Chairman's Blog
On hat-doffing, in the Catholic Herald
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| A Roman sacrifice: the (male) priest has covered his head. |
This weekend I have a letter in the Catholic Herald about hats.
I've written about headcoverings in church here, and the decline of hats in fashion here.
What I didn't mention in the letter is that the view I put forward in it, which I think is overwhelmingly plausible--that the discipline on head-coverings in the primitive Church was at the time a counter-cultural sign, as a reversal of Jewish practice--contradicts the standard narrative explaining why Catholic women are no long obliged to cover their heads in church today. This view found its way into the 1976 Instruction of the CDF, Inter insignores: that St Paul's stern demand that what he describes as a universal custom among Christians was 'probably inspired by the customs of the period', or, more simply, was a 'cultural fact'.
Inter insignores is a desperate attempt to stop post-Vatican II 'updating' throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The CDF wanted to argue that some of what St Paul and the New Testament in general said about the differences between the sexes was culturally-conditioned and could be ignored, but other things are of perennial and fundamental importance. It is a tricky argument to make, because what St Paul says about male headship and women covering their heads is so much more emphatic and theologically grounded than anything in the New Testament about women not being allowed to be priests. Indeed, if you want to construct a scriptural argument against female ordination, a topic not explicitly addressed anywhere in the canon, what St Paul says about the roles of the sexes is going to have to be your starting point: there is really nothing else.
To reiterate the point about the historically indefensible idea that the head covering rules were 'culturally conditioned', St Paul says that men should uncover their heads, and women cover them. In Jewish practice men's head-coverings were far more important than women's: and still are. In ancient Greek custom (to generalise) neither men nor women covered their heads in cultic contexts, though both could wear garlands of flowers. Anyone can see for themselves scores of depictions of sacrifices on Greek vases from a Google image search. In ancient Roman custom men or women who actually carried out a sacrifice covered the head, but no one else did (apart from those garlands): again, the are scores of ancient depictions which underline the point. There simply is no contemporary cultural practice corresponding to St Paul's rules.
Sir,
Laura Cathcart (Feature, May 26) is correct that men should take off their hats indoors, but this is a very recent custom. Prints and paintings confirm that men of the 18th and even 19th centuries thought nothing of wearing hats in coffee houses. Hat-wearing in the houses of Parliament was so widespread it became part of procedure. Only the Highest Anglicans took hats off to visit churches; earlier, Puritans had doffed them to pray, but replaced them to hear the sermon. The general rule of no men's hats indoors may owe something to the end of the 'Little Ice Age', which lowered temperatures from the 16th to 19th centuries, with a number of consequences for fashion.Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.
Can non-Latinists pray the Latin Mass?
Reposted from Feb 2016
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| Eloquent gestures and expressive ceremonies in the Traditional Requiem Mass. |
Dr Robert Kinney (his doctorate is in Pharmacy, interestingly) has argued over at the Homiletic and Pastoral Review that is it impossible actually to pray in a language one does not understand, or with a celebrant who is using a language one does not understand.
[A]s Catholics, we believe that the Mass is the most powerful prayer on earth. If the Mass is said in an unfamiliar or entirely unknown language, though, can it properly be labeled as a “prayer”? Or, are the words uttered merely beautiful-sounding syllables without willed meaning?
This would have some pretty radical implications for Catholics visiting foreign countries and Masses celebrated for international congregations: in Lourdes, for example, it is common to find Masses celebrated in several languages, one lection in German, one in English, a prayer in French, another in Italian, and so on. The thought 'they'd be better off using Latin' is one which Dr Kinney presumably shares, since praying just a snatch of the Mass, or hearing just one lection meaningfully, must count as almost pointless.
It also implies that the silent prayers (the 'priestly prayers', such as the Lavabo) of the Novus Ordo are so much mumbo jumbo, even when Mass is celebrated in the congregation's mother tongue. If you can't hear the prayer, you can't understand it, right? As so often, attacks on the Traditional Mass rebound on the 1970 Missal. That Bugnini and Pope Paul VI: they got it all wrong, eh, Dr Kinney?
There is an interesting response to this article over at One Peter Five, which accepts the implication that we should familiarise ourselves with Latin. We should, of course, and you can sign up for the LMS intensive, 5-day Latin Course in July here. But Dr Kinney's argument fails at a more fundamental level.
The real problem with the argument is that he hasn't thought through what 'willed meaning' (and various equivalent phrases in the article) means. The Canon of the Mass, specifically, and the Mass as a whole, is an offering of Christ's Sacrifice on the Cross to the Father in reparation for the sins of mankind. That is a fact which can be inferred from the texts, though such an inference would take a bit of study and effort (particularly, perhaps, in the Novus Ordo), but in any case it should be and, particularly in the context of the Traditional Mass, commonly is, conveyed by preaching and catechesis. If you understand this fundamental meaning of the prayers of the Canon, then you can make this, the fundamental intention of the prayers, your own as you participate at Mass. Thus, as far as the most important meaning of the prayers is concerned, you do understand, and you do pray.
This can be done without a great deal of articulation. Someone without much catechism, who is familiar with the ancient liturgy (less so with the Novus Ordo, perhaps) will be able instinctively to grasp that what is going on is an act of worship. We can imagine such a realisation, for example, even by a non-Christian familar with pagan forms of worship, who encounters the Mass for the first time. Such a person would be correct: the offering of Christ's sacrifice is indeed the supreme act of worship. That degree of understanding is enough for the participant to will the act of worship with the priest. This is what we call the uniting of intentions: what we should do in Mass, is offer the worship together with the priest. Moving beyond the pagan's realisation that it is worship, we intend to associate ourselves with it.
No doubt Dr Kinney will object that, while this may be true at the most general level, many liturgical texts have specific intentions and messages, and ignorance of Latin can be a barrier to making these specific intentions our own. It is true that there are specific intentions and meanings in specific texts, but it is not true that missing out on some of these undermines the validity of our union with the most fundamental and important intention and meaning of the Mass. At least, Dr Kinney had better hope it isn't, because there is really no reason to imagine that this is a bigger problem for a non-Latinist who regularly attends the Traditional Mass, than a non-theologian who regularly attends the Novus Ordo being celebrated in his or her own cradle language.
The ceremonies of the Traditional Mass use a set of symbolic gestures, such as incensing, sprinkling with Holy Water, signs of the cross, and kisses, which any reasonably attentive regular worshiper will pick up and understand without needing much prompting. For example, the priest kisses the Gospel book after reading it: you don't need a degree in liturgical studies to understand that this is an act of reverence and love.
On the other hand, liturgical prayers and passages of scripture do contain some fairly complex theological ideas, whatever language they are declaimed in. In some ways the texts of the Novus Ordo are simpler than those of the Traditional Mass, but in other ways they are harder, because in order to understand them fully one needs to read them in a theological context which isn't provided in the liturgy itself: they require catechesis - instruction outside the liurgy - to understand them properly. But don't take my word for it.
On Communion in the Hand, from Memoriale Domine:
It is, above all, necessary that an adequate catechesis prepares the way so that the faithful will understand the significance of the action and will perform it with the respect due to the sacrament. The result of this catechesis should be to remove any suggestion of wavering on the part of the Church in its faith in the eucharistic presence, and also to remove any danger or even suggestion of profanation.
On Reception under Both Kinds, from Redemptionis Sacramentum
So that the fullness of the sign may be made more clearly evident to the faithful in the course of the Eucharistic banquet, lay members of Christ’s faithful, too, are admitted to Communion under both kinds, in the cases set forth in the liturgical books, preceded and continually accompanied by proper catechesis regarding the dogmatic principles on this matter laid down by the Ecumenical Council of Trent.
On receiving Communion standing, from the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (American edition)
The norm for reception of Holy Communion in the dioceses of the United States is standing. Communicants should not be denied Holy Communion because they kneel. Rather, such instances should be addressed pastorally, by providing the faithful with proper catechesis on the reasons for this norm.
The Novus Ordo, as usually celebrated, is just terribly confusing. The confusion undermines the proper understanding of the prayers and ritual actions, which, Dr Kinney must surely worry, can render impossible the congregation's praying along with the liturgy.
Dr Kinney must be even more worried over the mistranslations of the Missal, so many of which were exposed for all to see in the debate about the improved English translation finally promulgated in 2011. From 1974 to 2011 the faithful were given liturgical texts which failed to express adequately the mind of the Church. This must, I suppose, have prevented them from praying the Mass.
Finally, Dr Kinney must be besides himself with concern over the way that the three-year lectionary regularly serves up as lections in the Mass passages from the Sacred Scriptures which are obscure, not to say incomprehensible. The Traditional One Year cylcle tends not to do this.
Not for the first time, it falls to me to defend the Ordinary Form of the Mass from opponents of the Extraordinary Form. The reality is that a grasp of the fundamental meaning of the Mass is sufficient to allow the worshipper to unite himself with the fundamental intention of the Mass. A good understanding of the specific meanings of parts of the Mass and the texts proper to particular feastdays is to be heartily commended, but is not absolutely necessary. After all, even a lifetime's study of the texts and ceremonies of the Mass (in either Form) will not exhaust their meaning, or eliminate all controversy among scholars, just as a lifetime's Biblical scholarship will never uncover the whole meaning of the Sacred Scriptures.
It does appear to be the case, however, that the drama of the Traditional Mass does a better job at conveying the central meaning of the Mass to the Faithful than translation into the vernacular does for the Novus Ordo. At any rate, this survey of church-going American Catholics found that only half of them realised that the Church taught the Real Presence. That is clearly a mistake which is less easy to make if you attend the Traditional Mass.
For why the use of Latin actually assists the faithful, even those ignorant of Latin, to participate in the Mass, see here.
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Protecting people against bad ideas
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| John Stuart Mill |
Like everyone else involved in universities and schools, I have had to undergo training on dealing with students who might be at risk of 'radicalisation', as part of the Government's 'Prevent' strategy. In fact I think anyone can access and do this little on-line course. There has been a lot of criticism of the Government's policies in this area, but this aspect at least seems pretty sensible. It contained some important insights into how people are drawn into dodgy groups, which correspond with what I have read about recruitment done by cults, which is of course a pretty close parallel to what is happening. I can't comment on other aspects of Government policy, but I'm not uncomfortable with what I am myself being asked to do as a university tutor. It just looks like good practice: a matter of being concerned with student welfare.
The other, paradoxically, is with non-judgmentalism. I took a screen shot of one remark made in the training. We must keep people safe from certain ideas and world views, because they are harmful. They are harmful to people who end up being the victims of terrorist atrocities, but they are also harmful, and hideously so, to the people who are drawn into them. It is important to make that point because where we have a duty of care, or a simple concern for student welfare, we are concerned directly with the good of the young person in front of us; it not a just a matter of being a sort of auxiliary policeman trying to prevent a possible future crime.Support the work of the LMS by becoming an 'Anniversary Supporter'.
YouTube Video from Roger Buck
Having read two books by Roger Buck, and had some email correspondance with him, it is rather interesting to see him in the flesh, so to speak, on video, for the first time.
My posts about his books:
The lovely Gentle Traditionalist, suitable for non-Trads and indeed non-Catholic readers.
The longer Cor Jesu Sacratissimum: From Secularism and the New Age to Christendom Restored, detailed critique of the New Age, partly autobiographical, and a plea for the restoration of Europe.
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Eucharisticum Mysterium: blog post for the Catholic Herald
The Catholic Herald has published a post of mine on the 50th anniversary of one of the documents preparing the way for the Novus Ordo Missae. The highlight of the document is the evolving attitude to concelebration.
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| Simultaneous Low Mass at the LMS Priest Training Conference in Prior Park, |
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Instruction Eucharisticum Mysterium, signed by both the Prefect of the soon-to-be abolished Sacred Congregation of Rites, and the President of the Concilium, the temporary institution in charge of the liturgical reform. It now represents a fascinating snapshot of a fast-moving action sequence.
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New book on the Third Secret of Fatima
Kevin Symonds, whose book on the composition of the Prayer to St Michael I recommended on this blog back in 2015, has written another careful, thorough, and sober study of a subject surrounded by conjecture: the 'Third Secret' of Fatima.
Get it from Amazon.co.uk
I've provided a publicity-blurb for it as follows:
Symonds has done a very thorough job in getting to the bottom–insofar as it is possible–of the various confusions and conspiracy theories on the subject of the Third Secret, making a compelling case that what the Vatican published in 2000 was the whole text of it as written by Sr Lucia. No doubt the debate will continue, but the clarity and intellectual honesty of Symonds’ work, with copious reference to the relevant sources in their original languages, will be of enormous assistance for scholars in the future who wish to understand this tangled affair. –Dr. Joseph Shaw
I hope my regular readers won't be put off the book by the fact that, after exhaustive investigation of how each claim has come to be made and how the evidence stacks up, Symonds concludes that the various conspiracy theories to the effect that the Third Secret was not really revealed by the Vatican when the vision of the martyrdom of the 'bishop dressed in white' was finally published, fail: that is, that the Vatican really did publish everything they had.
I have read various things in support of these theories which, at the time, I found convincing, but Symonds shows, with painstaking detail, that there is less to these than meets the eye. Whatever you may want to believe, this book really must be taken into consideration.
He doesn't address the question of whether the Consecration of Russia has been done.
All the stuff about the alleged length and physical shape and alarming contents of the letter sent by Sr Lucia with the secret in it are considered, and it gets rather complicated. There is a larger and more earthy question, however, which used to worry me: if the secret was as un-explosive as the Vatican revealed it to be, why was it not published earlier? Symonds gives the following answer. Since the vision of the 'bishop dressed in white' appears to be a prophecy of the assassination of a pope, to have published it much earlier would have been for the Vatican to say, in effect, that they expected such an event to take place. It would have been like putting a target on the Pope's back: a challenge to every nutcase and hostile government on the planet to kill the Holy Father. Only insofar as they were able to say that, with hindsight, the vision was about the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, and more especially after the fall of Communism, could it be published without this kind of worry.
Get it from Amazon.co.uk
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SSPX ordinations: with permission from the Holy See
This is really wonderful news: Bishop Fellay, Superior of the Society of St Pius X, has said (h/t Rorate Caeli) that he recieved a letter from the Holy See last year telling him that he could continue with priestly ordinations, without needing permission from the local bishop. This is a move I noted as a possible 'next step' after those involving confession and marriages in my 'Chairman's Message' in the latest Mass of Ages, which I reproduce below.
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Mass of Ages: Summer 2017 edition published
If your local church doesn't have copies, get one by post here.
Bishop Schneider on Pentecost and the Holy Spirit.
James Bogle on the Emperor, Bl Charles of Austria.
Plus: Antonia Robinson, LMS Committee Member and Local Representative for Thanet, introduces the LMS Family Contact Register.
• The Lone Veiler with some words of wisdom from St Augustine
• Caroline Shaw looks at a pilgrim’s souvenir from the 16th Century: The miraculous bleeding Host of Dijon
• Fr Bede Row asks, “Do we still believe in marriage?”
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Who are Pope Francis' 'rigid Catholics'?
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| Crush not the spirit. From the Rosary Walk at Pantasaph, the Franciscan Retreat Centre in North Wales. |
“Communion is essential,” Francis said. “Sometimes it can be better to renounce living in every detail what your own path demands, in order to guarantee unity among the brothers who form the one ecclesial community, of which you must always feel yourself a part,” he said.
Translation: If local pastors or the bishop asks you to join everybody else for Mass on Sunday, do it. If the Vatican tells you to play by the liturgical rulebook, do that too.
Second, Francis urged the Neocatechumenate to respect the local cultures in which the group wants to put down roots.
Learning foreign languages is helpful, the pope said, but “much more important will be your commitment to learning the cultures that you meet, recognizing that the need for the Gospel is everywhere, but also [recognizing] the work of the Holy Spirit in the life and the history of every people.”
Translation: Don’t ride into places such as Japan, or Nepal, and insist that in addition to becoming Catholic, everybody also has to become Spanish or Italian.
Third, the pope asked the Neocatechumenate to foster internal freedom and to respect those who decide to leave the group.
“Everyone’s freedom must not be coerced,” he said, “and the eventual choice of anyone who decides to seek other forms of Christian life … outside the [Neocatechumenate] must be respected.”
Translation: Lighten up internally, and when somebody leaves, don’t swing into action like a K Street lobbying firm specializing in character assassination.
It hurts the heart when, before a church, before a humanity with so many wounds, moral wounds, existential wounds, wounds of war, which we all hear of every day, to see that Christians begin to do philosophical, theological, spiritual “byzantinism”, rather what is needed is a spirituality of going-out. Go out with this spirituality: do not remain securely locked inside. This is not good. This is “byzantinism”! Today we have no right to byzantinistic reflection. We must go out! Because — I have said this many times — the Church seems like a field hospital. And when one goes to a field hospital, the first task is to heal the wounded, not to measure cholesterol... this will come later.... Is this clear?
After 60 years, the original charism has not lost its youthfulness and vitality. However, remember that the centre is not the charism, the centre is one alone, it is Jesus, Jesus Christ! When I place at the centre my spiritual method, my spiritual journey, my way of fulfilling it, I go off the itinerary. All spirituality, all charisms in the Church must be “decentralized”: at the centre there is only the Lord! For this reason, in the First Letter to the Corinthians, when Paul speaks of charisms, of this most beautiful reality of the Church, of the Mystical Body, he ends by speaking of love, of that which comes from God, which is truly God’s, and which allows us to imitate Him. Never forget this, to be decentralized!
Thus the charism is not preserved in a bottle of distilled water! Faithfulness to the charism does not mean “to petrify it” — the devil is the one who “petrifies”, do not forget! Faithfulness to the charism does not mean to write it on a parchment and frame it. The reference to the legacy that Don Giussani left you cannot be reduced to a museum of records, of decisions taken, of the rules of conduct. It certainly entails faithfulness to tradition, but faithfulness to tradition, Mahler said, “is not to worship the ashes but to pass on the flame”. Don Giussani would never forgive you if you lost the liberty and transformed yourselves into museum guides or worshippers of ashes. Pass on the flame of the memory of that first encounter and be free!
Like this, centred in Christ and in the Gospel, you can be the arms, hands, feet, mind and heart of a Church “which goes forth”. The way of the Church is to leave her walls behind and go in search of those who are distant, on the peripheries, to serve Jesus in every person who is marginalized, abandoned, without faith, disappointed by the Church, a prisoner of one’s own selfishness.
“To go forth” also means to reject self-referentiality, in all its forms. It means knowing how to listen to those who are not like us, learning from everyone, with sincere humility. When we are slaves to self-referentiality we end up cultivating a “labelled spirituality”: “I’m ACL”. This is the label. Then we fall into the thousands of traps offered to us by the pleasure of self-referentiality; by that looking at ourselves in the mirror which leads us to confusion and transforms us into mere impresarios in an NGO.
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Ann Furedi in Oxford
The Birmingham March for Life is on Saturday: see the full details of the day's event here. The march itself is from 2pm but the day starts with Masses and talks from 9am. It's huge and important; please go if you can.
I'm reposting below my comments from November 2013 on Ann Furedi's talk in support of abortion which took place in Oxford.
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Last night I attended a debate organised by Oxford Students for Life. They invited Ann Furedi, head of the country's biggest abortion provider, BPAS; she was opposed by Sarah de Nordwall. I was very impressed, with my experience of abortion debates in the Oxford Union, at the good natured and rational quality of the discussions; this is a great credit to the organisers and their supporters (pro-abortion students were also present, in smaller numbers). It was a nice demonstration, in fact, that the hysteria in the abortion debate does not, in the main, come from pro-lifers, despite the strength of feeling on their side of the debate.
I was impressed by Sarah de Nordwall, particularly in the way she handled hostile questions. This blog post, however, which I promised Sarah I would write, is about what Ann Furedi had to say.
Furedi was witty and articulate. She made a number of very interesting concessions at an early stage which helpfully closed off a number of dead-ends for the discussion. She reminded us, for example, that there is no legal right to abortion in English law. Something else very interesting which she said is that until 1990 there was no time-limit on abortions in Scotland, but there were no more late-term abortions there than in England before then. Her point was that women don't want late-term abortions. Pro-lifers may need to consider the efficacy of time-limit legislation as a means to reduce abortion numbers.
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| Sarah de Nordwall surrounded by Dominicans |
Furedi's argument for a moral right to abortion turned on two ideas. The first was that moral personhood is assocatiated with functional attributes, such as self-consciousness. As the debate went on she seemed to back away from this idea somewhat; she didn't want to draw the conclusion, for example, that infanticide was permissible. So her argument came to rely exclusively on the second idea, which is that for a pregnant woman a moral right to abortion followed from her right to 'bodily integrity'. Actually I think 'bodily self-determination' might be a better term for her intuition here. What happens inside a body, in effect, should be up the owner of the body.
I felt that this argument should have come under more pressure in the debate, and I offer here some objections to it.
1. The argument appears to generate the conclusions Furedi wants only if the distinct existence and bodily integrity of the fetus is ignored. Given that the fetus has his own body, that brings something else into the equation which needs to be taken into consideration. What right has a women to interfere with another person's body? Furedi appears to think 'none' if the woman is a pro-life activist taking an interest in the fate of a woman considering an abortion (a point she made a number of times), but if the woman is a pregnant mother it appears to be quite different in relation to her unborn child. The first point noted above was designed I suppose to deal with this, but as Furedi conceded it cannot bear the argumentative weight: just because a human can't talk doesn't take away a moral status he would otherwise have. This being so, Furedi's argument seems to defeat itself: if we have the right to bodily self-determination, then the fetus' right would prevent the mother from aborting.
The responses Furedi made to this kind of point consisted of insisting on the lesser moral status of the fetus. Although she wasn't able to make a principled argument for this, she seemed to think it was sufficiently obvious, even while conceding that a fetus has value - more, as she put it, than a goldfish or a cat. But given that the fetus' life is at stake, and the mother's is not, to say that the fetus weighs less in the scales of value is not enough. I might be obliged to suffer a lot of inconvenience to save the life of, say, a whale, a colony of rare bats, or, come to that, to ensure the continued existence of an historic building.
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| Ann Furedi |
2. The principle of radical bodily self-determination, which Furedi needs, is not plausible, and is not applied in law or in common-sense moral thinking. Examples which show this are suicide and body-integrity disorder. No one has the moral right to commit suicide, which is why we all think that it is permissible for bystanders to save a would-be suicide from (say) drowning, or talk him off the window ledge. (The Samaritans even abandon their normal 'non-directive' counselling for prospective suicides.) Those suffering from body-integrity disorder, who want healthy limbs amputated, do not have the right to undergo the amputations, indeed it would be wrong for a doctor to carry out their wishes. These cases do not even involve the agents directly harming other parties, so a fortiori it cannot be concluded from our intuition that people are 'in charge of their own bodies', that a mother can harm a fetus enclosed inside her body. Yes, we say casually that we can do what we like with our bodies, but the principle here is a weak one. It may include body-piercing, but it doesn't even extend to experimenting with hard drugs, let alone anything more dramatic or irreversible.
A wider point is about people being (morally) the best judges of their own interests. The statute books are bursting with laws to prevent people making stupid decisions on the basis of what they imagine are their best interests. Everything from building regulations to tobacco duty acknowledges that the law has a role in guiding rational, grown-up and autonomous decision-makers away from bad decisions.
3. Furedi conceded that some women think of abortion in a moment of confusion and panic, and being better-informed or just a bit calmer they may well change their minds. She also conceded that many women are under intense social pressure to abort baby girls. She appealed to the case of the women who are cool, calm, and collected, and decide rationally to go through with it as being in their best interests. I would have liked to have asked, in light of this, whether making abortion easier, legally or practically, is in the best interests of women overall. It certainly isn't in the interests of the first kinds of cases, who are more likely to do something they later regret, and are easier for others to bully, the easier abortion is to arrange. Even supposing the cool, calm ones are right about their interests (see point two), it is far from clear that this means that a situation should be perpetuated in which many, many others end up being violated in the most horrible way, when they cave in to pressure to have an abortion which they do not want.
Again, compare the case with drugs. Drug users constantly tell us that, in the immortal phrase, 'they can handle it'. Suppose they can - suppose it is true that a certain proportion of users can genuinely derive pleasure from hard drugs without it destroying their lives. As an argument for de-criminalisation this is extremely weak, because everyone can see the drugs users who clearly can't handle it, and making drugs more widely available will cause terrible harm to people in that category.
These parallels are not exact. It is for the pro-abortion advocates to explain, however, what is the principled basis of a moral right to abortion, and why such principles don't lead to counter-intuitive results when applied to other cases.