Another photo of the Sung Mass last Sunday, Passion Sunday, at Holy Trinity, Hethe.The way to deal with offensive texts is to explain them. Such explanation may show that they are not, in fact, offensive, or it may show that they genuinely condemn something held dear by the offended person. If the enquirer is sincere, and the explanation is of the former kind, then he will be satisfied. If the explanation is of the latter kind, then he needs to hear it.

Thus, the claim is sometimes made that some or all of the Gospels are anti-Semitic, on the grounds of passages such as the cry of the crowd to Pilate, condemning Christ: 'His blood be on us and on our children' (Matthew 27:25). In his commentary on this verse, Pope Benedict points out that being sprinkled with Christ's blood has a very different meaning, for Christians, than acquiring blood guilt (Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, p187). Pope Benedict refers, like St Thomas Aquinas in his own commentary on the passage, to the Letter to the Hebrews, contrasting the effects of the blood of Christ with that of the murdered Abel (Heb 12:24). I was reminded of this last Sunday, in the Extraordinary Form, when we heard an earlier passage from Hebrews (9:13f):

For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

This observation turns any possible anti-Semitic usage of the text on its head, revealing a completely different way of looking at it. Whatever the crowd meant, and whoever the crowd actually comprised (as Benedict points out, the Chief Priests and a Zealot rent-a-mob wanting to free Barabas), the cry does have a mystical and enduring significance, like the saying of the Chief Priest that 'one man should die for the people' (John 11:50), and this is not something we need to hide from.

By contrast, when the claim is made that St Paul (eg in Romans 1:27) did not think that people sexually attracted to others of the same sex were morally entitled to lives of sexual self-expression and fulfilment, we have to say: Yes, he did think that, and the Church teaches it, and it is true. The caveats we need to make are not about St Paul's sexual ethics, but the question-begging and tendentious notion of 'sexual self-expression and fulfillment', the category of same-sex attraction itself, and all the rest of the machinery of modern liberal sexual ideology. But we know what they mean when they make the claim, and in their own terms they are perfectly correct. It is a matter of deep and bitter pain to many to be condemned in this way: to find themselves, as they understand themselves, condemned. But the Church does not exist to make people feel comfortable about their sinful ways of life. The fact that such people are often deeply vulnerable and in pain does, of course, affect how we address the issue, but it also points towards the failure of modern sexual ideology to give them any kind of peace. They need a route out of the way of thinking they have become trapped in, and it is not an act of mercy to withhold it from them.

The attitude of the ancient Latin liturgy towards those outside the Faith, whether they be heretics and schismatics, pagans, or Jews, is not of indifference. It is impassioned, pleading, and strongly-worded. We are not talking about subjective guilt necessarily, but of the objectively problematic situation of refusing the call, and of the somewhat different, but also problematic, sitution of not having heard the call. The reformed liturgy comes over as a trifle self-satisfied here, but we should not be. We should not be happy about the fact that the Gospel has not transformed the lives of any of our fellow human beings. We should not be happy that they do not have the sacraments, or that they are not in union with the Pope. We should, at least, pray for them.

This concludes, at least for now, my series on the Prayer for the Jews. I should reiterate what I said at the start of the series, that I did not particularly want to spend time on this issue, but that a Position Paper became necessary in light of the action of the Bishops of England and Wales asking the PCED is replace the existing version of the prayer in the Good Friday liturgy with the Novus Ordo equivalent. The question of the place of the Jews in the economy of salvation is not a constant topic of the Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass I know, any more than sex is a constant topic of conversation among Catholics in general. We don't minimise the importance of the issue; we are simply quite happy with the teaching of the Church about it. We are, however, forced to talk about it because of the obsession of our opponents, who want to attack us through this issue. I am reminded of one of my favourite letters to the Catholic press of all time:

If the Catholic Church is identified solely by its sexual moral precepts, it is largely due to those within the Church who persistently raise objections and maintain the the Church has got it wrong. It is a paradox that the ones who object are the ones who are doing the preaching, and perhaps we should be thankful to them for keeping the matter before our attention.

I hope that, for a good long while, I have said enough. There are plenty of other things to consider.

PS there is an excellent discussion of the issue by a Jewish commentator, Yoram Hazony, here.

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Passion Sunday, sung in Holy Trinity, Hethe, last Sunday. The Gospel, John 8:46-59, is
not found anywhere in the 1970 Lectionary. It is too scary.Ildefonsus Schuster, the great liturgical commentator of the early 20th century, and a bishop and beatus to boot, remarked of the Good Friday 'Orationes Sollemnes', which he thought of as a single, great 'litany':

In reciting a prayer of such venerable antiquity, we seem to enter into a closer spiritual relationship with those early generations of martyrs and confessors for the faith, who used the self-same words before us, and thus obtained the graces needful to enable them to correspond to their high vocation of witnessing to this faith with their own blood.

A couple of decades later, Josef Jungmann, whose personal views were distinctly reform-minded, not to say modernist, wrote in the great work which has become the standard reference for the history of the Roman Rite, that in the same prayers,

whose echo goes back to the first century, we have the general prayer of the Church in the exact wording in which it was performed … since the third century.

Annibale Bugnini, of all people, wrote about his reverence for these prayers when undertaking the limited re-writing of 1965:

It is always unpleasant to have to alter venerable texts that for centuries have effectively nourished Christian devotion and have about them the spiritual fragrance of the heroic age of the Church’s beginnings.

The point is not that changing such prayers could never be justified, but that the burden of proof lies massively against it.

One of the most remarkable texts to be found in the Position Paper, however, is a remark in an official commentary about the Holy Week Reform of 1956, about the new Latin Psalms created by Cardinal Bea and published in 1945:

In the new version of the psalms expressions are avoided which have acquired another sense in modern languages.

This is a truly vertigo-inducing thought: that the official, Latin version of Scripture, to be used in the Office, in liturgical texts, and as a reference point for vernacular translations, be changed so that it does not suggest false equivalents in modern languages. For one thing, it would be a matter of opinion what is 'misleading'. But even if this were granted, how many languages should be taken into account? Italian, French, Spanish, English? All Romance languages? Why not others as well? And how often should the exercise be repeated: every 50 years? Every 30?

In other words, not only would the Latin source-text be no more stable than a modern vernacular, it would be further twisted into knots to avoid suggesting to a Latin ignoramus anything 'misleading' in umpteen different languages. If this is so for the ideal Latin text, shunting aside the Latin versions used for more than 10 centuries, why not say we need an ideal Greek and Hebrew version? Don't the inspired texts include 'expressions which have acquired another sense in modern languages', including modern Greek and Hebrew?

This is simply the opposite of what Latin is supposed to be: a stable language enabling us to use the very same words as our predessors in the Faith. But it is the logical conclusion of the drive to remove from the liturgy anything which could cause offence. If this is raised to the level of a principle, then we can't stop with litiurgical texts. The same must be done for Scripture itself.

As a matter of fact, the 1945 Psalms were ditched by Vatican II, on the grounds that they failed to take account of 'the entire tradition of the Latin Church' (Sacrosantum Concilium 91), so we've ended up with yet another Latin Psalter, and indeed entire Latin Bible, the 'Neo-Vulgate', which also fails to respect the 'entire tradition of the Latin Church'. (See the discussion of the Vulgate here.)

There is another wrong way to deal with offensive texts: to ignore them. I have laid some stress on the prayers for the conversion of the Jews to Christianity to be found in the Liturgy of the Hours. It doesn't come as much surprise, given the general collapse of liturgical discipline, to hear of people skipping these prayers. What suprised me more, though perhaps it shouldn't have, is that in the German translation the texts are systematically mistranslated.

Christ, Son of David, fulfilment of the prophecies, may the Jewish people accept you as their awaited Deliverer [Messiah].

becomes:
In thee everything proclaimed by the prophets is fulfilled, help us to recognise God in our lives.
Again:Simeon and Anna proclaimed you as the Saviour; grant that the Jewish people may accept your message [Gospel] so long foretold.
becomes:O Christ, who was sung of (about) by the angels, made known by the shepherds, praised by Simeon and Anna; - give, that we may accept your Good News.
(Quotations in Latin and German and references are in the Position Paper, Appendix B.)

This is an outrageous falsification of the liturgical text. But I suppose it is actually less outrageous than the translation of 'pro multis' ('for many') as 'for all' in the words of consecration, and not so much worse than the many, many other ideologically-driven mistranslations found in 'old ICEL', such as 'hostia', 'victim', being rendered as 'sacrifice'. The degree to which these mistranslations were theologically justified by liberals came out very strongly in the debate about the 'new ICEL'.

A different way of ignoring awkward texts is to omit them entirely from the liturgy. It is of the nature of the liturgical reform that things Bugnini and his collaborators didn't like were left on the cutting-room floor. What readers may not already know is that passages of Scripture were removed from liturgical use, even as the Lectionary was being vastly expanded. For example, the First Letter to the Corinthians (11:27-9) warning against the unworthy reception of communion, which is read on both Maundy Thursday and Corpus Christi in the 1962 Lectionary, is not found anywhere in the new Lectionary.

Similarly, last Sunday, Passion Sunday, we had - in the EF - the Gospel of Jesus and the Pharisees disputing in the Temple from the Gospel of John: it is nowhere to be found in the Novus Ordo lectionary. There are many more examples in Appendix B of the Position Paper on the Lectionary here.

The problem with this should be obvious. The reformed liturgy has established a body of Scripture and ancient liturgical texts which needs to be hidden away in embarassment: the nasty bits, the bits where Jesus gets cross, where St Paul criticises things which people actually do, where sinfullness and the need for grace are mentioned.

It is a like a dysfunctional family where there are topics you're not allowed to broach, or emotions you are not allowed to display, like anger or grief. What is supposed to happen when Catholics pick up a copy of the Bible and find these passages for themselves? Well, what happens to a member of a dysfunctional family when they talk to an outsider who mentions a Forbidden Topic, or displays a Forbidden Emotion? They find it very hard to handle. You can see the same process of shock, panic, and denial in Catholic on-line forums where the phrase 'I have difficulty with this passage' crops up, and utterly insane interpretations are put forward by kind-hearted moderators to make the passage mean something unchallenging, ideally something entirely in conformity to the depraved customs of modern life.

This, obviously, is not a healthy situation, and it leaves Catholics wide open to attacks on the Church. Does the Church have unchanging teaching? Then how come all those liturgical texts had to be buried in a big hole in the ground? Does the Church base her teaching on the Scripture? Then why does she not want to hear St Paul talking about the theology of marriage during the Nuptial Mass, like she used to?

That is not to deny that apparantly offensive and difficult texts present a problem, just that these solutions are absurd and ultimately counter-productive. In the next post I will discuss a better solution.

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An image from the Mass of the feast of St Gregory the Great, who threatened
excommunication for anyone attempting to force Jews to convert to Christianity.I explained in the last post in this series that there are, in the reformed Liturgy of the Hours, numerous prayers for the conversion of the Jews: specifically, the conversion of Jews to Christianity, by accepting Christ as the Messiah, as in:

Let Israel recognise in you the Messiah it has longed for; 

may the Jewish people accept you [sc. Christ] as their awaited Deliverer [Latin: 'Messiah']

In the Bishops' Conference press release about the need to change the Extraordinary Form Prayer for the Jews in the Good Friday Liturgy, Archbishop MacDonald complained that by comparison with the 1970 Novus Ordo equivalent, the 2008 version 'reverted to being a prayer for the conversion of Jews to Christianity'. Other have noted, as problematic, that the title of the prayer in the Missal is 'pro conversione Iudaiorum' instead of, as in the Novus Ordo, simply, 'For the Jews'.

How are we to understand these complaints? Naturally, we must assume that spokesmen are being honest and are reasonably well-informed. What this is about, on those assumptions, is presentation, of controlling perceptions, above all by Jews. As I noted in the last post, the suppression of the more explicit language of conversion in the Novus Ordo cannot be explained theologically, since the explict language was retained in the Liturgy of the Hours published the year after the reformed Missal: 1971. Nevertheless, the Good Friday prayers have come to Jews' attention (why? as a result of briefing by whom?), the Liturgy of the Hours prayers have not, so - the argument must be - it will be possible to make progress in terms of Catholic-Jewish relations if we talk about changing the Good Friday Prayer and ignore the Liturgy of the Hours.

So the question arises: the Bishops of England and Wales made their move - how did it go down? This question of public relations, from its normally peripheral importance in theological and liturgical matters, becomes central: this was the whole object of the exercise. It is of course easy to answer. England is a small place, and the Jewish community has a long-established and widely respected newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, which covers all things of interest to the Jewish community, and is available online without a paywall. So what do we find?

The Catholic press had a smattering of coverage of the issue. The Catholic Herald had an analytical piece with quotes from me and others, and the other Catholic papers just had little news items. But to repeat, this is not about perceptions by Catholics, it is about perceptions by Jews. What did the Jewish Chronicle (JC) have to say?

As far as news is concerned, there was nothing. Despite the involvement of the Chief Rabbi in the dialogue leading up to the announcement, and his willingness to give quotes to the Catholic Universe and so forth, the JC did not think the think the event was worth reporting. Most unfortunately, however, it was noticed by its leading op-ed columnist, an academic historian called Geoffrey Aldermann.

Now, to understand his angle on it, you have to remember how the whole issue has been spun in recent years. As we all know, John Cornwell published his book Hitler's Pope in 1999. The massive publicity given to this book has established a media narrative that, never mind Medieval anti-Semitism, the actions of a recent Pope, Pius XII, should be explained in terms of sympathy for Nazism, and contemptuous indifference, if not hatred, towards the Jews. The dark past of the Catholic Church, on this issue, sweeps up through Medieval anti-Jewish riots, through French anti-Drefus activism, and into support for Hitler, not just by German Catholics but by an Italian Pope. It was opposed by the progressive faction at Vatican II, because that was about a break with the past, and the past is bad. Any move towards theological conservatism, any move towards making use of the Church's past, is tarred by the anti-Semitic brush.

Cornwell's followers might express it like this: don't tell us about the good points of the Catholic past, any more than you should tell us about the good points of Hitler's economic policy. It is all tainted. It must all be rejected. In this way, Cornwell's book might be said to be more about the ailing Pope John Paul II, and the question of who would succeed him, than about the events of the 1930s and 1940s.

When Pope Benedict liberated the Traditional Mass in 2007, the narrative swung into action. It was very handy that a contrast could be drawn between the traditional and the new Prayer for the Jews on Good Friday. Bishop Williamson's remarks on the Holocaust were a stunning boon to the narrative. The fact that Pope Benedict XVI was German also helped. Plenty of people in the Church who hated Pope Benedict and also hated the Traditional Mass were on hand to push things along. The whole thing gained, in media terms, a 'new pair of legs'.

This is a powerful media narrative, but it is not a universal one. It can be undermined and confronted. Great work has been done on this from all sorts of angles, and it is worth stressing that, motivated by a love of the truth, many Jews have played an important part in this: see Rabbi Neusner on the Prayer for the Jews, Rabbi Dalin on Pius XII, and a columnist in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, on Pius XII here. But it remains a safe and lazy option for many liberal Catholics and secular commentators.

So here is what Geoffrey Alderamann wrote. Those of a sensitive dispostion, look away now.

In the matter of Jews, the Second Vatican Council reached some brave conclusions. It stressed the Jewish roots of Christianity and God's love for the Jewish people. It declared that "although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God". These bold statements appear to have angered many of the Catholic faithful, and the demotion of the Tridentine Mass appears to have angered many more. Benedict XVI - formerly Joseph Ratzinger, one-time member of the Hitler Youth who, as the Vatican website calmly put it, "enrolled in the auxiliary anti-aircraft service" of Nazi Germany - was determined to make amends. He revived the Tridentine Mass, with the result that each year, on Good Friday (commemorating the execution of Jesus), the Roman Catholic faithful are once more enjoined to pray "for the conversion of the Jews". Where the faithful were once expected to "pray for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant," they are now enjoined to cry out "Let us pray also for the Jews, that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they may also acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ."

(The Jewish Chronicle declined to print my or any other letter responding to this article.)

Having read this, my readers will be able to answer the following question. Has the decision by the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales played well, from a PR point of view?

Instead of confronting the negative media narrative about Catholic anti-Semitism, instead of supporting brave authors like Rabbi Neusner who stuck his neck out for the truth, they have chosen a different approach. To concede, at least by implication, that there is truth in the narrative, but it is ok because we are making that break with the past which the narrative demands.

The degree to which such a move strengthens the narrative can be seen in technicolour in the passage from Dr Aldermann. He ends on a positive note: that Pope Francis looks like a man who is going to make a really big break with the past, and isn't that great? But in the meantime, the problem remains that celebrations of the Traditional Mass continue, and accordint to the narrative the problem with the Traditional Mass is far from being just about this one prayer. Furthermore, the whole thing is going blow up in the bishops' faces when, as seems overwhelmingly likely, Rome declines to change the prayer.

At least, it will blow up in their faces if anyone notices. Dr Aldermann may not find out. The bishops had better hope he doesn't find out, either, about their tolerance and in many cases support for the Traditional Mass, their work of architectural and spiritual restoration, and their use of those prayers for the conversion of the Jews of the Liturgy of the Hours. The great thing about a lazy media narrative is that the kind of people who use it tend not to be the kind of people who'd spend even a few minutes on Google exploring its implications, and aren't the kind of people who revisit their old articles when they are proved wrong. But you never know. What would Dr Aldermann make of the fact that Archbishop MacDonald himself created an official Chaplaincy for the Traditional Mass when he was Archbishop of Southwark?

We will probably never know. But a note to my readers: don't tell anyone.

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The unique and wonderful annual Roman Forum conference on the shores of Lake Garda in Italy is taking bookings: the dates are

June 27th-July 8th 2016

The conference is ten days of talks from some of the best-known figures on the Traditional Catholic scene, including Fr John Hunwicke from England, accompanied by the Traditional Mass, good food, and beautiful surroundings. The President of the Roman Forum is Dr John Rao, who gave a talk to the LMS One Day Conference in 2012.

The theme of the conference this year is:

Half a Millennium of Total Depravity (1517-2017): A Critique of Luther’s Impact on the Eve of His “Catholic” Apotheosis

From the LMS website:

The LMS is offering two bursaries of £500 Sterling each towards the cost of attending the Summer Symposium in 2015 (the full price is $2,900). Our bursary, together with a further concession from the organisers of the Symposium, will reduce the total amount payable by each of these two participants to £500 each (based upon shared accommodation). The bursaries are for young adults up to 35 years. This offer is not limited to members of the LMS but is available to anyone from England and Wales.

Click here for more details.

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