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Chairman's Blog

    16/04/2020 - 12:46

    On Criticising fellow Catholics

    Cross posted from Rorate Caeli.

    I spend more time on Twitter than perhaps I should, but even so I tend to miss some of the nuances of the increasingly rancorous internecine Twitter arguments taking place between people who, one might think, should be on the same side, and if follower numbers are a guide to moral seriousness (which they are not), should know better. I doubt I have anything very edifying to learn by scrolling back through all the accusations and replies, but one thing which is characteristic of the latest, as of many other, Twitter spats, is that it has come down to catty generalizations about the character of Catholics attending Mass in different liturgical forms, or offered by different categories of priests.

    This reminds me of the claim once made by English Protestants, that one is more likely to find one’s umbrella has been stolen from the back of a Catholic church than from a Protestant one. As Oscar Wilde put it, “The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.”


    It is alarming to see this prim, Pharisaical nonsense raise its head again in online debates among supposedly Catholic commentators seeking to do down those who attend the Traditional Mass, or Masses celebrated by priests of the SSPX, or anyone else. I have zero interest in denying such claims: they should not be answered, but treated with contempt.

    It should be obvious that when it is a small group which is at issue, matters could go in two different directions. If it is a well-managed cult, potential recruits will be allowed to see only a carefully curated and thoroughly drilled selection of grinning devotees, who will be terribly friendly and nice. If it is not managed like that, then newcomers’ experiences will depend on who they happen to meet, and may well be dominated by people whose fondness for the sound of their own voice is not matched by intellectual or emotional maturity. Only when you get to know the regulars a bit, does it become clear to what extent the people you first met are, or are not, representative of the congregation as a whole.

    This, I say, should be obvious. Casual experience of even a small congregation offers absolutely no guidance in making a fair evaluation of the group.

    In larger groups, one can of course find every possible kind of person. I wish I could take some of these Twitter warriors on a tour of London’s great Catholic churches, where I could introduce them to some of the interesting people who attend perfectly normal and mainstream churches. Did I say, attend? Some of them more or less live there. The side chapels at Westminster Cathedral are regularly used by homeless people, sometimes with mental health issues, as a warm place to sleep. Others are there from pious motivations, and shamble up to Holy Communion at certain Masses as regular as clockwork. One individual always carries a large statue of Our Lady of Fatima. Another wears a plastic coat covered in writing about the imminence of the Great Chastisement. Another I know constantly holds in front of her face, while in church, a piece of paper, presumably with prayers written on it. As a priest friend of mine says, “All the crazies come to Jesus”. And you know what? Why shouldn’t they?

    The most unpleasant experience I have had at the hands of a fellow lay Catholic was in the middle of Mass at a church I then attended occasionally. A man crossed from one side to the other in order to tick me off at some length about the behavior of my small children. He wasn’t objecting to noise, but seems to have thought I should have had them all on their knees. The experience left me speechless, which is pretty unusual for me. However, because I knew the priest and some of the people there, I was afterwards given a bit of background on this fellow, and a few years later I heard of his death. He died fortified by the Sacraments, having been reconciled with long-estranged family members. It was certainly a bad thing that he’d taken out his frustrations on a young family he did not know, but I am glad that he was never driven away from attending Mass.

    Suppose you show me a whole congregation of people like that. Such a thing is possible. Where should they go? What would you do with them? Should they be excommunicated for being annoying?

    The best reply to the attitude that Catholic congregations should only be made up of nice people was made by Evelyn Waugh. When challenged for being the rather prickly character that he way, he replied, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” It is no small irony that Oscar Wilde himself ended his life, not at all respectable, a sinner and a broken man, in the arms of Holy Mother Church.

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    15/04/2020 - 15:21

    Some sanity breaks through on 'single sex spaces'

    My latest on LifeSite

    Two contrasting pieces of news crossed my path today. In the UK, the most liberal of the candidates for last year’s contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party, and now a non-party affiliated candidate for election and Mayor of London, Rory Stewart, recounted that when he had been a government minister with responsibility for prisons, there had been cases of (as he put it) “male prisoners self-identifying as females” raping members of staff. For this reason, he is not in favor of opening up “female spaces,” such a public lavatory, to all comers.

    The other news item was that a women’s shelter in Canada, Vancouver Rape Relief, has been deprived of public funding for not letting in, well, all comers. Furthermore, it has been described in an article on Medium as a “neo-nazi style”, “cryptofacist” “hate group” for this stance. Even more intriguingly, when I clicked on the link to read the article making these claims, I was instead presented with an error message: “This post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.” So here’s a screenshot from Twitter.

    13/04/2020 - 16:37

    Reflections on Maundy Thursday

    My latest on LifeSite

    In the Gospel of St. John, the focus of the account of the Last Supper is not the Institution of the Mass, but the “Mandatum”: Jesus’s command to the twelve apostles to love and serve each other. Christ introduces the point by washing their feet, usually, in the ancient world, the job of a slave. He is not setting aside His authority in doing this, but demonstrating what it is to have authority. To have authority over others is to serve them.
    In the changes to the Holy Week services that took place in 1955, the place of the Mandatum, and its ritual washing of feet, was emphasized, though it remained optional. However, its focus was subtly changed. Before 1955, bishops and priests washed the feet of the poor after Mass, thirteen of them, and they were then given clothing and money. After 1955, it became part of Mass, and the people having their feet washed were more closely identified with the apostles: their number was reduced to twelve, and the connection with almsgiving was lost. The pre-1955 ritual was not a specifically clerical thing, but a survival of the once widespread practice of kings and queens, lords and ladies, abbots and abbesses, of washing the feet of their inferiors and giving them alms. British monarchs still mint special coins to give out on this occasion, though, sadly, they no longer wash anyone’s feet.
    In this way, Christ’s example was understood as a model not just for clerical leadership, or the relationship between bishop and his priests, but about the nature of Christian leadership in general, religious or secular. As He says in the Gospel of St Mark, “Whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all” (10:44).

    Continue reading.

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    10/04/2020 - 10:00

    Music from the LMS recorded by locked-down musicians

    The Latin Mass Society was due, as for many years past, to employ professional musicians to accompany not only the 'major' services of Holy Week but also Tenebrae in St Mary Moorfields, London. Since these celebrations cannot now take place, the musicians have recorded some pieces from their own homes and edited them together.

    The group is Cantus Magnus, under the direction of Matthew Schellhorn.

    These are being released primarily from the LMS Facebook page.  Here is a Vimeo version of the first one, a piece from the Tenebrae of Maundy Thursday set by Anerio.

     

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    09/04/2020 - 12:37

    Coronavirus and the Family

    My latest on LifeSite.

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    The public health advice—and in some countries, command—to stay at home during the Coronavirus epidemic is forcing many people to spend the kind of continuous time with spouses and children which normally only happens on family holidays, though without the trips out. This is shining a light, and putting unaccustomed strain, on our household arrangements.

    The number of people filing for divorce spikes after Christmas and after the summer holidays, and it wouldn’t be surprising if we see a similar spike when the lockdown is lifted. In the meantime, people who might have been planning to leave their spouses (or throw them out into the street) have had to put their plans on hold. There is nowhere for newly separated spouses to go.

    The reaction of commentators hostile to the traditional family has been interesting to see. In this Guardian article the writer notes that the lockdown has forced people into a closer approximation of traditional family values, not least because opportunities for extra-marital affairs have dried up, apparently to her chagrin. Over at Soros-funded Open Democracy, a writer with an alarmingly tenuous connection with reality thinks that this is the moment to “abolish the family”, whatever that means, though she acknowledges that the actual effect of the lockdown has been to give it greater importance than ever.

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    Continue reading.

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    08/04/2020 - 10:00

    Cardinal Pell and Australia's anti-clericals
    Captain Alfred Drefus

    My latest on LifeSite, on Cardinal Pell, Dreyfus, and the liberal narrative on clerical sex abuse.

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    After 405 days in prison, Cardinal George Pell has finally been freed after the High Court of Australia overturned his convictions for sexual abuse of a minor.

    The seven judges sitting on the High Court were, remarkably, unanimous, and delivered a single, two-page explanation of their decision. They pointed out that the jury and the Appeal Court had failed to acknowledge the force of the ‘opportunity witnesses’, who had testified that the abuse could not have taken place at the times and places alleged because, among other things, Pell would either have been elsewhere or surrounded by people. However convincing the testimony of the accuser, this other testimony introduced ‘reasonable doubt’, making conviction impossible.

    There was, after all, no other evidence against Pell.

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    07/04/2020 - 11:52

    EF Triduum to be Live-streamed from Warrington

    This is great news. Here is part of the Catholic Herald report which used the LMS press release on the subject.

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    Archbishop Malcolm McMahon asked the priests at St Mary’s Shrine to live-stream their Holy Week ceremonies in order to “enable viewers to draw close to the sacred liturgy at the most important time in the Church’s calendar”.

    The archbishop’s request comes after the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales received several appeals to live-stream the Paschal Triduum in the Extraordinary Form. Fr Chris Thomas, General Secretary of the Bishop’s Conference, informed the Latin Mass Society of Archbishop McMahon’s request.

    While the FSSP at Warrington have been live-streaming ceremonies for the past three years, this is the first time the bishops have specifically requested and endorsed their doing so.

    As churches remain closed due to the coronavirus lockdown, St Mary’s Warrington is also one of the very few places in the country where five clerics are able to perform a Traditional Missa Cantata behind closed doors as they live as one household.

    The Masses will be available to watch at LiveMass.net.

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    Read the whole report there.

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    07/04/2020 - 10:00

    Faggioli and liturgical onanism
     Judah and Tamar. You can read abou them and Onan in Genesis 38

    My latest on LifeSite. It may be worth noting that Prof Faggioli's tweet which I quote which seems to have beed deleted was only the saltiest of a number of tweets attacking the Bishops of Umbria; others can still be seen, here.

    The well-known liberal Catholic theologian Massimo Faggioli declared his irritation with the Bishops of the Italian region of Umbria, who are encouraging their priests to continue to celebrate Mass even while the people are unable to attend. 
    In a now-deleted tweet, Faggioli, who is a professor of theology at Villanova University and one of Pope Francis’ staunchest defenders, suggested that Mass without the people was a form of “liturgical onanism”.

    When I wrote to the UK-based liberal Catholic weekly The Tablet mentioning, among other things, the practice of Spiritual Communion for times when the reception of Holy Communion is impossible for some reason, this idea (which has since been promoted by Pope Francis and bishops all over the world) was similarly subjected to ridicule. In the next edition (21st March) they published a short letter from a certain Fr David Sillence:
    Continue reading.

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    06/04/2020 - 16:26

    A queue for
    IMG_3595
    A queue for confession in St Bede's, Clapham Park. 

    My latest for LifeSiteNews.

    During the coronavirus epidemic, many Catholics have been cut off from the Sacrament of Penance (Confession). Confession has been so neglected in recent decades that the amount of controversy this has created is a small sign of hope. 
    Also pleasing is the spotlight it has shone on the concept of an ‘act of perfect contrition’.  ‘Perfect contrition’ is simply being sorry for our sins out of our love for God, and not merely for other reasons, such as disgust at sin or fear of its consequences. If a penitent has perfect contrition his sins are forgiven, though he retains an obligation to confess any mortal sins in the usual way. (There is more about this and related issues here.)
    Much less reassuring, however, has been the reaction of some bishops, several of whom have placed severe restrictions on the hearing of confession, which seem to go beyond what is required by the civil authorities or prudence. Other bishops have taken a different view. 
    03/04/2020 - 14:28

    Baptisms when public services can't take place

    IMG_0966

    My latest on LifeSite

    Much has been written about the lack of Holy Communion and the Sacrament of Penance (Confession) in the current public health situation, but I’d like to say something about the Sacrament of Baptism. This will only affect a small number of people, but it has a particular interest because in principle, as we are all taught in Catechism, anyone having the use of reason can baptise. You can’t baptise yourself, but if you’ve not been baptised you can get your atheist cell mate to baptise you before you are thrown to the lions or whatever, if he follows the correct procedure.
    The response of many priests and others will be that ‘private baptism’, without the full ceremonies, whether carried out by a priest or a lay person (and obviously only a priest can do the full ceremonies, with the anointing, blessings and so on), is only to be contemplated where there is ‘danger of death’.
    This is clearly not the full story, however, since Catholics have found themselves in situations of persecution where priests were simply not available, sometimes for decades, like Japanese Catholics in 17th century. Readers may remember the classic film The Magnificent Seven: one of the features of the Mexican village that the seven gunmen go to protect was that the priest only visited them once a year. This was indeed the situation for many remote Mexican communities in that era, and historical parallels are not lacking. In the Catholic Highlands and Islands of Scotland, for example, for much of its history priestly visits were not as frequent, or predictable, as that.

    Continue reading over there.

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