Chairman's Blog

A passer-by taking a photo of the procession with the Easter Candle at the Easter Vigil in St Mary Moorfields.

I've been reading Hamish Fraser's Fatal Star, part biography and part commentary on the Church of his day. It was published in 1952, Fraser having been received into the Church some seven years earlier, after an extended period as a Communist activist: including in the Communist secret police in the Spanish Civil War. The edition I have includes extracts from his writings up to the 1980s.

Fraser became a greater supporter of the Traditional Mass, but this isn't the focus of this book. Instead, he connects the Presbyterian culture of his childhood with the untrammelled capitalism which made Communism attractive, laments the failure of the Church to offer an alternative, and points to the message of Fatima as a call to do just this, not (simply) through private devotions, but through penance and conversion of life. He quotes Sister Lucy as saying that the primary message of Fatima is not the Rosary or the First Saturdays, but Penance, and the duties of one's state of life.

His experience of Catholics in industrial Glasgow between the wars was that they offered a watered-down Marxism as a response to the social ills of the Great Depression. After the Second Vatican Council, this was even more the case, and in the case of Liberation Theology, not much watering down was being done. In the meantime, Fraser had discovered the Church's social teaching (Leo XIII and his successors), when researching for a prize essay, and was bowled over by it. He thought it would be fun to win a prize essay on the subject of religion as an atheist, but was no longer an atheist by the time he received it. God has a sense of humour.

Why, he asks, was no one in the Church talking about this social teaching? Or so few that it never percolated down to ordinary Catholics in the trade union movement. Leo XIII framed his teaching precisely as a counter to the rise of anti-clerical Socialism, but it was simply never incorporated into the Church's everyday teaching and practice.

There is a good deal to be said about this historical question, but it also raises a broader practical question for today. People are not going to benefit from what Christ has given the Church to help them be saved if they do not hear anything, or anything positive, about the Church. Most people do not hear Catholics talk about the Faith, and they do not see the Faith manifested in any other way either.

One would never know, from Fraser's complaints about the Church of the 1930s and 1940s, that this was a high point of Catholic evangelisation. It doesn't mean he was wrong: perhaps the Church could and should have been doing even better. But compared to today the Church was visible. Catholic colleagues at work could be identified in all sorts of ways, such as their eating fish on Fridays, which would be impossible today. They were not just identifiable as Catholics by such symbolic actions, however, they had noticeably different attitudes. In the society depicted by the novels of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and others of that generation, being a Catholic meant that you'd have noticeably different attitudes to a range of ethical issues, including sex outside marriage, abortion, and euthanasia. It wasn't that Catholics were all saints, but their Faith made a difference to way they thought even if they were sinners.

To manifest one's religion in this kind of way today is to set oneself apart not only from non-Catholic society, but from the majority of one's fellow Catholics. Most self-identified Catholics do not attend Mass, nor do they have particularly strong or distinctive views about divorce or contraception. Fraser thought that the Faith was invisible in 1950; today you need a microscope to detect it. When an individual Catholic does do or say something reflective of the Faith, far from being representative of the Catholic community, it is nominal Catholics who will be among those most eager to shout him down. Outsiders don't always have any reason to think that an orthodox Catholic is more characteristic of the Faith than an unorthodox one. Converting to the Faith must seem a little like joining a debating society, perhaps with a view to supporting the less popular side.

It is not easy to know how to handle this situation. What I would at least suggest is that we still need, indeed need more than ever, Catholics in the workplace, in academia, and in the media, who are identifiable as such; we need all kinds of good works to be identifiable as Catholic; and we need ideas identifiable as Catholic in debates about all manner of public and private matters.

Perhaps this is obvious, but there are many who do not behave as though it were true. While I criticise no one who needs to keep the Faith under the radar for personal reasons in the workplace--only they can make that judgement--others make a virtue of it, claiming that they can do more good by being invisible. I'm sorry, but this is wrong. You may have some good influence, but if you succeed in hiding the fact that this influence has any connection with the Catholic Faith, you have also done harm, by creating the dangerous illusion that the wholesome moral instincts and the energy to implement them can as easily spring out of a purely secular source as from grace.

Again, many Catholics can't see a Catholic organisation doing some good work or other without wanting to make it more 'inclusive', either of other Faiths, or of secularists, making it either officially ecumenical or Catholic only in its 'heritage'. Again, this is a way of pretending that good works springing from a living Faith are just humanistic impulses. It is not evangelisation, but a counter-evangelisation.

I don't see the situation for evangelisation in this country as entirely hopeless. If you know where to look, you can find a great many Catholics, deeply indebted to the Faith, serving their fellow citizens in all sorts of ways, which should be making the Faith visible. There is a problem, however, that so many of them are deliberatly trying to keep their Faith under wraps.

To repeat, I don't blame anyone for keeping quiet when colleagues mention the explosive issues of the day, in order to preserve the ability to earn a living for their family. What I am blaming is the attitude that a self-confessedly Catholic organisation, initiative, or idea is ipso facto an embarrassment. If you are embarrassed of Christ, ultimately, he will be embarrassed of you.

For he that shall be ashamed of me, and of my words, in this adulterous and sinful generation: the Son of man also will be ashamed of him, when he shall come in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. (Mark 8:38)

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Taking the Blessed Sacrament to the Altar of Repose on Maundy Thursday.

Reposted from January 2016.
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Austen Ivereigh claims that in opening the Mandatum to women, Pope Francis is 'restoring an older Tradition'. Claiming the change has 'infuritated traditionalists' (sorry, Austen, I'm not infuriated), he explains:

Yet Francis has been restoring what once was tradition. The custom in the seventeenth century, for example, was for bishops to wash, dry and kiss the feet of 13 poor people after having dressed them and fed them. Nor is there any obligation for the foot-washing to be part of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.

This is a bit thin as an explanation, so let me fill it in a bit. Because Ivereigh has a point.

It is the rubrics of 1955 and 1970 which say that the foot-washing of Maundy Thursday should happen (a) after the Gospel, (b) in the choir or sanctuary of the church, and (c) to 'viri', men as opposed to women.

N.b. the word 'viri' (plural of 'vir') is only used if you want to exclude women. There is another Latin word for 'men' in the sense of 'people': 'homines' (plural of 'homo'); again, you might expect the gender neutral 'christifideles' (the Faithful) or some such term to be used, if gender was not an issue.

Before 1955, and in accordance with an organically developing tradition going back to the earliest times, the Mandatum took place (a) after Mass was over, after the 'stripping of the Altars' ceremony, (b) not in the sanctuary, and (c) to 'pauperes': the poor. Also, interestingly, as as Ivereigh notes, the number of pauperes was 13, not 12. Indeed, the Mandatum carried out in the context of a parish celebration of the Mass of Maundy Thursday, by a parish priest, was simply a particular case of a wider phenomenon, of Maundy Thursday foot-washing by bishops, abbots, abbesses, kings and queens, lords and ladies, of poor folk. Rubricarius (who knows about these things) tells us in my com-box that the Parish Priest, in line with the wider phenomenon, would have been expected to give these pauperes food, clothing, and money afterwards.

Male foot-washers would have washed male feet, and female washers female feet, as a matter of pudicy. If Ivereigh thinks that a 17th century bishop would have washed the feet of women, he's wrong. (I love the way he implies they did, without quite implying that they did.) Such considerations of pudicy are still relevant in our multi-cultural world: yes, multi-culturalism can mean taking care not to offend people with more old-fashioned attitudes that your own, such as those of American gangsters (bad language warning). What that famous scene from Pulp Fiction demonstrates is that a man touching a woman's feet has an erotic meaning.

I really wouldn't want any priests to 'develop a speech impediment' as a result of washing ladies' feet.

What happened in 1955 was that the Mandatum was made a liturgical act, in the middle of Mass and in the sanctuary, in the form of a literal-minded re-enactment of the scene described in the Gospel of St John (13:1-17). As has often been pointed out, Our Lord washed the feet of His Apostles, His priests: but that is not how it has been understood and imitated in the Latin liturgical tradition. Rather, the command has been understood in a more general sense that the higher should serve the lower, whether the higher is religious or secular, whether the relationship is sacramental or economic. Indeed, one can see in the tradition an application of a specifically lay obligation, to conform secular relationships to the reign of Christ.

As for the 1955 rite, it goes along with a current of thought which understands the liturgy as re-enactment in a way it had never been understood before, a form of antiquarianism. The argument that the 'original meaning' or 'original form' of something should be restored, often on the basis of bad scholarship or simple fantasy, was heard even more loudly in 1970 than in 1955. Along with supposedly authentic vestments and pottery chalices, we have a 'restored' kiss of peace, 'restored' bidding prayers, and a 'restored' offertory procession, and it is common to hear people unable to understand why the priest does not break the Host while saying the words 'He broke the bread', and why the Feast of the Holy Innocents is celebrated before Epiphany, when the event it commemorates took place after. In every case the wisdom of the developed tradition is lost, along with the continuity of what we do with what our immediate predecessors did - usually for at least the last eight centuries, and often for a lot longer.

I said in my last post that the latest change to the Mandatum reflects the results of the contradictions of the 1970 Missal. I should make clear that in this case, the contradiction was inherited from the 1955 reform of Holy Week, for which I have no brief to defend. The contradiction consists specifically in the way the rite uses the sanctuary. The sanctuary is a space for the clergy and their assistants, and the nave is the space for the Faithful. The distinction between the sanctuary and the nave is similar to the distinction marked by the use of Latin, marking out sacred time and space. It is just inappropriate for a dozen lay men to troop into the sanctuary, wearing ordinary clothes, and start taking off their shoes and socks. Adding lay women to the mix doesn't help. The result of the conflict between seeing the sanctuary as a sacred space, and seeing it as a handy 'performance space' for all sorts of activities, results in the disappearance of the former idea. The placing of the Mandatum there wasn't the decisive move, but it was part of a problematic trend.

Maundy Thursday with the FSSP in Reading: the Altar of Repose.

For the meaning of the distinction between sanctuary and nave, see the Position Paper on Altar Girls.

For the problems of the 1955 Holy Week Reform, see the Position Papers on that, Part I and Part II.

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St John Fisher was the learned and heroic Bishop of Rochester, was the only one of all the Bishops of England and Wales refused to consent to Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy of 1534, the Act supporting to separate the kingdom from the jurisdiction of the Holy See. He was executed on 22nd June 1535.

He had earlier written a book against Luther defending the Catholic theology of the priesthood: ironically, in support of Henry VIII's own work against Luther, to which Luther had made a characteristically intemperate response.

Fisher's work deserves wider recognition, and I am pleased to see this new edition and printing available. It can be bought from Amazon here.

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I see from my stats a small spike of interest in this post: someone must have linked to it somewhere. So I thought I'd repost it. I'll repost a follow-up post on the same subject tomorrow. They both first appeared in January 2016.

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It is tempting to see the decree allowing women's feet to be washed on Maundy Thursday as an indication of an acceleration of liturgical decay underway with Pope Francis, following his breaking of the rule up to now. However, what has happened is no different from what happened under his predecessors.

Bl Pope Paul VI gave in to the pressure of endemic abuse when he allowed the reception of Communion in the hand. But there are other examples too from his troubled reign. One of the most peculiar documents of the Papal Magisterium is his Sacrificium laudis, an Apostolic Letter directed to religious superiors, begging, cajoling, and ordering them to preserve Latin in the Office. You won't find this document in the Acta Apostolicis Sedis, and only in Italian on the Vatican website. The speed of its transformation into waste-paper gives new meaning to the phrase 'dead on arrival'. (You'll find an English translation on the LMS website.)

Pope St John Paul II gave way, again because of the pressure of abuses, on Altar girls. It was he, also, who permitted another set of countries to take up Communion in the hand. It was on his watch, again, that the restrictions on Communion under Both Kinds fell by the wayside - this was forbidden on Sundays, in theory, and for 'large congregations', but the American bishops defied him, and he gave in. It was under him that major investigations of American seminaries and women religious were turned into whitewash, liturgical abuses were established on an industrial scale at the World Youth Days, and being blessed by witch doctors, kissing the Koran, and putting Buddha on altars became de rigeur. Religious sisters not wearing their habits sat right in front of him at a Papal Mass of beatification in Australia in 1995. That day, liturgical discipline was dead.

Pope Benedict XVI allowed Communion in the hand in Poland, where Pope John Paul II never had. Did Pope JP know something his successor did not? It was Pope Benedict who chose to continue JPII's Youth Day Masses, and Assisi ecumenical gatherings, at a moment when it would have been perfectly possible to let both series stop, and merely tried to make them less awful. But he did not continue JPII's series of Instructions lambasting liturgical abuses: he must have realised it was pointless. It was under Pope Benedict that the investigation of the American women's religious lost its conservative mojo: yes, he was the one who appointed João, Cardinal Braz de Aviz as Prefect of the Congregation for Religious, in 2011, with entirely predictable results.

There is, however, an important difference between the actions of these three Popes and Pope Francis. As far as one can tell, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Pope Benedict believed that poor liturgical discipline was a bad thing. Paul VI lamented Communion in the hand and the loss of Latin. John Paul II apparently dislike Altar girls, and condemned abuses vigorously before permitting them. Pope Benedict surely had no sympathy with the ghastly things which were happening in American convents. There is no reason to think that Pope Francis is similarly conflicted when he allows the washing of women's feet on Maundy Thursday.

And another thing: to be crass about it, the Mandatum is not all that important. It happens once a year, and it is optional. It is not an integral part of the Maundy Thursday service - despite its name. Allowing Altar girls and EMHCs and syncetistic pagan rites during Mass are far more serious issues.

Let's not get on a high horse about Pope Francis at this juncture. This is just another step, and not a particularly large one, in the development of the Ordinary Form away from Tradition, and it is not happening because of the personality of the Pope. It is happening because the Novus Ordo Missae of 1970 was unstable. It included a series of compromises which were never going to last. Given the direction of pressure, these compromises were always going to unravel the same way.

This is the real lesson to be learnt. Attempting to shore up the tottering edifice of the Novus Ordo with ferocious-sounding rules has failed. JPII and Pope Benedict didn't manage it, and obviously - obviously - Pope Francis, though not a liturgical 'meddler', is not going to succeed in a project in which he has no interest. If it is collapsing, it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

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