Chairman's Blog
Coat making workshop with the Guild of St Clare
Three day coat making workshop
Oxford, 28th Jan, 18th Feb & 4th Mar 2017
Riding high after our mastery of waistbands, zips, collars, cuffs and plackets, we are holding a set of three workshops over the course of which we will construct a coat or jacket.
See more at the Guild of St Clare
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What's with a saturno?
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| Blessed John Henry, Cardinal Newman's saturno, in the Birmingham Oratory |
How could a harmless hat become the object of such strong feelings? Perhaps it is not so strange. My Facebook timeline has filled up with images of, mostly young, priests, wearing the things: posted by themselves. They are trying to say something by wearing it, and we shouldn't be so surprised when people who don't like the message use the hat as a symbol of it.
So what's the message?
1. Saturnos are fun.
You know what? Young priests have a sense of fun. This will perhaps be the aspect of the message which liberals find it hardest to understand. People of my generation, and younger, don't see liberalism as a blessed release from the strictures of the past. We grew up under the liberal jackboot. Liberals were the kill joys, the fun police, the people who like to say 'no'. Catholic culture is all about innocent pleasures, healthy and often edifying pleasures: about music and art and food and family life, about the joys as well as the pains and perils of pilgrimages, about feasting as well as fasting. Liberals hate those things: that, at any rate, was the impression we received.
They would be indulgent, in a sordid and patronising way, towards sinful pleasures, but innocent pleasures seem to be forbidden in liberal institutions, where the detritus of a vandalistic hatred of beauty were, of course, to be seen everywhere. Talking freely with one's friends is turned into a guilty treat which can only be done in secret. Reading books of real value and letting one's mind explore the great intellectual edifices of past thinkers is something only allowed when off-duty. And above all, anything associated with the liturgy which has beauty and artistic value, anything which embellishes or underlines or draws attention to the unvarnished sacramental realities, is totally forbidden.
Clothing of course is a key battleground here. Liberals would like priests to wear a strictly-enforced uniform of jeans and (in Mass) polyester stoles. These do not give joy, they do not raise the soul to God. They are flat, banal, and puritanical. Classical clerical dress was not supposed to be ugly; it is supposed to express the clerical state with differences related to religious order and rank, and it did so with great elegance. The saturno is part of that.
Now I and my clerical peer group are no longer under the oppressive heel of liberal superiors, at least to such an extent, we can wear what we like, whatever the old misery-guts of school and seminary might think.
2. Saturnos are Roman.
It is, in fact, the Roman hat: the capello Romano. For Catholics in Protestant countries, to have some specifically Roman or Italian things around can be a powerful statement of identity, even of defiance. It was important for English Catholics in the 19th century to take possession, again, of the English Gothic style, which had become associated with the Established Church (since they had stolen all our churches), but it is also a joyous thing to see the flamboyantly Italianate Brompton Oratory parking its tanks, so to speak, on the London lawn. It says: yes, we do have a connection with Rome: like it or lump it.
It may sound odd to say it right now, but it is true: Rome is our guarantee of unity and orthodoxy. We are not some miserable little sect based in Milton Keynes or Tunbridge. We are part of the Catholic Church, and if there should be any doubt about what we mean, it is the Roman Catholic Church, and let the Ulster Prots choke on their outrage if they like. We aren't going to spend our lives skulking in the shadows: that was not what Christ's mandate to the Church was. We are going to allow ourselves be identified for what we are.
3. Saturnos are traditional
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| From Maurice Sendak This is Rome, published 1960 |
The connection with Rome is not, as C.S. Lewis once described the Church of England, about agreeing with the latest motions of a debating society. It is a connection with Roman tradition, a tradition which is passed on and manifested in its own way in the cultures of all the nations of the world. What the saturno says today, not despite but because they have not been common for half a century, is that we are not attaching ourselves simply to the latest thing. We are attached to the perennial thing, the thing manifested in the recent past by the saturno, and over the centuries by many different types of clerical dress. Clerical dress (and clerical address: how we address clerics) is something which has been surprisingly fluid over the centuries, and in England in particular has gone through a few revolutions. But right now the saturno speaks of a restoration of continuity, the healing of a specific break in the living tradition of the Church. The partisans of this discontinuity want to place us on the opposite side of an unbridgable chasm from the saturno, and so much else, which was taken for granted 60 or so years ago, and for a priest to wear it today say No! What was sacred then is sacred now. What the wise scribe takes from the treasury is not only what is new, but what is old as well.
The (it must be said, tiny) revival of interest in the saturno is part of a creative, energetic, and also somewhat whimsical and self-deprecating, movement which takes the opportunities it finds to assert continuity, romanitas, and the innocent pleasures of elegant headwear, in the face of the ugly, parochial, and solipsistic pressure to deny those things. Associating the saturno with the attack on 'rigid' young priests may just the thing to make it go mainstream.
For the new world still is all less fair
Than the old world it mocks.
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Finniz and Grisez appeal to Pope Francis over Amoris laetitia
John Finnis and Germain Grisez, longstanding collaborators, are extremely eminent Catholic academics. Finnis is best known as a legal theorist, and Grisez as a moral theologian, but they have had the most notable influence on the Catholic debate in their joint and several work on the ethics of sex and of killing. They have been hugely influential, having founded what is identified (though not by them) as the school of 'New Natural Law' theory. They are not 'traditionalists'; they are rather establishment figures, in the context of the 'conservative' Catholic establishment. Their weighing into this debate is of the greatest significance.
I have followed their work closely as a philosopher, and there are many areas in which my own views diverge from theirs. One of the interesting things about their letter, for me, is that I agree with every word of it.
Here is their letter. There is some more commentary on First Things.
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The Misuse of Amoris Laetitia to
Support Errors against the Catholic Faith:
A Letter to the Supreme Pontiff Francis, to all bishops in
communion with him, and to the rest of the Christian faithful
In this letter, John Finnis and Germain Grisez request Pope Francis to condemn eight positions against the Catholic faith that are being supported, or likely will be, by the misuse of his Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. They ask all bishops to join in this request and to issue their own condemnations of the erroneous positions, while reaffirming the Catholic teachings these positions contradict.
The eight positions are these.
Position A:
A priest administering the Sacrament of Reconciliation may sometimes absolve a penitent who lacks a purpose of amendment with respect to a sin in grave matter that either pertains to his or her ongoing form of life or is habitually repetitive.
Position B:
Some of the faithful are too weak to keep God’s commandments; though resigned to committing ongoing and habitual sins in grave matter, they can live in grace.
Position C:
No general moral rule is exceptionless. Even divine commandments forbidding specific kinds of actions are subject to exceptions in some situations.
Position D:
While some of God’s commandments or precepts seem to require that one never choose an act of one of the kinds to which they refer, those commandments and precepts actually are rules that express ideals and identify goods that one should always serve and strive after as best one can, given one’s weaknesses and one’s complex, concrete situation, which may require one to choose an act at odds with the letter of the rule.
Position E:
If one bears in mind one’s concrete situation and personal limitations, one’s conscience may at times discern that doing an act of a kind contrary even to divine commandment will be doing one’s best to respond to God, which is all that he asks, and then one ought to choose to do that act but also be ready to conform fully to the divine commandment if and when one can do so.
Position F:
Choosing to bring about one’s own, another’s, or others’ sexual arousal and/or satisfaction is morally acceptable provided only that (1) no adult has bodily contact with a child; (2) no participant’s body is contacted without his or her free and clear consent to both the mode and the extent of contact; (3) nothing done knowingly brings about or unduly risks significant physical harm, disease transmission, or unwanted pregnancy; and (4) no moral norm governing behavior in general is violated.
Position G:
A consummated, sacramental marriage is indissoluble in the sense that spouses ought always to foster marital love and ought never to choose to dissolve their marriage. But by causes beyond the spouses’ control and/or by grave faults of at least one of them, their human relationship as a married couple sometimes deteriorates until it ceases to exist. When a couple’s marriage relationship no longer exists, their marriage has dissolved, and at least one of the parties may rightly obtain a divorce and remarry.
Position H:
A Catholic need not believe that many human beings will end in hell.
The letter is copyright © John Finnis and Germain Grisez; Notre Dame, Indiana; 21 November 2016. Permission is hereby given to everyone to publish electronically or otherwise this entire letter as a unit or the entire treatment of any one or more of the eight positions dealt with in it provided this copyright notice is included in the publication; all other rights reserved.
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Letter from Catholic Academics and Pastors in support of the Dubia
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This press release speaks for itself; I am a signatory.
I have given a statement to Lifesitenews:
While many prominent prelates and academics feel obliged to remain silent during this time of crisis, it has fallen to the four Cardinals to seek paternal guidance from the Holy Father, asking him to exercise the central charism of the Papacy, and 'confirm the brethren' in the faith (Luke 22:32).
Statement of Support for the Four Cardinals’ Dubia
As Catholic scholars and pastors of souls, we wish to express our profound gratitude and full support for the courageous initiative of four members of the College of Cardinals, Their Eminences Walter Brandmüller, Raymond Leo Burke, Carlo Caffarra and Joachim Meisner. As has been widely publicized, these cardinals have formally submitted five dubia to Pope Francis, asking him to clarify five fundamental points of Catholic doctrine and sacramental discipline, the treatment of which in Chapter 8 of the recent Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (AL) appears to conflict with Scripture and/or Tradition and the teaching of previous papal documents – notably Pope St. John Paul II’s Encyclical Veritatis Splendor and his Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio. Pope Francis has so far declined to answer the four cardinals; but since they are in effect asking him whether the above weighty magisterial documents still require our full assent, we think that the Holy Father’s continued silence may open him to the charge of negligence in the exercise of the Petrine duty of confirming his brethren in the faith.
Several prominent prelates have been sharply critical of the four cardinals’ submission, but without shedding any light on their pertinent and searching questions. We have read attempts to interpret the apostolic exhortation within a ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ by Christoph Cardinal Schӧnborn and Professor Rocco Buttiglione; but we find that they fail to demonstrate their central claim that the novel elements found in AL do not endanger divine law, but merely envisage legitimate changes in pastoral practice and ecclesiastical discipline.
Indeed, a number of commentators, notably Professor Claudio Pierantoni in an extensive new historical-theological study, have argued that as a result of the widespread confusion and disunity following the promulgation of AL, the universal Church is now entering a gravely critical moment in her history that shows alarming similarities with the great Arian crisis of the fourth century. During that catastrophic conflict the great majority of bishops, including even the Successor of Peter, vacillated over the very divinity of Christ. Many did not fully lapse into heresy; however, disarmed by confusion or weakened by timidity, they sought convenient compromise formulae in the interests of “peace” and “unity”. Today we are witnessing a similar metastasizing crisis, this time over fundamental aspects of Christian living. Continued lip service is given to the indissolubility of marriage, the grave objective sinfulness of fornication, adultery and sodomy, the sanctity of the Holy Eucharist, and the terrible reality of mortal sin. But in practice, increasing numbers of highly placed prelates and theologians are undermining or effectively denying these dogmas – and indeed, the very existence of exceptionless negative prohibitions in the divine law governing sexual conduct – by virtue of their exaggerated or one-sided emphasis on “mercy”, “pastoral accompaniment”, and “mitigating circumstances”.
With the reigning Pontiff now sounding a very uncertain trumpet in this battle against the ‘principalities and powers’ of the Enemy, the barque of Peter is drifting perilously like a ship without a rudder, and indeed, shows symptoms of incipient disintegration. In such a situation, we believe that all Successors of the Apostles have a grave and pressing duty to speak out clearly and strongly in confirmation of the moral teachings clearly expounded in the magisterial teachings of previous popes and the Council of Trent. Several bishops and another cardinal have already said they find the five dubia opportune and appropriate. We ardently hope, and fervently pray, that many more of them will now endorse publicly not only the four cardinals’ respectful request that Peter’s Successor confirm his brethren in these five points of the faith “delivered once and for all to the saints” (Jude 3), but also Cardinal Burke’s recommendation that if the Holy Father fails to do so, the cardinals then collectively approach him with some form of fraternal correction, in the spirit of Paul’s admonition to his fellow apostle Peter at Antioch (cf. Gal. 2:11).
We entrust this grave problem to the care and heavenly intercession of Mary Immaculate, Mother of the Church and Vanquisher of all heresies.
December 8, 2016, Feast of the Immaculate Conception
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The meaning of Papal silence
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| Jesus is stripped of His garments. |
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Does anyone want a harmonium?
A (more or less) working harmonium is Holy Trinity Church, Hethe, Oxfordshire is available for anyone who wants it. (Contact details here.)
Contact the parish to see it or collect it.
Holy Trinity is a lovely church, which thanks to an enterprising former Parish Priest has a very interesting 18th century chamber organ (in need of some restoration). For some reason it also has this harmonium, which takes up a good deal of space in the tiny choir loft.
Someone: give it a home!
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Religious absolutism
Reposted from January 2015
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Some years I recall a fellow Oxford academic speculating about why Christianity and Islam, among world religions, were the ones used to justify the persecution of religious dissent. Perhaps, he suggested, it was because they were absolutist religions: they claimed an exclusive possession of the truth.
It wasn't clear how he imagined Hinduism and Buddhism worked; I fancy he was as ignorant about them as I was, and am. But it must have been a long time ago, because this conversation clearly predated the emergence, at least into the Western media, of militant Hinduism in India, and the persecution of Christians and Muslims by militant Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Burma.
So, so much for that idea. But the idea of religious absolutism has been wheeled out again in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Some forms of some religions are incompatible with Western democracies, we hear, but most are fine, and the difference can be expressed by the idea of religious absolutism. Absolutist religions: bad. Non-absolutist religions: good, or, at least, ok.
It's not very clear what absolutism means, but I'll give two options a try. One is to do with conceptions of religious truth. It is sometimes said that Hinduism regards all religions as paths to the same end, and in that sense true. This idea pops up in books about Yoga - usually towards the end... If you can see how all religions are really one, then you really have mastered meditation, because the idea is incoherent. The view 'all religions are one' is itself a religious claim, and one that very few people accept. It is something the great world religions have in common, but only as something they all reject. Here is one religious view, incompatible with its rivals: so what? It tells us nothing about the other religions, and it isn't a view which is particularly suited to dealing with the other religions on a practical level, since it is incompatible with them.
The same is true of more modest claims. Something politicians are likely to say might be: 'All [or most] religions help their believers to live moral and spiritually rewarding lives, to a roughly equal extent'. (The last bit may just be implied, and left unsaid.) This is the kind of thing someone would say who rejects, or has simply forgotten, the idea that a religion's concrete teaching makes a difference. Since serious-minded members of the different religions think that their concrete teachings do make a difference, this isn't something any of them can accept. But more fundamentally, it is itself a theological claim, which must submit to inquiry just like all the other theological claims. Has it been revealed by some deity? Can it be deduced philosophically? Is it the conclusion of anthropological research? I think most of the people who say something like this do so for no better reason than that it sounds nice and feels right.
People who make that kind of claim like to feel terribly superior to ordinary religious believers, and imagine themselves looking down on the different religions from an Olympian height. But they aren't. They are just another group of people making theological claims, though in their case they have neither numbers, nor a long historical tradition, nor profound philosophical thinking, to back them up. And what is more, their claim is just as 'absolutist' as any other religious claim you care to mention, such as that none come to the Father except through the Son, or that Allah is God and Mohammed is His Prophet. The claim that the truth of the teachings of the world religions is unimportant is simply a denial of claims that most of them make. This eccentric religious idea is as incompatible with the great religions as they are with each other: indeed, more so, since it would seem that there is less overlap of attitude or theological principle between this liberal religious conception and the major religions, than they share amongst themselves.
A liberal interlocutor might at this point want to slide into the next of the two interpretations of the phrase 'religious absolutism'. The fact is, he might say, some versions of some religions are tolerant and some are not: that's what we mean, and that's what is important for practical politics. The Western democracies must find a way to suppress versions of Islam, and indeed any other religion, which say that non-believers must be put to the sword, since obviously groups of people with that view are not going to integrate well into a multi-cultural society.
That might seem fair enough, but there is something which the liberals are still trying not to admit. This is that their attitude to these radical religious groups is based on theological principles. They are not being neutral between religions, they are not rising above the religious debate, they are getting stuck right in with a substantive theological view, which they don't want to make explicit because they don't want to be obliged to give it any theological justification. What is it? It is the claim that the radicals are wrong. If the radicals are making a theological claim about an obligation to slay blasphemers (or whatever it might be), the denial of this claim is itself, just as much, a theological claim.
In short, the liberal political response is a matter of theological principle. And you know what? It is an intolerant one. They aren't going to tolerate radical Islam, for example, or the Hindus who terrorise dalit converts to Christianity, or the Buddhists who burn down churches.
The liberals are, of course, correct: there is no genuine obligation to slay people who draw pictures of Mohammed, nor is there any genuine theological justification for stopping dalits being baptised or for burning down churches. I believe these things, however, because I can appeal to a highly articulated theological system from which these facts follow. The liberals have nothing much to appeal to; they aren't, for example, all atheists, and those who are have no intellectual justification for their atheism (because there is none).
The response of the Western political elite to the rise of religious extremism has been to insist more than ever on the importance of the system they have created: a seething cauldron of religious pluralism, under the lid of liberal political institutions backed by armed police. With varying degrees of self-consciousness, they and their predecessors welcomed and facilitated the emergence this system, to destroy the political relevance of Christianity: to reduce it to being just one religion among many. But it is only Christianity which can give a coherent answer to the question: Why should we forbid female circumcision, child prostitution, and a terroristic response to depictions of Mohammed, while tolerating most other manifestations of religious belief?
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| The liberals wouldn't like them, they didn't go quietly. The martyrs Thomas Percy, John Beche, and Adrian Forescue. |
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First EF Missa Cantata in Holy Rood Church, Oxford
Since the church was consecrated in 1970 I think we may fairly claim that this is the first time a Missa Cantata has been celebrated there.
It is not exactly a traditionally-designed church, but the accoustic was good and there was no difficulty in celebrating ad orientem.
This is the bases of the Ordinariate in Oxford, and the Ordinariate Usage is celebrated here by the same priest, Fr Daniel Lloyd, on Saturday evenings.
It was the feast of St Sylvester, Abbot, and coincidentally the day before the First Sunday of Advent.
Holy Rood, just south of the river Thames in Oxford, is in Portsmouth Diocese, and with the permission of Bishop Philip Egan, Fr Daniel blessed the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham for public veneration. Up to now, it has only had an ordinary blessing.
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Prior Cassian Folsom of Norcia retires
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| Fr Benedict, new Prior of Norcia |
Fr Cassian Folsom, the founder of the Benedictine community at Norcia (Italy), has after 18 years as superior retired. The new Prior is Fr Benedict, of the community.
Fr Cassian speaks below of the need, particularly in light of the terrible earthquakes which have destroyed their main monastic buildings and lovely church, for a younger and more energetic superior. It is good to hear that he remains in good health. He will be a great asset to the community as an elder statesman, something of great value for all religious communities.
We should give thanks to Fr Cassian for his great work, and offer our prayers for Fr Benedict and the entire community in the huge task which lies before them. May they continue to flourish!
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What could happen next?
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| Proclaiming the Gospel: Dominican Rite |
The letter of the 'four Cardinals' seeking a clarification of the meaning of Amoris laetitia raises the question: what could happen next? In terms of official process, Cardinal Burke has answered: a formal 'correction' of the Holy Father. This kind of thing is so rare in the Church that the way this could happen, and the implications it could have, are simply not mapped out by custom, but only by theological speculation.
The theoretical possibility of the condemnation of a reigning Pope for heresy, in such a way that has canonical consequences, is explained helpfully by Robert Siscoe here. Although this account seems sensible to me, I'm no expert and no doubt some will find fault with it. I don't want to get into the details, however: Siscoe's analysis can serve as a reference point, the view of a traditionalist, but definitely not a sede vacantist. My point would be: if this is what people like him think, then the hoops people are going to have to jump through to make such a thing happen are, for practical purposes, insuperable. Call a council of the Church? Get it to meet? Get it to denounce him? Get it to recognise such a denunciation as activating his loss of office? Elect a new Pope? We'll all be having snow-ball fights in hell before this happens.
But if that is so, what will happen? Or, perhaps better: what is happening?
As Cardinal Burke noted, a formal correction of the Pope might come from just a single cardinal - or, we might add, of non-cardinals. If this doesn't depose the Pope (it certainly wouldn't be enough on the Siscoe analysis), what is the point of it? The point is that it is part of process, in some hypothetical situation, in which it becomes clear to at least some people that the teaching of the Church is one thing, and the published opinion of the Pope (or what can be drawn from his publications and his silence with moral certainty), another. If that becomes clear, then it has implications, at least for the people to whom it becomes clear.
Bear in mind that, in fact, the Church is permanently in this situation, according to some people. The Greeks told us back in 1054 that the Pope was in error for adding the filioque to the Creed. In 1870 the 'Old Catholics' thought that the Pope and the First Vatican Council was in error over the definition of Papal Infallibility. In both cases, they, like many, many, groups in between, went into schism, which is to say that they stopped accepting the authority or communion of bishops and others who sided with the Pope.
In many ways this is a self-defeating strategy, since it leaves the Pope and his supporters on their own with their supposed error. It is particularly problematic if you believe in the Papacy as an institution, since the schismatics lost it. So most people who have, over the centuries, thought the Pope was wrong, have simply muddled along in the Church, sometimes acting disobediently, sometimes keeping their heads down.
That's not to say that it doesn't make a difference that a pope's error be publicly demonstrated, in some manner with serious moral force. It makes a difference for the people who accept this demonstration, and if they are numerous then it will have an affect on the Pope and the Church. The kind of affect is the kind of affect we quite standardly see in the Church, or come to that in any institution, when a large number of people regard the leader as going off the rails, even if they can't remove him. The leader in question will find it harder and harder to get things done: his moral authority and practical power will ebb away.
This can happen to a greater or lesser extent. At the lesser end of the scale the leader can eject or simply ignore the disaffected people and carry one. At the greater end he will find his job impossible, and the institution ungovernable. The general loss of authority will be magnified where the disputed matter is at issue; even if the leader can't get things done on that topic, in other aspects of his job he may find everything carrying on as normal.
It is important to remember that this is a perfectly familiar process in human affairs, and usually far preferable to violent revolution. Under Pope Benedict, many prelates and curial officials seemed to be opposing his initiatives simply by not being very helpful, by ignoring them, quietly contradicting them, and so on. Pope Benedict's most memorable moves were cooked up 'motu proprio', by his own initiative, which is to say that they did not emerge from the curial machinery. The sidelining of the curia has gone even further in the present pontificate, but the policy can be traced back to Pope John Paul II and even to Pius X. All these Popes encountered massive and entrenched opposition, within Rome and around the world. A feeling that the Pope is not just wrong-headed, but acting contrary to the Faith, among a significant proportion of people, would make things much more difficult. But the ways it would make things difficult, for the most part, would be the ways that opponents of papal policies have always made things difficult.
I don't want to suggest that the current crisis is not more serious than what was going on, say, in the 1970s and 1980s, although we should not imagine that was any kind of golden age of Church unity. The attacks on Cardinal Burke and his co-signatories from a small number of other prelates have been peculiarly unrestrained; the silence of many more prelates who are in office may be even more significant. The tone of Bishop Frangiskos Papamanolis is reminiscent of something from the 16th century. If enough people line up on either side of the argument, publicly or not, and if the strength of feeling is great enough, the Church will become ungovernable very quickly. Official documents will cease to have weight if they are regarded as emanating from one party or the other, rather than from the Holy See. Unrelated issues will become impossible to resolve if ordinary civil relations between bishops and Cardinals can't be taken for granted, and if routine meetings are cancelled because of the danger of confrontation spilling over. Outsiders will become unwilling to deal with the Church's representatives if they start looking like the partizans in a civil war, instead of the officers of a unified body. People will be reluctant to give money to the Church for the same reason. This could all happen in a few months, if the crisis continued to build up steam. Or it could fizzle out.
In this situation, leaders can change tack, resign, or soldier on. On the last option, institutional trench warfare can go on indefinitely, interspersed with purges perhaps, but purges tend not to be totally effective, and can only reach so far down the chain of command. Any minimally sane new pope arriving on the scene will be keen to make a big reconciling gesture, even if one side of the argment has been quite effectively subdued (Leo XIII offers a precedent). Even if things develop in the most dramatic way in the coming months, the crisis could still go on for a long time, and when it ends, end with more of a whimper than a bang.
But this being the Church, and not just any other institution, it will have to end with the clarification of doctrine. It can come soon or late, but it will come.
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