forms of violence. As Lord Acton said, Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In the Gospels, we read about Jesus portrayed as something like a mystic revolutionary, like John the Baptist, rejected from “respectable society”. He preached among the outcast and those who were condemned for bad morals. He rose up dramatically against hypocrisy, clericalism, intrigue and generally the abuse of power. We easily see the anarchist in Jesus of Nazareth. Another hallmark of this Gospel would be the refusal of war or revenge against another for wrongs committed. That is just about the hardest precept, as we can only imagine the consequences of allowing the Nazis, Daesh or other monsters in history to win and dominate. Would that not be a greater evil than fighting them? Was Christianity ever a “going concern” from the beginning?

There are groups of Christians which are particularly concerned for this kind of pacifism like the Quakers and the Mennonites, and they are admirable in their honesty and devotion. There are also the Franciscans and most orders of monks in Catholicism. People of this frame of mind are found in all denominations and traditions, generally the Churches in which they were brought up. We try to meditate on the spirit of Christ and make it our way of life. Dostoievsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor is fundamentally an account of how the institutional Church found that Christianity was not feasible and was irrelevant to the world. This is the very drama of the three temptations in the desert. What is the Church that is not Christian or of Christ? It is only a political organisation under false pretences.

Is Christianity meant to be a Church in the way we understand it? If not, the priesthood, liturgy, sacraments, any idea of the continuing presence of Christ – are gone and relegated to the collective memory, nothing more. Is it possible to separate the Church as communion from the political over-empire, the priesthood from clericalism and the corruption of power ad money? These are eternal questions betraying the cause of all disunity between Christians.

Another consideration from my accidentally deleted post was the notion of universalism. We no longer force conversion to a “true church” on pain of everlasting hell, but rather proclaim God as a loving Father, one who would transfigure even sin and sickness. We are Christians when we live according to the spirit of Christ, even if we happen to be outcasts, people of other religions and cultures, or unable to identify with any particular institution. Membership of a Church through Baptism should be the consequence and confirmation of our commitment to that essential message.

Universal salvation is not “cheap grace” for the evidence suggests justice for the wicked, yet hope and an eternally outstretched hand for when repentance is sincere. We all face justice and karma.

If political authority is all about violence, capitalism and allowing people to sink into alcoholism, drugs, degradation and prostitution, then that authority has to be resisted. How is that done without war and violence? That is the question that can only be answered when the situation is encountered. How far is righteous anger legitimate?

We continue down the slippery slope towards World War III, and I do not believe it to be the fault of Russia. If that happens, we will all die and our planet will be destroyed. We allowed it to happen. I have confidence that we will be spared as happened in 1962. If there remains enough of the spirit of Christ in humanity…

* * *

Here is the lost text a kind reader sent back to me:

A New Apologia

Conversations over the past couple of days have brought me back to a constantly recurring theme in my thought and work on this blog, that of Christian anarchism. It is my immediate reaction when someone recommends a regime like Franco to enforce Roman Catholicism and repress anything else, or at least its public expression. Even traditionalist Roman Catholics have had to refuse submission to current personalities in positions of authority by appealing to Tradition.

Even more important is how we react to atheism or representatives of other religious traditions who persecute Christians. We are too used to defend Christianity, and even defend what is indefensible. What could possibly be wrong with us Christians? Good question. What does atheism claim to give mankind? Simply liberation, however illusory that might be. Man fights against alienation and discrimination. In doing so, religion is perceived as a part of the structures of oppression.

I risk coming over like Bishop Spong or any number of liberal thinkers, but what is liberalism? It has a point when it finds our representations of God and Christianity too human and too demystified. Perhaps instead of opposing atheism, Christianity has an examination of conscience to make.

We often complain about the hypocrisy and duplicity of our political leaders, their complicity with evil in the line of business. It is nothing new. The Church has not been exempt from such complicity, at least at the level of some local bishops and elements in the Roman curia. I think of some of the remarks of Bonhöffer in his letters and works concerning the impotence of the Church under the Hitler regime. Communism has failed and capitalism is going the same way. In the words of Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely“. It is intrinsic to human nature. The obvious conclusion is that authority must be destroyed or at least subordinated to a higher principle.

We know precious little about Christ outside the Gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts and various other ancient manuscripts found here and there. The revelation of God as the Father was revolutionary. We are freed from the tyranny of the “demiurge”, an erroneous idea of God as a supreme and fickle dictator. Christ is manifest in a “straight” reading of the texts and a faculty of putting everything together to bring out a “big picture”. Which god are the atheists rejecting? Certainly not one who had made humanity his children and loves us. Frankly, when I hear or read the words of American fundamentalists and French Catholic fascists, I react like the atheist. That “god” does not exist or at least must be banished from our lives.

There is an image of Christ that is so different from the behaviour of men of power and ambition. I wanted at this point to quote something from Oscar Wilde in his famous letter from Reading Gaol, but there is too much. For someone who got in trouble with the law for homosexuality, his understanding of the Gospel message is amazing, coloured as it is through his suffering and Romantic outlook. Uppermost is the comparison between self-righteous Christians and the Pharisees of Christ’s day, and that the spirit trumps the flesh every time. We can see some comparisons between Christ and the anti-conformists of our own day, from Wilde to the Hippies, but he was much more universal and far above cultures and tastes.

In the Church, there has always been the notion of paternal authority, someone we revere and respect because of his love and goodness. At what point does it corrupt and become evil? Are some intrinsically good and others evil? Who is the judge of that? These are difficult questions. There has to be a Church, because we cannot each one of us go it alone. The trick is defining that Church and the mystical dimension before the material.

I very much believe in the idea of “anonymous” Christians, who have in some way assimilated the message of Christ, but who are repelled by the Church because of human evil and hypocrisy. In my experience of life, I have met people I would revere as saints even though they are not churchgoers. I understand the “liberal” or expressing it better, the “radical” reaction of the 1960’s. They had some measure and authenticity before they became “institutionalised” and imposed as a “new orthodoxy”.

I am very much convinced that the Christians of the future, like the folk in Africa right now, will be those who have embraced the Gospel through love and freedom whilst remaining in their own cultural expressions. The slum priests in the nineteenth century reached out to the people in very simple terms, and only then did they attend the elaborate liturgies in English in a church building that inspired awe and wonder. There is no reason to copy all those cultures in the liturgy, but rather to respect all people in the lives they lead as they reach out to God and Jesus Christ.

I have already touched on the subject of universal salvation, even if it is after a “stage” of purgation and healing of the dis-incarnate soul. I am inclined towards it because it situations the notion of Christian mission differently. We no longer tell people that they have to convert to our camp on pain of eternal damnation – but rather that they are loved by Christ. No one is excluded from God’s love. Universalism presents many problems, especially the notion of justice for evil. A few days ago, I wrote some speculations on the notion of hell in the light of “unorthodox” sources like mediums. The rejection of a “one true [institutional] church” and the offering of salvation to all by divine love is a more attractive idea than the Ecclesia as some kind of spiritual totalitarianism.

In the words of St Paul (I Timothy 4:10), we read: For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe. Certainly we can find other texts about fire and brimstone, certainly because justice awaits the wicked and those who refuse love. The whole question needs a lifetime’s study, and far holier and more erudite men than I have only cracked the surface.

I think such an approach has been tried especially by Pope John Paul II, frequently accused of heresy for this very reason. I would like to read and try to understand Wojtylian philosophy better. He combated the Communist ideology with love and a philosophical construct called existential personalism or Christian humanism. The idea is to defend Christianity from the accusation of being anti-human and anti-person. The theories derived from St Thomas Aquinas and German idealism are immensely complex, but they merit study and effort. It would appear that he had tendencies to believe and teach the idea of universal salvation, which also provoked the wrath of traditionalists.

There is much wisdom in many of the lights of the twentieth century, and not only those who were elected to the Papacy. We desperately need a new way to present the Christian message and way of life, but not what has been tried in the big Churches and their bureaucracies. I have never hidden my sympathy for the so-called Modernist George Tyrrell, even though many of his ideas would later be refuted by science. I seek and study, and reach out. I see it as a part of my duty as a priest and Christian believer.

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