Latin Mass Society

Chairman's Blog

25/10/2017 - 11:45

LMS Annual Requiem Sat 4th Nov

Bishop Jabale at the Cataphalque in 2016 (Photo: John Aron)

The Latin Mass Society's Annual Requiem Mass will take place in Westminster Cathedral on Saturday 4th Nov at 2:30 pm

It will be Pontifical High Mass; the celebrant will be the Rt Rev. Mark Jabalé O.S.B., Emeritus Bishop of Menevia, with the assistance of priests from the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.

Before Mass, a wreath is laid at the tomb of Cardinal Heenan in grateful thanks for his role in helping to preserve the Traditional Mass in England and Wales.

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Bishop John Arnold celebrating the Requiem in 2014

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23/10/2017 - 19:30

Seasonal offerings in the LMS Shop

Now available is the famous Latin Mass Society Ordo, which has all the feasts of England and Wales as well as the Universal Calendar;

Our indispensible Wall Calendar with its unique design to give you more space to write things into the dates and lots of photos;

Christmas cards with four different classical paintings of the Nativity and a proper seasonal greeting inside.

Get yours now!

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22/10/2017 - 10:00

The Dominican Rite for the Latin Mass Society in Oxford

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Yesterday was the annual LMS Pilgrimage to Oxford in honour of the city's Catholic martyrs. This year we visited the site of the martyrdom of Bl George Napier, the Castle Gallows, where he had his eternal nativity in 1610, after many years of ministering as a priest in his native Oxford, and the surrounding area.

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The LMS has for a number of years had this pilgrimage at the Oxford Blackfriars, celebrated by the friars in their own Rite, the ancient Dominican Rite. It is a lot like the ancient Roman Rite, but there are a number of differences which are interesting to see, and it has an austere elegance all of its own.

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The Schola Abelis, Oxford Gregorian Chant choir which exists to support celebrations of the traditional liturgy, accompanied the Mass as usual, with Dominican Chant. Just as the rubrics of the Mass are a little (actually, quite a bit) different from the Roman ones, so the chant melodies and the whole feel of the chant is a bit different.

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It was an entirely chant Mass, with a Dominican Chant Mass Ordinary to go with the propers.

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The changable weather and 'storm Brian' may have contributed to a lower than usual turnout, but the Schola Abelis had the biggest group I think we have ever fielded at a service: fifteen.

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A sudden downpour during the procession added to the interest of the occasion, as did our being joined by one of Oxford's ... characters. I'd not normally encourage someone to carry a processional statue while holding in one hand a half-drunk bottle of wine, but he was very attached to the idea and it seemed a pity to discourage him. He assisted at Benediction as well.

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The public witness of the procession, and the liturgy, meant something to him. These things have a power which we cannot fully articulate or perceive. The saints in prison managed without the liturgy by a special grace but for the rest of us it is necessary. It is the normal and indispensible food for the soul, to sustain us and to help us grow in the faith.

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I know for many Catholics for the last half-century the liturgy has been a trial, a source of suffering. It is no small thing to contribute to a liturgy which is an occasion of light and consolation. The value of the Traditional Mass, in whatever Rite it may be, and the other traditional liturgical acts and devotions, cannot be calculated. Don't allow yourself to miss out on what should be a Catholic's birthright.

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21/10/2017 - 09:16

More on Pope Francis and doctrinal development

I've been included in a panel of academics interviewed for LifeSiteNews on the subject of doctrinal development, in light of Pope Francis' remarks on the Death Penalty.

An extract:

Shaw said so-called “conservative” Catholics would be especially susceptible to a change in Catholic teaching on capital punishment.

“Pope St John Paul II was clearly personally opposed to capital punishment and campaigned for its abolition. While he was careful never to claim that the teaching of the Church ruled capital punishment out, his views have become strongly associated with the Catholic Church and have influenced many conservative Catholics,” he said.

“It may seem a relatively small step between what Pope St John Paul II claimed – that capital punishment was not wise or appropriate in the conditions of the modern world – and what Pope Francis is now claiming – that capital punishment is never ‘admissible,’ and that Catholics living in very different conditions from our own were wrong to make recourse to it.”

“However, it is obviously a huge step to say that the Church herself was wrong in her consistent teaching, which has always been that capital punishment can be legitimate,” he added.
Read the whole thing there.

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20/10/2017 - 10:00

A friendly warning to Opus Dei

I don't want to single out Opus Dei; what I have to say is applicable to a number of conservative Catholic organisations. But Opus Dei does rather single out itself.

We had the organisations 'number 2', the Vicar General, Mgr Mariano Fazio, criticising the Filial Correction for 'correcting a father in public':

Any faithful, bishop, cardinal, lay person has the right to tell the pope what he sees fit for the good of the Church. But it seems to me that he has no right to do so publicly and to scandalize the whole Church with these manifestations of disunity.

I've responded to that in the linked LifeSite article.
Mgr Fazio is simply following, however, the line of the head of Opus Dei himself, Mgr Fernando Ocariz, who wrote an article for L'Osservatore Romano on December 2, 2011, indicating the kind of obedience which the documents of the Second Vatican Council have: remarks which presumably cover any reasonably high-level official documents of the Church.

A number of innovations of a doctrinal nature are to be found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council: on the sacramental nature of the episcopate, on episcopal collegiality, on religious freedom, etc. These innovations in matters concerning faith or morals, not proposed with a definitive act, still require religious submission of intellect and will, even though some of them were and still are the object of controversy with regard to their continuity with earlier magisterial teaching, or their compatibility with the tradition. In the face of such difficulties in understanding the continuity of certain Conciliar Teachings with the tradition, the Catholic attitude, having taken into account the unity of the Magisterium, is to seek a unitive interpretation in which the texts of the Second Vatican Council and the preceding Magisterial documents illuminate each other. Not only should the Second Vatican Council be interpreted in the light of previous Magisterial documents, but also some of these earlier magisterial documents can be understood better in the light of the Second Vatican Council. This is nothing new in the history of the Church. It should be remembered, for example, that the meaning of important concepts adopted in the First Council of Nicaea in the formulation of the Trinitarian and Christological faith (hypóstasis, ousía), were greatly clarified by later Councils.

The problems with this paragraph are many, and I don't want to give his article a detailed critique, so to keep it brief I invite the reader to answer for him or herself the following two questions:

1. Given that Council documents and other official documents contain both statements of the Ordinary Magisterium and other kinds of proposition, such as historical and scientific claims (such as are not inseparably connected with teaching), prudential judgements, and theological speculations, would the loyal Catholic not need to apply his mind first to determining what was actually magisterial in a document before submitting intellect and will to it?

Anyone who thinks that the non-magisterial content of one official document cannot contradict that of another simply needs to read a few. The mutually-contradictory Papal Bulls of the Franciscan property debate would be one place to start.

2. When the meaning of putatively magisterial statements in Council or other official documents are disputed, and where such disputes are themselves legitimate, how is it possible to submit one's intellect and will to them? How can one submit one's intellect to a statement whose meaning one cannot determine?

What seems reasonably clear is that the top two officials of Opus Dei are inviting Catholics to adopt an attitude of pre-emptive intellectual submission towards anything emanating from Rome, without making use of the right - which can also be a duty - to inform our fellow Catholics of their concerns about such emanations. Yes, they say, there can be ambiguities and problems, but obedience of the intellect comes first, acceptance come first, and attempts to smooth over the problems can follow later.

I've been told in comments on this blog, what I already knew, which is that Opus Dei contains many Good People. Of course it does. These are, in fact, among the most good-hearted and faithful Catholics whom one could hope to meet. It is through no lack of charity towards them that I write as a I do: quite the contrary. While I know that what I write will have no effect at all on the leadership of the organisation, I want to warn those who are members, and those associated with the many other organisations which include what we call 'conservative' Catholics, of the dangers of the road you are going down, when you start thinking of obedience as the chief or even the only virtue, instead of humility, justice, courage, charity, and the virtue of faith itself.

One danger, which follows obviously from what I have just said, is a spiritual distortion arising from a failure to recognise and cultivate the full set of virtues. That is something readers will just have to meditate upon. I want to focus on two other dangers.

The first is that it leads into anti-intellectualism. Perhaps this doesn't look like a big deal, but it will destroy the intellectual prestige of your communities and drive out those of your members of an intellectual bent. People with an intellectual formation who are honest will not be able to stick it: it will drive them nuts.

The second problem derives from the fact that when the wind changes direction, the internal policy will follow also. This isn't some uncharitable speculation on my part, it is exactly what Mgr Ocariz is saying. A new Pope, a new policy, and a new document, and all the 'faithful Catholics' who follow his advice will be reading the 'innovation' back into previous documents, submitting their intellects, and tying themselves into knots to say that what they'd previously said was black is actually, now you come to look at it, white. You may think we'll have to wait for a new Pope to see this happening, but no, we can see it happening with the current Pope.

It is a fact, and not a particularly disturbing one in itself, that Papal policy changes. Again, anyone doubting this just needs to do some reading, but a nice example is the maddening succession of policy reversals the Popes made towards the 'Chinese Rites'. Now it may be that such changes of policy require obedience on the basis of the disciplinary authority of the Pope, but anyone living through a period such as that who tries to justify each policy as correct, as in continuity with previous rules, and as based on fundamental magisterial principles, because he does not want to admit that official documents should ever be disagreed with, has got a problem.

He has got, in fact, the problem that the British Communist Party had in and just before the the Second World War. First the Party Line was that the Nazis were evil, as they were persecuting communists in Germany. Then the Party Line was to be neutral in the war against Germany, since the Soviet Union was allied to the Nazis. And then the Party Line was to support the war with Germany, since the Soviet Union was at war with them itself. Each had to be passed off as eternally true for fundamental ideological reasons.

Although in France and Italy the Communists were able to retrieve some self-respect by their resistence to occupation, in Britain the flip-flopping did irreparable damage to the Party's credibility. The same thing is going to happen to any organisation which claims to base itself on objective principles which does repeated 'backflips', to use Cardinal Pell's phrase. To put it bluntly, this will destroy your community.

Am I applying this to Opus Dei? Let me correct that impression. Really, what I have been saying applies to the Catholic Church as a whole over the last half-century. We have all seen it: good-hearted and loyal people twisting themselves into pretzels to make everything seem ok, but other Catholic intellectuals just dropping out of the whole game because it looks incompatible with intellectual self-respect. And yet others, observing all this, concluding that the Church doesn't really stand for anything much any more.

That's a lesson we should learn from. If we don't, we are going to repeat it till we do.

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19/10/2017 - 12:53

‘Pro-Pope Francis’ petition launched


A German-based petition praising Pope Francis has been launched, signed by a handful of bishops and about 100 theologians and others.
The text of the petition itself is vague: it simply expresses support for Pope Francis' ‘initiatives’ and ‘leadership’. It is interesting, therefore, that despite appearing first on the website of the German Bishops’ Conference — which suggests some kind of official endorsement — so few German bishops have added their names. Indeed, the episcopal signatories one does find are either retired or are auxiliary bishops. It adds to the sense that even quite liberal bishops, who have dioceses to consider, are a bit concerned about the crisis, and are wary of simply throwing themselves into battle on the liberalising side. Every now and then a bishop makes a statement of enthusiasm for a liberal interpretation of Amoris laetitia — the other day it was Cardinal Barbarin’s turn — but these remain very much the exception, not the rule.


The signatories are, indeed, obscure and marginal figures. Cynics might say: just like the signatories of the Filial Correction. If so, this is a remarkably poor showing for something supported by the German Bishops’ Conference machinery, ostensibly in support of the Pope. It is obvious what limits the ability of the organisers of the Filial Correction to get big names: the very real danger of losing one's job. What is their excuse? Where are all those hundreds of theology professors in Church-supported institutions? Is it too much to ask them simply to ‘support the Pope’?

Instead we find figures who are notorious for their dissent against Papal teaching, who presumably look at Pope Francis’ pontificate a purely tactical light. This isn’t an upsurge of Ultramontanism; as soon as there’s another pope they’ll be back to demanding an independent Church in Germany, as they did under Pope Benedict.

One of the signatories has actually been excommunicated, and by Pope Francis himself, as recently as 2014. As 1Peter5 notes:

Martha Heizer — the Presidentof the Austrian grass-root organization “We Are Church” (Wir sind Kirche) — was excommunicated by Pope Francis in May of 2014 for having, together with her husband, “celebrated” repeatedly Holy Mass in their private home and in the presence of guests.

This makes a mockery of the criticism of the Filial Correction for being signed by Bishop Fellay, Superior of the SSPX. Bishop Fellay's big crime, in canonical terms, was being consecrated bishop without the mandate of the Holy See, back in 1988, for which the penalty is excommunication. But Pope Benedict lifted that excommunication in 2009. Fellay and Heizer are clearly moving in very different directions, vis-a-vis canonical regularity.
We should, of course, support the Pope. I commend to readers the prayer recommended by the Bishops of England and Wales, in the official book of authorised devotions, the Manual of Prayers, last revised in 1953. In England and Wales it can be added to the Prayers After Low Mass in celebrations of the Extraordinary Form. (I have added the current Pope’s name, obviously.)

For the Sovereign Pontiff


V. Let us pray for our holy Father the Pope.

R. The Lord preserve him, and give him life, and make him blessed upon earth, and deliver him not up to the will of his enemies.

Let us pray.
O Almighty and eternal God, have mercy on thy servant Francis, our Pope, and direct him according to thy clemency into the way of everlasting salvation; that he may desire by thy grace those things which are pleasing to thee, and perform them with all his strength. Through Christ our Lord.

R. Amen.


See also the LifeSiteNews report.

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18/10/2017 - 11:49

Oxford Pilgrimage this Saturday

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This Saturday, 21st October, the annual Latin Mass Society Pilgrimage to Oxford will take place.

11am High Mass in the Dominican Rite, Blackfriars, in St Giles, Oxford

2pm Procession to the Castle Gallows, site of the martyrdom of Bl George Napier in 1610

3pm Benediction in Blackfriars

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15/10/2017 - 10:00

Ultramontanism's Death Sentence

Pope Pius XII
In 1952 Pope Pius XII said the following, in a public address recorded among his official acts:
Even when it is a question of the execution of a condemned man, the State does not dispose of the individual's right to life. In this case it is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned person of the enjoyment of life in expiation of his crime when, by his crime, he has already disposed himself of his right to live.

In 2017 Pope Francis spoke, in a not dissimilar context:

It must be clearly stated that the death penalty is an inhumane measure that, regardless of how it is carried out, abases human dignity. It is per se contrary to the Gospel, because it entails the willful suppression of a human life that never ceases to be sacred in the eyes of its Creator and of which – ultimately – only God is the true judge and guarantor. 

Again:

It is necessary, therefore, to reaffirm that no matter how serious the crime that has been committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and the dignity of the person.

What can the Ultramontanists, those with an exaggerated view of papal authority so prominent in the debate over Amoris laetitia, make of this situation?

Presumably, in 1952 all good Ultramontanists said that, because the Pope had said so, it follows that it is true that the death penalty is not only permissible, but for sufficiently serious crimes, uniquely appropriate. (What else does it mean, to say that a criminal has 'disposed' of his 'right to life'?)

Today, in 2017, all good Ultramontanists are saying that, because the Pope has said so, it follows that it is false that the the death penalty is ever permissible.
Now, the official Ultramontanist line is that Papal authority, being supreme and (for practical purposes, always) infallible, can never be self contradictory. But between these two papal statements there is a contradiction as plain as the nose on your face. The suggestion that the 2017 statement is a 'development' or 'clarification' of what was said in 1952, or that is draws out implications of this and other expressions of the Church's teaching on capital punishment over the centuries, is not something one needs to haggle over. It is simply insane.
But for those who wish to haggle, a simple test of the development of doctrine is to ask if later authors can continue to accept earlier expressions of a doctrine as being true. Thus, we find the discussion of grace in Augustine lacking some distinctions developed by later authors and used in dogmatic statements, but Augustine is not for that reason wrong, and what he writes is not, with hindsight, heresy. It might on occasion be misleading to quote Augustine on grace, but one need not disavow him. In this case, by contrast, it is evident that Pope Francis disagrees with Pope Pius XII: they can't both be right.
Today's Ultramontanists are in a bind, therefore. In order to uphold the supreme and (for practical purposes, always) infallible authority of Pope Francis, they are going to have to admit that the authority of Pope Pius XII was not so supreme or infallible after all.
But if people would have been wrong in 1952 to throw themselves on their faces before Pius XII and agree with what he said about capital punishment, just because he'd said it, then the hideous possibility must exist that people may be wrong to agree with everything that Pope Francis says in 2017, just because he's said it.
Pope Francis' statement, by so simply and so clearly contradicting his predecessor of 65 years ago, demonstrates the falsity of Ultramontanism in a way I would never have thought possible. We may point out to the Ultramontanists that the contradiction of one Pope by another on a matter of faith and morals is possible, given the fallibility of most of their pronouncements, even when they are giving every appearance of exercising their teaching office (let alone when they are talking off the cuff on aeroplanes, or writing private letters), but usually Popes are far too careful in preparing their public remarks to allow this to happen, except in the most subtle and tacit way. But Pope Francis has done it. The game is up.
Ultramontanism as a practical guide for Catholics only works, insofar as it can work at all, in times of great stability. At times like the present, it is self-contradictory and absurd. After Pope Francis' statement on the death penalty, no Catholic with intellectual integrity can continue to hold it.
Where does this leave the ordinary Catholic? The ordinary Catholic is obliged to believe what the Church teaches. The Church hands on faithfully what she has received from her Lord. We can see Pope Pius XII doing that in the quoted passage: using the language of his time, certainly, but in its content faithful to the Popes, the Fathers and Doctors, and Scripture (see Gen. 9:6; Lev. 20-1; Deut. 13; Deut. 21:22; Matt. 15:4; Mk. 7:10; Jn. 19:11; Rom. 13:4; Heb. 10:28).

Of Pope Francis' statement, to put it mildly, this cannot be said.

Note: the liceity of capital punishment is the first of the propositions discussed in the Appeal to Cardinals of the 45 Theologians, which gives more references.

Cardinal Dulles gives a thorough account of the teaching of the Church on First Things here.

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14/10/2017 - 13:07

Fr Thomas Crean on whether Amoris is 'Thomistic'


LifeSiteNews carries an interview with Fr Thomas Crean OP on the use of St Thomas Aquinas by Amoris laetitia, in light of Christoph, Cardinal Schönborn's claim that the document is 'Thomistic'.

Read the whole thing there; I paste in an extract below.

(The English version of) paragraph 145  (of Amoris Laetitia) states: “Experiencing an emotion is not, in itself, morally good or evil. The stirring of desire or repugnance is neither sinful nor blameworthy. What is morally good or evil is what we do on the basis of, or under the influence of, a given passion.” It footnotes the Summa, 1a 2ae 24, 1.
But what St. Thomas says here is that no emotion, abstractly considered, is either good or bad. Even hatred is not bad as such: it is good to hate sin. However, every actually existing emotion will always be either good or bad. This is true, independently of any actions to which they may give rise.
St. Thomas says: ipsae passiones, secundum quod sunt voluntariae, possunt dici bonae vel malae moraliterDicuntur autem voluntariae vel ex eo quod a voluntate imperantur, vel ex eo quod a voluntate non prohibentur (“The emotions themselves, inasmuch as they are voluntary, can be called morally good or bad. And they are said to be voluntary inasmuch as they are commanded by the will, or else because they are not checked by the will.”) There is a serious mistake in the text of Amoris Laetitia here, since certain emotions can rise by themselves to the level of mortal sin, for example, certain kinds of deliberate anger and sexual desire. It is dangerous to give the impression that only outward acts can be morally good or evil.
The Latin text of paragraph 145 is slightly different, but the net result is the same. On the one hand, it changes “the stirring of desire or repugnance is neither sinful nor blameworthy” to “perceiving a desire or repugnance beginning is neither harmful nor blameworthy,” which strictly speaking is true, since the perception itself would not be a sin. However, it retains the claim that moral good and evil lie only in outward action. And, bizarrely, it also quotes one of the objections in the Summa as if it were St. Thomas’ own teaching!
Next, paragraph 301. Here Amoris Laetitia states that people … can be living in irregular (e.g. adulterous) situations and may know the Church’s teaching on ‘the rule’, and yet may be unable to see the value of “the rule.” These people, Amoris Laetitia says, may possess sanctifying grace and may be unable to obey the rule without sinning.
It goes on: “St. Thomas Aquinas himself recognized that someone may possess grace and charity, yet not be able to exercise any one of the virtues well.” As Dr. Joseph Shaw has pointed out, this quotation is irrelevant to the question of whether one can be excused from obeying the divine law by an ability to see its value, or whether one can be obliged to disobey it to avoid some other sin. St. Thomas is simply talking of people who have repented of past sins, and who now live virtuously, but do so with some difficulty because of the effect that those past sins have left behind.
Hence Dr. Shaw wrote: “Aquinas is simply pointing out that impediments are more likely when the virtue has not been acquired by a process of training and habituation over time, but by an infusion of grace from God. This abstruse issue is completely irrelevant to the matter at hand, and makes me wonder about the intellectual integrity of the people advising Pope Francis at this point in the document.” A more relevant passage from the Summa would have been found in 1a 2ae 19, 6: “If erring reason tell a man that he should go to another man's wife, the will that abides by that erring reason is evil; since this error arises from ignorance of the Divine Law, which he is bound to know.”

More serious because more plausible misuse

A more serious, because superficially more plausible, misrepresentation of the angelic doctor is found in paragraph 304. Amoris Laetitia is discussing the question of universal moral laws, in the context, of course, of invalid second marriages and the conferral of the sacraments, and it quotes a passage from 1a 2a 94, 4: “Practical reason deals with contingent things, upon which human activity bears, and so although there is necessity in the general principles, the more we descend to matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter defects …  In matters of action, truth or practical rectitude is not the same for all, as to matters of detail, but only as to the general principles.”
Although the argument at this point in Amoris Laetitia seems designed to be hard to follow, the impression is very strongly given that St. Thomas would have said that either sexual activity within a marriage not recognized by the Church as valid, or else giving Holy Communion to those who engage in such activity, cannot be objects of a universal prohibition. There can be, the text implies, only a defeasible presumption against such things. In fact, St. Thomas teaches, with the whole tradition of the Church, that there are indeed such things as intrinsically bad actions which generate universal prohibitions.

Read the whole thing on LifeSite.

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12/10/2017 - 11:51

The Tablet on the Filial Correction

I said some time ago that the instinct of conventional Catholic ‘progressives’ would be to ignore the Filial Correction. It is the strange new brand of Ultramontanist liberal who is writing article after article and tweet after tweet attacking it. Compare the response of John Allen (report it as briefly as possible alongside two unrelated issues) or PrayTell (pretend it never happened) with that of the likes of Walford, Fastiggi and Goldstein, Fagioli, and Buttiglione (see this blog passim ad nauseam).

The old-style liberals have spent a life-time criticising Ultramontanism, and many — there’ll always be exceptions — have sufficient integrity (or at least shame) not to use the simple fact that it is the Pope this time who is supporting their views as a reason to dismiss objections. Indeed, the present crisis has made it clear that most at least of their long-standing opponents have, contrary to the liberal stereotype, never been robotic Ultramontanists mechanically repeating the Party Line, but are actually motivated by serious theological principles, and are therefore worthy of some degree of respect.

This week’s Tablet, the premier dead-wood media liberal Catholic publication of the English-speaking world, has published a feature article on the Correction and the Dubia by Richard R. Gaillardetz, who rejoices in the title of the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College. This appears to have the function of filling out and making plausible the sketchy response to the Correction The Tablet's editorial page gives in the same edition -- the editorial refers readers to Gaillardetz.

His view of the controversy is rather nuanced:

What we are witnessing today is neither a humble request for doctrinal clarification, nor a stealthily-plotted, mean-spirited assault on the Pope’s integrity. What we are witnessing is the clash of two fundamentally different understandings of how to be a faithful Catholic in the contemporary world and two different understandings of what constitutes the Church’s core mission.

For some, fidelity is ultimately measured more by formal doctrinal assent to the Church’s teaching. These Catholics believe the Church’s mission consists in offering timeless certitudes to a world lost in a sea of relativism. For others, particularly for those who find Pope Francis’ leadership so compelling, fidelity is measured more by the concrete practice of Christian discipleship. For them, the Church’s mission should primarily be directed toward responding to the questions and yearnings of humankind today.
(‘Humankind’: donchalovit?) The implicit claim that taking doctrine seriously is incompatible with ‘discipleship’ and pastoral effectiveness would, I think, have been surprising to everyone of proven discipleship from St Peter to St Maximilian Kolbe via St Francis of Assisi, but let it pass. This is the liberals’ self-understanding. If they admitted to themselves that telling people that they don’t need to be forgiven doesn't often lead them to repentance, there’s no telling what would happen.

What is interesting is that Gaillardetz is not doubting our sincerity or calling for us to be chained up in the Castel San Angelo. He is not saying that we are cruel and wicked people, or even that we victims of pathological rigidity. He seems to be suggesting that we are sincere, consistent, thoughtful, and mistaken.

Over the years The Tablet has been pretty judgemental about those it dislikes. Opposition to females serving at the Traditional Mass, for example, was denounced as misogyny. The Tablet’s opposition to the 2011 translation of the Missal and those who produced or supported it can best be described as ‘spittle-flecked’. Thanks in part no doubt to the change of Editor, when it comes today to a conflict between Ultramontanists who happen to agree with them on matters of substance, and conservatives who do not, The Tablet takes a more eirenic tone. Gaillardetz even calls the former party’s sound and fury ‘manufactured outrage’.

Those pushing the liberalising agenda on Communion for the divorced and remarried may think that Ultramontanism is their strongest card. But actually it cuts two ways. It can be relied on to get the support of senior clergy in Opus Dei, but the liberal Catholic establishment are not riding to their aid. What is even more worrying for them is the fact that, when the official wind starts blowing the other way, as it surely will at some point, Opus Dei spokesmen will without doubt find a way of finessing their position back to orthodoxy. Less flexible partisans of the agenda may find themselves looking rather exposed.

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