Chairman's Blog
Pontifical Mass in St Bede's, Thurs 28th Sept
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| Laudete Sunday Mass at St Bede's |
Pontifical Mass at the Faldstool will be celebrated
What Rees-Mogg could have said
Every Catholic politician from Parish Councillor up needs to have a rehearsed answer to the 'bloody questions' of today, just as the Jesuits and seminary priests of penal times had a rehearsed answer to the 'bloody question' of penal times (viz.: if the Spaniards invaded to topple Queen Elizabth, who would you support?).
Today's 'bloody questions' are these:
Is gay sex a sin?
Would you force a woman pregant from incestuous rape to continue with the pregnancy?
The thing about such questions is that they are framed in a slanted way, but if you refuse to answer, it will look not only weasally but also a tacit admission that you hold the most unpopular views possible. In answering them, you have to try to reframe it, but you have to do this in a few words, before you get interrupted. You have about ten seconds, and each ten-second statement must make sense on its own.
I don't claim to be an expert on media engagement - though I have been in the hotseat a handful of times. The point of this post is not to criticise anyone who has no time to think under pressure, but to make some suggestions about how we can think about these things when we do have the chance: in advance.
So, Mr Shaw, is gay sex a sin?
Answer: Sexuality finds its fulfilment within marriage. The fruits of sexuality include the relationship of the couple and children, and these both work best within marriage. Yes I'm talking about heterosexual marriage.
I'd probably be interupted at this point. If they haven't changed the question completely, carry on.
For this reason sex outside the marriage is problematic.
Ditto.
Morality is not a set of arbitrary rules designed to make our lives difficult. It is about what is ultimately satisfying and fulfilling. I believe that sex outside marriage is bad for people.
What do you say to homosexuals who find fulfillment a loving, stable, long-term relationship?
Other homosexuals think that for their integrity and peace they need to live celibate lives. Others again have multiple partners. It is obvious which ones I agree with.
Now like Jacob Rees-Mogg I have refused to use the form of words which the hostile interviewer wants to put in my mouth: 'gay sex is a sin'. It's not because I (or Rees-Mogg) don't want to affirm this proposition, it is because using those words affirms the interviewer's frame. Once you have said those words, no one has any reason to listen to you any more: you are obviously a bigot.
So, Mr Shaw, you would force a woman pregnant from incesuous rape to have the baby?
The rapist puts this woman into a terrible dilemma: to continue with the pregnancy, or to kill her own child. But killing the child cannot be the way to come to terms with this. It adds another trauma to the trauma of rape.
Don't you think the woman should be allowed to choose what to do?
Women in this situation have all sorts of people offering them advice and help. In practice they are encouraged to have an abortion. Everyone assumes that's what should happen; friends and family often find it easier. But it is the wrong answer. It isn't so easy for the woman, or for the child.
A follow up question (which can be applied to either topic), which Jacob Rees-Mogg found particularly difficult, was about changing the law. The bogey-man the interviewer wishes to conjure up is that of the politician who wishes to impose a lot of legislation on the country which is unacceptable to viewers: this, obviously, makes him unacceptable as a political leader or candidate. Since Catholic politicians do think (or should think) that, for example, unborn children should be protected by law, this is a tricky question. But it is an inevitable question, so what do you say?
So, Mr Shaw, you would change the law to prevent abortions/ gay marriage / whatever?
It is only going to work for Parliament to look again at this issue if there is a change of public feeling. The original legislation was forced on people without proper consultation or thought about the consequences. Now we can see the consequences a bit more we can have a debate, we are having a debate, about it, and you know my position in that debate. But this is clearly going to take time.
These aren't the only possible approaches to these questions, and I expect there are better ones; I offer these simply as a stimulus to further thought and discussion. I agree totally with Rees-Mogg that one can't go on TV and simply blurt out the Catechism: that's not going to get us anywhere. We must be as suble as serpents. But another way of being caught out is to say something which is not quite true, or is misleading.
What did the priests of penal times say to their 'bloody question'? Well, they were forbidden to study or discuss the topic of just rebellion at seminary, and they claimed ignorance and practical indifference to the subject. They insisted, truly, that they had not come to England to preach rebellion, and that they did not do so.
Would it in fact have been just to support an invasion of England by Spain to free England from the terrible persecution of Bloody Bess? Very probably, on any sensible account of the grounds for just rebellion. But they couldn't say that.
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Why Rees-Mogg is wrong
The knives are out for Jacob Rees-Mogg MP for saying that, as a Catholic, he opposes Same Sex Marriage (SSM) and abortion in all circumstances. I agree and support him, but I feel I must qualify the way he expressed himself, not on a matter of mere technical accuracy but in relation to questions of fundamental importance.
First, he repeatedly notes that he accepts Church teaching, and this is why he opposes these two things. Since many non-Catholics agree with him, today and in the past, this seems a curious way of talking. It seems to be an implicit appeal to religious freedom, and this is indeed how the debate about his comments is now playing out in the media: the question has become 'can Catholics lead political parties, or hold important government positions?' The argument for answering that question in the affirmative is 'religious freedom'. We shouldn't exclude people from positions just because of their religious affiliation. Rees-Mogg and other Catholics should be allowed their eccentric views because those views are part of being Catholic.
This line of argument has a number of unfortunate consequences, not all of which make an appearance in the interview, but all of which will come back to haunt us.
a. It implies that views about SSM and abortion belong on the 'faith' side of a 'faith' vs. 'reason' distinction. In liberal political theory, this means that they are not part of public discourse (which can only appeal to what people in different religions have in common: i.e. reason) and should not be allowed to influence political decision-making. Now, we can argue with this theory and we can dispute the understanding of the relationship between faith and reason it rests upon, but in making brief public statements and in debates the fact that the theory is hugely influential among listeners must be taken into account.
The simple way out here is to emphasise that in the cases of both SSM and abortion Catholics and all others of the same view are appealing not to faith but to reason, a reason which includes the discussion about values which is a necessary part of political discourse. That is, in fact, what the most prominent opponents of SSM and of abortion have consistently laboured to do, in the case of abortion over many decades. Their opponents have equally consistently striven to present them as motivated solely by religious faith (or bigotry, if you prefer), because if that is so they are effectively silenced.
In short, Rees-Mogg's appeal to religious faith plays right into the hands of those who want to make opposition to SSM and to abortion unsayable in public. Once that has happened, they will move on to make it unsayable in private - indeed, they've already started on that. Religious freedom will not protect what has come to be seen as injustice in the public realm: it will not allow us to impose our bigotry about homosexuality on our children any more than it will allow us to practice wife-beating.
b. Suppose, per impossible, that the strategy were successful, and the liberals allowed Catholics the kind of protected private space they sometimes allow Muslims, and say: we must allow those Catholics a bubble of autonomy to be intolerant of homosexual relationships and prevent their daughters getting abortions. Obviously, this is never going to happen, but if it did: it would mean hanging out all our non-Catholic allies out to dry. The extremely courageous secular homosexuals who refuse to conform to type and opposed gay marriage; the non-religious doctors and nurses who can feel in the depths of their being that cutting a tiny human into pieces in the womb is not what they studied medicine to do: what are we saying to them? That they are outside our cosy protected space and can be devoured by the wolves of the new orthodoxy?
c. It is not just a matter of media or political strategy: the idea that our opposition to SSM or abortion derives from faith rather than reason (even when their relationship is correctly understood) is not what the Church teaches. We know that God has asked us to be baptised, from revelation, which we believe by faith. We Catholics are obliged to abstain from meat on Fridays, by command of the Church which has authority over us (and not over non-Catholics). By contrast, we know that marriage cannot be contracted between two people of the same sex, and that killing the unborn is wrong, by reason. It is a matter of Natural Law, not Divine or Ecclesiastical Law.
What the Church tells us is that the obligation of keeping most of the Ten Commandments does not derive from a divine command which could apply to one community and not another, or varied over time. There are many, many obligations in the Old Testament and in the Church which apply to some groups of people and not others, and apply at one time and not at another, and there are others which are universal and unchangeable. We say that the latter are matters of Natural Law. Because the obligations of Natural Law apply to everyone all the time, they must be knowable, at least in principle, to everyone all the time: that is, by reason. When God commanded the Israelites not to kill, on Mount Sinai, He was reminding them of an obligation which already applied to them, and to everyone, and always will.
It should be obvious how vitally important this distinction is in the debates about SSM and abortion. If we allow the impression to form that SSM and abortion is something which Catholics can't do because of rules which apply only to Catholics, then as far as the law of the land is concerned we have lost the argument in a totally irretrievable way. We have also given a totally false impression of the teaching of the Church.
Second, Rees-Mogg keeps saying that marriage is a 'sacrament'. What is the significance of this supposed to be? On this I share the exasperation of the canonist blogger Edward Peters. The sacrament of matrimony takes place when two baptised Christians contract a marriage. The debate about SSM has got nothing, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing, to do with the sacrament of matrimony. It has everything to do with state's recognition of regulation of marriage.
The marriages the state recognises and regulates will be sacramental when they are contracted by two baptised Christians (the Church teaches us); when contracted validly by a couple who are not both baptised Christians they will be what we call 'natural marriages': perfectly licit, binding, life-long, and the proper context for sexual relations and the raising of children.
The only reason I can imagine for Rees-Mogg's baffling but repeated references to sacramentality is that he wants to avail himself of the distinction the government started making in the context of the same sex marriage legislation, between 'civil marriage' and 'religious marriage'. As many people pointed out this was a completely new distinction, with (at that time) no basis in law or linguistic usage. People are either married or they aren't, according to either civil or to canon law. If they are married, they may have been married on a beach in California by a humanist Registrar, or in St Peter's in Rome by the Pope. As a matter of fact, the former may be a sacramental marriage, if the couple were both baptised Christians and neither of them was impeded by Canon Law from getting married in that particular way (as Catholics are, but other Christians are not), and the latter might be a non-sacramental marriage, for example if one of the parties was not baptised.
In short, if Rees-Mogg is trying to appeal to a distinction between marriage-as-religious-ceremony and marriage-without-religious-ceremony, he has chosen the wrong way to do it. Nevertheless, this remains my best explanation for his talking about marriage as a sacrament.
The promise of this spurious distinction between 'civil' and 'religious' marriage was that the question of religious personnel, buildings, and services being used in marriage services could be separated from the question of the legal right to marry, which was being given to same-sex couples. The idea was that such couples could marry, but not have the right to a religious service. This idea collapsed immediately, however, from both directions. On the one side Anglican (and other Protestant) ministers wanted to carry our same-sex marriages in their churches. On the other side, same-sex couples pointed out that they were being denied something not denied to heterosexual couples: clearly wrongful discrimination, if it is conceded that SSM is in fact possible. It was a complete dead-end as a distinction in political terms, as well as being conceptually incoherent.
Third, Rees-Mogg makes a distinction between the two issues, of SSM and abortion, which is seriously unhelpful. He says that in the case of SSM the couple involved are doing something themselves, whereas in the case abortion the rights of the unborn child are at issue. This may seem plausible enough at first glance, until it is remembered that the whole debate about SSM was about the status of marriage as a legally recognised, public institution.
The implication that we can let homosexual couples who wish to 'marry' get on with it, whereas we can't let abortionists and their clients get on with abortion, suggests that marriage is not a public institution with implications for other married couples, children, and society as a whole. Not only was this suggestion not accepted by the Catholic opposition to SSM, it was not accepted by the proponents of SSM either. Same-sex couples were already legally free to shack up with each other, and engage in sexual activity, and they were, by the time of the SSM debate, free to enter into 'Civil Partnerships' which gave them certain legal privileges.
What was being held back from them was the recognition of their relationships as legally equivalent to marriage. That recognition meant that the law ceased to give proper recognition to the natural institution of marriage, which has a different nature and purpose from other kinds of relationship. It ceased to be possible for the law, and therefore employers, the armed services, the taxman, adoption agencies, and a lot of other institutions and individuals, to recognise the difference between a married couple, and a couple in a same-sex relationship who'd been through a certain legal form. Any rights ,privileges, and special treatment accorded to the married couples would from then on have to be accorded to the latter as well, which means in practice that such privileges are watered down, distorted, or abolished.
What is surprising about Rees-Moggs position here, as with his suggestion that opposition to abortion is a matter of faith rather than reason, is how his position undermines that of the many perceptive and courageous defenders of life and marriage, many but not all of them Catholics, who battled and continue to battle for common sense in public debates all over the world. If I were them, I must say I'd be pretty miffed.
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LMS Brinkburn Pilgrimage: this Saturday
Brinkburn Priory, a Medieval monastic house dissolved in the 16th century and later re-roofed, hosts an annual pilgrimage organised by the Latin Mass Society.Saturday 9th September, 12 noon,
Longframlington, Morpeth, Northumberland, NE65 8AR
The annual Mass at Brinkburn Priory will take place on Saturday 9th September at 12 noon. This will be the twenty-third and last. The choir Antiphon will be singing the Missa L'homme arme' by Guillaume Dufay with the motets Benedicta et venerabilis by Byrd and Parsons Ave Maria. We will also have a Gregorian chant group led by David Edwards. I`m hoping the Mass will be a Solemn High celebration but am still trying to confirm the sacred ministers.
This looks like being the last pilgrimage Mass in Brinkburn, because of 'health and safety' concerns about candles and incense. See Fr Brown's post for more.
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What's wrong with Yoga? Part 2
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| Liturgical prayer: a High Mass of Requiem |
In the first post of this pair I explained that Yoga, as typically experienced today in the West (and, for that matter, elsewhere in the world) is not helpfully described as an ancient practice, as a specifically Hindu practice, or as a practice with a basis in a single Indian philosophical tradition. It is is, unfortunately for our purposes in trying to dissent and assess it, too new and too complex for such generalisations.
What can one say, then, about Yoga and the Faith? Are Catholics wrong to feel uncomfortable, as they sometimes do, with Yoga being presented as something for people of 'all faiths and none', to take place in the parish hall like a cake-making demonstration?
I think the easiest way for Westerners to think about Yoga is as related to the New Age. Yoga is such a huge movement that it has a distinct identity from the New Age; also the physical exercise side of Yoga claims to be scientific and medical, and (at least to a degree) is genuinly so. But on the other hand, Yoga derives from many of the same attitudes and aspirations as the New Age, and fits it very comfortably with it. The New Age is full of attempts to use techniques to transcend and to heal; Yoga is one such technique.
What I have said elsewhere about the New Age is applicable in some part to Yoga: that it is the spirituality of the modern world. When modern, secular people want to be spiritually serious, instead of reverting to some dimly remembered Christian confessional practice, as they would perhaps have done fifty years ago, they may start babbling about all religious traditions leading to self-realisation. Reading books, meditating, and meeting up with like-minded people to advance the goal of global self-realisation is something serious New Age people do, but for a much larger group of people, that is what they feel they might do if they felt in a more spiritually serious mood. It is what 'spirituality' means to them.
In the case of Yoga, the goal of self-improvement is focussed on the body, but the door to a parallel self-improvement of the mind and spirit through meditation and changes of attitude is, generally, left very clearly open. And who is to say, in any case, that the improvment of the body is not itself a quasi-religious goal for materialistic people?
It is possible to find doctrinal incompatibility between Yoga and Catholic teaching, when you look at the philosophical views of the higher-level gurus. This invites the response, however, that only a tiny number of the people sitting on Yoga mats have heard of that stuff, and few would understand a word of it if they did. And come to that, the exercises themselves aren't intrinsically connected with the philosophy. On the contrary, people tell us, Yoga practicioners typically think (and are told by their teachers to think) that everything they do in the studio is compatible with any possible religious faith.
The place I would locate the problem, instead, is here: that what we are dealing with is a body of practice which takes place in a culture dominated by New Age attitudes which are incompatible with the Faith, such as the attitude that all religions are basically one, or true, and that spiritual progress can be made through the self-realisation of the body. If you enter the world of Yoga, you enter this atmosphere. There's nothing wrong with bending and stretching. Holding to some myth about how these bends and stretches are related to ancient Hindu polytheism is not, exactly, edifying. Saying 'Om' when you have no idea what it means is clearly spiritually reckless. But even if you avoid those things, I would never recomend a group of Catholics to go to Yoga, because even if they start with the least spiritually-focused Yoga class, there is a good chance that the Yoga world is going to draw them in, and the attitudes of the Yoga world are not theologically sound attitudes.
If that sounds weak, think of some parallels. Suppose there is some perfectly harmless card game which is typically played in the context of gambling for high stakes. Do we need to exercise caution about encouraging Catholics to enter the milieu of such a game? Suppose there was a group which went on bracing country walks, and this particular group tended to attract racists. Would we need to exercise caution in recommending it? The fact that bending and stretching are not spiritually dangerous in themselves does not absolve us from responsibility to ask about who we are going to be bending and stretching with, what kind of attitudes and views are in the atmosphere while this is going on, and what happens to that minority who want to take it a bit further.
However, there is more. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Ratzinger, produced a very balanced and sane document in 1989 about non-Christian methods of meditation. Not all Yoga is meditation, but a short period of meditation is included as the conclusion of many Yoga classes, and one attitude one may take to the postures (taught, for example, by one Yoga franchise) is that they are prayers.
Now, the kind of meditation encouraged and facilitated in this context can be problematic. Not all attempts to reach out to the divine within or to the spiritual realm outside of ourselves are well considered. It is easy to say to a person with basically Christian understanding of prayer that they should pray more, and we say that prayer is an obligation on all rational creatures, but if the prayer is being directed in the wrong way, and is informed by the wrong attitudes, then it can be spiritually dangerous.
Actually, all prayer has the potential for danger. Times of intense prayer can be opportunities for temptation, to spiritual pride for example. Prayer is a battle, and we forget that at our peril. The formal and especially the liturgical prayer of Catholics is protected in countless ways from many perils, but it remains a battle. Intense contemplative prayer outside those contexts is highly recommended, but the practioner would do well to do this in the context of competant spiritual direction. It is worth noting that Eastern traditions of meditation can be even more emphatic about the need for the guidance of a mature spiritual teacher, for those undertaking this path. And indeed you can take this point even if you don't think there is anything at all 'out there', because there is still plenty of stuff, not all of it bright and cheery, 'in there'.
Saying 'Om' and clearing the mind of all distractions, in the context of Yoga, simply in order to get in touch with who-knows-what, is not something any sensible person should recommend. One of the key characteristics of the New Age to be relentlessly optimistic about the spiritual life. This optimism is not shared by the authentic Eastern traditions from which it claims inspiration, and is not well founded. As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
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What's wrong with Yoga? Part 1
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| Physical Culture: from Wikipedia Commons |
I have been doing a bit of thinking and reading about the New Age, and a talk at the Roman Forum in Gardone this year stimulated me to do more of each about the phenomenon of Yoga: a talk by the Swedish academic Clemens Cavellin, which is available on his website here.
Yoga is one of those hot-button issues which arouses strong feelings in Catholic social media, and as much of the discussion is not very well informed, I thought I'd try to inform it a little.
Before my full assimilation into traddie-land I did a bit of Yoga myself for a few years; accordingly I have my own impressions of the general atmosphere and attitudes of Yoga classes, books, and personal practice. However it must be said that my experience was fairly superficial; I never entered any inner circle of Yoga adepts. The spiritual aspects of Yoga was part of the reason I stopped: I got fed up with being told to say 'Om', for example. Another was doubts about its physical efficacy. I don't deny the health benefits, but there is a natural tendency in Yoga to want to advance to the more perfect performance of more difficult postures, and, in short, become really really bendy, and while being a bit bendy is probably a good idea, I don't think it is particularly beneficial to be really really bendy. However, I'm not qualified to comment further on that.
In this post I want to talk about the philosophico/religious presuppositions of Yoga, or rather why it is so difficult to talk about such presuppositions. Having cleared this ground, in the next post I'll say what I think can be said about Yoga as a phenomenon, and its relationship with the Catholic Faith.
Yoga is typically characterised as a set of physical practices, of ancient origin, associated with Hinduism. This needs to be qualified in a number of ways.
First, we need to distinguish 'physical' Yoga from way the term 'yoga' is used in ancient Indian texts. The term is in fact extremely broad; it can refer to any kind of practice or technique (and various other things). From now one I'll take for granted that we are talking about 'postural' Yoga unless I specify otherwise.
Secondly, a distinction between Yoga as we know it today and pre-modern (pre-20th century) Yoga, insofar as it is useful to talk about pre-modern 'Yoga'. The money quote is this (from Andrea Jain Selling Yoga):
In other words, today’s popularized yoga systems are new, not continuations of some static premodern yoga tradition from which practitioners and nonpractitioners alike often claim they originate. Even postures and breathing exercises were marginal to the most widely cited sources on yoga prior to the twentieth century, and the forms of postures and breathing exercises that were present in those sources dramatically differ from those idiosyncratic forms found in postural yoga today.
Jain cites many academic sources on this topic and goes into some detail about what kinds of postures are mentioned in pre-20th century texts: basically, just sitting still and comfortably for prolonged meditation; and what kind of breathing exercises they mention: basically, holding the breath, in or out, for periods of time. Anyone bamboozled by talk of the 'Yoga Sutras' and other ancient texts or artifacts should read her book. In a word, the claim that Yoga as practiced today has ancient origins, except in the loosest possible sense, is completely false.
Thirdly, ancient and modern Yoga alike (acknowledging that they are two completely distinct things) are not the property of Hinduism. Ancient Yoga is found in the context of the Jain religion, Islamic Sufism, and Buddhism, as well as Hinduism, the last being itself a vastly complex collection of religious beliefs and practices and philosophical ideas. Modern Yoga is found in the context not only of Hinduism, but versions have been developed and promoted by a Jain sect, and obviously also by every imaginable shade of syncretist, secularist, and even Christian guru or organisation.
The question is complicated by the fact that some Hindu groups in India would like to appropriate ('authentic') Yoga as their possession, and minority religious groups have responded in kind, by resisting, for example, the inclusion of Yoga as a compulsory school subject in Indian schools. The limited historical connection between modern Yoga and Hinduism does not mean that Yoga cannot become a badge of identity for Hinduism in certain contexts.
So, where does modern, postural, Yoga come from? It derives from a serendipitous meeting of Hindu nationalism with the early 20th century European/English speaking physical culture movement. All the stuff about exercising by bending and stretching in unison comes from Western sources. Just do an image search for 'physical culture' and you'll find lots of black-and-white photos of (mostly female) fit-looking individuals in taxing-looking poses in sync, from the 1930s; the one above is an early example, dated 1913. If it looks a little fascistic, obviously the fascists thought this stuff was great, but you didn't need to be a fascist to do it. It was picked up by Hindu nationalists in the 1940s, who connected it with Hindu spirituality and the concept of 'yoga'. This then re-entered the West in time for a craze for Eastern wisdom connected with the New Age movement, in the 1960s. (This, essentially, is the thesis of Jain's book.)
Now obviously anyone can pick up where the physical culture movement left off, but the spirituality and philosophy of its Indian incubation has had an impact on what Yoga is all about. The trouble is that this spirituality and philosophy is extremely complex, and movements and individuals can evolve and be as syncretistic as they wish.
There is a basic distinction which needs to be made in Indian thinking, between dualistic and non-dualistic approaches. By Dualism is meant a distinction between the body and the spirit, which leads to asceticism as a route for the spirit to subdue and ultimately escape the body and the physical world. Non-dualistic views, which can be pantheistic, see this distinction as itself an illusion, so are more open to the idea of using the body in spiritual exercises. Now, it is possible to see postural yoga as an ascetic exercise, along with a vegetarian diet and celibacy; confusingly, it is also possible to use postural yoga on the basis of a non-dualist philosophy, the most famous manifestation of which is Tantra. Everyone knows Tantra's connection with sex: not only does some Tantric practices promise greater sexual performance, but sex itself can be a practice of deliberate norm-violation to free oneself from false ideas about the distinction between the body and the spirit.
Different strands of Yoga can in principle be lined up with this distinction. The Jain religion is firmly dualistic, and one Jain sect has developed and marketed a version of Yoga. On the other hand, Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram Yoga, ended up in a scandal about inappropriate relationships with female devotees, something connected with the interest he developed, as his career progressed, in Tantra; something similar happened to John Friend, founder of Anusara Yoga. Tantric theory is a bit like Freudianism, in giving support - real or imagined - to some unfortunate personal choices.
Having made this distinction, one has to ask whether it makes any difference to the experience of Westerners going to a yoga class. The philosophical views of the class teacher, or the school in which the teacher trained, may make some difference to the way he or she goes about the task of teaching Yoga, but most of the people in the class are there for the goals of physical health, beauty, and fitness. The titillating possibility of enhanced sexual powers is a nice touch of course, but you can spend a lot of time doing Yoga without that coming up.
Given Yoga's debt to early 20th century Western ideas about physical culture, and given its extremely successful adaptation to the modern interest in fitness and beauty, debates raging back in India about dualism and non-dualism seem of very slight importance. As I have described them neither view is compatible with the Catholic Faith, but then again you can find Yoga teachers with zero interest in any version of Indian religious and philosophical thought, and come to that you can find Catholic priests teaching Yoga.
So to conclude this first post of the two-part series, I think it is important to avoid trying to solve the problem of the relationship between Yoga and the Faith in too simplistic a way, by saying for example that Yoga is a body of ancient Hindu spiritual or even latreutic (worship) practices: it isn't. Nor does it have an indelible connection with any single set of philosophical views.
The problems with Yoga need to be approached in a more subtle way.
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Epiphany and Ascension restored to their proper days
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| Corpus Christi Procession in Oxford: on the correct day |
As I've noted before, the 2006 decision of the Bishops Conference of England and Wales to celebrate Ascension, Corpus Christi, and Epiphany onthe nearest Sunday in the Ordinary Form is the most unpopular one I can think of in my experience. Letters in the press and blog posts criticising it appear year after year. The few who defended the decision when it was first made long ago gave up trying to respond. It is good to see the bishops are big enough to recognise that they made a mistake, although it is also true that there has been a big turnover of the Conference in the last eight years, and ironically enough today's announcement is accompanied by the news of the death of Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the architect of the original decison: requiscat in pace.
Here is the Bishops' Decree. We can now set our sights on restoring Corpus Christi to its proper date, and reversing the decision of 1984 to move the celebrations of all the Holy Days to Sunday when they fall on a Saturday or a Monday (except Christmas). At any rate, it seems we'll have a few more years to advertise the fact that if you want to attend Corpus Christi on its 'particular day' (as the CDW expresses it) you'll have to go to the Traditional Mass.
I've written about the importance of the precise dates here; about the importance of the obligation to attend Mass on these days here. There is a Position Paper on this subject here.
The wheels of the Church grind slowly indeed. The Bishops of England and Wales have been talking about reversing the 2006 decision since at least 2014. I see they made the decision on 17th November 2016, and that the Congregation for Divine Worship received their letter on 21st February. So it took them three months to compose and send the letter. It then too the CDW more than six months to reply, with the paragraph I past in below, simply to allow our bishops to revert, partially, to what is envisaged as the norm by Canon Law (Canon 1246). It then took nearly a whole month for the Bishops' Conference to release the letter from the CDW to the public.
I'm not complaining. I'm just awed.
CONGREGATION FOR DIVINE WORSHIP AND THE DISCIPLINE OF THE SACRAMENTS
Prot. No. 180/17
ENGLAND AND WALES
To His Eminence, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, President of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, having taken into consideration the letter received on 21st February 2017, by virtue of the faculty attributed to this Congregation by the Supreme Pontiff FRANCIS, we willingly grant that in future, in the calendar specific to the same Conference, the celebration of the solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord will be celebrated on its particular day, namely, forty days after Easter; the celebration of the Epiphany of the Lord on its particular day, namely, 6th January. When the solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord falls on a Saturday, it is to be assigned to the Sunday following; when on a Monday, to the Sunday preceding. All things to the contrary notwithstanding. From the offices of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, 4th August 2017, on the feast of St John Mary Vianney, presbyter.
Robert Card. Sarah Prefect
+Arthur Roche Archbishop Secretary
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Irreversible reform? Me in the Catholic Herald this weekend
This weekend the Catholic Herald has a cover story about the Traditional Mass' appeal to young people, by Matthew Schmitz.
Accompanying this is a shorter piece by me on Pope Francis' remarks, make in a speach to a group of Italian liturgists, that the 'reform' is 'irreversible'.
It is not available online, so you'll need to look out for a paper edition. Here's a taster.
Pope Francis’s recent address on the liturgy – about which he has hitherto said little – was striking for its conventionality. In almost every respect, the Pope’s speech hews to the official, post-Vatican II line. It emphasises the continuity of the post-conciliar reform with the efforts of Pius X and XII; it praises the reform for its “vitality”; it condemns liturgical abuses (“deformations”); and it calls for an end to liturgical conflict.
But it has raised eyebrows for its rejection of the possibility of revisiting the “decisions” of the reform in light of its “inspirational principles: an explicit rejection of the “Reform of the Reform” project, which seeks to go back to the Council documents and do the reform again, better. This should be no surprise. In the official mindset, the reform was perfect and was marred only by liturgical abuses. Liturgical progressives should note that the account of the liturgy which follows is entirely traditional, focusing on the altar, the Sacrifice of the Mass, and the Priesthood of Jesus Christ, not even mentioning the Last Supper, the Mass as a shared meal or the liturgy as an affirmation of community.
Pontifical Mass for the 10th Anniversary of Summorum Pontificum in London: 14th Sept
Thursday 14th September, 7pm: Pontifical High Mass in St Mary Moorfields, Eldon Street EC2M7LSTo celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Summorum Pontificum, celebrated by Rt. Rev Mark Jabale OSB, Emeritus Bishop of Menevia.
Music by Cantus Magnus directed by Matthew Schellhorn:
Thomas Tallis (c. 1505 – 1585) Mass for Four Voices
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525 – 1594) Nos autem gloriari
Luca Marenzio (c. 1553 – 1599) Super omnia
Kyrie XI
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Crying rooms in churches: a terrible idea
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| Adults and children kneel for the Consecration at the St Catherine's Trust Summer School |
Last weekend's Catholic Herald carried an article by me about 'crying rooms', spaces sealed off with soundproof glass intended for noisy children and their parents.
I was inspired to write it by realising that the notion of excluding children from the rest of the congregation, or even from Mass entirely, was an idea with a following among not a few conservative and traditionally-minded Catholics. It is a reaction against the experience of chaotic liturgy where children are allowed to wander around, perhaps even into the sanctuary, which I suppose is more associated with a 'progressive' liturgical attitude. The thought would be: if we want a well-ordered, reverent liturgy, we need to get the small children under control; since we can't rely on parents to do this, we should bundle them into a separate space where they won't spoil things for everyone else.
This is short-sighted, however: as I explain the article, children won't learn to behave if shoved into a room where they can behave as badly as they like, and their parents won't learn to discipline them in that context either. Neither the parents nor the children will experience the atmosphere of the liturgy, and both are left with the impression that they are not truly welcome.
I have noted on this blog that another element in the anti-child mindset is the idea that children won't get anything out of the liturgy anyway because the liturgy has to be grasped intellecually in order to have any effect on the worshipper. This, of course, is absurd; indeed I fancy that few people who are influenced by this idea would actually agree with it when set out in black and white. But if it is false, then obviously children, and indeed infants, will benefit from the sacraments and blessings of the liturgy, which is of course why we get babies baptised.
Here's the beginning of the article.
To many people disturbed by children making a noise during Mass, “crying rooms” must seem like an answer to prayer. The children can just go in there, and the problem is solved.
Things look rather different from a parent’s perspective, however. If your noisy child goes into a crying room, with other noisy children, then you have to go as well, and quite probably your other children with you. The problem of the disturbance hasn’t actually been solved: it has been alleviated for most members of the congregation, and made much worse for others. If you haven’t had the incomparable experience of screaming babies in a confined space, you should try some long-haul flights in the holiday season.
Read it all there.
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