I have not posted any item from Fr. Hunwicke lately - in addition to brief items on this and that (the feast of St. Januarius, Assisi 2016, the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, patroness of the first Anglican Ordinariate to which Fr H belongs, a couple more criticisms of the Anglican Church and the Catholic 'formators' assigned to mentor the Anglican clergy who were joining the first Ordinariate), he had a five-part series on the Anglican Ordinariate and how to use the argumentum ad hominem effectively to neutralize particularly nasty and partisan opponents - a very good series, BTW, which one of these days I will post. But in the past two days, he had two items of more general interest...
A tale of two churches -
and what have they been teaching seminarians?
Sept. 25, 2016
While doing the North, we found ourselves looking over a perfect 'transitional' Augustinian Priory Church, which, as Pevsner observes, was in ruins but still complete enough in the 1840s to make its restoration at that time almost totally reliable.
It is beside a ruined Regency house: if only the Priory were still in ruins; and the Regency house were not in tatters; the whole (immensely romantic) site would be a perfect setting for Jane Austen's
Northanger Abbey.
I will call it Effchurch Priory; we visited it at noon on the Saturday when forty or fifty people were gathered there for a Tridentine High Mass. It happens, I gather, once a year. An elegant and very accessible sermon on the day's Saint (St Nicolas of Tolentino); perfect liturgy; excellent singing. An enthusiastic and very participatory congregation, who knew their way around the Church's immemorial Liturgy and took part in a natural, relaxed, unforced, often quite loud, way.
Sadly, I did not feel that having heard Mass on Saturday at 12:00 would fulfill the Sunday obligation; so in the evening we went to a Vigil Mass in a town some miles away, which I will rename Offchester. The difference was palpable.
The 1969 rite done very badly. Very little participation; the organ droned out eight stanzas of a hymn tune and not a person made a sound. The parish priest obviously deemed himself a brilliant mystagogue, because every single 'presidential formula', even the pseudo-Hippolytan Eucharistic Prayer, was either changed or interpolated.
There was, unsurprisingly, no sermon. I say "unsurprisingly" because I have met the same liturgical corruption in the South of England, not least in a church where the priest proudly referred to it as "a Vatican II church".
[Fr Z has commentary, in red, on the rest of the item:]
I wonder why some priests of a certain generation and a ‘Conciliar’ culture have such a rooted aversion to preaching. This leads me on to wonder what exactly it was that they were taught in the corrupted and emptying seminaries of the post-Conciliar decades.
We know that (despite Canon 249 and the
Veterum Sapientia of St John XXIII)
they were not taught Latin or Greek; because of this, they were blocked from sudying Patristics.
[They were kept in the fog…. on purpose!]
They did not … clearly … do Liturgy or Liturgical Theology or Practical Liturgy; it appears that they received no education in Scripture, Biblical Theology, or how to open the Word of God for their people.
I somehow doubt that they were all given a deep formation in traditional moral theology or the hearing of confessions, because I know of (another) church in the South of England where the priest explained that the difficulty about hearing confessions was that the Confessional had for many years been used for stacking away the unsold debris of Parish bazaars.
What, in the Name of God Almighty and God most Adorable, did all those men learn in those seven expensive years of ‘priestly formation’? [It was a horror show, let me tell you.]
I know some traddies cheerfully but (IMHO) irresponsibly point out that Monsignor Time will solve the problem of that generation of clergy; [What I have called the “Biological Solution”.] but, in a decade or two’s time, will the joyless and infantilised congregations still be in existence? These are souls for whom Christ died.
[“But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?” Maybe in small communities. “Base” communities?]
If I were a bishop, I would send round formidable, even terrifying, hit squads of bright, orthodox, and cheerful young clergy with the oil of ordination still damp upon their hands, to teach the dear old gentlemen all the things that their lecturers forgot to mention in the 1970s and 1980s; and to overhaul
a radicibus [from the roots] the parish liturgies.
[I once thought that we needed a new religious order called The Rubricians. They would go two by two into the world to battle liturgical abuses and teach the erring the error of their ways.]
Cardinal Sarah’s recent extremely sound suggestions could provide a lively and exciting start to a programme of restoring catholic authenticity in the desert areas. And His Eminence, with his true and accurate pastoral heart, clearly understands the urgency of this need. Happily, one hears of diocesan bishops loyally responding to his timely initiative. Let us hope that, on Advent Sunday …
But not, sadly, quite all bishops. One or two
Ordinarii locorum prefer to resemble stewards careering crazily around on the Great Liner’s dangerously sloping decks while shouting noisily and inaccurately at anyone they meet about the ‘true post-Conciliar’ alignment of deckchairs.
Once again, questioning
the limits of papal authority
Sept.26, 2016
(1) The latest
Catholic Herald has a good piece by a Fr Mark Drew on the ongoing
Amoris laetitia crisis. (I cannot resist entering here a snide comment that visitors to this blog have already repeately read most of his points here ... Parrhesia and all.) Father refers to the intimidation
[against AL critics and dissenters] experienced in this country as 'discreet' ... but then, we are English, aren't we? In some other places, it has been anything but discreet.
(2) Sandro Magister (Chiesa 21 September) quotes an Andrew Grillo, whom he calls a keen Bergoglian, as forecasting that the next Synod will, among other things, deal with "The Collegial exercise of the episcopacy and
the restitution to the Bishop of full authority over the diocesan liturgy".
I presume we all know by now that
'Collegiality' is well established as a code-word for giving improper competences to Episcopal Conferences - a serious potential ecclesiological corruption (upon which Cardinal Mueller spoke well a year or two ago).
But what I am particularly drawing your attention to this morning is the part of the sentence I have put into italics.
It means that the bully-boys who hate Ratzinger and his legacy are beginning to set their sights on demolishing Summorum Pontificum and eliminating its admirable doctrinal emphases on Subsidiarity and the auctoritas of Tradition.[
I am only surprised that it has taken the Wolves and their cubs so long to get round to this.
Both of these two superficially diverse items exemplify the same over-arching problem which this increasingly dysfunctional pontificate continually throws up: the limits of lawful papal power. Time to read again what Ratzinger so wisely said on this. And to revisit Pastor aeternus (together with Denzinger 3114 and 3117).